Wyman Genealogy – Paternal Grandfather Charles Percival
Wyman, from East Pubnico, Nova Scotia - Overview
I am just about at the end (later edit: no I wasn’t), at the arbitrary boundary I
have set of stopping once a line has crossed the Atlantic and I can see where
in England – almost always England – that group comes from. I traced some lines
on Jean’s father’s side back well into the 13th C and now regret
it. It’s unreliable, with way too many
people living to be more than a hundred; or being born in one place, moving 300
miles away to get married and have their first child, then moving back home to
have six more children, including the last one at 47 years old, and then die
there. And oh yes, the names don’t quite
match, record to record. But mostly, I
just don’t care that much. Not anymore.
Every time I think I am at the end, I see there is another line I
haven’t followed. I think there are over 1000 names that I’ve entered in ancestry
at this point. The fun part of genealogy
at close relations is to know the stories.
I’m sure some of these 1000 people have simply awesome stories, too. Yet
at this point I am not curious. I like
looking at the broad sweeps of things, though, so I will have a stab at tying
our people into History.
The short version is yes, we have Mayflower ancestors, including William Brewster, and a few on the
next ship, the Anne. We have seven (eight. nine) different lines
that trace back to the least-respectable of the Mayflower passengers, Stephen Hopkins, who Shakespeare wrote about
in “The Tempest” – five through his daughter Constance and three through his
son Giles (and one through daughter Deborah, by second wife Elizabeth Fisher, also
a Mayflower passenger). And yes that
does mean some second and third cousin marriages back near the beginning. There is a first cousin marriage among the
Crowells, and another among the Spinneys which look weird on a tree diagram. John
Howland and Elizabeth Tilley were both on the Mayflower and married here. There
is probably nobility back earlier in England, which I will mention later, but
nothing very big just before everyone came over. Very little else shows up in any line – just
Puritans, the occasional Quaker, and the seafarers* that brought them and
decided to stay.
The lines that come down closest to us are Wyman, Neat,
Eaton, and Crowell. I think that’s
pronounced “Crole” or “Cro-ell” not “Crauwell.” In my head I think of those as
four large categories. The next-closest
are Spinney and Larkin from Nova Scotia, and Robbins and Benton from central
Massachusetts. I sort of vaguely think
of those as categories of their own, but certainly after that I just regard it
as a wash, just name after name. I get far back into a tracing, into Mayo or
Waterhouse or Diamond, and I can’t remember what line it’s in. I may just make
an alphabetical list of names in our tree at the end.
The Great Migration – The David Hackett Fischer Albion’s Seed overview is very, very
good, and I am working from that. Half
of the immigrants to New England came from the easternmost parts of England:
Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and Kent. Less often, they came from the counties
bordering those: Cambridge, Bedford, Lincolnshire. Lastly, they came from everywhere else in
England (not much from Scotland, Ireland, Wales. Those would come later). They trickled in at
first, then from 1625 to 1643 20,000 poured into New England, and it stopped
abruptly. Because of the English Civil War, after 1643 the Cavaliers went to
Virginia instead. Very brief and intense migrations, both. The New Englanders had few with titles and
few very poor. Few servants and very few slaves, even though it was legal. It
was a middle-class migration of entire families, in contrast to Virginia or
Pennsylvania. They arrived at an area that had recently had 70% of its
population wiped out by disease. We now
know that those were diseases spread by earlier traders, mostly in Maine and
the Maritimes, but there was no germ theory them, and the Natives were
devastated emotionally as well. Half the
villages were empty. It is a typical
response when warring tribes encounter a newly arriving tribe, that they don’t
band together to fight off the intruder, but tend to each try to use the
intruder to their own local advantage.
It happened during the Crusades, when some local Arab tribes allied with
the Europeans to try to kick out the other Muslims, such as the Seljuks. Ronald Reagan said that if Martians attacked
the Earth the nations of the world would band together, but I think he was
wrong. We might all calculate whether they would help us against our enemies
here. The devastated New England natives
often allied with the English in hopes of kicking out Narragansetts or
Mohicans. Other tribes favored the French or Dutch traders. The first fifty
years were remarkably peaceful between settlers and Natives, especially in
contrast to how ugly it was back in Europe or just 100 miles inland in the US
among other native tribes. That peacefulness stopped in 1673, and you can begin
to see military titles creep in among our ancestors, where they had been absent
before.
So, 20,000 intense Puritans and sympathisers; they had lots of
children once they started surviving the winters; and hardly anyone else came
in for a hundred years after. Our people fit this mold very tightly. They came
to Massachusetts, and though a few crept up the coast to Portsmouth or Kittery,
it’s mostly all Massachusetts until free land in Nova Scotia showed up - because
the English had kicked the Arcadians out and made them become Cajuns in New
Orleans instead. Apparently the Miqmaqs were happy at first, because they hated
the French. I haven’t asked my Miqmaq
friends what the final opinion was on that. Whenever a line of ours doesn’t
evaporate and I can get it back before 1640 it goes to England, arrival here a
few years before or after 1635. The immigrant ancestor usually came from one of
the main counties I mentioned above, and came with family.
Here are the oddities and exceptions. We had a lot of
ancestors on Cape Cod, and it is largely from that group that the Nova Scotians
came. Many of them were seafarers, which shouldn’t have surprised me. We think of colonists as settling down onto
farms or into towns, but of course the money in Massachusetts was being made in
trading fish, then other goods. We had very few ancestors from the cities at
all. Almost none from Boston, or Salem,
or Dedham. There were also a fair number from the North Shore, from Essex and
Newburyport and even Hampton. Connecticut shows up twice. Long Island twice. Rhode Island once. Two of the seafarers died in Maryland, and
one on a bay in Mexico, but their wives lived after and died here. On the other
side of the Atlantic, we did have a disproportionate number of immigrants from
Devon and Gloucestershire, I assume sailing out of Bristol. Larkin is an Irish
name, and ours was a sea captain from the Isle of Wight, so that may have been
a temporary stopover for him. There was one thin line on a branch of the Neats
that came from Wales, and a single Welshman on a Crowell line. One Scotsman, no Irish, no French - though
“Delano” may be from de Lannoy and Mayo may be from Mahieu (now Mayhew in New
Hampshire) and originally around Lille, France. The immigrants from Holland all
had English names and were from Leiden between 1620-1650, so likely the Puritan
group that settled there.
We do have a nice assortment of Puritan names such as Deliverance,
Patience, Hate-evil, Endurance, Mercy, Thankful, and Hope, plus all the
obscurer Biblical names such as Ephraim and Bethia. Hatevil Nutter is a name
you could not give a Puritan in a book (okay, maybe Kurt Vonnegut or WP
Kinsella could get away with it), but it’s real. We have a Captain Jonathan
Sparrow, which is very cool. He was
son-in-law to Governor Thomas Prence, who changed his name from “Prince” upon
arrival because he did not want titles of nobility in the New World. That’s a real founder effect that became part
of the new America 150 years later.
Damn. I just found I
have only pushed the Neat and Eaton, etc lines back to about 1750. I have a lot more work to do on all those.
Maybe an Italian or something will show up there. After all this work I might
be only half done.
I found it frustrating to evaluate the efforts of other
researchers. They appear in a list of
hints, and often are clearly just copying each other. Which is what I am doing, so I’m not
complaining, just wary. I paid close
attention to records and proofs back through the great-grandparents, but the
farther back I go, I just start taking people’s word for it if there seemed to
be agreement and few documents. If
someone was referencing a DAR or SAR tracing I felt pretty confident about
that. But my heart sank when I got back to the original settlers and I kept
seeing places of birth in Massachusetts before 1620. These researchers I have been trusting are
not keeping track of actual events, such as oh, the Mayflower. It may not be so bad. If someone were to ask them
“What’s the earliest Massachusetts date you’re going to accept?” a lot of them
might go, “Ohhh, right! Nothing before
1620.” But the fact remains that they
didn’t do it. Hopefully, they were just
working from a gravestone that said 1598-1642 in Barnstable and just
reflexively thought well, I haven’t got
anything else, so I’ll just guess Barnstable. BTW, the Puritans still
reckoned the New Year as beginning at the vernal equinox, so you will often see
records kept that way. Born 1712/13
means born over the late fall and winter, so in our counting Nov 10 would go to
1712, Jan 9 would be 1713. I notice that
most of the researchers don’t know this.
Or perhaps they are just trying to record on their tree exactly what is
written in the primary source.
I’m also not liking what’s being accepted for ages of death,
marriage, and childbirth. People living to more than a hundred are rare even
now. Very rare then. They must be
confusing two people of the same name.
Also, women giving birth at 46 – possible, but so many?, or Puritans
marrying at 14. Yes, there are cultures
that do that, and people sorta wave their hands now and say “Well, they married
young then.” But they didn’t. Not in
Massachusetts. The average age for men was 26, for women 23. There would be exceptions, especially near
the seaports, and people who wouldn’t give a fig what the church in town said,
but rare, very rare. Statistic: In
Concord, Hingham, and Sudbury from 1650-1680 the number of brides pregnant on
their wedding day was zero, as measured by number of births within the next
nine months. Zero is a ridiculously low number for
whole towns in successive decades. Puritans
might have been very open in their diaries about how important and how much fun married sex was, but their strictness
otherwise is according to stereotype. No
one was letting young people have a moment’s privacy precisely because they knew what would be up with normal
people. All that stuff about
bundling was over a hundred years later. No minister in Massachusetts was
approving marriages at 14 or even 16. So when I saw one with a 44 year old man
and his 14 year old wife supposedly being the parents of one of my Waterhouses,
I knew that was just nuts. These are
friggin’ Puritans. They would have
whipped the man for suggesting it. The Quakers were even worse in those days**.
There were Quakers on the Cape, and we have a few of those in the tree. Different
in those days, busting into churches and pouring blood on the altars. Good times.
Also, too many wide discrepancies in ages. I can swallow a few 36-year-old wives
marrying 18-year-old boys, and I don’t know which
ones are the mistakes, but there just can’t be that many. Second-cousin marriages in small communities
I can generally accept, at least in the first few generations when there just
weren’t that many choices. The early
Wymans and Richardsons, from neighboring towns in Norfolk, England, seemed to
marry each other in Woburn a lot, and in Nova Scotia, Nickersons kept showing
up in everyone’s line. It makes the branches a little denser in those areas.
Nobility. The titles get watered down each generation. Only one (or two) gets to be the Earl, and
while the others get to be knights, their children don’t always get to inherit
the title and in a few generations no one has any honorific. Yet these were the wealthier families, whose
children were best fed and didn’t have to do the most dangerous jobs, so they
survived at higher rates. Add in that the births of the wealthy were more
likely to be recorded and remembered, and it is unsurprising that everyone
traces back to some lord or lady. So while I intuitively know that some of
these lines somewhere are going to trace back to really cool historical
figures, I just can’t be bothered. Some
relatives very near in our family tree were not respectable, so borrowing honor
and status at a long distance seems very weird.
* We use “seafarers” because it now includes some women, but
mostly to avoid the pun.
** If they were giving you a Scarlet A, it was branded into
your forehead, later your thumb. Now that’s scarlet.
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