Ralph Isaacs Ingersoll (February 8, 1789 – August 26, 1872) was a lawyer, politician, and diplomat who served as a member of the Connecticut House of Representatives, where he was Speaker of the House, a United States representative from Connecticut for four consecutive terms from 1825 to 1833, and was the U.S. Minister to the Russian Empire under President James K. Polk in the late 1840s.
[1] On August 8, 1846, he was appointed by Democratic President James K. Polk (the former Speaker of the House of Representatives)[7] to serve as the sixteenth U.S. Minister to the Russian Empire.
[11] Margaret was the daughter of Charlotte Augusta (née Apthorp) and Jan Cornelis Van den Heuvel, the former governor of the Dutch province of Demerara from 1765 to 1770 who later moved to New York.
[2] Her maternal grandfather was prominent New York landowner Charles Ward Apthorp and her siblings included younger sisters, Maria Eliza van den Heuvel, who married John Church Hamilton (son of U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton), and Susan Augusta Van den Heuvel, the mother of Charlotte Augusta Gibbes, wife of John Jacob Astor III, from her marriage to Thomas Stanyarne Gibbes II.
[2] Together, Ralph and Margaret were the parents of seven children:[12] Ingersoll died in New Haven on August 26, 1872, and was buried in Grove Street Cemetery.