Ranney, Richard

Richard Ranney was a Wangunk tribal member whose maternal grandfather was the tribal leader Robin (d.c. 1750).  Since the last name Ranney is one of the English colonists of East Middletown, it has been suggested that his father may have been the English colonist Richard Ranney (1705-1759); however, it is quite possible Ranney was an indentured servant within the Ranney household and took their surname, since he indicated that he had been raised among the colonists who taught him to read and write, converted him to Christianity, and taught him the joiners’ trade.  In 1757, Ranney was living in Newtown, Connecticut, and petitioned the Connecticut General Assembly, as a Wangunk and descendant of Robin, for an articulation of his rights at the Wangunk reservation.  The following year, he was granted ten acres to cultivate and improve.  After the distribution, Ranney’s name no longer appears on Wangunk petitions, and it is possible that he removed to the Indian community at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where in 1775 an Indian named Richard Ranney enlisted as a private in Captain William Goodrich’s company of Colonel Patterson’s Regiment.  R. W. Bacon, “Native Americans in Middletown, Part II,” The Middler: The Newsletter of the Society of Middletown First Settlers Descendants (vol. 10, no. 2, Fall 2010), 8.  Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1904), 967.