Henry REYNOLDS was the one of his parent's ten children whose birthplace cannot be confirmed. As previously noted, although England is shown on his pedigree, logic suggests that he first saw the light of day in Chester, PA. In 1678 Henry married Prudence CLAYTON at the Burlington Monthly Meeting of Friends in Burlington, New Jersey, where her family lived before settling in Pennsylvania. She was the daughter of William CLAYTON who brought his family to America (Colonies) from the county of Sussex England, in 1671. Their English forebearers could be traced back hundreds of years. William CLAYTON was a friend of William PENN, and filled several high posts in the early government of PENN's proprietary colony of Pennsylvania. (See notes on the Claytons)
Henry and Prudence REYNOLDS became the parents of ten children between 1680 to 1697, evenly split with five sons and five daughters. Three of them, Henry, Hannah, and William, married three members of the Brown family; Hannah, Richard, and Mary.
At the time Henry's father and mother first came to the area it was a wild land with only a scattering of settlers, but as Henry was growing up it was beginning to attract more colonists. When he was about 26, some 50 years after his father had settled in Chester, proprietary rights to the entire region were granted to William Penn by Charles II in settlement of a debt owed by the king to William's father, Admiral Sir William Penn. It became the colony of Pennsylvania, a name meaning "Penn's Woods". The king not only settled the debt but was glad to be rid of Penn, who had been arrested many times for espousing his Quaker beliefs, actively denouncing religious intolerance and rejecting the Church of England. The new proprietor paid the Indians for their land, although he was not required to do so, and made fair treaties with them. This evenhanded approach resulted in a period of peace that lasted until a large influx of immigrants to the colony became threatening to the Indian way of life.
Penn founded what he called his "greene countrie towne", Philadelphia, about a dozen miles up river from Chester in 1682, and over the next several decades it grew into the largest town in the American colonies -- an estimated 20,000... inhabitants by 1750. The name Philadelphia appropriately mirrored the Quaker philosophy, being drawn from a Greek term meaning "brotherly love".
After witnessing southeastern Pennsylvania change from wilderness to an emerging center of the Colonies, Henry died at age 69. Prudence joined him almost four years later. (Taken from: A Family History, by Donovan Faust)
