The Dominion of New England
Growing up, one of my favorite books was The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare. The novel, which won the Newbery Medal in 1959, tells the story of a young woman who, in 1687, comes to live with Puritan relatives in Wethersfield, Connecticut (Speare 1958). So I was delighted to discover relatives of mine among the founders of the earliest English settlements in Connecticut, including Wethersfield.
Lost on the Lady Elgin
On September 8, 1860, the steamship Lady Elgin, overloaded with passengers on a fundraising excursion, sank on Lake Michigan, an incident which remains the deadliest wreck on the open waters of the Great Lakes
Refugees in London
When I think of early immigration to the United States from the part of Europe that is now Germany, I tend to think of German settlers in Pennsylvania, many of whom were religious dissenters like the Mennonite ancestors I have written about in a previous post. As a result, I was quite surprised to learn that my seven-times great-grandfather, Johann Henrich Krantz, arrived in New York in 1710 and settled along the Hudson River in Ulster County. As I learned more about why he arrived when and where he did, I came to see many parallels between his experience and that of refugees and asylum seekers today.
Wide Awake in 1860
In 1860, my four-times great-uncle, Servetus Longley, invented and patented a street-sweeping machine. It’s an ingenious device, with brushes attached at an angle to a set of wheels so that the machine can be pushed along a street. This invention might have made a fortune for Servetus. In fact, in the fall of 1860, the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, granted him a three-year contract to use his machine to clean the streets in the city’s western district. They withdrew the contract a few weeks later and therein lies a tale.