The Swarm

They have become so many: Capps and Kemballs, Swains and Cranes, Goodyears and Goodales. Wilkens and Wells, Randalls and Tuthills and Wallace and West—a four-hundred year swirl.

Ancestors are in my head like glimpses of faces in clouds. I can catch them on paper for a moment; names and dates, father of, mother of, spouse. Today though they all swarm and swim.

I have traced, with some accuracy, the direct lines. I know the grandfathers and grandmothers from Hattie and Vince, Peggy and Bill back to the first of their people to wade ashore. Every few generations I can’t find the surname of a grandmother, but mostly I know the names and places. Some of them jump off the pages of history, some are footnotes and some are forgotten. They came and settled, or settled in, brand new towns in five states between 1610 and the Revolution.

I do not know if the great number of very early colonial ancestors in our tree is unusual in American genealogy. I have heard that 53% of Americans had ancestors here in colonial times. We have family lines that were in the colonies for several generations before the Revolution. We have a string of ancestors who fought in the War of Independence. They represented militias in North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey. We have ancestors who came well-provisioned and from solidly upper class families. We also had ancestors who arrived with very empty bellies and no prospects whatsoever.

When I started to write our genealogy, I thought I would write the chronology of each line, but it is impractical. You wind up with something like the ‘begats’, fun to memorize but deathly dull unless you know the stories attached to each person.

So this post is meant to give a scant overview of the main family lines relevant to when, where and under what circumstances they arrived. After that I can start to share some of the stories I have turned up.

Hattie Mae McGowan’s parents were Grace Swain and Elmer McGowan

Vince Calvert’s parents were Agnes Shrum and John Doak Calvert

William Dempsey Randall’s parents were Mattie Capps and Ervin Randall

Margaret Nora Dugan’s parents were Ellen Mary O’Callaghan and Patrick Henry Dugan

Here are the first immigrants in each line in their order of arrival.

William and Catherine Capps from England in 1610 to Jamestown, Virginia on the Sea Venture.

Elizabeth Randall (possibly a widow) from England to Watertown, Massachusetts before 1630.

Tys Barentsen Swaim (later Swain) and Scytje Cornelise Swaim came from the Netherlands to settle in New York City (Staten Island) in 1659.

Johan and Ana Maria Schramm (later Shrum) came from Germany in 1737 and settled in Pennsylvania.

The McGowans arrived before 1800 but probably in the mid-18^th century from Northern Ireland or Scotland to settle in western Pennsylvania.

Thomas and Martha Calvert came in 1848 from Belfast and settled in Erie, Pennsylvania and later went to Wisconsin.

John Dugan arrived from Ireland in 1847 in New York City.

Ellen Mary O’Callaghan arrived from Ireland in 1892 in New York City.

The profiles of the families who arrived in the 17^th century are of course similar. The Virginians (Capps) were not religious dissidents, but Anglicans and more interested in Virginia land and rumored gold than in religion. The New Englanders, the largest group of our immigrant ancestors, were religious dissidents and in some cases extremely radical. They were Randalls and associated families and also families who married into the Swains and Shrums. The Mid-Atlantic area was home to the Shrums who settled in Pennsylvania around the same time as the McGowans. While the McGowans stayed in western Pennsylvania until after the Civil War, the Shrums went to North Carolina in their second generation. One generation later they went to the Mississippi River Valley and settled Cape Girardeau. They was our first family on the River. The Virginians stayed in that state and in North Carolina until they left for Ohio and Illinois before 1820.

The latest comers in our tree were the Presbyterian Northern-Irish Calverts and the Catholic Dugans who came after the Famine. Ellen Mary O’Callaghan from Cork was the last immigrant ancestor and, possibly, the only one on either side who came through Ellis Island.

The New Englanders who arrived before the English Civil War took advantage of the English invitation to colonize New England in trade for religious autonomy. Those English who came after the English civil war often left under the cover of night. They include three men of Cromwell's men who stood guard over the execution of Charles I and a daughter of a man executed as a regicide of that king. (These people were ancestors of Grace Swain through both her paternal grandmother and her maternal grandmother.) The New Englanders founded towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut primarily between 1630 and 1640. Some of these were Watertown Massachusetts, Southold, New York, Saybrook, Milford, and New Haven Connecticut and Elizabeth and Caldwell, New Jersey.

That is the overview with the briefest facts, but it is the treasure of stories that I want to share with you. Here are some that I have planned. I hope they will tempt you.

William Capps and the Salt Mine

Mrs. Capps and the Raid

Mathias Swain and the Pirates

Big Shots

The Salem Incident

The Regicides

I’m a Tuthill?

Loyals and Rebels

Blues and Grays

Editha’s Letters and Polly’s Divorce.

Nicholas and John Shooting Wolves

Buttons

Moses' Corn

... and a few more.

The photograph is of the home of Nicholas and Editha Shrum, Vince Calvert's grandparents. It is in Saverton, Missouri. It was taken in 1983 and is courtesy of a Shrum cousin, Linda Thompson.