Jonathan Ince, Hartford Founder

Compiled by Timothy Lester Jacobs, SDFH Genealogist

JONATHAN¹ INCE, HARTFORD FOUNDER was born in England, and died 1666 in Boston, MA. He married _____ ______ abt. 1630.

The ancestry and origin of Jonathan Ince, and when he emigrated to the American colonies is unknown. He was in Hartford by 1637, when he served from Hartford in the Pequot War. He was an original proprietor of Hartford but removed to Boston in 1640, where he died in 1666. In the Hartford land inventory of February 1639/40 (which was actually compiled later than that date), the land which was sequestered for him had been settled on Hartford Founder John Cullick, who also removed to Boston, by 1659. Jonathan Ince’s properties in Hartford were: two acres and two roods on which his dwelling house stood with other outhouses, yards and gardens located on the road from the mill to the South Meadow; five acres in Hockanum; three roods in the Soldiers Field; four acres in the Great Swamp; and fourteen acres in the Forty Acres.

There is no record of his wife of any sort, and he appears to have had only one child, son Jonathan, who graduated from Harvard in 1650 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and remained three years for postgraduate study. This younger Jonathan Ince went to New Haven, where he intended to live, married in 1654, and had a son also named Jonathan born in New Haven in 1655, who apparently died young. Jonathan the second had “a singular facility to learn and pronounce the Indian tongue”, and probably collaborated on the production of “Some Helps for Indians: A Catechism in the Language of the Quiripi Indians of New–Haven Colony”, as he was taking a copy of it to England in the winter of 1657, when the ship he was sailing on was lost and all hands died.

Genealogy: none known, which is logical given that all members of this family had died by 1666.