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WHERE DID THEY COME FROM?
(Part I of Two Parts) by Robert Barnes Once the family historian traces his/her family back to the immigrant ancestor, the next problem to be tackled is discovering the place of origin of the newly arrived settler. This aspect of research has grown tremendously in the past few years. The writer of this article has found a number of American sources that give clues to the overseas origins. Whatever sources are used to find a clue to the place of origin, once a place name has been found, one should check a gazetteer for that country. There may be place name finders on the Internet. If a parish is identified, one should check to see if the records are either at the George Peabody Library in Baltimore, or the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Or, the Mormons may have microfilmed the parish records.
In Maryland, and perhaps elsewhere, settlers taking up a
tract of land gave it a name. Sometimes the name was that
of a place in their home country, province, or county.
Some time ago, I discovered that James Phillips of
Baltimore County had surveyed a tract of land called
Sedgely. Checking Frank Smith's
A Genealogical Gazetteer of England (Baltimore:
Genealogical Publishing Co., 1987), I found that Sedgely
was a parish in Staffordshire. Fortunately the George
Peabody Division
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baptism of James Phillips, and other records pertaining
to family members.
The State Archives has a card index to patents (land grants) in Maryland, now being scanned for availability on its web site. Ideally every settler could have named one tract for his home parish, one for his wife's home parish, and one for his mother's home parish. The ideal seldom happens, but one never knows. Church records often give clues to the origins of the parishioners. In the eighteenth century, Anglican churches occasionally gave the overseas places of birth of individuals. German churches would often contain obituaries of older parishioners, many times telling where they were born and when they came to the New World. Quakers routinely recorded the certificates of transfer brought by members from their previous meeting. In Baltimore in the early 19th century, the Roman Catholic church gave quite complete details of the origins of French émigrés. When Constantine Bull and his wife Catherine (nee Walker) took their son William Horatio to St. Paul's Church in Baltimore to be baptized, the minister recorded the English home parish of Constantine (St. George's Tombland, Norwich, County Norfolk) and the home place of his wife (Dalton Hall, Rothrop, Yorkshire). Newspapers may contain advertisements asking individuals to contact the printer for news of a legacy in England. This writer recently found "John Nesmuth, native of North Britain, died 20th inst. In Easton, aged 67. He engaged in the civil commotions of his country in 1745. He (continued on Page 2) |
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