Sampson was one of nine children of John and Elizabeth Watts Parminter who sailed from England to the US in 1832. They settled in northeastern Pennsylvania at Honesdale.

Before leaving Pennsylvania, Sampson married Mary Westlake in 1838. She had also been born in England. Sampson, his wife Mary, and their first four children moved to Ohio in 1845. His older brother, William, moved to Ohio in 1854.

Sampson and Mary had eight children. Ephraim, their fifth child, died in infancy in 1847. Mary died in 1854 after the birth of their eighth child Abraham, who also died the same year. Sampson married again in 1855, with six surviving children he needed a wife! His new wife was Margaret Beaty.

Sampson and his older brother, William Watts Parminter, changed the spelling to Parmenter for their families in 1855. We don't know why the spelling change was made, but according to one account, that is how the name was being pronounced. Not all of John's children made the change. (Sampson's oldest daughters, Elizabeth and Isabella both gave their name as "Parminter" when married in 1859 and 1860, per County marriage records.)

The family continued living on the farm near the village of Tiverton, Ohio, where eight additional children were born to Sampson and Margaret, including two sets of twins! In 1866, the family moved to a farm near Summum, Illinois. Charles Grant Parmenter was born there in 1867. Charles Grant Parmenter and a twin brother, Garfield, who died soon after birth, were the ninth and tenth (and last) children of Sampson and Margret Parmenter.

In the Spring of 1872, Sampson, Margaret, and the younger children (Cary, William, Wilson, Andrew, Sarah, and Charles) moved to a farm located between Ashland and Yutan in Eastern Nebraska. Sampson's oldest son, George Westlake Parmenter, who had served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and his first wife Ellen Ralstin and daughter had moved to Nebraska in Febuary 1868. They lived on adjoining farms south of Yutan, Nebraska. The Parmenter Cemetery is on land provided by George W.

Although a total of eighteen children were born in Sampson's two families (including three sets of twins), only eleven lived to adult age.