Robert Dibbell of Glastonbury, Somersetshire, England had a son named John who was baptized in 1605. Nothing else is definitively known about this person.

However, Van Buren Lamb apparently believed that he came to New England and settled in the area of Stamford, CT. The book History of Stamford, Connecticut, 1641 - 1868, including Darien until 1820, by Elijah Baldwin Huntington, published in 1868, contains information about a John Dibble who was in Stamford in the first half of the 17th. century.

According to Huntington, who transcribed his information from hand-written town records, this John Dibble died in Stamford in September 1646. Nothing is given about his age at the time, or how he came to be in Stamford, or when. To date, no one has found a ship passenger list showing that John of Glastonbury ever came to North America. So we don't know why Lamb thought John of Stamford was Robert of Glastonbury's eldest son. But lots of people have picked up this notion and run with it; many extensive genealogies of this John's descendants have his father as Robert.

This is, of course, of specific interest to the Lt. Jonathan Dibble line, because Stamford is, broadly speaking, the area where he lived as an adult. Huntington, without explanation or attribution, states that the John who died in Stamford in 1646 had "two sons, Samuel and Zachariah Dibble [who] probably came with their father". There is a "Zacharia" Dibble listed in the town records, and according to Huntington this Zacharia had a son "Zachary" who he apparently believed was the "Zachariah" Dibble also listed in the records. (The spelling differences are probably not important, except as a way for us to distinguish these people from each other for purposes of discussion.) "Zachary" was supposed to have been born in 1667, and he then supposedly had a son named John, born October 22, 1701.

Some researchers believe that Lt. Jonathan's father was a man named John who lived in Stamford. This John, son of Zachary, is obviously not him; he would have been ten years old when Jonathan was born. No other John of an appropriate age at the time appears in Huntington's book, which is riddled with information about other Dibbles in this line. Nor does anything in his book indicate anything about the lineage of the George Dibble whom he mentions as a resident of nearby Chestnut Ridge in 1722. As George was clearly an adult in that year, John born in 1701 also could not be his father. (This could have been the George who was involved in founding the Stanwich Church and whom we have identified as a possible second cousin of Jonathan.)

However, assuming it is true that the John who died in 1646 also had a son named Samuel, nothing is reported in the book about that line. Although I haven't made a concerted effort to investigate this, so far in all of the published genealogies and documents I've looked at, I haven't found anything about this Samuel or his descendants. So it remains an open question as to whether he could be an ancestor of Lt. Jonathan.