Chapter 1: Early Family Origins – Raised in a Covenant World

Edward Frisbie was born on a winter day in January 1678, in the small Puritan settlement of Branford, along the shoreline of what is now New Haven County, Connecticut. He came into a world shaped not only by the thrum of colonial life but by the powerful weight of religious vision—a world that believed in covenants, in predestination, in collective purpose. His father John Frisbie, and mother Ruth Bowers Frisbie, were among the founding settlers of Branford. They were not strangers to hardship. By the time Edward was born, New England had just emerged from the devastation of King Philip’s War (1675–1678)—a brutal, existential conflict between Indigenous nations and English colonists that had left deep scars across southern New England.