Sometimes family lines are as hard to follow back to their origins
as untangling a ball of thread
Before I started delving further into my family's past, I had the mistaken notion that, in the past, generations of people lived and died in one village and that only some moved any distance away where they once again put down roots for the family generations that followed. If this was the case then genealogy would be a search for places from which my family rarely budged. I couldn't have been more wrong. As I recently read when doing research on my Colonial American lines, "The truth is that there had always been much more going and coming in early America than the chroniclers have conceded."1 And it wasn't just in early America that this was true.
Although it did make sense that people would move around more in the new world. Their ties with the old country were weaker and the attachment to the new lands wasn't as strong so their moves in the new land weren't as surprising. My Matheson family from Skye moved in a way that I wasn't expecting, however. After settling close to his twin brother, Murdock, in PEI, my 3 x great-grandfather, Kenneth, moved to Ontario with his family. Why did that happen? The subsequent moves west in Ontario were explained by a general migration to the west as new land opened up. The next generations of the family continued the westward drift, going as far as Regina before retrenching to Winnipeg. Well, except for my great-grandfather and great-grandmother who decided to move to Selinas in California towards the end of his life. Why did he do that?
It looks like I have some research to do to better understand the lives of my ancestors in North America, particularly focusing on where and why they moved. But it wasn't only the family in the new world who didn't stay put. I have been able to find information back to the mid-1700s for one of my families who were in Northamptonshire, well, at least for a time. It appears that the family also had ties to Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire and some of them lived for a while in Kent. Their moves seem to be connected to their religious nonconformity. At least, that is something to look into when I look into that line again.
Some of that nonconformist line also ended up in London. But then, London was a big draw. I have more than one family line with links to the Big Smoke. They came from all over drawn to the magnetic big city and there they mixed with one another to create a confused lines that look like a tangled ball of thread. Each time I pluck a family thread to follow it takes me back to a different place, most of which are in England but the one thread that I would dearly like to follow would take me back to somewhere in Ireland. Just where did they come from?
Sources:
1Bridenbough, Carl. Fat Mutton and Liberty
of Conscience, Society in Rhode Island, 1636-1690. Brown University Press,
Providence. p88
Images:
By This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as
part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data
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