Dana, *Richard

Ancestry.com Database: Genealogical Dictionary of New England Settlers
Source Information: Savage, James. A Genalogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England Showing Three Generations of Those Who Came Before May, 1692, - Vol. I-IV (4). Boston, 1860-1862.
Volume 2; page 5

Dana, RICHARD, Cambridge, m. Ann Bullard, had John, b. 15 Apr. 1649, d. in six mos.; Hannah, 8 July 1651; Samuel, 13 Oct. 1653, d. next mo.; Jacob, 2 Feb. 1655; Joseph, 21 May 1656; Benjamin, 20 Feb. bapt. 8 Apr. 1660; Eliz. 27 Apr. 1662; Daniel, 20 Mar. bapt. 3 Apr. 1663; d. Abiah, d. young; Deliverance, 5 Mar. 1667; Sarah, wh. d. 11 Jan. 1670; and Sarah, again, 1 Jan. 1670; twelve in all, of wh. one d. prob. Hannah, m. Samuel Oldham; one, perhaps Eliz. perhaps Deliverance, m. Daiel Woodward; and Sarah m. Samuel Hyde. The time of his d. by a fall in his barn, is giv. 2 Apr. 1690, but the partit. of est. was not bef. 15 Apr. 1695, when div. to wid. and four s. beside Oldham, Woodward, and Hyde is found. Thirteen of this fam. had been gr. in 1839 at Harv. and thirteen at other N. E. coll.
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Ancestry.com Database: Massachusetts Pioneers
(Source Information: Pope, Charles Henry. The Pioneers of Massachusetts, np, nd.)

THE PIONEERS OF MASSACHUSETTS,

DANA, DANIE, DANY,
Richard, planter, Cambridge, propr. before 1650. Wife Anne; ch. Anne, Jacob, Joseph and Abigail, all bapt. in Camb. before 1658; Benjamin bapt. April 8, 1660, Elizabeth bapt. April 27, 1662, Daniel bapt. April 3, 1664. [Mi.]
He d. April 2, 1690. Inv. filed. No will probated.
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(See source below text)

"RICHARD DANA, the first Dana to come to America, landed in New England about 1640, and was
one of the early settlers in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was the only person of the name of Dana
to come to America from abroad for at least two hundred years. He is, accordingly, the progenitor
of the Dana family in America, and, with a few recent exceptions, all the Danas to be found in this
country are his descendants. It is about this Richard Dana of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and about
his descendants that this genealogy is written.

Formerly doubt existed about the origin of this early settler, Richard Dana, and various suggestions
were made as to where the name and the family came from. (*) Recent researches in England,
however, seem to indicate the probability that this Richard Dana who settled in Cambridge in New
England about 1640 was none other than the Richard Dana who was baptized in the Manchester
Collegiate Church in England on October 31, 1617.(+) This Richard Dana of Manchester was the
next to the youngest of the eleven children of Robert Dana (1571-1644), a tanner living in "ye
Mylne Gate" (Mill Street) in Manchester. The burials of other members of that family are recorded in
England, but there are no later records of this Richard Dana and no mention of his death there.
Accordingly, as the name of Dana was then very rare in England, and as there was apparently no
other Richard Dana of that period, it seems more than probable that this was the same Richard
Dana who landed in New England about 1640. In this case, he came over at about the age of
twenty-three, during a period when many other young men from the same part of England
were coming over and settling in the same part of New England. Several of those with whom we
shall find the name of Richard Dana associated in the records of Cambridge in New England came
from the city of Manchester, England. For example, Henry Sewall, Jr., Robert Walker, William
Aspinwall, and Henry Dunster all came from Manchester or its neighborhood.

In fact, two of these friends of Richard Dana's -- Henry Sewall, Jr., and Robert Walker -- had lived
across the street from each other in the same "Mylne Gate" (Mill Street) in Manchester, where the
Danas lived.(*) Undoubtedly all three had been schoolmates there together, and all three later
decided to try their fate in America. In America we find them referring to each other in their letters
and diaries. Sewall's son, Samuel Sewall, in his famous diary mentions his father's two associates,
and gives an account of the deaths of "Father Walker" and "Father Dana," as he calls them.(+)

Another of Dana's associates, Henry Dunster, had been born in Bury, some eight miles to the north
of Manchester.?? After graduating from Cambridge University, where he had been associated with
other Puritans such as John Milton and Jeremy Taylor, Dunster returned to Bury and became
master of a school there. It is possible that Richard Dana attended this school. In 1640, when
Henry Dunster sailed to New England and was elected President of Harvard College, Richard Dana
may have come over with him or may have come at his suggestion. Dunster apparently sent for
other friends and scholars to join him; for his father replied to him in a letter of March 20,
1640/41: "I do not know of any that you sent for that entend to come as yett."? In any case,
Richard Dana and Henry Dunster both from the neighborhood of Manchester, in England, came to
Cambridge in New England at almost exactly the same time, and were evidently acquainted with
each other in Cambridge. Both names are to be found on the same document written by the Clerk
of Courts for Middlesex County. Moreover, Richard Dana was one of the early donors to Harvard
College,** of which Dunster was President, and Dunster married for a second wife Elizabeth Atkinson, who had come from the same parish of Kendal in Westmoreland from which Richard Dana's father had come.

These circumstances all tend to substantiate the supposition that it was the Richard Dana who was
baptized at Manchester in 1617, who, at about 1640, when he was scarcely twenty-three years old,
ventured to leave Manchester, England, and come to the town of Cambridge in New England,
where he spent the remaining fifty years of his life, became the father of eleven children, and the
progenitor of many generations of descendants in America.

Cambridge had been settled some ten years earlier, in 1631, on the north bank of the Charles
River, on the path from Charlestown to Watertown, as this site seemed to Governor Winthrop and
the Court of Assistants "a fit place for a fortified town."(*)

At first it was called "The New Towne," Newtowne or Newton, but in 1638, after Harvard College
had been founded, the name was changed to Cambridge, in honor of the University of Cambridge,
England, where John Harvard and others had studied.

As further evidence that this was the Richard Dana of Manchester, England, we may mention the
fact that on Arrow Street, here in Cambridge, lived a Roger Shaw, possibly from Manchester, as the
name Roger Shaw -- not a common name -- is found there. Shaw was town clerk of Cambridge in
1642 and selectman four years. With wife Anne and several children he removed to Hampton, was
representative from there, and died there in 1660.

Richard Dana, as a young unmarried man, seems to have been employed at one time in mowing
hay for the aforesaid Roger Shaw on land over near the creek at Graves' Neck, which was later East
Cambridge.

Thomas Graves, from Gravesend, Kent, England, came to this country in 1629, under contract with
the New England Company as land surveyor. He laid out the town of Charlestown, was granted
land next the Cambridge line, near the Creek (Willis Creek, later called Miller River), and lived on his
one hundred acres on the uplands, now East Cambridge.

When Graves left Cambridge, the place called "Graves, his Neck," was bought in 1635 by Atherton
Haugh, who was a man of means, Assistant to the General Court and later Deputy; an adjoining
estate was owned by Roger Shaw. Richard Dana's fellow worker was William Taylor, possibly
from Manchester. On October 28, 1647, Richard Dana and William Taylor bore testimony in a case between Roger Shaw and Atherton Haugh.

More history on Richard Dana can be found in "The Dana Family in America" by Elizabeth E. Dana(1956); Above information found on RootsWeb World Connect Gedcom of Tod Marshall