Seeking English

Even if our ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower, there's still a bit of merry old England in our heritage.  We're not alone, millions of Americans have English roots.  Unlike many ethnic heritages, we don't have to struggle with records in foreign languages.  Some people start looking for famous ancestors or, especially hoping to find royal lines.  Our ancestors did something extraordinary; They left their homes, possessions, families, friends and homeland forever to try to find a better life.

Most immigrants left England for economic reasons.  A few immigrants left for religious reasons, such as the Pilgrims in 1620 and the Puritans who came to New England from 1629-1640.  Some did not come by choice; for example, English prisons were cleared and convicts shipped to the American colonies.  Some women and children were even kidnapped from the countryside or from the streets of cities such as London to provide labor in the colonies.

Even after the Revolutionary War, English immigrants kept coming to the former colonies in search of freedom and opportunity.  George and Sarah Esgate arrived after 1840.  English immigrants were the third-largest group of US newcomers, behind only Germans and Irish,  in the 1830-1860 censuses, and surpassed the Irish in the 1870 and 1880 counts.

No matter when or where they arrived, whether they came to the wilderness or to a large city already settled with people from their homeland, our ancestors were pioneers.  They all had incredible stories to tell.

Even the term "England" can be confusing.  In 1536, King Henry VIII united England and Wales under the same system of laws and government.  In 1707, Great Britain was formed when the Parliaments of the Kingdom of England and Wales and of the Kingdom of Scotland passed the Act of Union.  In 1801, Ireland was united politically with Great Britain to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.  In 1921, most of Ireland separated from the United Kingdom.  So today, Great Britain refers to England, Wales and Scotland, while United Kingdom refers to all of the above plus Northern Ireland.

Here are a few of the photos I've taken when I had layovers in London.

Wedding Bell Clues

Everyone has wedding certificates in their possession.  Working on genealogy, I  probably have more than my share.  I have some as current as my own to ones back to the 19th century.  But there are more to wedding records than just wedding certificates.

Marriage bonds--as in money, not the bonds of holy matrimony--were common in some states, particularly in the South, into the 18th century.  They were posted in the county courthouse to help offset any costs of legal action in case the marriage was nullified.  The groom and usually the father or brother of the bride posted a bond; if a woman posted bond, it may have been the bride's mother because the father was deceased.

Licenses eventually replaced bonds in the 19th century.  In some states, however, a license wasn't required for a couple to be married, or the license might be recorded in a different jurisdiction from the marriage.  For those states requiring licenses, sometimes couples took out a license or application but never made it to the altar.

Marriage licenses and certificates from 1852 had little genealogical information.

Marriage license applications from 1944 had a wealth of information.  The license gave addresses, birthplaces, occupations, and parents' names.  All very helpful with clues to further documentation.  The addresses directs you to city directories.  The birthplaces directs you to where birth certificates can be found.  Occupations can lead you to archived business records or directories.  Parents' names can give you another generation back.

If anyone has marriage records in your possession, I would love to have a copy to document the marriage in our family.

Getting Your Irish Up

I know, I know.  The Esgates aren't Irish, they're English.  But I'm sure other lines in your family may have Irish roots.  My adoptive great-grandmother had Irish roots.  Her father came from Ireland possibly around 1844.  As yet, I haven't researched that line over the pond.  Not even sure, where in Ireland he came from.  This blog entry is more of a informational entry for people with Irish ancestry.

My adoptive 2nd great-grandfather was part of a phenomenal wave of Irish migration--one of 7 million to leave the Emerald Isle since the 1600s.  In previous decades, from the 1820s through the Great Famine and into the 1880s, one-third to one-half of all the people starting new lives in America sailed from Ireland.  They came seeking refuge from poverty, hunger and oppression.  They found prejudice and hardship, but also opportunity--and they changed the culture and history of their adopted land.

From President John F. Kennedy to Grace Kelly, John Huston, Eugene O'Neill, social activist Dorothy Day and Sen. Eugene McCarthy, it's an understatement to say the Irish have "arrived" in America.  According to the 1990 census, 40 million Americans identify themselves ethnically as Irish, behind only British (us) (50 million) and German (49 million).

The high points in the exodus were always linked to low points in Irish life--persecution by the British, desperate poverty and, of course, the Great Famine.  In the 17th and 18th centuries, Protestants from Ulster were among the first to leave Ireland for the frontiers of colonial America.  (The British government essentially forbade Catholic emigration until 1827.)  but the hemorrhage of emigration that forever changed Ireland started in the early 1800s.

Between 1780 and 1830, Ireland's population quadrupled, from 2.3 million to 8 million.  Much of the populace lived in extreme poverty, made dramatically worse by such disasters as torrential rains that destroyed potato and grain harvests and outbreaks of smallpox, typhus and cholera.  About 20,000 people left Ireland for North America in 1815 alone; 50,000 others died of disease between 1816 and 1818.  An even larger wave of emigration to North America--400,000 strong--came in 1827.  And between 1830 and 1841, another 400,000 people emigrated to England, mainly to London, Liverpool and Manchester.

Then, between 1845 and 1855, as a completely unknown blight ravaged Ireland's potato crops, one-fourth of the population fled the country and the Great Famine.  About 1.5 million went to the United States, 340,000 to Canada, 300,000 to Great Britain and 70,000 to Australia.  Some 1.5 million in Ireland died of starvation or disease.

Those fortunate enough to escape the desperate situation at home dutifully sent money back to Ireland, hoping to bring other family members across the Atlantic.  The cost of a steerage-class passage to America during the famine years was $5 to $20, a small fortune in those days if you were poor.

You can get in touch with your heritage as simply as reading any of the following books:

44: Dublin Made Me by Peter Sheridan

More Bread or I'll Appear by Emer Martin

The Mammy by Brendan O'Carroll

Tara Road by Maeve Binchy (An Oprah Book Club selection)

Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

Are You Somebody: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman by Nuala O'Faolain

A Monk Swimming: A Memoir by Malachy McCourt

A Song for Mary: An Irish-American Memory by Dennis Smith

Angela's Ashes: A Memoir by Frank McCourt (A movie made in 1999)

Or, you could make a trip to Boston.  Or Ireland itself.  Unfortunately, Ireland is not a destination I am able to fly while I'm working so it would have to be a planned trip for me.  I have been to Boston many times, although I haven't done research there.  Below is a favorite picture of mine from Boston.

I hope this has wet your appetite to research your Irish Family History.  If you need more resource help, let me know.

Coming to America

George and Sarah (Osborn) Esgate came to America from England in approx. 1851.  I have looked at the Passenger Lists for New York and have yet to find their arrival documents.  They arrived with their sons, John and James.  From what I understand, the rest of their families remained in England.  

At the time Castle Garden and Ellis Island did not exist.

For them, having their name on a ship's manifest was the culmination of a dream.  A steerage ticket to America may have cost as much as two years' wages.  That bought a crowded, 3,000-mile voyage of two weeks to a month as human cargo, suffering seasickness and unsanitary conditions on a diet of thin soup and bread.  Harder still than the voyage was leaving behind everything and everyone they knew.

George and Sarah continued on to Ohio, just outside of Cleveland, to settle in Medina, Ohio.  

If anyone has more information or copies of documents, please let me know.

Welcome

This is the first entry in my blog.  I want to tell you about who I am and how I came to develop this website.  I was born in Eugene, Oregon and four days later I was adopted.  We lived in Oregon for six months and then left for California.  I started my schooling in the Los Angeles area.  We lived there until I was nine.  We then moved to the Seattle area.  This was quite a shock to me because it was on my 9th birthday, which is in January, when we arrived at our new home and I walked out onto the patio and slipped and cracked my tailbone on the icy surface.  I immediately declared my hatred for our new home.  We lived in the area for 12 years.  I graduated from high school there and began my college education at a local community college and transferred to a state university for a year.  My adoptive parents retired to San Diego and I followed them there.  I finished my college degree there and while working at a Savings & Loan, I began my love of genealogy.

The spark started when my adoptive dad's sister and her husband visited and showed pictures of their trip to Scotland, where they did some genealogy research.  This was in 1987.  Fortunately, someone had already done a lot of research on my adoptive line.  No one had one any on my adoptive mother's line so I started working on her line first.  This was long before the internet.  I didn't even have my own personal computer.  Everything was done by hand and snail mail.  If I wanted to look at census records, I had to drive to the National Archives in Laguna Niguel, about an hour and a half drive north, to look at microfilm rolls.  It was very time-consuming and expensive.

In 1989, I became a flight attendant and a year later I purchased my own computer.  There still wasn't the internet but technology was making research a little less time consuming.  At least now, when I had a layover in a town with a good genealogy library or family, I got research done.

In 1999, I came home from a trip and turned on Headline News to hear a story about the state of Oregon passing a law about opening up their adoption records.  The next day, I put my name on the wait list to receive my original birth certificate.  In the summer of 2000, I finally received that certificate.  Three days later, I got on the internet and looked up the Esgate name in Eugene, Oregon's white pages of their telephone book.  There were six Esgates still living there. I proceeded to call each one, not realizing I was actually related to them all.  The last one turned out to be the most helpful by putting me in contact with my immediate family.

I want this website to not only show my biological family roots but as a means of sharing my genealogy knowledge that I have acquired over the years and perhaps enlighten my visitors.  Therefore, I will discuss what actions I have taken, the results I have found, and topics of genealogical interest.  I want to teach others things I have learned and discovered all these many years.

This blog will be updated on a regular basis as well as the research on my family tree.  If you have information to add or correct, please feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.  All genealogy of living people will not be published on the website but will at least be accounted for privately.  If you want that information, you will have to contact me personally through email.  I look forward to hearing from you.