Hacienda Circle: Heading to Hillmorton -- for July 4th

04 May 2010

Heading to Hillmorton -- for July 4th

This July 4th will be exactly 133 years 9 months and 4 days since Elizabeth Anne "Annie" Walton arrived in New York City. She was a servant to Catherine (Parkin) Fisher, wife of Morton Coates Fisher (an American engineer who had fallen for an English girl, married her, and was bringing her to California with him where he had been hired to build levees.)

They boarded the S.S. Brittanic in Liverpool and sailed to New York where they arrived 30 September 1876.

Annie had been in service at least since 1871 when the census counted her family in Hillmorton, a village now a part of Rugby, in Warwickshire, England. They mentioned her on the census as unmarried and "in service, out of place" which I guess means she wasn't living at home then.

After Annie settled in the United States, she wrote to her family for the rest of her life, but never saw England again. She met a fellow English immigrant in San Rafael, Marin County, California, Joseph Truman Sale. She married him in 1878 and stayed put. They had four daughters, the youngest my Grandmother, Willa Truman Sale. Granwilla was penpals with her cousins in England but never met them. In 1966 when I first visited England I met her first cousin, Tom Edward Hackett at the home of his daughter, Winnie (Hackett) Miles. Winnie's son, Roger Miles, had been a math professor at Cal, and when Winnie visited him, she contacted Granwilla and re-started the family connection. Since then, my parents, Jack and Lavinia Gilbert, my nieces, Debbie and Darcy Gilbert, my daughter Kim Schwarz, our English cousin Jim Hackett and his son Colin, cousin Gillian Miles and Roger, as well as Maurice and Gillian Walton and their daughters Kate and Liz, and Tony Walton's family, and Maurice's sister, Diana and her husband Mark and their daughter -- and others I'm probably neglecting -- have met here in the U.S. and there in England on numerous occasions.

So this July 4th in Hillmorton where Annie and her siblings were born and raised, those who can will meet again.

We're heading to Hillmorton!

Here's Annie before she left home.

No comments:

Post a Comment

I am not responsible for any comments made by contributors in the Comments section. However I will exercise my right to moderate and edit comments which are deemed to be offensive, childish or just plain outstandingly dumb.

Note to Gilberts

All the ancestors posted on this blog belong to us all. Hacienda Circle lives. It is a place of our present with Jack & Roxanne there now, and it is a window into our past.

We are true American mutts -- a mixture from England, France, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, and Germany.

Our DNA will, no doubt, reveal more counties of origin. I'll be adding information about this as I gather and understand it. but we already have two 37 marker matches (one with a Frank M. Cresap -- no surprise there!).

1. Thank you, Jack, for doing our Gilbert DNA.

2. Thank you, Karen (Cresap) Bach, for having your late father, Andrew Bruce Cresap, Jr., do our Cresap DNA.

3. Thank you, Maurice Walton, for doing our Walton DNA (via Granwilla's maternal grandfather, James Walton's line).

4. I did our mitochondrial DNA back through Mom, Pi, and our direct female line back. This line is also included in a family finder project at https://www.familytreedna.com/. This works by comparing our autosomal DNA to that of other people who have taken the test through FamilyTree. Our relationship with a match is calculated based on sharing linked segments of DNA. Although any two people from the same population may have some of their DNA in common, as a matching segment of DNA becomes longer and we share more segments, it becomes more likely that the sharing is due to a recent common ancestor than a chance match. Thus far we have five people who we are probably 4th cousins with, but we haven't figured out the exact connection.

Happy ancestoring!