What Time Is It: The Ingersoll Watch Company

Recently, I saw a segment about Ingersoll wristwatches circa World War I on the PBS television program Antiques Roadshow. It triggered a flashback to my mother telling me that we’re related to the Ingersoll watch family. At the time, images of Bavarian forefathers living deep in the forest and building cuckoo clocks swirled in my head. Before family lore starts spinning out of control, let’s explore the real story.

I can trace at least two family lines, the Bryants of Reading, Massachusetts and the Ingersolls of Long Island, New York to early colonial America, through my great-grandfather, Jerome Calvin Bryant. Jerome and his mother, Mary Ellen Ingersoll, are listed on page 494 of A Genealogy of the Ingersoll Family in America 1629-1925, by Lillian Drake Avery (click here to view a digital version of the book at FamilySearch).

Mary Ellen (Henry Jackson⁶, Henry⁵, Ezra⁴, Josiah³, John²,John¹) was the seventh generation from the immigrant ancestor born in England, John Ingersoll of Huntington, Long Island, New York.

Robert Hawley Ingersoll and his brother Charles Henry Ingersoll founded the Ingersoll Watch Company in New York City 1892. Today Ingersoll watches are sold by Zeon Ltd. (Click here for a company history.) Their branch of the Ingersoll family is featured on pages 252-254 of Avery’s genealogy, with a long biography of Robert. Like Mary Ellen, their father, Orville Boudenot Ingersoll (Erastus6, David5, William4, David3, Thomas2, John1) was the seventh generation from the immigrant ancestor, John Ingersoll of Westfield, Massachusetts. This was a different man named John.

Is my family related to the founders of the watch company? It is unknown. A common misperception is that people who share a surname are related. This is not necessarily true. Last names derive from occupations, place names, characteristics, father’s names, and so on. Unrelated families took on the same names in different times and places. If people are likely to be related, it is more important to know where they came from than the name to find a connection.

Avery’s book outlines the families of brothers Richard and John Ingersoll of Massachusetts and of John Ingersoll of New York in the 1600s through ten generations of descendants in the early twentieth century. She descended from John of Massachusetts. It was during her research that she discovered the separate line of Ingersolls from Stamford, Connecticut and Westchester and Dutchess Counties, New York.

According to Avery, my ancestor John left England for America alone in 1654 at the tender age of thirteen (see the preface of the book). He may have been the second son of Robert Inkersall and Elizabeth Blower of Weston County, Hertfordshire, who inherited the family’s arms and estate from his father Geffrey Inkersall of Southwell, Nottinghamshire. The older son, Robert, would have inherited the family estate. (Click here for The Visitations of Hertfordshire by Robert Cooke, et al., page.) Further research is needed to identify John’s family for certain.