A Long Trip to America & Love
- Leslie Ryan
- Sep 24
- 3 min read
This month I have been researching for a nice couple from Iowa. Their families arrived there in the 1800's and that's about all they knew. Come with us, down a long arduous trip to America, true love, our new discoveries AND mysteries through Genealogy!
The husband has a very unique last name. According to Ancestry, there are only 112 people in the US with that last name! Its origin is thought to be German or Dutch. Our subject's great-grandfather was born in Ireland according to the Census records. He emigrated to New York in probably 1837 (there's a record), and there is a death record for a same-named individual in 1848. However, there is a 17 year difference in birth dates between the two records. There is no record for a mother.
His grandfather, Charles, was born in 1847. He appears in the 1860 and 1870 Censuses as a child, working on farms in Indiana and Illinois, reporting his father was born in Ireland and his mother in England. How I wondered how and when did he get to Ireland? There are no records at MyHeritage, FindMyPast, or FamilySearch.
I moved on to the wife's side. What a nice difference! Every time I added an ancestor to the Ancestry tree, documented hints about potential parents popped up. In no time at all, I had her family back to 1700's in New York!
Their ancestors were all from Germany and Switzerland and names associated with "The Palatine." Now, I have heard the term, but had no idea where or what that was. Genealogy depends upon recorded history, ladies and gentlemen!
Here is a map of Germany in the 1700's from Britannica, and I found a lovely history of the Palatinate in NY from the National Parks Service. Basically, during the Holy Roman Empire the Palatines were a ruling family in a region of Germany bordering Luxemburg, Switzerland, Belgium and close to the Netherlands. There were over 100 years of wars that wiped out most of the families and farm lands in the Palatinate. They were forced to move.
They moved to The Netherlands and to England. The English saw them as a great opportunity to increase the number of Protestants versus Catholics there and in Ireland. By 1709, there were over 13,000 of them living in tents and barns in England, there is no found information about their population in Ireland yet.
Now, across the Atlantic in New York, England had taken over the Dutch Colonies in 1673. The landowners there needed laborers, to work the farms and build more harbors. They sent the Palatines to some land that had been donated by a Six Nations chief who felt pity for the refugees in 1708.
By 1715, there were 150 odd families prospering in the New World. But now that there were cleared lands and working harbors, England decided to sell these lands rather than let the Palatines continue their colonization. They could stay and pay rent or move. A few stayed, and many moved on to the new lands acquired from the Native Americans in the Mohawk Valley, or to Pennsylvania to join other Dutch Reformed Church members already there.
The wife's family went to the Mohawk Valley and were among the earliest settlers of Albany County, NY between 1723-1725.
Fast forward 150 years to the 1870's to the Heartland of America. And here we have our couple that met and got married 75 years ago.
Let's pause and think for a minute, about the husband's unusual last name, shared by only 111 other people as of yesterday, that should be German or Dutch, whose only known ancestor was born in Ireland in the early 1800's. I think they are both Palatine descendants!
I'm hoping I can convince him or one of their children to take a DNA test! As it is, we do have a wonderful story of a Long Trip to America and two souls traveling thousands of miles and hundreds of years to reunite some 4,000 miles away from where they started! This is going to be my early Christmas gift to these two wonderful friends, I can't wait to share it with them!
What kind of mysteries are you working on? Would you like some help? Send me an email, I will be glad to devote up to 2 hours evaluating what you have at NO CHARGE, and work out a plan to take your journey in time further back with NO OBLIGATION!
Best regards,
Leslie Ryan
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Further reading:
The Palatines in N. America https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-palatine-germans.htm