First Immigrants

Our family's immigrant origins

In January, 2018, I began to write an essay a week on my family history based on the prompts from Amy Crow Johnson's invitation to #52ancestors.   Week four's essay's prompt was Invite to Dinner.  Here are the first immigrants from the families of the John McCauslin and June Turnock McCauslin.

In this essay, you will meet these first immigrant families from Europe to North America:
McCauslin/McCausland
Archambault
Turnock
Stuckey
van Swearingen
Dunham
Walcott

Please enjoy visiting with them at a special dinner party!

What a quandary I have been in this week!  There were too many ancestors I wished to share a conversation with over dinner, and so I spent a lot of time on the invitation list.  (No time spent on the menu yet!)

In the final analysis, I decided to bring together the first generations of my family lines to come to America that I have discovered so far (and that “I” must include my nephew Michael).  This guest list brings pride for their obvious courage and/or desperation to leave their homes and come to an unknown land.  No one had an easy trip, except perhaps my dad’s father who came from London, Ontario, to Chicago in 1899; not so easy for his grandfather, Andrew McCausland (as far back as I can trace the McCauslands), as he was most likely in steerage on a boat from Ulster in the second decade of the 19^th centrury.  He became a farmer in Ontario who married Julia McLarty, also an Irish immigrant, in London, Ontario. 

My paternal grandmother’s family, Jean Louis and Chantal Desormier Archambault, came by wagon from St. Roch de l-Achignon, Quebec, to South Bend, Indiana, just after the Civil War.  Her father went to work for Studebaker Wagon Company.  But his ancestors, Jacques and Francois Touroult Archambault, had come to French Canada in 1643.  Thus, the McCauslands from Ireland and the Archambaults from central France head the list of invitees.  All these transplanted Canadians are Roman Catholic.

Next, I need to include ancestors of my mother June Turnock McCauslin.  The first of the Turnocks, Benjamin and Mary Whittaker Turnock, arrived in 1840 in New York City from Stoke on Trent, Staffordshire, England.  They moved to New Jersey, but finally settled in Elkhart, Indiana sometime after 1850.  Richard’s ancestors were masons and all his male descendants were in the constructions trades, at least as young men.  His grandson, William Leonard, moved to South Bend and married Catherine Bridget Flynn whose father, Thomas O Flynn, came from Tipperary in 1847, escaping the Irish famine. So, my grandfather Ted Turnock was raised in a “mixed marriage” between an Episcopalian and a Roman Catholic. None of their children were baptized in any church.  (An aside, eight of their nine children married Catholics, except my grandfather.)

Now, when it comes to my grandmother, Helen Stuckey Turnock, you find yourself with no knowledge of where the Stuckeys lived before North Carolina.  James married Rebecca Swearingen in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1831.  She was also born in North Carolina.  The Swearingens do go back to colonial America, New Amsterdam and the Maryland  Colony.  Garrett van Swearingen, born in Beemsterdam, The Netherlands, worked for the Dutch East India Company until his ship stranded off Long Island and he left the Company.   He settled in New Amstel (now Delaware and there met and married his wife Barbara DeBarrette; they and their children were naturalized in 1669 in Mary’s.  I haven’t discovered if James and Rebecca’s families came north together, but, after their marriage, they settled on land to farm in Clay Township, St. Joseph County, Indiana (just outside the present-day limits of South Bend).   

It is with the marriages of their male descendants that we end up again in the 17^th century and the families of the first English settlers in New England.  Their son Oliver married Marietta Webster whose ancestor was Governor John Webster of Connecticut who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1630 and 1633.  Oliver’s son Charles, my great grandfather, married Harriet Dunham, the daughter of a farmer in Concord, Michigan.  Now it gets truly complicated.  She is descended from Deacon John Dunham and his wife Agnes Smith; John was born in Scrooby, England and came from Leiden, The Netherlands, to the Plymouth Bay Colony in 1632. But she is also descended from Henry Wolcott and Elizabeth Saunders who came to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, because in 1808 a Dunham married a Wolcott, her grandfather Shubael Dunham and Fannie Wolcott.  In Harriet’s family we have an historic group of dissenters from the Church of England and then from each other who literally just kept moving on until they all settled in Michigan on a route that included New York. 

All in all, this group promises a scintillating conversation around the dinner table.  How will the French Canadian and Irish Roman Catholics get along with the English Protestant dissenters?  Will the latter even get along with each other?  To avoid religious controversy, they can compare the ships that brought them here and the people they found in what they called the New World, where they discovered it was not a new world to the people already here.  Lots of room for controversy when this comes up.  There might be conflict between the French Canadians and the New Englanders over how the Native Americans should be treated.  Will they just avoid the differences in how they interacted with the Native Americans and the tragedies that ensued?  Or instead stick to the conflicts of their Old World homelands?  Would major fisticuffs ensue if any such discussions begin?  What will the women at this gathering bring to the conversation when, and if, they speak up about their lives and hopes on these journeys.  Won’t it be wonderful if these ancestors of mine are women like Anne Bradstreet or Anne Hutchison!

And, oh, dear, what drinks to serve – wine, beer, water only (to better ensure no fisticuffs)?   In the end, perhaps the safest topic will be the foods they most enjoyed from the 17^th and 19^th centuries. A lively group of men and women, for sure, and just think how much we could learn from them!  Do you have questions you would like to ask?!  Please join us.