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| Julia Etta Kinney Hancock, 1910 |
The latest post in my series about my great-great grandparents focuses on Julia Etta Kinney, wife of Ernest Justus Hancock, who was the focus of my last post. She is one of my four great-great grandparents born outside the United States (all four in Canada), but her family's history is in Massachusetts, going back to the Mayflower. The Kinneys were a sea-faring family; most of the men were ships captains, owned ship-building companies, or served as port authorities. Over their history, they tended to move from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia and back again as if the border didn't exist. Julia's grandfather and father, though, eventually re-located to the west coast, which is how she came to living in Coupeville, Washington, and meet her husband.
Julia was born in 1859 in Hall's Harbour, Nova Scotia, the daughter of Captain Thomas Kinney and Mary Elizabeth (Houghton) Kinney. Thomas Kinney was working on the west coast by 1851 (1), while Julia and her mother stayed on the east coast, which may be why Julia was an only child. According to a biography published in the Island County Times in 1947, her family moved to Yarmouth when she was four and then Boston the next year (2). Her parents had been married in Boston, so it is possible that they moved to be near her mother's family. In 1868, when she was 11, she and her mother moved to San Francisco to join her father. In 1871, they moved up the coast to Coupeville.
Julia was unusually well-educated, compared to the other children in Coupeville. She had, after all, gotten her elementary education in Boston and San Francisco, while many of the other Coupeville families had come from less developed areas. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that she would become a teacher.
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References:
1) Lewis and Dryden
2) Island County Times
