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1828, most Irish emigrants were well-educated, well-to-do Protestants from Ulster, but in 1827 the British government repealed all restrictions on emigration, allowing more Catholics, more of the poor, and more people from outside Ulster to leave.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

Loyalists in the closet

John Trumbull’s "Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill".
(Boston Museum of Fine Arts/BOSTON MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS)

On a recent Facebook forum someone I don't know commiserated with me for having Loyalist ancestors. My first reaction was to laugh. I mean, I'm a white woman with a 400 year family history in a nation founded on genocide and slavery. If Loyalists were the worst my family tree had to offer, I'd be thrilled.

I'm extremely grateful that some of my ancestors, and many other men and women of the time, chose to fight for our independence, but it is laughable to think that that choice was obvious, except with 20/20 hindsight (and not necessarily even then). After all, freedom and justice are wonderful values to fight for, but so are loyalty and patriotism, both of which motivated those who supported the British crown. Furthermore, while some of the liberties our ancestors fought for are rightly enshrined as fundamental human rights, some points of contention between us and the British, like slavery and white expansion into Native lands, were cases where we were definitely on the wrong side of history.

I have a post listing of all my ancestors who served in the American Revolution. But what about my Loyalist ancestors? I want to create a list of them, too, not, perhaps, out of pride, but to acknowledge this face of our past. What I've found is that Loyalists are surprisingly hard to trace. While organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution provide "proven" genealogies to link us back to the soldiers who fought on the side of independence, there is no such organization that does the same for Loyalists (at least, not one so well-funded and comprehensive). In fact, I don't have proof that any of my ancestors fought for the British, there's just the suspicious coincidence that many on the Kinney line moved to Canada during or after the war, and they were particularly concentrated in the areas of Nova Scotia where the Loyalists were resettled. I've decided to focus some real effort on this question now, however, and will update as I find information.

Planting Heritage

Maurice Cunningham's great-great-great-great-grandson plants
one of his heirloom Newtown Pippin apple trees

We decided to plant apple trees this year. I was looking on-line for Honeycrisps (because, yum) when I came across this entry at a heirloom tree site. The Newtown Pippin? That sounds familiar. It's a tree with heritage. My heritage.

The Newtown Pippin was, as the link will tell you, the first apple grown commercially in the United States, and it was developed in New York in the mid-1700s. This webpage has a history of the Newtown Pippin. The apple was first exported to Europe in the late 1700s, but this paragraph is what really stands out to me:

In 1845 it is stated that Newtown Pippins from the orchards of Robert Pell, Ulster county, New York, sold in London at $21 a barrel.  The nobility bought them at a guinea a dozen, or 42 cents an apple.  Mr. Pell's orchard of 20,000 trees of Yellow and Green Pippins became famous on account of the high prices received for the fruit, and in consequence the varieties mentioned were planted and grafted throughout the apple regions of the country.  They did not prove successful elsewhere, except in the Piedmont and mountain regions of Virginia and North Carolina.

Robert Pell, of Ulster county New York, did not, of course, work the orchards by himself. He employed a large staff, and his head gardener was Maurice Cunningham, my third great-grandfather. Maurice and his wife came to New York from Cork County, Ireland, in 1828. It's not clear when he began working for Robert Pell, but by 1843 he is mentioned in New York state records as having won multiple prizes for his winter apples and vegetables (1). Pell's Newtown apple trees were described as 40 years old in 1872, so they had been planted in 1832, more or less, perhaps around the same time as Maurice began working there (2). 

An article about the suicide of Robert Pell's son, James, pasted
in the scrapbook of Eliza Cunningham, Maurice's daughter.
(photograph courtesy of Mike Cunningham)

Maurice and his family left New York before 1860, for Wisconsin, where they owned a farm. The relationship between the Cunninghams and the Pells is an interesting topic for speculation. Maurice's daughter, Eliza, left a scrapbook in which she pasted a newspaper article about the suicide of Robert Pell's only surviving son. She disfigured the article by crossing it out in ink. Out of grief? Anger? Denial?

Minnesota is on the edge of zone hardiness for Newtown Pippins, but once I saw they were still for sale, I had to buy one. We planted it today, and I said a little prayer for my great-great-great-grandfather. I hope it makes him smile to know that his descendants are still tending the apples he so prized.

Our new Newtown Pippin.
Long may it reign.

References:

1) 1843 Documents of the Senate of the State of New York, Volume 3. pp. 74, 75, and 47.

2) 1872 ''Gazetteer and Business Directory of Ulster County, NY for 1872'', compiled by Hamilton Child. 

Other Deans of Pennsylvania

I wrote an earlier blog post about Abraham Dean, his (probable) father, James, and the many Deans of central Pennsylvania in the mid-1700s. I laid out in that blog post my evidence for a connection between James and Abraham Dean of the area near Alexandria, Pennsylvania, and Margery Dean Canan, wife of John Canan.

There are other Deans in the same area at that time, some of whom may be relatives and others who may have been wholly unconnected. Evidence for these relationships tend to be more tentative, but I lay it out below. As with the previous post, this one is aimed at the two or three people in the world who actually care about the details of this topic. And, as with the previous post, most of this information comes from the research by Larry Dean, with a few items of my own thrown in.

The Connection Between Abraham and Robert Dean

Abraham is listed in the U.S. Direct Tax Lists for Huntingdon and Somerset Counties, Pennsylvania, in 1798. Abraham is listed as Occupant #14, in Baree Township, "on head waters of Shavers and Stone Creek". Occupant #15 is Robert Dean, with the exact same location information. Occupant #16 is James Dean, also located in the same area. No other families are listed with that location. James, and I already discussed, was Abraham's father. However, this James seems likely to be his brother, since James Sr.'s death was recorded in the Canan family bible in 1795. Robert is another likely brother.

The Connection Between Abraham and William Dean

William Dean was the only other Dean whose name was directly connected to Abraham's in the primary literature. Abraham was appointed the administrator of William Dean's estate in Pitt Township, Allegheny County, on April 21, 1789, after William died without a will. Abraham's co-administrator was Jane Dean, William's wife (1). Allegheny County is significantly farther west than Huntingdon, where James and Abraham lived.

Larry Dean's post covers this case in detail, and includes an email from the local Genealogy Society which claims that the Abraham Dean who administrated William Dean's estate was the son of William and Jane Dean. However, there are no other Abraham Deans who appear in the 1790 census, other than the one in Huntingdon County (2) (well, there is the one in Maine, but that seems a stretch). If William Dean had a son named Abraham, then he was not the head of his household in 1790, yet the fact that he was administering William Dean's will suggests he was of age. So, assuming the Abraham who administered William Dean's will is the same Abraham who is our direct ancestor, what relationship did Abraham have with William and Jane Dean?

The previous blog post includes the evidence that Abraham was James's son, not William's. The genealogy that was cited in Larry's post included no sources to collaborate the suggested relationships or the dates, but it claimed that William was born in 1735 and had received land in Pitt Township for his service in the Revolutionary War. The war ended in 1783, so William could have been elsewhere in Pennsylvania before that time. 

In the mid-1770s, multiple Deans appear in Hopewell Township of what was then Bedford County. At that time, what is now Huntingdon County was part of Bedford County, and Hopewell Township was created in 1773 from Barree (about 10 miles north of Alexandria, PA) (3). James Dean paid taxes on 300 acres in Hopewell township in 1779. A William and a John Dean paid taxes there in 1775, 1776, and 1779 (4). In 1784, there was a William Dean listed as an inhabitant of Huntingdon, where James Dean was also living. (Abraham was not listed, but he may not have bought his land until later that year.)  William's household consisted of 7 white persons (4). In other words, IF this is the same William Dean, then James, William, and Abraham Dean lived in the same area in the 1770s and early 1780s, after which William and his wife Jane moved farther west when they were granted land in Pitt Township. William appears to be in the same generation as James, as far as we can tell from the land records. Certainly, he is at least ten years older than Abraham, as he begins buying land and paying taxes in 1775. 

It is possible, then, that William was the father of Abraham. We cannot disprove this on the basis of the primary documents. However, the secondary evidence more strongly suggests James is Abraham's father, and Abraham never named any of his children William or Jane (see my previous post for discussion of Scotch-Irish naming practices). My suspicion - which I am unable to prove - is that William was Abraham's uncle, a brother of James. Abraham, as a relatively young and fit man (compared to, say, his father, who was around 50 at a time when life expectancy was much lower), was sent to his Aunt Jane's side when his uncle died unexpectedly, and helped her set the estate in order.

However, just to make things more complicated, the William Dean who died in Allegheny County may not have been the same William Dean who lived in Huntingdon! Larry Dean makes a good case that that William Dean, in fact, moved to Kentucky. Which, if either, or these Williams were related to our line remains frustratingly uncertain.


The Connection between Abraham Dean and Matthew and John Dean

And finally, I descend far into the realms of speculation. 

Matthew Dean and his son John lived in in Frankstown Township in what was then Bedford County. This area was later divided into Bedford and Baree Townships (which we've heard of before) and is located in Blair County, just southwest of Alexandria, PA (3). Their lives are fairly well documented because much of their family was killed in a border raid by Native people who were angry at the incursion of white settlers onto their land (4, 5, 6, 7). Matthew, his oldest son John, and his three oldest daughters (Margaret, Rebecca, and Elizabeth) were in the fields and missed the attack on his farmstead/fort that killed Matthew's wife Rebecca and their five other children. 

There is only circumstantial evidence that Matthew and John Dean are related to James and Abraham Dean:

1. Matthew and James Dean lived very close to the area where James and Abraham lived, and at the same times. Matthew is first listed on the tax roles for Frankstown Township in 1776, and lived there until he died in 1781 (8).
2. In his will, Matthew Dean named John Canan as executor. John Canan was James Dean's son-in-law (he had married James Dean's daughter, Margery) (9).
3. John Dean (son of Matthew), James Dean, and John Canan were all founding members of Hart's Log Presbyterian church (5).
4. According to secondary sources, Matthew and James Dean came to the United States around the same time. Matthew Dean's great-grandson said that “Matthew Dean came to Pennsylvania about the year 1760 from Ireland.” (7). As discussed in my previous post, James Dean's great-grandson claimed he, too, had come from Ireland in 1760.
5. A number of family names are shared in common, although unfortunately they are also very common names from the period, so the fact that both families have Margaret/Margery or Elizabeth, John, etc., is not very convincing.

My suspicion - again, not provable - is that Matthew and James Dean were brothers. William may have been another brother. 

If this is true, then one other intriguing piece of information may help clarify the Dean families of Pennsylvania: John Dean listed his birth city as York, PA, in his Revolutionary War pension file (10). If Matthew and James (and William?) Dean arrived in Pennsylvania in 1760, but they are first found on the tax rolls in the mid-1770s, what were they doing between those dates? Of course, they may have been working as laborers, and therefore not showing up in the records until they had saved enough to become men of property. But John's birthdate of 1763 in York suggests they spent some time there. York is south-southeast of Harrisburg, The Clerk of Courts Quarterly for York County record an Elizabeth and a Hans Dean living in the town in October of 1768, when they were brought in for a court case (I believe they were witnesses) (11). Elizabeth Dean was also tried for stealing in York in July of 1775. Obviously, Dean is a rather common name, but it's possible that these Deans were somehow related to the (three?) Dean brothers who arrived in Pennsylvania from Ireland in 1760.


References:

1)  American Revolutionary Soldiers of Franklin county, Pennsylvania compiled by Virginia Shannon Fendrick, published 1969 by the Historical Works Committee of the Franklin County Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
2) "United States Census, 1790," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XHKJ-8MR : accessed 17 July 2015), James Dean, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, United States; citing p. , NARA microfilm publication , (Washington D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.), roll ; FHL microfilm .
3)  http://www.pa-roots.com/bedford/history/originoftownships.html
4) History of the Early Settlement of the Juniata Valley by U. J. Jones, published by Floyd G. Hoenstine, Holidaysburg, Pennsylvania
5) History of Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania Volume I, by J. Simpson Africa, published by Louis H. Everts 1883 at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
6) History of Blair County, Pennsylvania Volume II, by J. Simpson Africa, published by Louis H. Everts 1883 at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
7) A History of Blair County by Tarring S. Davis, published 1931
8) The Pennsylvania Archives Third Series, Vol. 22, p. 121, 200, 267, 297
9) Ancestry.com. Pennsylvania, Wills and Probate Records, 1683-1993 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2015.
10)  Genealogical Abstracts of Revolutionary War Pension Files by Virgil D. White, pub 1990, National Historical Publishing Company
11) http://www.yorkcountyarchives.org/search.asp

How Irish Are We?

Lá ‘le Pádraig sona dhaoibh!

That, according to this webpage, at least, means "Happy St. Patrick's Day". My apologies to all Irish Gaelic speakers if it actually says something profane.

In honor of the patron saint of Ireland, today's post will focus on "How Irish Are We?" This is a surprising difficult question because the answer depends on what you mean by "Irish". Does this term refer to everyone born or raised on the island? Does it require a particular ancestry, such as native or gaelic Irish (as opposed to, say, Scotch-Irish)? Does it require a particular religion?

The Feast of St. Patrick is an acknowledged holy day for the Catholic church, but also for the Anglican Church of Ireland, the Lutherans, and some other protestant sects. It is an official holiday both in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland (still part of Great Britain). Therefore, one could argue that it is a holiday that belongs to all Irish.

That one would not be me, however. The celebration of St. Patrick developed among the (particularly American) diaspora as a celebration of native or Gaelic Irish culture and the Irish Catholic religious traditions. St. Patrick's day was a nationalist holiday, mostly celebrated, for obvious political reasons, by those who no longer lived in the nation in question.

The majority of Irish Catholic, or Gaelic Irish, to immigrate to this country came during or after the Potato Famine, an Gorta Mór (the Great Hunger), during which at least one million people died (many estimates put it closer to two million) and another million found their way to the Americas on the famine ships. My mother, who is 1/4 Gaelic Irish, has one line that exemplifies this history. Her great-great-grandparents, Joseph and Elizabeth Rooney, sailed into New York, in steerage, on a dangerously over-crowded ship, in 1848. Their eldest (surviving) child was born at sea.

The Rooneys spent relatively little time in New York. They soon moved to Wisconsin where they farmed and their eldest daughter, Elizabeth, married Robert Cunningham. Robert and Elizabeth (Rooney) Cunningham were my mother's great-grandparents.

The Cunninghams represent a different path of Irish immigration. Maurice and Elizabeth Cunningham were born and raised in County Cork, but came to this country in 1828, well before the Great Hunger forced so many Irish from their homes. I don't know why they chose to come to this country, but unlike most Irish immigrants of the Famine period, Maurice Cunningham was a skilled worker. He gave his occupation as carpenter at immigration, and he was soon head gardener on a very large and successful estate in New York. I assume, like many immigrants before and after, Maurice and Elizabeth Cunningham came to the United States for new opportunities they were denied back home.

Those two families are the only immigrants from Ireland on my mother's side, making her, as I said, 1/4 Gaelic Irish. My brother and I are, then, 1/8 Gaelic Irish.

On my father's side, the question is harder to answer because most of his Irish ancestry is more remote, and we don't always know their ethnic or religious affiliations. In most cases, however, his Irish ancestry is clearly Scotch-Irish. The Deans, for example, were Ulster Scots who immigrated to the mid-Atlantic region in the early 1700s. In fact, the only possible exception is the Houghton family, whose origins might be in County Cork and who might have been Catholic. That line, however, is not well researched. If we expand the definition of Irish to include all those who immigrated from the island (which I don't necessary advocate, as I said above), then my father is between 11 and 15% Irish, mostly through his mother's Manary line.

How did I calculate that? If we go back to his 6th great-grandparents, then we have (mostly) gone back to or past the first immigrants to the U.S. I can't actually trace every one of his lines back that far, but I assume that an immigrant 5th great-grandparent born in Ireland had parents from Ireland. That might not be true (in particular, they my have been Scots), but it's a reasonable assumption. Unfortunately, I can't trace every one of his lines back to the country of origin. Some of his family lines I know for certain came from Ireland (such as the Deans and the Manarys), but others, like the Dooleys, I'm guessing based on their last name. My father has 28 6xgreat-grandparents who were certainly from Ireland, and another 11 who were probably from Ireland. Since he has 256 6xgreat-grandparents, that makes him 11-15% Irish.

My brother and I, then, are 18-20% Irish.

Tabhair póg dom, táim Éireannach! (supposedly, "Kiss me, I'm Irish". Again with the apologies.)