(Check back later for changes.)
TREE-CHECKING. The John French linked below is Jonathan's father. Any tree for Jonathan's line should show his father John, a tailor, as born 1620ish, not 1612ish, with Freedom Kingsley as his wife, and as buried in Hampshire County, Mass. BEWARE: If you instead see an older birth year, his wife's name changed to Grace, or anyone in his family moved to Braintree, Mass., then a John French of a different DNA, a farmer, not a tailor, has been mixed into Jonathan's family tree.
Findgrave contributors have co-operated to properly separate the John French who married Freedom Kingsley and then went from one end of Mass. to the other, from the farming John French who married Grace Unknown, possibly an Alden, and stayed until death in a place called Braintree. Some other sites still mix them. Mass. databases can be viewed at FamilySearch.org (remove quote marks when entering titles in Records section).
============================================================
RECORD-CHECKING FOR JONATHAN
1667. Born to father John French of Ipswich (up by the Maine border), according to "Massachusetts, Births and Christenings, 1635-1915"
Circa 1692. Jonathan married Sarah Warner, born May 28, 1668, in Hadley, elsewhere in the Connecticut River Valley, but northeasterly of Northampton (Source--1919 book about the Warners, cited below, p. 68).
1714. Death in Northampton (over on the Connecticut River), according to "Massachusetts, Deaths and Burials, 1706-1910". Wife & widow Sarah, cited in estate inventory, as "relict of Jon. Frentch".
Massachusetts records and the inventory division confirm children born to Jonathan French and Sarah, with the birth years of most known. Some have info added from the 1919 book by the Warners cited below or from USGWarchives.net. His children:
*28 Aug 1693 Jonathan [died young, no division, USGW found death date of 2/5/1697]
*01 Mar 1694 Sarah [m. Coss or Corse, to Southampton]
*?? ??? ???? Hannah [m1 Edwards, m2 Strong]
*15 Nov 1700 Elisabeth (m. Bascom?)
*?? Nov 1705 Ebenezer (Grandpa of Abigail Bartlett, who married one of the Braintree Frenches, after his father and grandfather, both called Abiathar French, arrived pre-Revolution, in what became Westhampton, in Northampton outskirts.)
*21 Aug 1710 John
*1708 Samuel and 1700 Mary?
General Sources:
1) Inventory of estate, post-death, in Northampton, done by three witnesses who divide property across surviving heirs. The witnesses included a John Kingsley [perhaps son to Jonathan's uncle, Enos Kingsley, thus a first cousin],
2) Both parents' dates, children' details, and the above details of Jonathon's estate inventory are cited in Sarah Warner's entry (p. 68) in "The descendants of Andrew Warner" by Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Co., 1919 (found online as a Google eBook)
=======================================================
JONATHAN'S COMMENTARY
Many old gravemarkers in Jonathan's cemetery in Northampton have long been illegible. This was noted in an 1850 survey that recorded the readable Northampton inscriptions remaining then, many of those now unreadable, after another 170 years.
What cannot be read on stones, must come from other records. The best? Those done in the era of the person, the case with the above, when knowledgeable living survivors could still speak out, to correct errors.
THIS JONATHAN. This Jonathan French was the last male child of a Puritan John French born 1620ish who married the Puritan Freedom Kingsley. The two families, his Frenches, her Kingsleys, had followed different ministers (Rogers to Ipswich vs. Richard Mather to Dorchester), so had different geographies, northish versus southish of an emerging Boston.
Thus, Jonathan and all but one of his siblings started life by being born near their father's Frenches, Ipswich so far north of Boston that it was up by the part to turn into Maine in 1820. Freedom and John would sell their Ipswich land, did so well after Jonathan's birth, then moved far southwest, way below Boston, in the opposite direction from Maine, into the area New York wanted to claim, it was that far west, and so far south. it received escapees from Connecticut shore towns when set afire by firing British ships in the Revolution. Freedom and John's move let them join the children's uncle, Freedom's brother, Enos Kingsley. Enos and a Mather-trained minister preceded them to Northampton, a brand new town then, to start a brand new church, both church and town given the same name, old Bay Colony rules not letting a town start unless its church was begun. Enos is then in their records as marrying there in 1662, at Northampton. His descendants became new members through all subsequent decades, through the 1880s, when the church's last public record book was published.
In their place and era, town and church shared the same meeting place, called a "meeting house". Church and town thus had the same boundaries and the same cemetery. You could call it a town cemetery or a church cemetery and be right either way.
For people in this rural place and this early era, you often do not have to decide between different cemeteries to search for graves, as there, very often, was just the one. Weather was not Texas-hot, houses were clustered around the meeting house and cemetery, no need to put a newly deceased in the family garden to avoid a body-rotting ten-mile ride by wagon. However, a few people would state in their wills to bury them in a family yard (this was done by Grandpa John Kingsley, his stone a deeply hand-carved boulder later moved to a Rhode Island cemetery, when development took the former farm land outside East Providence).
However, most wanted "church ground", a permanent place under city protection. The cemetery of the original meeting house started next to the church, burials then later moved to the Bridge Street Cemetery, so the early burials such as as Jonathan's and his parents should all be there. (Their wills did not specify home burial, we simply cannot read the many time-washed stones in the graveyard.)
RELIGION RULED, FOR THE PURITANS. Northampton was not a purely random choice.
It had to do with following certain ministers. Jonathan' grandfather, John Kingsley, allied himself decades earlier with ministers produced by Richard Mather, at first training them out of a mother church in Dorchester. Thus, when John Kingsley went down near RI, to Rehoboth, it was no surprise to find him with Rev. Samuel Newman's congregation, as Newman had trained at Dorchester.
Rev. Richard Mather would grow to operate his religion and churches like a family business, making it pay to check the surnames of ministers. Thus, no surprise, Northampton's first minister was Rev. Eleazer Mather, son to Richard Mather. Richard Mather set a good precedent, insisting on education, not just for the prospective ministers that included his five sons, but for others in the Congregation. He took over the Dorchester church after a prior congregation left to start a church-town that became Windsor , Conn., at the mouth of the river with that name, Northampton to form a generation later. John Kingsley was present for what we'd call Dorchester's grand re-opening, a ceremony they called "signing the covenant". He and other elders signed after Mather's name. Elizabeth Kingsley and two other wives of elders signed later on the same list, no X next to their names. Many other women, in contrast, could not write, instead marked their X, signaling they watched while someone else signed for them.
BIRTH ORDER. The younger siblings like Jonathan naturally stayed longer with or close to their parents or other older kin. In general, as a family's elders grew closer to retirement age, hoping to be sold a family farm or business at a good price. This John French's family had been called tailors when near Boston. John Kingsley's will chastised the "taylor" for taking John's daughter too far away to care for him, silent about Enos. Grandpa John Kingsley had been a "husbandman", making remarks about the fate of cattle in harsh times. Jonathan stayed close.
The paper trail for Freedpm's youngest son Jonathan stretched from Ipswich, where he was born, to Northampton. We look no further as this Jonathan died there, youngish, not yet 50, the date of dividing his estate inventory among his adult children giving us a date. Some descendants, like those of uncle Enos Kingsley, stuck around Northampton for generations.
Some church-active relatives of maiden name French became hard to follow after marriage changed their surname. One was Abigail Bartlett, with cousins of Bartlett pear fame. Her grandmother had been a Mary French, a great-granddaughter of Jonathan, via Jonathan's son Ebenezer.
Some of Jonathan's siblings, however, did not stop moving once Northampton was reached. The eldest, John French the younger, sought out Grandpa Kingsley's group in Rehoboth.
John the junior's descendants would, at times, be distinctively named, as Elkanah French, Seba French. Some were found for a time in or near Bristol County, Mass. (Uncle Eldad Kingsley had gone there to help found an adult-baptizing church of the separatist sort. Such churches usually did not integrate with infant baptizers, even though ministers might argue for both types of baptisms inside a congregation, given the child baptizers essentially promised to take their children to church.)
The Seba line was not a Bristol, instead at Rehoboth, to leave for Rutland County, VT, some of his later off to far north Ohio, along Lake Erie's edge. Their descendants included an Oratus Seba French who died a wealthy man, in manufacturing in Fremont Ohio, at the turn of the last century. He was the last in the direct line of his parents, , he and his sister doubly orphaned when young, his father Warren, his grandfather Seba, producing cousins called French, others called Richmond on his mother's side. Called O.S. for short, he left an Estate, forcing a genealogical study of the descendants of his uncles. (Warning: Census-takers may treat Seba and Zeba as different spellings of the same name, interchangeable. Both are biblical, however, Seba is a placename in the bible, a town's name. Zeba or Jeba instead tend to be nicknames for Bibicalpersons called Zebediah or Jebediah. Seba was used by the Ipswich-to-Rehoboth-to-Vermont set. Zeba and Jeba are found more often among the Braintree Frenches, noted above as of different male DNA. Tree with Jeba or Jeba should be checked for corruption, mixing in of a wrong DNA.)
Copyright by JBrown, Julia Brown, Austin, TX, Apr. 2015, Revd. Aug., 2015, Match 2023, August 2023. Permission given to Findagrave for use at this page.
TREE-CHECKING. The John French linked below is Jonathan's father. Any tree for Jonathan's line should show his father John, a tailor, as born 1620ish, not 1612ish, with Freedom Kingsley as his wife, and as buried in Hampshire County, Mass. BEWARE: If you instead see an older birth year, his wife's name changed to Grace, or anyone in his family moved to Braintree, Mass., then a John French of a different DNA, a farmer, not a tailor, has been mixed into Jonathan's family tree.
Findgrave contributors have co-operated to properly separate the John French who married Freedom Kingsley and then went from one end of Mass. to the other, from the farming John French who married Grace Unknown, possibly an Alden, and stayed until death in a place called Braintree. Some other sites still mix them. Mass. databases can be viewed at FamilySearch.org (remove quote marks when entering titles in Records section).
============================================================
RECORD-CHECKING FOR JONATHAN
1667. Born to father John French of Ipswich (up by the Maine border), according to "Massachusetts, Births and Christenings, 1635-1915"
Circa 1692. Jonathan married Sarah Warner, born May 28, 1668, in Hadley, elsewhere in the Connecticut River Valley, but northeasterly of Northampton (Source--1919 book about the Warners, cited below, p. 68).
1714. Death in Northampton (over on the Connecticut River), according to "Massachusetts, Deaths and Burials, 1706-1910". Wife & widow Sarah, cited in estate inventory, as "relict of Jon. Frentch".
Massachusetts records and the inventory division confirm children born to Jonathan French and Sarah, with the birth years of most known. Some have info added from the 1919 book by the Warners cited below or from USGWarchives.net. His children:
*28 Aug 1693 Jonathan [died young, no division, USGW found death date of 2/5/1697]
*01 Mar 1694 Sarah [m. Coss or Corse, to Southampton]
*?? ??? ???? Hannah [m1 Edwards, m2 Strong]
*15 Nov 1700 Elisabeth (m. Bascom?)
*?? Nov 1705 Ebenezer (Grandpa of Abigail Bartlett, who married one of the Braintree Frenches, after his father and grandfather, both called Abiathar French, arrived pre-Revolution, in what became Westhampton, in Northampton outskirts.)
*21 Aug 1710 John
*1708 Samuel and 1700 Mary?
General Sources:
1) Inventory of estate, post-death, in Northampton, done by three witnesses who divide property across surviving heirs. The witnesses included a John Kingsley [perhaps son to Jonathan's uncle, Enos Kingsley, thus a first cousin],
2) Both parents' dates, children' details, and the above details of Jonathon's estate inventory are cited in Sarah Warner's entry (p. 68) in "The descendants of Andrew Warner" by Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Co., 1919 (found online as a Google eBook)
=======================================================
JONATHAN'S COMMENTARY
Many old gravemarkers in Jonathan's cemetery in Northampton have long been illegible. This was noted in an 1850 survey that recorded the readable Northampton inscriptions remaining then, many of those now unreadable, after another 170 years.
What cannot be read on stones, must come from other records. The best? Those done in the era of the person, the case with the above, when knowledgeable living survivors could still speak out, to correct errors.
THIS JONATHAN. This Jonathan French was the last male child of a Puritan John French born 1620ish who married the Puritan Freedom Kingsley. The two families, his Frenches, her Kingsleys, had followed different ministers (Rogers to Ipswich vs. Richard Mather to Dorchester), so had different geographies, northish versus southish of an emerging Boston.
Thus, Jonathan and all but one of his siblings started life by being born near their father's Frenches, Ipswich so far north of Boston that it was up by the part to turn into Maine in 1820. Freedom and John would sell their Ipswich land, did so well after Jonathan's birth, then moved far southwest, way below Boston, in the opposite direction from Maine, into the area New York wanted to claim, it was that far west, and so far south. it received escapees from Connecticut shore towns when set afire by firing British ships in the Revolution. Freedom and John's move let them join the children's uncle, Freedom's brother, Enos Kingsley. Enos and a Mather-trained minister preceded them to Northampton, a brand new town then, to start a brand new church, both church and town given the same name, old Bay Colony rules not letting a town start unless its church was begun. Enos is then in their records as marrying there in 1662, at Northampton. His descendants became new members through all subsequent decades, through the 1880s, when the church's last public record book was published.
In their place and era, town and church shared the same meeting place, called a "meeting house". Church and town thus had the same boundaries and the same cemetery. You could call it a town cemetery or a church cemetery and be right either way.
For people in this rural place and this early era, you often do not have to decide between different cemeteries to search for graves, as there, very often, was just the one. Weather was not Texas-hot, houses were clustered around the meeting house and cemetery, no need to put a newly deceased in the family garden to avoid a body-rotting ten-mile ride by wagon. However, a few people would state in their wills to bury them in a family yard (this was done by Grandpa John Kingsley, his stone a deeply hand-carved boulder later moved to a Rhode Island cemetery, when development took the former farm land outside East Providence).
However, most wanted "church ground", a permanent place under city protection. The cemetery of the original meeting house started next to the church, burials then later moved to the Bridge Street Cemetery, so the early burials such as as Jonathan's and his parents should all be there. (Their wills did not specify home burial, we simply cannot read the many time-washed stones in the graveyard.)
RELIGION RULED, FOR THE PURITANS. Northampton was not a purely random choice.
It had to do with following certain ministers. Jonathan' grandfather, John Kingsley, allied himself decades earlier with ministers produced by Richard Mather, at first training them out of a mother church in Dorchester. Thus, when John Kingsley went down near RI, to Rehoboth, it was no surprise to find him with Rev. Samuel Newman's congregation, as Newman had trained at Dorchester.
Rev. Richard Mather would grow to operate his religion and churches like a family business, making it pay to check the surnames of ministers. Thus, no surprise, Northampton's first minister was Rev. Eleazer Mather, son to Richard Mather. Richard Mather set a good precedent, insisting on education, not just for the prospective ministers that included his five sons, but for others in the Congregation. He took over the Dorchester church after a prior congregation left to start a church-town that became Windsor , Conn., at the mouth of the river with that name, Northampton to form a generation later. John Kingsley was present for what we'd call Dorchester's grand re-opening, a ceremony they called "signing the covenant". He and other elders signed after Mather's name. Elizabeth Kingsley and two other wives of elders signed later on the same list, no X next to their names. Many other women, in contrast, could not write, instead marked their X, signaling they watched while someone else signed for them.
BIRTH ORDER. The younger siblings like Jonathan naturally stayed longer with or close to their parents or other older kin. In general, as a family's elders grew closer to retirement age, hoping to be sold a family farm or business at a good price. This John French's family had been called tailors when near Boston. John Kingsley's will chastised the "taylor" for taking John's daughter too far away to care for him, silent about Enos. Grandpa John Kingsley had been a "husbandman", making remarks about the fate of cattle in harsh times. Jonathan stayed close.
The paper trail for Freedpm's youngest son Jonathan stretched from Ipswich, where he was born, to Northampton. We look no further as this Jonathan died there, youngish, not yet 50, the date of dividing his estate inventory among his adult children giving us a date. Some descendants, like those of uncle Enos Kingsley, stuck around Northampton for generations.
Some church-active relatives of maiden name French became hard to follow after marriage changed their surname. One was Abigail Bartlett, with cousins of Bartlett pear fame. Her grandmother had been a Mary French, a great-granddaughter of Jonathan, via Jonathan's son Ebenezer.
Some of Jonathan's siblings, however, did not stop moving once Northampton was reached. The eldest, John French the younger, sought out Grandpa Kingsley's group in Rehoboth.
John the junior's descendants would, at times, be distinctively named, as Elkanah French, Seba French. Some were found for a time in or near Bristol County, Mass. (Uncle Eldad Kingsley had gone there to help found an adult-baptizing church of the separatist sort. Such churches usually did not integrate with infant baptizers, even though ministers might argue for both types of baptisms inside a congregation, given the child baptizers essentially promised to take their children to church.)
The Seba line was not a Bristol, instead at Rehoboth, to leave for Rutland County, VT, some of his later off to far north Ohio, along Lake Erie's edge. Their descendants included an Oratus Seba French who died a wealthy man, in manufacturing in Fremont Ohio, at the turn of the last century. He was the last in the direct line of his parents, , he and his sister doubly orphaned when young, his father Warren, his grandfather Seba, producing cousins called French, others called Richmond on his mother's side. Called O.S. for short, he left an Estate, forcing a genealogical study of the descendants of his uncles. (Warning: Census-takers may treat Seba and Zeba as different spellings of the same name, interchangeable. Both are biblical, however, Seba is a placename in the bible, a town's name. Zeba or Jeba instead tend to be nicknames for Bibicalpersons called Zebediah or Jebediah. Seba was used by the Ipswich-to-Rehoboth-to-Vermont set. Zeba and Jeba are found more often among the Braintree Frenches, noted above as of different male DNA. Tree with Jeba or Jeba should be checked for corruption, mixing in of a wrong DNA.)
Copyright by JBrown, Julia Brown, Austin, TX, Apr. 2015, Revd. Aug., 2015, Match 2023, August 2023. Permission given to Findagrave for use at this page.
(Check back later for changes.)
TREE-CHECKING. The John French linked below is Jonathan's father. Any tree for Jonathan's line should show his father John, a tailor, as born 1620ish, not 1612ish, with Freedom Kingsley as his wife, and as buried in Hampshire County, Mass. BEWARE: If you instead see an older birth year, his wife's name changed to Grace, or anyone in his family moved to Braintree, Mass., then a John French of a different DNA, a farmer, not a tailor, has been mixed into Jonathan's family tree.
Findgrave contributors have co-operated to properly separate the John French who married Freedom Kingsley and then went from one end of Mass. to the other, from the farming John French who married Grace Unknown, possibly an Alden, and stayed until death in a place called Braintree. Some other sites still mix them. Mass. databases can be viewed at FamilySearch.org (remove quote marks when entering titles in Records section).
============================================================
RECORD-CHECKING FOR JONATHAN
1667. Born to father John French of Ipswich (up by the Maine border), according to "Massachusetts, Births and Christenings, 1635-1915"
Circa 1692. Jonathan married Sarah Warner, born May 28, 1668, in Hadley, elsewhere in the Connecticut River Valley, but northeasterly of Northampton (Source--1919 book about the Warners, cited below, p. 68).
1714. Death in Northampton (over on the Connecticut River), according to "Massachusetts, Deaths and Burials, 1706-1910". Wife & widow Sarah, cited in estate inventory, as "relict of Jon. Frentch".
Massachusetts records and the inventory division confirm children born to Jonathan French and Sarah, with the birth years of most known. Some have info added from the 1919 book by the Warners cited below or from USGWarchives.net. His children:
*28 Aug 1693 Jonathan [died young, no division, USGW found death date of 2/5/1697]
*01 Mar 1694 Sarah [m. Coss or Corse, to Southampton]
*?? ??? ???? Hannah [m1 Edwards, m2 Strong]
*15 Nov 1700 Elisabeth (m. Bascom?)
*?? Nov 1705 Ebenezer (Grandpa of Abigail Bartlett, who married one of the Braintree Frenches, after his father and grandfather, both called Abiathar French, arrived pre-Revolution, in what became Westhampton, in Northampton outskirts.)
*21 Aug 1710 John
*1708 Samuel and 1700 Mary?
General Sources:
1) Inventory of estate, post-death, in Northampton, done by three witnesses who divide property across surviving heirs. The witnesses included a John Kingsley [perhaps son to Jonathan's uncle, Enos Kingsley, thus a first cousin],
2) Both parents' dates, children' details, and the above details of Jonathon's estate inventory are cited in Sarah Warner's entry (p. 68) in "The descendants of Andrew Warner" by Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Co., 1919 (found online as a Google eBook)
=======================================================
JONATHAN'S COMMENTARY
Many old gravemarkers in Jonathan's cemetery in Northampton have long been illegible. This was noted in an 1850 survey that recorded the readable Northampton inscriptions remaining then, many of those now unreadable, after another 170 years.
What cannot be read on stones, must come from other records. The best? Those done in the era of the person, the case with the above, when knowledgeable living survivors could still speak out, to correct errors.
THIS JONATHAN. This Jonathan French was the last male child of a Puritan John French born 1620ish who married the Puritan Freedom Kingsley. The two families, his Frenches, her Kingsleys, had followed different ministers (Rogers to Ipswich vs. Richard Mather to Dorchester), so had different geographies, northish versus southish of an emerging Boston.
Thus, Jonathan and all but one of his siblings started life by being born near their father's Frenches, Ipswich so far north of Boston that it was up by the part to turn into Maine in 1820. Freedom and John would sell their Ipswich land, did so well after Jonathan's birth, then moved far southwest, way below Boston, in the opposite direction from Maine, into the area New York wanted to claim, it was that far west, and so far south. it received escapees from Connecticut shore towns when set afire by firing British ships in the Revolution. Freedom and John's move let them join the children's uncle, Freedom's brother, Enos Kingsley. Enos and a Mather-trained minister preceded them to Northampton, a brand new town then, to start a brand new church, both church and town given the same name, old Bay Colony rules not letting a town start unless its church was begun. Enos is then in their records as marrying there in 1662, at Northampton. His descendants became new members through all subsequent decades, through the 1880s, when the church's last public record book was published.
In their place and era, town and church shared the same meeting place, called a "meeting house". Church and town thus had the same boundaries and the same cemetery. You could call it a town cemetery or a church cemetery and be right either way.
For people in this rural place and this early era, you often do not have to decide between different cemeteries to search for graves, as there, very often, was just the one. Weather was not Texas-hot, houses were clustered around the meeting house and cemetery, no need to put a newly deceased in the family garden to avoid a body-rotting ten-mile ride by wagon. However, a few people would state in their wills to bury them in a family yard (this was done by Grandpa John Kingsley, his stone a deeply hand-carved boulder later moved to a Rhode Island cemetery, when development took the former farm land outside East Providence).
However, most wanted "church ground", a permanent place under city protection. The cemetery of the original meeting house started next to the church, burials then later moved to the Bridge Street Cemetery, so the early burials such as as Jonathan's and his parents should all be there. (Their wills did not specify home burial, we simply cannot read the many time-washed stones in the graveyard.)
RELIGION RULED, FOR THE PURITANS. Northampton was not a purely random choice.
It had to do with following certain ministers. Jonathan' grandfather, John Kingsley, allied himself decades earlier with ministers produced by Richard Mather, at first training them out of a mother church in Dorchester. Thus, when John Kingsley went down near RI, to Rehoboth, it was no surprise to find him with Rev. Samuel Newman's congregation, as Newman had trained at Dorchester.
Rev. Richard Mather would grow to operate his religion and churches like a family business, making it pay to check the surnames of ministers. Thus, no surprise, Northampton's first minister was Rev. Eleazer Mather, son to Richard Mather. Richard Mather set a good precedent, insisting on education, not just for the prospective ministers that included his five sons, but for others in the Congregation. He took over the Dorchester church after a prior congregation left to start a church-town that became Windsor , Conn., at the mouth of the river with that name, Northampton to form a generation later. John Kingsley was present for what we'd call Dorchester's grand re-opening, a ceremony they called "signing the covenant". He and other elders signed after Mather's name. Elizabeth Kingsley and two other wives of elders signed later on the same list, no X next to their names. Many other women, in contrast, could not write, instead marked their X, signaling they watched while someone else signed for them.
BIRTH ORDER. The younger siblings like Jonathan naturally stayed longer with or close to their parents or other older kin. In general, as a family's elders grew closer to retirement age, hoping to be sold a family farm or business at a good price. This John French's family had been called tailors when near Boston. John Kingsley's will chastised the "taylor" for taking John's daughter too far away to care for him, silent about Enos. Grandpa John Kingsley had been a "husbandman", making remarks about the fate of cattle in harsh times. Jonathan stayed close.
The paper trail for Freedpm's youngest son Jonathan stretched from Ipswich, where he was born, to Northampton. We look no further as this Jonathan died there, youngish, not yet 50, the date of dividing his estate inventory among his adult children giving us a date. Some descendants, like those of uncle Enos Kingsley, stuck around Northampton for generations.
Some church-active relatives of maiden name French became hard to follow after marriage changed their surname. One was Abigail Bartlett, with cousins of Bartlett pear fame. Her grandmother had been a Mary French, a great-granddaughter of Jonathan, via Jonathan's son Ebenezer.
Some of Jonathan's siblings, however, did not stop moving once Northampton was reached. The eldest, John French the younger, sought out Grandpa Kingsley's group in Rehoboth.
John the junior's descendants would, at times, be distinctively named, as Elkanah French, Seba French. Some were found for a time in or near Bristol County, Mass. (Uncle Eldad Kingsley had gone there to help found an adult-baptizing church of the separatist sort. Such churches usually did not integrate with infant baptizers, even though ministers might argue for both types of baptisms inside a congregation, given the child baptizers essentially promised to take their children to church.)
The Seba line was not a Bristol, instead at Rehoboth, to leave for Rutland County, VT, some of his later off to far north Ohio, along Lake Erie's edge. Their descendants included an Oratus Seba French who died a wealthy man, in manufacturing in Fremont Ohio, at the turn of the last century. He was the last in the direct line of his parents, , he and his sister doubly orphaned when young, his father Warren, his grandfather Seba, producing cousins called French, others called Richmond on his mother's side. Called O.S. for short, he left an Estate, forcing a genealogical study of the descendants of his uncles. (Warning: Census-takers may treat Seba and Zeba as different spellings of the same name, interchangeable. Both are biblical, however, Seba is a placename in the bible, a town's name. Zeba or Jeba instead tend to be nicknames for Bibicalpersons called Zebediah or Jebediah. Seba was used by the Ipswich-to-Rehoboth-to-Vermont set. Zeba and Jeba are found more often among the Braintree Frenches, noted above as of different male DNA. Tree with Jeba or Jeba should be checked for corruption, mixing in of a wrong DNA.)
Copyright by JBrown, Julia Brown, Austin, TX, Apr. 2015, Revd. Aug., 2015, Match 2023, August 2023. Permission given to Findagrave for use at this page.
TREE-CHECKING. The John French linked below is Jonathan's father. Any tree for Jonathan's line should show his father John, a tailor, as born 1620ish, not 1612ish, with Freedom Kingsley as his wife, and as buried in Hampshire County, Mass. BEWARE: If you instead see an older birth year, his wife's name changed to Grace, or anyone in his family moved to Braintree, Mass., then a John French of a different DNA, a farmer, not a tailor, has been mixed into Jonathan's family tree.
Findgrave contributors have co-operated to properly separate the John French who married Freedom Kingsley and then went from one end of Mass. to the other, from the farming John French who married Grace Unknown, possibly an Alden, and stayed until death in a place called Braintree. Some other sites still mix them. Mass. databases can be viewed at FamilySearch.org (remove quote marks when entering titles in Records section).
============================================================
RECORD-CHECKING FOR JONATHAN
1667. Born to father John French of Ipswich (up by the Maine border), according to "Massachusetts, Births and Christenings, 1635-1915"
Circa 1692. Jonathan married Sarah Warner, born May 28, 1668, in Hadley, elsewhere in the Connecticut River Valley, but northeasterly of Northampton (Source--1919 book about the Warners, cited below, p. 68).
1714. Death in Northampton (over on the Connecticut River), according to "Massachusetts, Deaths and Burials, 1706-1910". Wife & widow Sarah, cited in estate inventory, as "relict of Jon. Frentch".
Massachusetts records and the inventory division confirm children born to Jonathan French and Sarah, with the birth years of most known. Some have info added from the 1919 book by the Warners cited below or from USGWarchives.net. His children:
*28 Aug 1693 Jonathan [died young, no division, USGW found death date of 2/5/1697]
*01 Mar 1694 Sarah [m. Coss or Corse, to Southampton]
*?? ??? ???? Hannah [m1 Edwards, m2 Strong]
*15 Nov 1700 Elisabeth (m. Bascom?)
*?? Nov 1705 Ebenezer (Grandpa of Abigail Bartlett, who married one of the Braintree Frenches, after his father and grandfather, both called Abiathar French, arrived pre-Revolution, in what became Westhampton, in Northampton outskirts.)
*21 Aug 1710 John
*1708 Samuel and 1700 Mary?
General Sources:
1) Inventory of estate, post-death, in Northampton, done by three witnesses who divide property across surviving heirs. The witnesses included a John Kingsley [perhaps son to Jonathan's uncle, Enos Kingsley, thus a first cousin],
2) Both parents' dates, children' details, and the above details of Jonathon's estate inventory are cited in Sarah Warner's entry (p. 68) in "The descendants of Andrew Warner" by Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Co., 1919 (found online as a Google eBook)
=======================================================
JONATHAN'S COMMENTARY
Many old gravemarkers in Jonathan's cemetery in Northampton have long been illegible. This was noted in an 1850 survey that recorded the readable Northampton inscriptions remaining then, many of those now unreadable, after another 170 years.
What cannot be read on stones, must come from other records. The best? Those done in the era of the person, the case with the above, when knowledgeable living survivors could still speak out, to correct errors.
THIS JONATHAN. This Jonathan French was the last male child of a Puritan John French born 1620ish who married the Puritan Freedom Kingsley. The two families, his Frenches, her Kingsleys, had followed different ministers (Rogers to Ipswich vs. Richard Mather to Dorchester), so had different geographies, northish versus southish of an emerging Boston.
Thus, Jonathan and all but one of his siblings started life by being born near their father's Frenches, Ipswich so far north of Boston that it was up by the part to turn into Maine in 1820. Freedom and John would sell their Ipswich land, did so well after Jonathan's birth, then moved far southwest, way below Boston, in the opposite direction from Maine, into the area New York wanted to claim, it was that far west, and so far south. it received escapees from Connecticut shore towns when set afire by firing British ships in the Revolution. Freedom and John's move let them join the children's uncle, Freedom's brother, Enos Kingsley. Enos and a Mather-trained minister preceded them to Northampton, a brand new town then, to start a brand new church, both church and town given the same name, old Bay Colony rules not letting a town start unless its church was begun. Enos is then in their records as marrying there in 1662, at Northampton. His descendants became new members through all subsequent decades, through the 1880s, when the church's last public record book was published.
In their place and era, town and church shared the same meeting place, called a "meeting house". Church and town thus had the same boundaries and the same cemetery. You could call it a town cemetery or a church cemetery and be right either way.
For people in this rural place and this early era, you often do not have to decide between different cemeteries to search for graves, as there, very often, was just the one. Weather was not Texas-hot, houses were clustered around the meeting house and cemetery, no need to put a newly deceased in the family garden to avoid a body-rotting ten-mile ride by wagon. However, a few people would state in their wills to bury them in a family yard (this was done by Grandpa John Kingsley, his stone a deeply hand-carved boulder later moved to a Rhode Island cemetery, when development took the former farm land outside East Providence).
However, most wanted "church ground", a permanent place under city protection. The cemetery of the original meeting house started next to the church, burials then later moved to the Bridge Street Cemetery, so the early burials such as as Jonathan's and his parents should all be there. (Their wills did not specify home burial, we simply cannot read the many time-washed stones in the graveyard.)
RELIGION RULED, FOR THE PURITANS. Northampton was not a purely random choice.
It had to do with following certain ministers. Jonathan' grandfather, John Kingsley, allied himself decades earlier with ministers produced by Richard Mather, at first training them out of a mother church in Dorchester. Thus, when John Kingsley went down near RI, to Rehoboth, it was no surprise to find him with Rev. Samuel Newman's congregation, as Newman had trained at Dorchester.
Rev. Richard Mather would grow to operate his religion and churches like a family business, making it pay to check the surnames of ministers. Thus, no surprise, Northampton's first minister was Rev. Eleazer Mather, son to Richard Mather. Richard Mather set a good precedent, insisting on education, not just for the prospective ministers that included his five sons, but for others in the Congregation. He took over the Dorchester church after a prior congregation left to start a church-town that became Windsor , Conn., at the mouth of the river with that name, Northampton to form a generation later. John Kingsley was present for what we'd call Dorchester's grand re-opening, a ceremony they called "signing the covenant". He and other elders signed after Mather's name. Elizabeth Kingsley and two other wives of elders signed later on the same list, no X next to their names. Many other women, in contrast, could not write, instead marked their X, signaling they watched while someone else signed for them.
BIRTH ORDER. The younger siblings like Jonathan naturally stayed longer with or close to their parents or other older kin. In general, as a family's elders grew closer to retirement age, hoping to be sold a family farm or business at a good price. This John French's family had been called tailors when near Boston. John Kingsley's will chastised the "taylor" for taking John's daughter too far away to care for him, silent about Enos. Grandpa John Kingsley had been a "husbandman", making remarks about the fate of cattle in harsh times. Jonathan stayed close.
The paper trail for Freedpm's youngest son Jonathan stretched from Ipswich, where he was born, to Northampton. We look no further as this Jonathan died there, youngish, not yet 50, the date of dividing his estate inventory among his adult children giving us a date. Some descendants, like those of uncle Enos Kingsley, stuck around Northampton for generations.
Some church-active relatives of maiden name French became hard to follow after marriage changed their surname. One was Abigail Bartlett, with cousins of Bartlett pear fame. Her grandmother had been a Mary French, a great-granddaughter of Jonathan, via Jonathan's son Ebenezer.
Some of Jonathan's siblings, however, did not stop moving once Northampton was reached. The eldest, John French the younger, sought out Grandpa Kingsley's group in Rehoboth.
John the junior's descendants would, at times, be distinctively named, as Elkanah French, Seba French. Some were found for a time in or near Bristol County, Mass. (Uncle Eldad Kingsley had gone there to help found an adult-baptizing church of the separatist sort. Such churches usually did not integrate with infant baptizers, even though ministers might argue for both types of baptisms inside a congregation, given the child baptizers essentially promised to take their children to church.)
The Seba line was not a Bristol, instead at Rehoboth, to leave for Rutland County, VT, some of his later off to far north Ohio, along Lake Erie's edge. Their descendants included an Oratus Seba French who died a wealthy man, in manufacturing in Fremont Ohio, at the turn of the last century. He was the last in the direct line of his parents, , he and his sister doubly orphaned when young, his father Warren, his grandfather Seba, producing cousins called French, others called Richmond on his mother's side. Called O.S. for short, he left an Estate, forcing a genealogical study of the descendants of his uncles. (Warning: Census-takers may treat Seba and Zeba as different spellings of the same name, interchangeable. Both are biblical, however, Seba is a placename in the bible, a town's name. Zeba or Jeba instead tend to be nicknames for Bibicalpersons called Zebediah or Jebediah. Seba was used by the Ipswich-to-Rehoboth-to-Vermont set. Zeba and Jeba are found more often among the Braintree Frenches, noted above as of different male DNA. Tree with Jeba or Jeba should be checked for corruption, mixing in of a wrong DNA.)
Copyright by JBrown, Julia Brown, Austin, TX, Apr. 2015, Revd. Aug., 2015, Match 2023, August 2023. Permission given to Findagrave for use at this page.
Family Members
Advertisement
Records on Ancestry
Sponsored by Ancestry
Advertisement
