Thomas Leonard, of England

This Thomas Leonard has been confused with the Thomas Leonard who was the father of the Leonards who immigrated to Massachusetts to work in the Saugus Iron Works. That Thomas Leonard is here Thomas Leonard.

The connection was disproven in 1933 by Donald Lines Jacobus in an article in The American Genealogist (uploaded at the Source Tab).

It is unclear when and by what source these two men began to be confused. One of the earliest mentions is in the 1851 "Genealogy Memoir of the Leonard Family" by William Reed Deane (see page 6). https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Genealogical_Memoir_of_the_L...
But that source says that it has not been proven but only "has been said", and on page 7, it also states that this Thomas did not immigrate to America. Supposedly, Leonards from Massachusetts had traveled to England in the late 1700s to find a connection but were unsuccessful. So, there had been a long history of that claim.

It might have been a 1908 publication entitled Stephen Banks Leonard (see uploaded TAG article). It might have been the more widely cited1911 Publication of the Annals of the Leonard Family, by Fannie Leonard Koster, which makes wildly unproven declarations of relations to the Darces, indicating that the father of the 11 children was this profile. She does, however, state on page 61 (pdf p 95) that Thomas Leonard, the father of James and Henry of Taunton, did not leave England (as she properly noted the burial in 1638 in England), but she states that James and Henry arrived in 1652 - although they were working at the Saugus Iron Works in the 1640s.

https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/viewer/375118#page=96&vi...

It should be noted that many online trees, Find A Grave, and other publications incorrectly state that the Thomas who is conflated with this profile died in Tauton, MA in 1638, using the death date of this profile in England. The Find A Grave profile, however, as of 10/17/2022 includes a scan of page 604 of the History of Bristol County, Massachusetts, which makes the incorrect claim about the ancestry of the Leonards of Tauton descent from Leonard Lord Dacre.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/60380372/thomas-leonard

The actual information on this profile (Thomas Leonard, b. 1577, d. 1638) is found in,

Barrett-Lennard, Thomas. An Account of the Families of Lennard and Barrett. Norwich, Norfolk: Self-Published, 1908.
https://archive.org/details/accountoffamilie02barr/page/242/mode/2u...
Page 216 lists the children, including Thomas, 23 Mary 1577 in Chevening.
Page 240 "Samson's three younger sons - Gregory, Thomas, and John - all died without leaving issue."
Page 242 discusses Thomas's will and that he was unmarried in 1628.