Overview of the Cunninghams

For my mother's birthday, I put together a family history book, with a two-page layout dedicated to each of her family lines. I only went back to her great-grandparents to determine how many family lines to include, but I talked about their multi-family ancestry, too, if I knew it.

Since there are a number of descendants of these families, I thought I would reproduce this information on the blog, as well. Some of this information I have posted before in greater detail or with a different focus, some of it is new. If you want to see all the posts together, just click on the "Mom Book" tag on this post.

Cunningham

Our first Cunningham ancestors to come to the United States were Maurice and Elizabeth, who arrived in New York on October 2, 1828, from Cork, Ireland. They were a young couple, aged 21 and 18, probably only recently married. Prior to 1828, most Irish emigrants were well-educated, well-to-do Protestants from Ulster, but in 1827 the British government repealed all restrictions on emigration, allowing more Catholics, more of the poor, and more people from outside Ulster to leave. Between 1828 and 1847, 400,000 Irish left for North America. They were looking for opportunities that weren't available for them back in Ireland, where overcrowding and failed harvests had led to epidemics of famine and disease that, eventually, would culminate in the horrors of the Potato Famine.

Upon entering the United States, Maurice gave his occupation as "carpenter", but he found work as the head gardener on the estate of Robert Livingston Pell of Pelham in Ulster County, New York. Robert Pell was known for his agricultural innovations, and Maurice's produce won prizes at the agricultural Fair of the American Institute in the 1840s. About the time Maurice started working for Pell, an orchard of 20,000 apple trees was planted on the estate. Pell eventually exported the fruit to England, where it sold for over $20 per barrel.

By 1860, Maurice and Elizabeth moved to Columbus, Wisconsin, where they farmsteaded. They had eight children. Their youngest, Robert Steven Cunningham, was born November 22, 1850. He trained to be a carpenter, like his father, and worked for a wagon-maker in Columbus where he met his future wife, Elizabeth Theresa Rooney. They were married November 24, 1880, at St. Jerome's church. A decade after their wedding, Elizabeth's family moved farther west, to Minnesota, to find new opportunities. Robert and Elizabeth moved as well, and Robert set up shop as a wagonmaker in Minneapolis.

Robert and Elizabeth had five children, the oldest of whom was Robert Francis "Frank" Cunningham, born in Wisconsin on December 6, 1881. Frank was ten when the family moved to Minneapolis. It was there that he met his wife, Medora LeFebvre, whose French-Canadian family had moved from Quebec to Maine to Minneapolis in the late 1800s. They were married June 9, 1908 and spent the rest of their lives in Minneapolis, raising two children, including Robert Francis, Jr. Robert married Mary Jane Leyes in Dayton, Ohio, on July 9, 1938.

References:

http://www.irishtimes.com/ancestor/magazine/emigration/pre-fam.htm

http://thedeanbeaverblog.blogspot.com/2015/08/robert-steven-cunningham.html

http://thedeanbeaverblog.blogspot.com/2015/08/cunninghams-of-columbus-wisconsin-part-1.html

Putting the Genes in Genealogy

Random sciency-looking picture of DNA

When I had my DNA tested by 23andMe, I was not surprised that my ancestry came back as 100% European. (Yup, I'm the whitest person you've ever met). But what do these DNA tests really tell us about ancestry, and how? DNA can't conclusively place you in any ancestral group, partly because of limitations of the tests themselves, and partly because of the reality of DNA differences between human groups.

I'm an excellent example of the limitations of DNA ancestry tests. The test showed I was European, because that is the ancestry of the vast majority of my ancestors, but my 11th great-grandmother was a Nipissing woman whose name has been lost to history. She married a French trader, and their daughter, Euphrosine Madeline Nicolet, was recorded in the Church records of Quebec.

But if I have any non-European ancestry, that would show up in my DNA test, wouldn't it? Not necessarily, for a variety of reasons:

1) Small amounts of DNA from one group are swamped by DNA from others. My 11th great-grandmother was the ultimate heir of millions of Indigenous ancestors who lived in what today we call North America. People have lived here at least 12,000 years, or around 600 generations. If we calculate how many ancestors one person would have over that time period, the answer is, frankly, a ridiculously large number that basically boils down to "everyone who reproduced in the region back then" (see my post We're All Kings Now). That's a lot of Native ancestors on my family tree, but I have an equally large number of European ancestors for each of my other 11th great-grandparents, all 8192 of them. Therefore, although this one 11th great-grandmother represents a large number of Native ancestors, she contributed only 0.012% of my DNA (if any, at that distance, it could all be lost to chance). Such a small amount is not going to show up on a DNA test, unless she was a direct maternal-line ancestor from whom I inherited mitochondrial DNA. (She wasn't. My mDNA is German.).

2) There are no genes for race or ethnicity, and even ancestry isn't that simple. For the sake of simplicity, DNA testing companies will tell you that your genes are "European" or "West African", but these labels are not as easy to interpret as it might seem. 

First, some vocabulary: race is a socially-defined category, a set of labels our culture has developed to categorize physical and ancestral variation in people, but it's not a reflection of biological reality. Racial categories, like "Black" or "White" are like our units of time. Time is real, and it really changes, but our units of "minutes" and "hours" are just abstract concepts, agreed-upon ways of measuring and categorizing the continuous sweep time. They don't exist in nature, and we could just as easily have decided to make 100 hours in a day, or 10 minutes in an hour. 

The same is true of race. Human variation exists, and people really are different from each other, but our racial categories are just arbitrary ways of breaking people into different groups. In the U.S. we use skin color and facial features as the major way of doing this, but in other cultures they use different criteria. There are no genetic divisions between the racial categories we've chosen. Therefore, "race" can't be studied genetically. (Note: this isn't the same as saying that race doesn't exist. It does, and it's immensely important for understanding social and power dynamics in the United States, it's just not biological.)

Similarly, ethnicity is difficult to study genetically. Ethnicity relates to the culture in which we were raised: our language, religion, customs, etc. Ethnicity is tied into our identity, but it may have little (or nothing) to do with genetics. For example, I was raised to think of myself as Irish in ethnic identity, but the truth is that I'm mostly German. A lot of German-Americans abandoned their ethnic identity during the first half of the 20th century, because of the world wars. My grandmother used to tell the story of her older sister, during WWI, telling her mother (Mabel Ruffertschofer) and her grandmother (Christiana Wiemer) how much she hated and feared the Germans.

So we're left with ancestry, pure and simple. Statistically speaking, how likely are each of our genes to come from any particular region of the world? And putting all our genes together, what does that tell us about where all of our different ancestors came from? The truth is, there's no such thing as a "European" or an "African" gene. Rather, certain genetic traits are more common in some populations than others, just like certain expressed traits. However, there are no hard and fast rules in biology that state a particular gene or trait can only be found in one general region or another.

Certain lineages (that is, all the people descended from a common ancestor) have unique markers. A new variation of a gene appears through mutation and can be passed on to the mutated person's children. If the gene is advantageous, or even neutral, then it might spread throughout the community and beyond. This will lead to a group of people, all descendants of that original mutant, who carry particular variants of genes that are absent or rare in other groups. For example, a population living high in the Andes may have a lot of people who carry a gene that helps them maintain higher blood oxygen levels. If you carry that same gene, it could suggest you were a descendant of that population. However - and this is an important 'however' - some people in that population may not carry that gene, and some people outside that population may have had genetic mutations that created the same gene variant. The presence or absence of that gene is not a 100% guarantee that you are (or are not) a descendant of that population. That is one reason why the ancestry data you are given from a DNA testing company is probabilistic. You are given confidence intervals that tell you, statistically speaking, how likely it is that a particular gene comes from a particular source.

In other words, there are no categorical genetic differences between different ethnic groups, certainly not groups as large and diverse as "European" or "West African". There can be categorical differences between lineages, however.

3) The genetic differences between ancestral groups are small. Much of our DNA is so similar to the DNA of all other humans that it has no discernible regional origin. Our DNA is 95-98.8% identical to a chimpanzee (the range is because there are multiple ways that variation in DNA can be measured)(1). That leaves only 5-1.2% of our DNA that is uniquely human. Within that human DNA, very little of the variation can be attributed to different ancestry on the large scale (that is, between continents or regions, rather than between families or individuals). Samples from around the world suggest only 5-10% of human genetic variation is related to differences between large ancestral groups, and much of that diversity is related to local environmental adaptations (such as the high-elevation community I mentioned earlier), rather than genes shared across a whole continent or region (2). It's no surprise, then, that my one Native American 11th great-grandmother's contribution to my DNA (if any) is not identified in my DNA test.

4) Not all distinct ancestries have genetic markers, or the DNA tests choose not to record those markers. DNA tests can tell you if you have Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. That's because the relatively isolated Ashkenazi community has a number of distinctive genetic markers. But French-Canadians are also an isolated community (see my previous blog post: French Canadians: What We Mean by an Isolated Population), and they also have distinctive genetic markers, but 23andMe doesn't report on French-Canadian ancestry. Why not? Perhaps the French-Canadians have not been a unique sociocultural group long enough to develop distinctive genetic markers (although a study suggests otherwise [3]), or it may be that, from the perspective of the test makers, they are not perceived as being a separate ethnic group (see above for social vs. biological definitions of human communities). It may simply be that companies like 23andMe do not consider ethnic groups that developed after European colonization of North America to be the appropriate field of study. Regardless, it's important to recognize that not every ethnic group is represented in the ancestry reports you receive from a DNA testing company.

23andMe is actually rather vague about how they determine ancestry. I assume (because it's what I would do) that they are looking for snippets of non-coding DNA that are characteristic of certain lineages, and then telling you where those lineages are found. Their database of lineages, however, is far from complete. As more people take advantage of DNA testing, the accuracy with which we can determine ancestry will improve.

References:

1) Ebersberger, I., Metzler, D., Schwarz, C., Pääbo, S., 2002. Genomewide comparison of DNA sequences between humans and chimpanzees. American Journal of Human Genetics 70, 1490–1497.

2) Lewontin, R., 1972. The apportionment of human diversity. Evolutionary Biology 6: 381-398. and Hinds D.A., Stuve L.L., Nilsen G.B., Halperin E., Eskin E., Ballinger D.G., Frazer K.A., Cox D.R., 2005. Whole-genome patterns of common DNA variation in three human populations. Science 307, 1072–1079.

3) Casals F, Hodgkinson A, Hussin J, Idaghdour Y, Bruat V, de Maillard T, et al. (2013) Whole-Exome Sequencing Reveals a Rapid Change in the Frequency of Rare Functional Variants in a Founding Population of Humans. PLoS Genet 9(9): e1003815. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1003815

Samuel Osborn, the Rebel Reverend, and the Cape Cod Calvinist Kerfuffle of 1717-1738

Gratuitously beautiful Cape Cod sunset

In my last post, I mentioned my interest in the Kinney line. Although my great-great-grandmother, Julia Kinney, was born in Nova Scotia, her family was originally from Massachusetts. While filling out some details of her ancestry, I came across the story of Samuel Osborn, the Rebel Reverend.

Let's be clear: by the strict standards of Puritan New England, it didn't take much to be a rebel. Still, my eighth great-grandfather was at the heart of a 20-year rumpus that I'll call the Cape Cod Calvinist Kerfuffle. The following description of his life comes most from the The Doane Family, written in 1902 by A.A. Doane, and based on the information given by Israel Doane, Samuel's grandson (and my sixth great-grandfather)(1). However, there are a number of other sources on his life, including a pamphlet he wrote stating his own side in the CCC Kerfuffle (2).

Samuel Osborn was born around 1685 in Scotland, although his parents were from Ireland. He was educated in Glasgow, then received an advanced degree from the University of Dublin. He arrived in Boston in 1707 with letters of recommendation from well-established church men in County Down. We don't know what he did to make a living those first few years, but we do know that he courted a young woman by the name of Mercy Norton on Martha's Vineyard because sometime in 1710 or 1711, she had a son she named Samuel Osborn Jr.

Despite modern usage of the word "puritanical", the Puritans were not opposed to sex, even premarital sex. In fact, premarital pregnancy was rather common (as many as 40% of women were pregnant or had children before marriage), and this may have been encouraged as a way of ensuring that a couple was both compatible and fertile. The assumption, though, was that the couple would marry before (or shortly after) the baby was born. Samuel Osborn did not marry Mercy Norton, however, claiming that she had been 'loose' in her behavior and that he had no reason to believe the child was his. It's worth pointing out, however, that a) most illegitimate children were not named after their fathers, if their fathers refused to admit paternity; b) Samuel Osborn was known to have spent time with the boy, because, he claimed, it was a normal, neighborly, totally not-awkward thing to do; and c) there is some evidence that Samuel Jr. came to live with Samuel Sr. and his family when his mother married.

So, yeah, totally not his son.

The Hoxie House, Sandwich, MA
home of Reverend John Smith

On January 1, 1710, presumably (possibly?) after he and Mercy had parted ways, Samuel Osborn married Jedidah Smith, my eighth great-grandmother. Samuel's choice of wife may have been an early sign of his 'radical' religious leanings. Her paternal grandfather, Reverend John Smith, was the minister of Sandwich, Massachusetts, one of the more liberal communities in the region. After attending Quaker meetings and listening to their community concerns, he lobbied for the repeal of colonial laws that prescribed the practice of their religion. The Hoxie House, one of the oldest surviving Cape Cod homes and now a museum, was his residence.

Jedidah's maternal great-grandfather, Reverend Thomas Mayhew, was the leader of the European settlement on Martha's Vineyard. He required all members of the settlement to buy their land properly from the Wampanoag who owned the land, he learned the Wampanoag language, and he set up a school teaching Native youth Greek and Latin. Because the relationship between the Wampanoag and the Martha's Vineyard European settlement was so good, it was one of the few peaceful places in New England during King Phillip's War. Relative to his contemporaries, Thomas Mayhew was practically a saint. In other words, he acted like a decent human being. (Granted, he tried to set himself up as a hereditary aristocrat but, hey, nobody's perfect. Perhaps in restitution, his great-great-grandson coined the phrase "No taxation without representation.")

Governor Thomas Mayhew of Martha's Vineyard

In marrying Jedidah Smith, then, Samuel Osborn was allying himself with a family that had a reputation for tolerance and mercy, admittedly only in comparison to the rather low standards of Puritan New England. The young couple began their life modestly. Samuel was a schoolmaster at Edgartown (near Sandwich) in 1712, in Harwich in 1713, and in Plymouth by 1715 or 1716. In 1717, he was called to serve as minister in the church at Eastham (Orleans), and so began the Cape Cod Calvinist Kerfuffle.

At heart of the Kerfuffle was the personal animosity of Reverend Nathaniel Stone, minister of Harwich (Brewster) since 1700 (3). Stone was not a well-liked man, described by contemporaries as arrogant, self-aggrandizing, and a toady. He was also not above attacking others for his own gain. Let's just say that Cotton Mather -- he of Salem witch trial fame -- described Stone as too quick to stir up trouble, and leave it at that.

Reverend Stone's congregation of Harwich was the nearest neighbor to that of Eastham, and although he had no authority there, he still objected to their new minister. The objections he gave were theological and moral, as well as national -- Irishmen were not well-respected in that time and place -- but one wonders what the personal relationship was between the men. Samuel Osborn had been schoolmaster in Harwich four years earlier, and his wife, Jedidah, was the first cousin once removed of Reverend Stone's wife, Reliance Hinkley.

Reverend Stone arranged for a letter protesting Samuel Osborn's ordination as minister, signed by three men and thirteen women (including Hannah Hobart Doane), and delivered by Hannah Doane's husband, John. (Note: John Doane was my first cousin, many times removed.). Osborn attacked the letter, particularly the implication that women should have any say in the running of the church. With his deacons, John Paine and Joseph Doane, he convinced all but one signer to withdraw their objection. The last, obstinate holdout was Hannah Doane, who having reached the age of fifty and loosing her son at sea, had no f-$!s left to give. She never did back down in her fight against Osborn and was eventually excommunicated for her "ungodly carriage" (i.e. unwillingness to shut up while possessing two X-chromosomes).

Quick genealogical/inbreeding note: Samuel Osborne's deacon, John Paine, was likely a relative of

Honest to goodness gold from an honest to goodness pirate
treasure chest, recovered from the excavations of the Whydah

some sort, since Paine was his mother-in-law's maiden name. His other deacon, Joseph Doane, the cousin of John Doane, was my 8th great-grand-uncle. The Cape Cod Calvinist Kerfuffle was no big deal to Joseph, who was known at the time for capturing nine pirates from the Whydah, the flagship of Captain "Black Sam" Bellamy. The Whydah was rediscovered and excavated in 1984. Both excavations and artifacts can be visited at the Whydah museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts, as can the original jail in Barnstable, where Joseph delivered the pirates.

By the end of 1718, it appeared that the Cape Cod Calvinist Kerfuffle was at an end. Reverend Osborn was permanently fixed in Eastham, and Reverend Stone was chewing his liver in nearby Harwich. But for people who raised their own food, built their own houses, created all their own household items, and bore about ten children each, they had a shocking amount of free time on their hands to snipe at each other. The two congregations spent 20 years competing for members and fighting over theological niceties, before Reverend Osborn was finally ousted by the local "squire" Nathaniel Freeman (yeah, I'm related to him, too, as first cousin ten times removed) and Deacon Joseph Doane, who had switched sides. Maybe he got bored by the lack of pirates in his life and wanted to stir the pot a little.

Samuel Osborn was removed on suspicion of Arminianism, which all Good Calvinists (like the Puritans) considered heretical. I'm not the best person to explain the theological difference here because a) I'm Catholic and I don't understand how any congregationalist religion can accuse someone of heresy when there's no structure to determine what is orthodoxy; and b) I don't care that much. But, basically, as I understand it: Good Calvinists believed in predetermination. In other words, people like Reverend Stone would go to heaven because that was God's will. Whomever God's will turned against was doomed to hell. (You'll be shocked to hear that God's will for individuals bore a strong resemblance to Reverend Stone's personal opinion of them.) Arminianists, on the other hand, allowed some measure of personal responsibility in a person's moral choices. A person could, for instance, reject God's mercy, thereby dooming themselves to hell when they were intended for heaven. That suggested there was no predetermination, which every Good Calvinist knew was a Lie of Satan deserving of Fire and Brimstone.

Samuel Osborn never again ministered to a congregation. He attempted to move to Maine, but Reverend Stone and his allies wrote letters to the congregations there warning of his heretical ideas, and they turned him away. Mercy and tolerance weren't just uncommon in Puritan New England, they were dangerous. Giving up on the ministry entirely, Reverend Osborn opened a school in Boston and taught there until he died in 1774. His reputation was redeemed by later generations, including Henry David Thoreau, who admired his practical, pastoral approach in teaching his parishioners how to dry and store peat for fuel (score one for the Irish!). The last laugh, of course, went to Reverend Osborn when, after Reverend Stone's death, his church became Universalist.


References:

(1) The book is available on-line through Google: https://books.google.com/books?id=qu5EAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA499&lpg=PA499&dq=reverend+samuel+osborn&source=bl&ots=tCxM3hS7TM&sig=3XpRXuMRQQTXmnBYhf3DPqyyd5M&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjG1KrD4q3MAhWos4MKHcj3B2wQ6AEIKDAC#v=onepage&q=reverend%20samuel%20osborn&f=false

(2) A Church of Christ Vindicated, published in Boston in 1724

(3) Most details of this conflict come from: Paine, Gustavus Swift, 1952, Ungodly Carriages on Cape Cod. The New England Quarterly 25: 181-198 http://people.brandeis.edu/~dkew/David/Swift-Cape_carriages-1952.pdf