Our Thompson family was one of the first European families to permanently settle in North America. Records suggest that David Thomson was sent to explore the North American coast at least once between 1618 and 1621 as an agent of the Plymouth Company. In 1623, the successor company, the Plymouth Council for New England, sent him to establish the first permanent settlement in what is now New Hampshire. When his wife, Amyes, joined him later, she is thought to have been the 25th white European woman permanently living in North America, the other 24 being the women in Plymouth Colony.

The next five generations (John I, John II, John III, Benjamin, Samuel) lived in the Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont region, often moving in family groups to new communities on the frontiers of European settlement (Bellingham & Mendon, MA; Smithfield, RI; Swanzey, NH; Richmond, VT) over the next two hundred years.

Samuel's youngest son, Rufus, continued that tradition, migrating from Vermont to Michigan in the later-1820s, where he married and started a family, and then to Iowa by the early-1850s, where his daughter Louisa later married Samuel Bowers.