His father, Josiah Franklin, was born in England, in the year 1655, during the reign of Charles the Second. He abandoned the ancestral forge for a dyer's trade, which, again, after his emigration to Boston, he exchanged for that of tallow-chandler and soap-boiler. In his old home he had espoused the cause of the Puritans, and in 1682, the very year of William Penn's arrival in Pennsylvania, he emigrated to the New World, at the age of twenty-seven, with his wife and three small children, that he might enjoy freedom of conscience.
The two colonies of Massachusetts and Plymouth had at that time a population of about fifty thousand. Boston was a small town of five or six thousand inhabitants, and the very next year after Josiah Franklin's arrival, the richest part of it was destroyed by fire. Fifteen years later it had over one thousand houses, and in eight years more its population had grown to eight or ten thousand. John Dunstan, who visited the place in 1680, says that "the houses were for the most part raised on the sea-banks, and wharfed out with great industry and cost, many of them standing upon piles, close together, on each side of the street, as in London, and furnished with many fair shops. The south side of the town is adorned with gardens and orchards... There is a small but pleasant Common, where the gallants, a little before sunset, walk with their marmalet madams, till the nine o'clock bell rings them home."