The Brintons were Quaker and came from Staffordshire County, England. William Brinton, Sr. (1635-1699) was born to Thomas Brinton and Ann (Biddle) Brinton and is referred to by the family as “William the Elder” or William the Colonist.”

In 1659 in England, William the Elder married Ann Bagley. They are known to have had five children (3 girls and 2 boys) between the years 1660 and 1675, but one son, Edward Brinton, died at an early age.

In an effort to escape religious persecution, William Sr. came to America in the spring of 1684 with his wife and his only living son, William Jr. (1670-1751), who is known as "William the Younger" or "William the Builder". The family of three anchored near what is now New Castle, Delaware, and lived in a cave through the first winter. The following summer, they built and settled in a cabin on some of William Penn's land near West Chester, Pennsylvania.  

(Several years later, the son, "William the Younger," built the William Brinton 1704 House on an adjoining part of this land.) William Sr. and Ann originally had left their three daughters (Ann, Elizabeth, and Esther) behind in England, but eventually they and their husbands also emigrated to this area.
____________________________________________________________________

William “the emigrant” 3362
____________

The Delaware County township which officially became Chadds Ford on December 11, 1996, has a 300-year history as "Birmingham Township."

The land was inhabited by the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians centuries before the Europeans arrived. The Indians’ town sites were located along the waterways at major communication and trade junctions, with paths laid out between villages and tribes. These much traveled footpaths through the woods became the first roads.

It is believed that the early English Quaker settlers like the Brintons and the Gilpins used caves as their first shelters. According to local tradition, both families were befriended by the Lenni Lenape Indians.3320
____________

"The English family of Brinton, from whom those in America derive descent, took their name from the parish of Brinton, now Brimpton, in Berkshire. The first so named of whom we possess any definite account is Robert de Brinton, who received a manor in Shropshire from King Henry II. about the year 1160. His lineal descendant removed to Staffordshire about 1450." — Dr. Daniel G. Brinton. [Are Joseph and others within this record part of this family?]3363
____________

The Brintons were Quakers, and William Brinton, Sr. (1636 – 1700), with his wife and son, moved to the colony of Pennsylvania to escape religious persecution in England.3364
____________

William Brinton, the Quaker ancestor of the Pennsylvania family of the name, living at the little village of Nether Gournall, in the parish of Sedgely, Staffordshire, but seven miles from Church-Eaton-cum-Orslow, held by John Brynton, in 1464, but two generations at most before his time doubtless came of the same family, but no records have been discovered to form the connecting link. [There is an extensive history of the Brinton family dating to the 1300s at this source.]

William Brinton, born about 1630, came to Pennsylvania, in 1684, from the village of Nether Gournall. parish of Sedgley, county Stafford, England. He came of an ancient family of Staffordshire. He became a convert to the doctrines of the Society of Friends [Quaker] when a young man, and was married according their form, in 1659, to Ann Bagley, daughter of Edward Bagley, a Friend of the same vicinity.

William Brinton, like many other of the early Friends, suffered persecution for conscience sake. He was fined in 1683, and had goods to a considerable value taken from him for standing fast to his faith. In the spring of 1684, with his wife and son, William he embarked for Pennsylvania, leaving his three daughters, Ann, Esther and Elizabeth, in England, where they married and followed him to America, later. Landing on the west bank of the Delaware, in Brandywine Hundred, New Castle county, he pushed back into the unbroken forest and erected a temporary shelter, in what became Birmingham township, Chester (now Delaware) county, in which they spent the winter. In the spring he erected a log cabin and effected a small clearing, and eventually received patents for several hundred acres in that vicinity and in Concord township, adjoining.

The home tract of four hundred and fifty acres was surveyed to him August 5, 1685, as well as another tract of like size on the Brandywine, which he later conveyed to his sons-in-law, John Willis and Hugh Harry, in 1695. He was a member of Concord Monthly Meeting, and at a Quarterly Meeting held gmo. 3, 1690, "it being moved to this Meeting that Concord First-day Meetings be every fourth first-day at William Brinton's in Birmingham, beginning the 23d of this month, also the fourth day following if this meeting see fit."

Ann, wife of William Brinton, died in 1699, and he did not long survive her; his will, dated 6 mo. 20, 1699, being proven December 1, 1700.3365
____________

U.S. President Richard Milhouse Nixon is the seventh great grandson of William Brinton Sr. (1635-1699) through his daughter Elizabeth who was Nixon’s 6th great grandmother.3366
____________

Available for sale, a hardcover 800 page book, 1924 edition.

The Brinton Genealogy: A History of William Brinton, Who Came from England to Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1684, And of His Descendants, with Some Records of the English Brintons. Data collected by Gilbert Cope. Compiled and edited by Janetta Wright Schoonover. Originally printed and published in 1924 by MacCrellish and Quigley Co. (Trenton, New Jersey). Reprinted and published for the Brinton Family Association (now called The Brinton Association of America) in 1998 by Gateway Press, Inc. (Baltimore, Maryland).

Also available a 1998 supplement at this source.3367