He was the son of Minsk's Stalininkas Józef Wołodkowicz [pl] (born in 1730) and Regina née Broniec.

[1] Following the family's tradition, Jan assumed the land judge's office in Minsk in February 1789 or around 1790 as the Lithuanian chamberlain.

[1] Thanks to this marriage with Anna Małgorzata Fergusson-Tepper, a wealthy Warsaw banker's daughter, on 29 June 1792, he increased his fortune to 150,000 Polish złoty.

[2] Jan Henryk Wołodkowicz fought in the Prussian and Polish campaigns of the War of the Fourth Coalition.

Member of Grande Armée during Napoleon's Invasion of Russia, he was taken prisoner and deported to Siberia by the Russians during the battle of Smolensk in 1812, in which his eldest son Joseph got killed.

After being released in 1815 he spent the rest of his life fighting legal battles in St. Petersburg, to regain his confiscated and usurped estates in Poland and Belarus.

Others argue it is the name of a French colonel Claude François Henry who died in 1812 in Spain during the siege of Valencia.

They also had one child, Alexander Henryk, French Henri Alexandre (Knight of the Légion d'honneur).