Hester Ingersoll

1665-1705 · Northampton MA

Born 1665, Northampton, Massachusetts

Died 1705

Mother: Abigail Bascom

Children include Samuel

Hester Ingersoll, also written Esther, was a daughter of John Ingersoll and his second wife Abigail Bascom. Savage's dictionary gives her birth as 9 September 1665. The family moved from Northampton to Westfield the next year. Her mother died in 1668, when Hester was two, and her father married a third wife who bore him eight more children. He died in September 1684.

That same year Hester married William Gurley, who had come from Inverness as a boy in the household of the Rev. Solomon Stoddard of Northampton. On 1 May 1687 he drowned in the Connecticut River. Sixteen days later she gave birth to their only child, Samuel.

On 23 January 1689 she married Benoni Jones of Northampton. They had four sons: Jonathan, born 4 January 1695, who died young; Benjamin in 1696; Ebenezer on 12 November 1698; and a second Jonathan on 3 March 1703. They lived at Pascommuck, a small outlying settlement of Northampton at the north end of Mount Tom.

In 1704 England and France were at war, the war the colonies called Queen Anne's War. On 29 February the French and their Native allies destroyed Deerfield, and Hester's half-brother Joseph Ingersoll was killed there. On 13 May they came to Pascommuck. They killed Benoni Jones, about thirty, and the two youngest boys, Ebenezer, six, and Jonathan, one. Three families lived there, and the attackers burned the houses and took the women north.

Hester went to Canada with her niece Margaret Huggins, eighteen, and a boy of eight, Elisha Searls. Margaret later came home to Connecticut. Hester did not. In Canada the priests worked to bring the English prisoners into the Catholic church. The Rev. John Williams of Deerfield, another captive, "conversed with her daily" and wrote what happened. She refused until she was ill and could no longer speak, and she died on 27 November 1705.

Her son Samuel Gurley was sixteen when she was taken. He lived to be a prominent farmer of Mansfield, Connecticut. Her son Benjamin Jones also survived and settled at Coventry.

Parents

Abigail Bascom (1640-1668)

Children

Samuel Gurley 1687-1760

Sources

The History and Genealogy of the Gurley Family (1897), p. 39; archive.org historygenealogy00gurl

The History and Genealogy of the Gurley Family (1897), p. 40, quoting the Rev. John Williams and the History of Deerfield; archive.org historygenealogy00gurl

The History and Genealogy of the Gurley Family (1897), pp. 39-40, archive.org historygenealogy00gurl, quoting the History of Deerfield and the Rev. John Williams; James Savage, A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England (1860), under Ingersoll

If Hester Ingersoll is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Hester Ingersoll (1665-1705)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/hester-ingersoll-1665-1705-6e21bb.