Revised August 3, 2014
Twenty-four of the forty-two immigrants listed here arrived in the seventeenth century, twenty-two from England and one couple from Scotland. Nine of the twenty-four clearly arrived before 1650.
Nine went to Virginia, seven to Connecticut, five to Pennsylvania, and three to Maryland. Known birthplaces of the English immigrants are in southern England.
Fourteen immigrants arrived in the eighteenth century, one Scot, one who may have come from France, two from England, one identified only as from Germany, and the other nine from the upper valley of the Rhine River, now in southwestern Germany and northern Switzerland.
Nine of the fourteen went to Pennsylania, three to Virginia, one to Maryland, and one whose destination is at this point unknown.
Only four arrived in the nineteenth century – the early nineteenth century. Two, from England, went to what was is now Ontario, Canada. The other two, from Ireland, went to Pennsylvania and later Ohio.
If my arithmetic is correct (not a given), then in the tenth generation in the past, there were at least three hundred and eighty-seven ancestors who were or started out in western Europe. There were two thousand forty-eight ancestors in all in the tenth generation, leaving sixteen hundred and sixty-one whose locations during that period (early and middle 1600s) are unknown.
One hundred ninety-nine of the three hundred and eight-seven (assuming none of them moved from the places where their descendants were born) were in England (about 54 percent), eighty in Germany and Switzerland (about 21 percent), sixty-four in Ireland (about 16.5 percent)[Note 1], thirty-six in Scotland (a little more than 9 percent), and eight in France (a little more than 2 percent).
Eleventh Generation
John Browning, born in Suffolk, England, in 1588, died in 1635 (or perhaps 1662) in York County, Virginia. He arrived at Jamestown in 1621. Whether his wife Elizabeth Demaron came to America is not known at this point. His son Thomas came to America with his wife, perhaps in 1656, but returned to England.
Tenth Generation
Richard Goad, born 1618 in England, died in 1683 in Lancaster County, Virginia.
Alice Kellogg, born 1600 in England (her parents were born in Essex), and her husband John Bouton, born 1615 in England. They were married in 1635 or 1636 in Hartford, Connecticut. (If all the dates are correct, there must be a story here. A bride of thirty-six or thirty-seven, a groom twenty-one or twenty-two, have a child either in the tenth month of the year of their marriage, or perhaps in the year before their marriage.)
Matthew Marvin, born 1600 in Essex, England, and his wife Elizabeth, born 1604 in Essex. Both died in Connecticut, she no later than 1646, he in 1680.
John Woodbridge, born 1602 in England, and his wife Elizabeth, born 1612 in England. Their son Paul Woodbridge was born in 1631 in Virginia.
Ninth Generation
John Browning, born about 1640 in England, died about 1690 in Maryland, and his wife Elizabeth, born about 1649 in England. Their son Francis was born in Maryland in 1672.
Abigail Bushell, born 1668 in Wiltshire, England, and her husband Nicholas Pyle, born 1666 in Wiltshire, died about 1716 in Chester, Pennsylvania. Their son Samuel Pyle was born in 1700 in Pennsylvania.
Jeremiah Cloud, born 1658 in England. He married Elizabeth Bailey (birthplace and parents unknown) in 1685 and their daughter Sarah Cloud was born about 1697 in Chester, Pennsylvania.
Cicely Coebourne, born 1657 in Berkshire, England, married 1691 in Chester, Pennsylvania, and her husband Francis Baldwin, born 1657 in Oxfordfshire, England, died 1702 in Delaware.
Elizabeth Lee, born in 1602 in Gloucestershire, England, and her husband Thomas Hanks, born on a date unknown in Shropshire, England. Their son William Hanks was born in 1654 or 1655 in Richmond County, Virginia.
Rebecca Goodyear, born 1626 in London, England, died 1679 in Stamford, Connecticut, and her husband the Reverend John Bishop, born 1610 in Dorset, England, died 1694 in Stamford.
Lucretia Johnson, born in Scotland in 1629, died in Virginia in 1709, and her husband John Burnett, born in Scotland in 1610, died in Virginia in 1685 or 1686.
George Slawson, born in Surrey, England, died in 1695 in Stamford, Connecticut.
Eighth Generation
Frances Barnfather, born about 1700, birthplace unknown, but both her parents were born and died in Cumberland, England. She married John Wells (parents unknown) in Virginia in 1723.
Elizabeth (Brashier), born at an unknown date in England. She married William Brashier (birthplace and parents unknown), and their son Thomas Brazier was born in 1701 in Maryland.
Johannes Leipp, probably born in what is now southwestern Germany in 1696, arrived in Philadelphia with his wife Anna Margaretha Hirtzel (born in Baden in 1702) in 1727.
Anna Constable Owen, born in London, England in 1615, died in Virginia in 1706, and her husband Richard Henry Lee, born in Shropshire, England, in 1613. They were married in 1641 in Jamestown, Virginia.
John Jacob Rudisuhle, born in the Kingdom of Würtemberg in 1706, died in Pennsylvania in 1785. (His wife Elisabeth Hamsbacher was born in Pennsylvania.)
Seventh Generation
Mathias Ambrosier, thought to have been born in 1695 in France.
Mary Magdalena Fortineux, born in 1720, probably in Switzerland, and her husband Caspar Rubi, born in Switzerland in 1720, died 1786 in Pennsylvania. Their daughter Juliana was born in Pennsylvania in 1749.
Anna Smith, born in Germany in 1733, died in North Carolina in 1762. She married Joseph Bates, birthplace unknown, in 1748 in Pennsylvania and their daughter Elizabeth Bates was born in Virginia in 1749.
Anna Elizabeth Voltz, born in Hesse in about 1700, her husband Johann Philip Kimmel, born in the Palatinate in 1695, died in Pennsylvania in 1777.
Elisha White, born about 1728 in England, whose son Ortho White was born in 1753 in Maryland.
Sixth Generation
Johann Georg Schwartz, born in the Palatinate in 1720, died in Pennsylvania in 1799. Both his wife and his son were born in Pennsylvania.
George Kimmel, born in the Palatinate in 1743, died in Pennsylvania in 1818, was brought to America by his parents, Anna Elizabeth Voltz and Johann Philip Kimmel.
Fifth Generation
James Tinder, born 1735 in Scotland. Both his wife Sarah and their son the Reverend James Tinder were born in Virginia, he in 1776.
Isabel Henry, born in 1777 in Ireland, and her husband James Mahon, born in 1765 in Ireland. They arrived in 1811.
Fourth Generation
Richard Paddy, born about 1818 in England, died in Canada, and his wife Sarah Rowe, born about 1815 in England, died 1880 in Canada. Their son John Edwin Paddy was born in 1841 (or was it 1843?) in Picton, Ontario (or perhaps at sea, on the way to Canada).
1. The Irish component of known immigrant families, about 16.5 percent of the three hundred and eighty-seven ancestors who were or started out in western Europe in the tenth generation (sixty-four ancestors) is made up of the ancestors of one couple.
They immigrated to Pennsylvania in 1811, becoming the next to last two ancestors to immigrate across the Atlantic and the last to immigrate to the United States.
Nothing now known about them suggests whether they were Irish (and thus Catholic) or Scots-Irish (and thus Presbyterian, in most cases). This matters because Scots-Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics in general lived very different lives both in Ireland and in America.
The couples' last names might be Scottish or Irish. Or even English. Some of the people called Scots-Irish who colonized Northern Ireland in the early and middle eighteenth centuries were English Protestants.
The one place they're known to have been is County Down, now in Northern Ireland, more Protestant than Catholic, but not exclusively.
They came to America late for the main Scots-Irish immigration in the early and middle eighteenth century, but early for the main Irish immigration, which reached its peak in the 1850s.
The husband's name was James, which might be thought somewhat provocative to Protestants – James II being the Catholic British king finally overthrown in 1690 in the Battle of the Boyne at Drogheda, about eighty road miles from the middle of County Down. But the couple named their American-born son William, and it was King William who defeated King James at the Boyne and stemmed the Catholic threat.
Nor is there anything conclusive in William's daughter having married a radical Protestant who served as a minister.
The answer might be church records about this couple, James Mahon and Isabel Henry – if such exist and are found.