I am an American mongrel of the northern European sort, genealogically speaking,. My ancestors were Scottish, French, German, English and Welsh. I have visited most of the places they came to when they arrived in this country.
In fact, when I began to investigate my family history, I was surprised to discover that all but one ancestor arrived here before this was a country. They came to the colonies. The one was Howell Williams, and on a recent visit to England, I took a little swerve to see a couple places from which the people of my maternal grandmother came.
She was Nelle Williams, and Howell (1828-1900) was the immigrant in that line. He was her grandfather and came from Swansea, Wales sometime in the 1860s. According to family lore he served in the Crimean War for Queen Victoria and to his obituary for the Union in the Civil War. I have yet to turn up documentary proof for either of these claims. I do know that he was a puddler in steel mills around Niles, Ohio in the gilded age, a union man and a backer of Ohio native son William McKinley.
I know far less about his life in Wales, other than a marriage certificate from 1858 which describes him as a mariner, names his already deceased father as Daniel, and gives the addresses at which both he and his bride, Elizabeth (Bessie) Owens resided at the time of their marriage.
The Swansea archival service didn’t offer much hope of filling in the blanks, other than parish records. They might contain their birthdates and the names of their parents. I may pursue that in the future. I also didn’t get to see the places they lived. Swansea is still there, by an attractive bay, but the city that marches up the hills from the sea is almost entirely new. The buildings at the addresses where Howell and Bessie lived date from after 1940 when the Nazis bombed to rubble what was then an important port. And the fishing, mining and smelting economy of Howell’s day is also a distant memory.
Lesson one: The past is fragile. Surprisingly little often remains of a world that seemed so permanent to our ancestors when they inhabited it, only a few durable works of man, shards, and scraps of paper. One of these is an 1860s photo of a woman in a long black dress that I inherited. The back tells me it came from Swansea’s M. Gorman and Sons photographic studio. Was this Bessie, or Howell’s mother or sister who posed so he’d have a picture to take to America? We’ll never know.
My grandmother’s mother, who married Howell’s son, was Ada Rumsey. She died of tuberculosis when my grandmother was seven, in 1897. The Rumseys were farmers and grocers in the Western Reserve portion of Ohio from around 1800 when Daniel Rumsey arrived, but the first of their line came to the New World much earlier.
The immigrant was Robert Rumsey of Collingbourne, England – a dot on the map about 20 miles north of Salisbury in Wiltshire. He married Matilda Sherfield in March of 1630 in the neighboring town of Idmiston. We visited there and were thrilled to discover that All Saint’s, the church in which they were almost certainly wed still stands. Its oldest parts are Norman, the nave with its pointed arches dates from the 14th century. A shingled steeple, that they never saw, was added by the Victorians.
By `1640 the couple and their children were living in their new home of Fairfield, Connecticut. Why did they leave the deliriously beautiful Wiltshire countryside, between the Salisbury Plain and the North Wessex Downs with their roiling hills and swift flowing trout streams? Why risk a long, perilous ocean voyage to reach an unknown land? The reasons were probably the same as today – economic opportunity, religious persecution, political upheaval, or a combination of the above.
The market town of Romsey, whose name is a variant of Rumsey indicating a significant presence by my tribe thereabouts, is just a few miles away, and here’s what was happened there shortly after Robert and Matilda sailed away. “Romsey changed hands several times during the English Civil War (1642-1651). Both Royalist and Parliamentary or Roundhead troops occupied and plundered the town.”
This conflict didn’t just pit king against parliament but the Church of England establishment against dissenting sects, especially the Puritans. In the twenty years prior to the outbreak of hostilities, the so-called Great Migration populated New England with these people, including Quakers and Baptists, who were subject to discrimination at home.
Fairfield was one of the towns established by people who thought religious reform in the Massachusetts Bay Colony was occurring too slowly, and a couple generations later some of the Rumseys relocated to southern New Jersey which was an early Quaker toehold in the New World. Religious practice there was not restricted.
It seems clear that the Rumseys were part of this wave of immigrants seeking freedom of conscience. I’m here because of these people. Yours may have come here for similar reasons. It’s worth remembering this history when today’s news is filled with a contemporary version of the same story.