When John Benjamin was born in 1763, in Mattituck, Suffolk, New York Colony, British Colonial America, his father, John Benjamin, was 30 and his mother, Hannah Tuthill, was 28. He died on 27 July 1775, in Suffolk, New York Colony, British Colonial America, at the age of 12, and was buried in Mattituck, Southold, Suffolk, New York, United States.
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Jewish (Sephardic and Ashkenazic), English, French, West Indian (mainly Haiti), and African (mainly Nigeria and Tanzania); Hungarian (Benjámin): from the Hebrew male personal name Binyāmīn ‘Son of the South’. In the Book of Genesis, it is treated as meaning ‘Son of the Right Hand’. The two senses are connected, since in Hebrew the south is thought of as the right-hand side of a person who is facing east. Benjamin was the youngest and favorite son of Jacob and supposed progenitor of one of the twelve tribes of Israel (Genesis 35:16-18; 42:4). The personal name was not common among Gentiles in the Middle Ages, but its use was sanctioned by virtue of having been borne by a Christian saint martyred in Persia in about AD 424. In some cases in medieval Europe it was also applied as a byname or nickname to the youngest (and beloved) son of a large family; this is the sense of modern French benjamin. In North America, this surname has absorbed cognates from other languages, e.g. Assyrian/Chaldean Benyamin and Italian Beniamino.
History: John Benjamin (1598–1645) came from England to Watertown, MA, in 1632. Jean-Baptiste Benjamin dit Saint-Aubin from France married Jeanne Allard in QC in 1704.
Dictionary of American Family Names © Patrick Hanks 2003, 2006.
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