William Henry Ruggles Pynchon

1786 - 1831  (45 years)

• Name	William Henry Ruggles Pynchon
  Birth	16 Feb 1786  [1]
  Gender	Male
  Death	11 Dec 1831  [1]
  Burial	14 Dec 1831	New Haven, New Haven, Connecticut   [1]
  Person ID	I44177	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others
  Last Modified	5 Oct 2025

  
  

  Father	Dr. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon,   b. 23 May 1760, Guilford, New Haven, Connecticut d. 10 Sep 1796, Guilford, New Haven, Connecticut (Age 36 years)
  Mother	Rebecca Tomlinson   d. 11 Oct 1794, Guilford, New Haven, Connecticut
  Marriage	30 Sep 1783  [1]
  Family ID	F25800	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Mary Murdock
  Marriage	2 Nov 1819	Schenectady, Schenectady, New York   [1]
  Children	+ 1. William Lyon Pynchon,   b. 23 Jun 1831, New Haven, New Haven, Connecticut d. 18 Jun 1868, Plainfield, Windham, Connecticut (Age 36 years)
  Family ID	F25801	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	5 Oct 2025

  
  

• Notes

  The record of his marriage calls him "cashier of the New-Haven bank", about which Robert Charles Anderson (citation details below) notes: "At this time, the cashier of a small bank was not a minor front-line functionary, but was the senior operating officer, directly answerable to the president of the bank." Further from Anderson: The estate of Henry R. Pynchon was administered in 1831 and included a lengthy and detailed inventory, running to seven long pages.43 More than half of this document consisted of a listing of the books in the decedent's possession. Most of the titles are abbreviated, so the exact identification of many cannot be made. About 190 titles were listed, several of which were multi-volume sets. Scattered through this catalog were many religious volumes, such as "Hale's Analysis of Scripture Chronology" (four volumes), "Wilson on the 39 Articles," "Episcopal Watchman" (three volumes), and many more. Henry R. Pynchon's library included volumes in other areas indicating a wide range of cultural interest, such as "Shakespear with Plates," several of the novels of Walter Scott, "Esop Fables," Latin and French dictionaries, and a forty-seven-volume set of "Roe's Cyclopedia." More practical matters were represented by "Silliman's Chemistry" (two volumes), "3 British Almanacs," and "American Mechanical Magazine" (two volumes). Buried within this list is one title which shows continuity with an earlier generation, given here simply as "Telemaque." Henry's great-grandfather, William Pynchon, had owned at his death a copy of "Telemachus Travels" in two volumes. These are not likely the same physical volumes, as Henry appears to have had a single-volume French edition, whereas William's was likely an early English translation. Nevertheless, this appearance of the same text in two inventories nearly a century apart is remarkable. We have no evidence that Henry R. Pynchon attended college, but his personal library might well have been that of a professor at Yale and not that of a bank officer.

  
  

• Sources

  [S5932] Robert Charles Anderson, "The Literary Pedigree of the Author Thomas Pynchon." New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 146:165, 2015.