St. Patrick’s Day Update: Our Long Lost Link to Ireland

It seems fitting this St. Patrick’s day to offer a brief post on our connection to Ireland. Recent research links the Greene family to an Irish immigrant named David O’Killia (also spelled O’Kelley, O’Killey, Okilley, Ogillior and O’Killea in New England historical records).  David is a seventh great-grandfather to my grandfather, Shirley (see chart below).  He also is among the earliest Irish immigrants to New England, probably arriving sometime during the early 1650s, and likely a progenitor of the O’Kelly or Kelly surname in New England. Some sources allege he came from the northwestern part of Ireland, near Galway, although documentary evidence of this currently is lacking. This timeframe coincides with the efforts of Oliver Cromwell to conquer Ireland (1649-53) during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

(Click below to view the larger image)

David O’Killia to Shirley Greene Explained

Records show David was an indentured servant to John Darby of Yarmouth, Massachusetts. The servitude seems likely to have been in exchange for the boat passage across the Atlantic to New England. It may be David was attempting to flee the conflicts related to England’s latest attempt to subjugate Ireland, or perhaps he was simply looking for new opportunities. David next is recorded in Plymouth County, Massachusetts on 4 October 1655 as David O’Gillior (clerk’s spelling at the time) “the Irishman” servant to Edward Sturges. His period of indentureship probably expired in 1657 when he is recorded as having taken an oath of fidelity and admitted as an inhabitant of Yarmouth with the right to vote in town affairs. The record again refers to him as David O’Kelly, “the Irishman.” 

While the date is uncertain, David eventually married in Yarmouth to Jane Powell, who had been a servant/maid of William Swift, a well-to-do Quaker living in Sandwich, Massachusetts. In several references, Jane is noted as being Welsh, but there is no documented evidence of her place of birth.  David paid for her freedom and purchased approximately 100 acres of land near Kelley’s Bay (see image below) on an estuary of the Bass River. The bay is named for David and located in the Mayfair section of Dennis, Massachusetts. David and his family lived at this location for some 40 years, likely engaging in farming and fishing, as would have been customary at the time.

Kelley’s Bay in Dennis, MA

In 1676, David was taxed two pounds, six shillings, and five pence for his share in defraying the costs of King Phillip’s War. The conflict, which lasted nearly three years, pitted a group of Native American tribes of New England against the English colonists and their indigenous allies for what the former group saw as repeated encroachments of their historical lands and violations of prior treaties.

In 1679, David appears on a list of townsmen of Yarmouth, Massachusetts. David and Jane had five sons (Joseph, John, Jeremiah, David Jr., and Benjamin) and two daughters (Sarah and Elizabeth).  His will was dated 10 Feb 1696 and probated 19 July 1697, the legatees of which were his wife, his sons, and his daughters. He and Jane are thought to be buried in a Quaker cemetery on David’s original plot of land in present-day Dennis, Massachusetts.

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December 2023 Update: Our Family Connection to the Alamo

The Alamo today

The Alamo is most remembered as the site of the decisive defeat of Texan and volunteer forces to the Mexican army during an 11-day siege in February-March 1836 that ultimately led to Texan independence from Mexico and later incorporation into the United States.

Less known is how the Mission in present-day San Antonio, Texas came to be known as “the Alamo.”  In fact, the name perhaps comes from the military unit that first occupied the San Antonio de Valero Mission in December 1802 – the Segunda Compañía Volante de San Carlos de Parras (Second Flying Company of San Carlos de Parras), which originated in the town of San José y Santiago del Álamo (present-day Viesca) in the Mexican state of Coahuila.  In Spanish, álamo means poplar, or cottonwood, and parras means vineyard, both of which were prevalent in the area surrounding the towns for which they were named.  After the company had occupied the San Antonio Mission for several years and converted it into a presidio, the local population began to refer to the presidio by the name of the company, La Compañía del Álamo, and later simply El Álamo.

Read the full post and the connection to the Vielma family at this link.

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September 2022 Update: Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua

This is the home page with the latest updates and links to new posts and pages on the blog.

Click on this link Ciudad Juárez (or alternatively click on the Our Towns tab from the Main Menu at the top of the page) and scroll down to the Mexico heading to check out the Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua page!  Ciudad Juárez is the largest city in the northern Mexican border state of Chihuahua and was the home to approximately ten generations of our Miranda and Vielma branches from approximately 1680 until 1904 when the last of our Vielma line moved permanently north of the Rio Grande to the United States.  Ciudad Juarez today may be more known for its concentration of factories (maquiladoras) and violence associated with drug cartels. but it is also a vibrant city with a proud history and claims as the originator of the margarita and the burrito.

**NOTE: All photos are the property of GreeneandMiranda.com unless otherwise noted. If you wish to use or copy any photos on this site, please contact us through the feedback form requesting permission. Thanks!

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June 2021 Update: Juan Aldama, Chihuahua, Mexico

This is the home page with the latest updates and links to new or updated pages on the blog.

Click on this link Juan Aldama (or alternatively click on the Our Towns tab from the Main Menu at the top of the page) and scroll down to the Mexico heading to check out the Juan Aldama, Chihuahua page!  Juan Aldama is a small town in the northern Mexican border state of Chihuahua and was the home of several generations of our Vielma family from approximately 1800, with the Spanish cavalry soldier Antonio Vielma, until around 1850 when Antonio’s son Francisco moved the family further north in Chihuahua State to the village of Guadalupe Bravos along the Rio Grande.

**NOTE: All photos are the property of Greeneandmiranda.com unless otherwise noted. If you wish to use or copy any photos on this site, please contact us through the feedback form requesting permission. Thanks!

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April 2020 Update: Sprinz – From Prussia to the U.S. Southwest

** With the benefit of additional research in early 2020, I’ve greatly expanded the Sprinz family page, which can also be accessed from the Related branches page!  

Sprinz, sometimes misspelled Spring, Springs, or Sprintz, is a minor branch that can be traced back to David Sprinz and Caroline Landsberg, who lived in a small Prussian Jewish community in the Posen region of Prussia (present-day Poznan in Poland) during the early to mid 19th century.  This was a challenging point of history for the region’s Jewish community, who were still not afforded the same rights as other citizens and were constantly caught between ethnic Germans and Poles.  As a result, many young Jewish men looked west for opportunities, and four of David and Caroline’s sons emigrated to the United States between 1874 and 1885.  Their son Rudolph was the first to depart, arriving in New York City on the ship Pommerania in February 1874.

Rudolph was a pioneer of the U.S. southwest and an early settler of the copper mining town of Clifton, Arizona Territory and later El Paso, Texas.  He owned dry goods and clothing stores in both cities during the 1880s and later was an accountant for several large businesses in El Paso.  He was also heavily involved in El Paso’s early Jewish community and contributed funds for the founding of the city’s first synagogue, Temple Mount Sinai.  Rudolph spent the last 30 years of his life in Los Angeles, California as an accountant and auditor for the Internal Revenue Service.  He died on June 24, 1934, and his descendants are scattered throughout the United States with last names as varied as Sprinz, Jacobs, Lucero, Palacios, and Miranda.

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November 2019 Update: Pellett Family Page

Pellett Family CrestThe November 2019 update to the site is the creation of the Pellett family page (can also be found under the Related Branches tab at the top of the homepage).  Our Pellett branch traces its roots back to Sussex, England but may go even back to Normandy, France.  The root word “pel” means skin in French, and Pellett could translate to a person who deals in furs or skins.  The Pellett family are among the earliest European settlers of New England likely having arrived in the decade after the pilgrims came to the New World on the ship the Mayflower.  The Pelletts were among the founders of the town of Concord, Massachusetts in the 1630s.  They were also part of the first wave of settlers of Canterbury, Connecticut beginning in the early 1700s and remained in that town as farmers and businessmen for some six generations.

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October 2018 update: Non-traditional Pioneers in the “Old West”

Americans have always been fascinated with the “Old West.”  Hollywood has produced some of its biggest stars and profitable movies telling the stories of the brave early pioneers seeking a their fortune, a fresh start, or new opportunities in the Western United States.  In most of these stories, the pioneers are eastern-based Americans or recently-arrived European immigrants, and their narratives normally involve homesteading, mining, or a noble effort to bring law and order to a wild environment under harsh conditions – the perennial “good guys.”  And until the revisionist Western movies beginning around the 1980s, the native inhabitants of the land, the Chinese railroad builders, and the Mexican laborers were nearly always depicted as dirty, savage, lazy, and foreign – the evil “others” of the lawless frontier.  Certainly these depictions by now have been exposed for being simplistic at best to utter nonsense at worst.  And as general population trends since the 1970s have seen swaths of Americans moving from the Northeastern and Midwestern United States into the Southwest, there is renewed interest with the origins and stories of the early settlers of the of the “Wild West.”

Mule Train

A Mule Train hauling ore in an early Arizona mining camp.  Photo courtesy of Mining World

Unfortunately there is a dearth of scholarship regarding non-traditional early settlers, such as the early Mexican immigrant pioneers in the Southwest, United States.  We know the stories of those who trekked thousands of miles West, but what of those who trekked thousands of miles north to contribute to the founding of early settlements in the Southwestern?  My GGG grandfather Jose Maria Jordan was one of those early pioneers that went first north, and then west to seek a better life for himself and his young family.  He was a fourth generation Mexican whose family originated in the southeastern region of Murcia, Spain.  In the early 1860s, while the United States was embroiled in its great Civil War Jose Maria became the first of the Mexican branch of Jordans to trek north across the Rio Grande.  With him went his young bride, Clara Hermosillo Jordan, whose family had lived in Chihuahua city since the mid 1700s.  From the birth records of their children, we know that the family lived in Las Cruces, New Mexico beginning at least in 1863.

Over the next 20 years, the Jordans were some of the earliest residents of several Southwestern U.S. boom towns – from Las Cruces and Silver City in New Mexico Territory to Clifton in Arizona Territory.  It is likely that Jose Maria was familiar with mining, particularly as significant operations existed at the time in the Mexican border states of Sonora and Chihuahua, some with partial investment from U.S. mining companies.  He is noted as an overseer of a coal pit in Silver City in the 1880 U.S. census and later as the owner of a freighting operation hauling mining ore and supplies between Lordsburg, New Mexico and Clifton, Arizona.  Tax records denote that he owned dozens of horses, mules, and oxen, as well as four wagons and an ambulance.  For many years, Jose Maria was employed directly by the Longfellow Mine, the first mining operation in Clifton.  As an important and respected businessman in town, Jose Maria was chosen to serve as a trial juror on several cases in Clifton’s inaugural session of the Graham County District Court.  This almost certainly implies that he spoke fluent English.  Records indicate that he naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1873 in New Mexico and that he paid taxes on the aforementioned wagons, horses, oxen, and mules.

So while this short biography does not include saloons, prostitutes, or gunfights, it does reflect the true life account of a hard working pioneer who sought a better life for his family and contributed to his society and whose descendants continue on in Arizona and throughout the United States some 150 years later.

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December 2017 Update: Nathanael Greene, “The Fighting Quaker”

Paine Portrait of NG

Portrait from Charles Peale, 1783

When I was younger, family members would always note with pride that we were related to Nathanael Greene, George Washington’s number two during most of the Revolutionary War.  He is my second cousin, eight times removed.  Only recently have I undertaken to research more about the Revolutionary War and Greene’s contributions to the founding of the United States of America.

What follows in this link is a short biography of a Quaker with a limp from the smallest British colony in North America who became a gifted military strategist and rose to become a legendary general of the American Revolutionary War – second in esteem only to George Washington himself.

Greene did it all during the course of the war.  He was commander of the city of Boston in 1776 once it had been evacuated by the British; during the remainder of 1776 he commanded Fort Lee in New Jersey and Fort Washington in New York; he served as Quartermaster-General of the Continental Army from 1778-1780; he succeeded Benedict Arnold as commander of West Point in late 1780; and lastly, after being recommended by George Washington and approved by Congress, Greene assumed command of all Continental troops from Delaware to Georgia beginning in December 1780.  By the end of the war in 1783, Greene and Washington were the only two generals to have served the entirety of the eight year war at the rank of General.

One can only speculate about what else Greene might have achieved in service to his country, but his life was cut short tragically at the young age of 43 of heat stroke.

Nathanael Greene’s longer biography link is here.

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August 2017 Update: Refined DNA Results

The incredible world of DNA Testing continues to evolve and as testing becomes more accessible, the results have gotten all the more accurate.  For those that know the science, our family volunteer DNA tester’s haplogroup results are:

R-FGC16979 Icon   and

MtDNA Haplogroup

The tester updated Y-DNA from the 67 to the 111 marker test and also tested positive for a subclade further down the P312 family known as R-FGC16979.  There have been no further updates to the MtDNA results although our tester has been closely matched to several other testers in recent months after going a few years without any matches.

In April 2017, Family Tree DNA’s My Origins site, which maps autosomal DNA to capture a person’s ethnic breakdown back 5-6 generations, launched it’s 2.0 update.  The results altered our family’s volunteer tester results quite significantly to include Ashkenazi Jewish and Sub-Saharan African markers for the first time (5 and 3 percent respectively), while the European and New World percentages (64 and 26 percent respectively) remained largely the same.  The full results are below.

My Origins Breakdown Aug 2017

For the full discussion on DNA testing, click on the following link.

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August 2016 Update: A Brief History of French Canadian Migration to New England

It is widely cited that between 1840 and 1930, nearly one million French-Canadians emigrated to the United States.  Our Despatie family, which had lived in Quebec for 250 years, was among these emigrants when they left the suburbs of Montreal to settle in Northeastern Connecticut in the early 1890s.  Several main factors pushed this southern migration, including poverty and debt, overpopulation, and infertile farmland.  Many scholars point to an unsustainable population growth in Quebec Province in the 19th century which led its largely agricultural workforce into subsistence farming.  With a short growing season, many farmers were unable to make ends meet and became dependent on loans they would never be able to repay.

Wauregan Mill

Wauregan Mill

In the meantime, the post-Civil War United States was in the midst of rapid industrialization, particular in the New England states.  Particularly cotton and textile mills began to pop up in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut offering a significant pull to many French Canadians at that time.  The emergence of a railroad system linking Quebec to New England meant an easier means of exploring the new economic opportunities provided by the mills.  Another significant factor was that these jobs in the mills did not usually require any type of formal skills or education and many employed women and children, meaning that several family members (not just the father/husband) could be employed at the same time.  By 1900, more than 500,000 French Canadians had emigrated to New England, with nearly half settling in Massachusetts.  While Connecticut received less than 10 percent of these immigrants, those that did settle in the state left a lasting impression.

Franco-Americains in New England in 1900

Franco-Americains in New England in 1900

Our Despatie family, led by Antoine Despatie, emigrated with several of his children to Wauregan, Connecticut (15 miles south of the Massachusetts/Connecticut border and five miles from the Rhode Island/Connecticut border) around 1890.  Antoine had been a farmer in Granby, Quebec just southeast of Montreal and likely had experienced many of the issues outlined above – subsistence farming, poverty, and debt – before deciding that the lure of New England’s factories would lead to a better life for his family.  Indeed, once in the mill town of Wauregan, he and several of his children worked in the cotton and textile mills.  Wauregan, like many other mill towns in New England at the time, became inundated with French Canadians, who voluntarily segregated themselves within these communities to maintain their distinct culture.  As New England was still largely made up of English-descendant Protestants, French Canadian immigrants held closely to their French language and Roman Catholicism, and the Catholic Churches became the focal points in these new communities.  In Wauregan, the Sacred Heart Parish was built in 1870 to serve the burgeoning French Canadian population in the region and remained the center of the growing Catholic population for a century.

Sacred Heart Parish in Wauregan

Sacred Heart Parish in Wauregan

Wauregan’s fortunes were entirely tied to the cotton mill.  Following World War II, the mill began a period of decline, partially the result of cheaper labor in the southern United States, free trade policies and a couple of hurricanes in 1955, which led to large scale flooding that destroyed portions of the mill.  By 1970, the Wauregan mill had ceased operations entirely and its assets were sold.  Many Franco-American families at that time had lived or three generations in the United States, and the soci0-cultural bonds that had kept them together – work in the mills, the French language, and the Catholic religion had begun to fade.  Today the descendants of these original immigrants are fully assimilated Americans, who speak English as a first language and who have scattered to pursue opportunities outside of New England throughout the rest of the United States.  However, their legacy survives and is a source of pride for the more than eight million Americans who claim French Canadian descent in the United States today.

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