For those who have been following my travel blogs, you will be aware of my trips in search of ancestors (see Solving a Mystery In My Devon Ancestry and My Old Way Pilgrimage to Canterbury). This theme gives me a personal perspective on the towns I visit and gets me off the tourist trail with its crowds and check off lists. In preparing for our trip to visit locations of our Scottish ancestors, and given the related that lasted over a year, I had plenty of time to do a deep dive on Lindas and my ancestors going back five hundred years and more. I currently have almost 10,000 ancestors in our tree, and that is mostly the direct bloodline without aunts, uncles and cousins other than recent generations. In doing so, I was able to identify many ancestors who immigrated to the North American colonies during the 1600 and 1700s prior to the American Revolution.
My grandmother Anna Elizabeth Weaver proved to be a gold mine for colonial ancestors, with 105 who arrived to the New World between 1607 and 1776. These include the English who first settled Jamestown in 1607 who spread west to the Appalachian Mountains and south to the Carolinas; then the Pilgrims who came
to Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620, and the Puritans who founded towns north of Plymouth who spread west across the state and south to found towns in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Long Island, New York; the Dutch who colonized New Netherlands in the Hudson River Valley and New Amsterdam on Manhattan in 1624; the Swedes who colonized New Sweden in 1638 in the lower Delaware River Valley, who were in turn absorbed by the Dutch and then the English in 1667, with many then moving west across Pennsylvania; and the Scottish Covenantors, English Quakers and Baptists, the French Huguenots, and the Swiss and German Moravians and Mennonites, all who were persecuted for the religious views in their home countries so took refuge in the new colony of Pennsylvania. My other three grandparents ancestors arrived in the United States and Canada in the 1800s from Norway and England, respectively.
On Lindas side, 46 of her fathers paternal ancestors from England, Scotland, Ireland and the Netherlands arrived prior to the American Revolution seeking liberty, economic relief and opportunities for a better future. His maternal ancestors arrived in America from Poland in 1888. Lindas maternal grandparents arrived in America from Slovakia in 1918.
Our colonial ancestors founded towns from Maine, Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Plymouth Colony, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New Amsterdam(New York), Pennsylvania, the New Sweden Colony and New Castle, Delaware; the Gunpowder River Colony in Maryland; and the Jamestown Colony in Virginia. As I planned our trip to the northeast and states, I realized that we wouldnt have time to visit every little town that was started by our ancestors, so would concentrate on the more interesting places and branches of our family tree.
As my oldest daughter and her family were now living with us until at least October 2021, we also had pet sitters that allowed Linda and me to travel together. With our trip to Scotland to visit our ancestral homeland there delayed until late August and early September 2021 (now delayed until Jun 2022), this provided us with an opportunity to visit our daughter Rosanna and her family in Connecticut and Lindas family in western Pennsylvania, and to visit the towns along the way where our colonial ancestors lived. So with both of us receiving our vaccines, we booked our flight to Connecticut departing on 26 April 2021.
30 Apr 2021 Monday through Friday. We had an uneventful flight via DFW to LGA where Evan picked us up at 10:15 PM and drove us to Ridgefield CT. We spent the week getting involved in the family daily routines...
