Family Migrations

Beverly Vorpahl discusses the tendency of friends to stick together.

David Wing,, Corliss Smith Wing (David’s son) and Lemuel Wing (David’s brother) helped lead a group of five families from Quebec to the Dakota Territories.

Every fall, birds in the north gather for their annual migration. They cluster together chirping and singing at one another, the older birds teaching the younger ones the songs they’ll use on their travels, say ornithologists. Great flocks of birds congregate, lining up on lengths of telephone wires filling bushes and trees until it seems as though the plant life were singing.

Then one day, once they’re fully prepared, they fly south together as a unit, not as individuals. There is protection in numbers.

That’s the way many of our ancestors arrived in North America and how they helped settle the West in groups — with family, friends or as a member of an organization with a binding tie.

The Separatists, better known as Pilgrims, traveled as a group when they made the great voyage across the Atlantic. Seeking religious freedom was their common bond. The earliest of my English ancestors arrived in Massachusetts in 1632, led by Rev. Stephen Bachiler, my 9th-great grandfather. He not only brought family members with him, but also parishioners of his congregation in Hampshire County, England.

“To a remarkable degree, the founders of Massachusetts traveled in groups,” writes David Hackett Fischer in Albion’s Seed, Four British Folkways in America. According to Fischer, in one early group of 700 emigrants sailing from England’s Norfolk and Kent counties, 97 percent were family units.

When searching through censuses, genealogists are cautioned to take note of the names above and below those of their ancestors — in case there might be kin close by. Some ”gene” teachers encourage their students to list every surname living in the same county as their ancestor.

Even if the people clustered around your grandparents aren’t family members in one census year, there’s every possibility that they might be in the next one, 10 years later. And by the following decade, they and their parents, in-laws and neighbors might well have pulled up stakes and moved west — as a unit.

Examples of group migration can probably be found in every family. For instance, my husband’s great-grandfather emigrated from Prussia and homesteaded in Wisconsin, neighbor to his brother’s family — and close by to his wife’s family.

As suggested above, it’s not just families that migrate together. Sometimes, an entire community uproots itself in search of better lands, a place that’s not so populated, a country that’s said to have rich, black top soil a foot deep.

The “Ten Men of Saugus,” as they were called, founded Sandwich, Mass., in 1637, according to Sandwich, A Cape Cod Town by R.A. Lovell Jr. In his book, Lovell cites the Plymouth Colony Records of 3 April 1637: “It is also agreed by the Court that those tenn men of Saugustn viz Edmond Freeman, Henry Feake, Thomas Dexter, Edward Dillingham, William Wood, John Carman, Richard Chadwell, William Almey, Thomas Tupper & Geroge Knott shall have liberty to view a place to sitt down & have sufficient lands for three score famylies, upon the conditions propounded to them by the Governor and Mr. Winslowe.”

These families were neighbors and friends in Saugus, now called Lynn. Although Thomas Dexter evidently did not move with them, 60 people together walked 100 miles from one town to an area in the wilderness where they would create another. With them was Stephen Bachiler’s daughter, Deborah Wing, a widow with four sons.

When the religious group of Friends (Quakers) migrated between 1681 and 1686 to West Jersey and Pennsylvania, great numbers of them arrived as nuclear families, again according to Fischer.

It was often necessary for our colonial forebears to migrate as families or neighbors to meet the requirements of forming a “plantation.” In the 17th century, the word plantation meant a new settlement or colony that had been established or planted. Before the government would consent to the formation of a new community, it needed a large enough population to ensure that it would flourish.

In 1644, Rev. Bachiler received permission to start up a plantation in New Hampshire, which he named Hampton. He is considered the founder of the town. With him were a daughter, son-in-law, several grandchildren and some of his devoted congregation.

In 1718, James McGregor and Archibald Boyd petitioned for a grant of land for themselves and 26 others who were already in Boston, and for 40 more families who were about to emigrate from Ireland, R.J. Dickson writes in Ulster Emigration to Colonial America 1718-1775.

Corliss Wing, Genevieve Amanda Wing, Hattie (Royce) Wing and Julia Elvina. This photo was taken shortly before they left for the Northwest Territories.

Twenty ministers, each traveling with congregations in tow, were expected to land at Boston in 1719, according to Dickson. Cotton Mather, New England’s leading minister at that time, wrote in his diary about “the great number of people that are transporting themselves thither from the north of Ireland.”

In 1794, Dr. Joseph Priestley, a clergyman, philosopher, scientist and political liberal, gathered together a group of friends to purchase land in Pennsylvania. The presence of friends would help “ameliorate the hardships,” Marcus Lee Hansen writes in The Atlantic Migration 1607-1860.

Friends can be a very good thing.

During the late 18th century, the new Americans began to get restless, according to Jack Larkin’s The Reshaping of Everyday Life: 1790-1840. People were less rooted to their hometowns and more prone to move.

By 1753, Sylvanus Thomas Wing, Deborah’s great-grandson, had moved from his birth village of Sandwich, Mass., to Hanover, Mass., and then on to Vermont. By the end of the American Revolution, the Wings migrated again as a family group to Lower Canada. Thomas Wing (Sylvanus’ son) followed his grown sons — Thomas Jr. Turner and Ward Wing — and their families across the border into Quebec.

At the end of the Revolutionary War came its rewards of bounty lands, some of it far, far away in the hinterlands of the young new country. And the move was on.

“Early 19th-century Americans became confirmed in the high rates of geographic mobility that have characterized them ever since,” writes Larkin. Between 35 and 40 percent of the households in Sturbridge, Mass., numbered at one census had removed before the next was taken a decade later. The call of new land was hard to resist.

And still immigrants kept arriving in America by the shipload. Once a man successfully crossed the seas and began farming or found some kind of work, he would write glowing letters home about his new country and encourage his parents and other relatives to join him. And more family units would come together.

In the 1840s, famine in Ireland created a “hunger” of more than one meaning for the Irish to leave their island home for a new one across the water. About the same time, the threat of war in Europe nudged Germans to emigrate at whatever cost.

There was a marked upturn in American immigration in 1827 and 1828. Those already in Canada and America valued their independence and preferred it to the real chance of poverty at home. Many saved their earnings and financed the cost of having their relatives join them.

For reasons I have yet to discover, my great-grandfather David Wing headed up a group of relatives and friends to quit Quebec for the Dakota Territories where they took out homesteads. Three of the five families that made the move contained a Wing sibling: David, Lemuel and Clarissa, all children of Hosea and Hulda (Beers) Wing, and all married with children of their own. And when, in 1900, the group migrated again — this time to the part of the Canadian Northwest Territories now known as Alberta — there were 10 families of them most related by blood or marriage.

Just as a new century was about to turn, South Dakota was hit with a few years of drought followed by an infestation of grasshoppers, resulting in poor crops discouraging the Wings and company. When they read of Northern Pacific Railroad’s attractive land offers, these Canadian-Americans decided to make one more giant geographic move which would take them about as far west on the continent as they had been east, where they began their lives.

Just as the friends and relatives from Quebec had farmed land in the same township of Lake County, they wanted to do so again in their new home in Ponoka, Northwest Territories.

Ebenezer Olmstead, who started the exodus ventures as a Wing friend, ended up an in-law when David’s daughter married Ebenezer’s son.

In 1934, “Uncle Eb” wrote for a county history: “We could have got land closer to the railroad, but not that would take all of the colony. We wanted to settle together, so we got back 14 or 15 miles. And as I yet think, we did not make a bad selection in locating the neighbors.”

The land these people homesteaded in 1900 and 1901 is still known as Ponoka’s Dakota District.

Following today’s method of moving and settling in new areas, the tradition of group migration has ended for this branch of the Wing family. But many of those travelers are buried in the Dakota District Cemetery. They’re together in death as they were in life.

This article originally appeared in the November/December 1999 issue of Family Chronicle.