Mushen family history:
400 years of American beginnings.

For six straight generations, New England holds between 85% and 95%. These people landed in Massachusetts and simply stayed — marrying other colonists in the same handful of towns, for a century and a half.

Then look at the step between the eighth generation and the seventh. New England collapses from 85% to 39% in a single generation. Nothing about that is gradual. It is the Revolution: Congress finished the war with no money and a great deal of western land, and paid its soldiers in acres.

And it is the same generation on both sides of that fact. The seventh generation has a median birth year of 1750 — twenty-five years old at Lexington. Ebenezer Nye was born in 1750 and Ebenezer Porter in 1732. The generation that fought is the generation that left. They were paid in land, and they went and stood on it.

The second rule on the chart is the Civil War. The fourth generation has a median birth year of 1841, which put its men at twenty when the war began — Albert Mushen was twenty-one, Robert Linton twenty, Lyman Beecher Warner twenty-four, Alexander Campbell thirty-three. Eleven men of the right age, spread across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Oregon. Not one of them carries a service record in this tree, which is a gap and not a finding. It means nobody has looked, not that nobody went.

But the Civil War did not send them west

It is the obvious guess, and the dates refuse it. The West appears on this chart at the fourth generation, but the family reached Oregon on 27 September 1852, nine years before Fort Sumter. Whatever moved them, the war had not happened yet.

What moved them was the same thing that moved them the first time: the federal government giving away land. In 1788 it was military warrants — Congress finished the Revolution with no money and paid its soldiers in Ohio acres, and the seventh generation went and stood on them. In 1850 it was the Donation Land Claim Act, signed by President Fillmore on 27 September 1850, which granted 320 acres to a single man and 640 to a married couple who reached Oregon Territory and worked it.

That is why the family record calls their land in the Rogue River Valley the Gore Donation Claim. It is a legal term, and it is the reason they went. Emerson and Mary Gore left Iowa in April 1852, nineteen months after the Act passed, and arrived on 27 September — two years to the day after it was signed, which is a coincidence but a tidy one.

So: both jumps west were land policy, not war. The wars decided who was eligible.

After that New England never comes back. The Mid-Atlantic peaks at 59%, the Midwest at 41%, and by the third generation the family's centre of gravity is Oregon — three thousand miles from Plymouth, having taken nine generations to get there.

The complication

Everyone else in this part of the record is refusing an authority. Lothropp goes to gaol rather than swear the King heads the church. Warner walks out of Hartford. Hadley hides two regicides.

Dudley was the authority. He was harder than Winthrop, and he ruled against Anne Hutchinson in the Antinomian Controversy — the colony's great test of whether a person could differ from its ministers and stay. He was on the side that said no.

And he did not soften. His last written words were verses against religious toleration, reportedly found in his pocket after he died: a warning to men of God to watch over any who would “a toleration hatch,” lest the ill egg bring forth a cockatrice. Toleration had become, to him, the crowning sin. supported

Which is worth leaving in rather than tidying away. A family history that only collects the people who defied power is telling half a story. This one also produced the man holding it.

And his daughter, who is not an ancestor

Anne Bradstreet, Dudley's daughter, was the first poet published in North America. The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America appeared in London in 1650, while her father was governor.

She is not in this line. The descent runs through her younger sister Mercy Dudley (1621–1691), who married the Rev. John Woodbridge and died at Newbury. So Anne Bradstreet is the sister of a direct ancestor, an aunt, nine generations up, and this page says so plainly, because the ordinary thing for a family history to do at this point is quietly promote her.

That deserves its own sentence, because of what the document turned out to be.

Henry Dunster, Harvard's first president, had asked the General Court for a charter. Dudley endorsed it on 30 May 1650 — the tag at the foot of the document bears his name, and the Court issued it on 9 June. It created a corporate body with perpetual succession, to be called “the President and Fellowes of Haruard Colledge.”

That body still exists. The Harvard Corporation has operated continuously under that charter for three hundred and seventy-six years, which makes it the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere — older than every company, every bank and every other university on this side of the Atlantic, and older than the United States by well over a century.

He did not found Harvard; the college dates from 1636. What he signed is the instrument that made it permanent. Three years later he was dead, at Roxbury on 31 July 1653 — the same town where John Gore would die four years after that.

While he was inside, his wife Hannah fell ill and died. Their six surviving children were left with no parent at liberty and, by tradition, begged for bread in the streets of London.

What happened next is the part worth keeping. The children were taken, dressed in their best, to the Bishop at Lambeth, to stand in front of him and be looked at. The contemporary account says they “made known unto him their miserable condition by reason of their father's being continued in close durance.”

It worked, in the narrowest possible way. He was released on bond in May 1634 and ordered to leave England immediately. He sailed on the Griffin and reached Boston on 18 September 1634. He went first to Scituate and then, on 11 October 1639, led his people to a place they named Barnstable. He died there on 8 November 1653, aged sixty-eight, having buried a wife in a country that gaoled him and founded a town in one that did not.

The pattern this sets

Read the next three sections together and the family's whole first century is one argument, escalating:

Lothropp goes to prison rather than swear that the King is head of the church, 1632. Andrew Warner walks out of Hartford rather than concede a point about baptism, and founds Hadley, 1659. And Hadley then hides two of the men who signed a king's death warrant for twenty-eight years, from 1664.

These are three different people in three different decades, and it is the same refusal each time. It is also, in the end, what the Great Migration was — not an adventure, and not a land grab, but twenty thousand people who would not sign something.

Andrew Warner (c. 1595–1684) arrived in Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s, then joined the migration that pushed inland to found Hartford on the Connecticut River. He was an original proprietor — one of the men who held the town's land in the beginning and parcelled it out.

Then, in 1659, he did it again. A doctrinal quarrel split the Hartford and Wethersfield churches — a fight over baptism and church membership bitter enough that the losing side chose to leave rather than submit. They moved twenty-five miles north into the Massachusetts wilderness and founded Hadley.

The town's first town meeting was held at Andrew Warner's house on 8 October 1660. He served as juror, selectman and highway commissioner, and worked as a maltster. Hadley became one of the major towns of the upper Connecticut Valley and the parent settlement of several others.

Four years after that first town meeting, two men arrived in Hadley in disguise.

Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe were regicides — among the commissioners who had signed the death warrant of Charles I in 1649. When the monarchy was restored in 1660 the new king's government hunted them across two continents. They fled to New England, were moved from safe house to safe house, and in the winter of 1664 they were taken to Hadley and hidden in the house of Rev. John Russell, the town's minister — the same man who had led the seceders out of Hartford.

They stayed for years. Whalley died there. The secret held for the rest of Russell's life and was not common knowledge until he died in 1692, nearly three decades later — in a town of a few hundred people, where everyone knew everyone's business.

Which is the point worth drawing out. Hadley existed because a group of Puritans had refused to bend on a question of baptism and would rather walk twenty-five miles into the wilderness than submit. Those are precisely the people you can trust to hide two men the King of England wants dead, and keep quiet about it for twenty-eight years. The stubbornness that founded the town is the stubbornness that concealed them.

Andrew Warner lived in Hadley the whole time. He died there in December 1684, with the secret still unbroken. In February 1679, in the middle of it, he is recorded taking the oath of allegiance to the Crown at Hadley.

The Wampanoag had kept peace with Plymouth for half a century — it was the father of their sachem who made the first treaty with the people off the Mayflower. In 1675 that ended. The war that followed killed a greater share of New England's population than any conflict in American history since, the Revolution and the Civil War included. Twelve towns were destroyed outright. The colonists came close to losing.

John Carter of Woburn was twenty-one, and in Captain Nathaniel Davenport's company. That December they marched through frozen swamp in a snowstorm against a fortified Narragansett town built on an island in the mire — the Great Swamp Fight, one of the bloodiest single days in colonial American history. The attackers went in across a single fallen log. Davenport was shot dead at the head of his own company.

Carter came home. He lived another fifty-two years, made lieutenant, and lies in Woburn's First Burial Ground under a stone that still names the war.

The muster roll25 November – 3 December 1675

None of that is family memory. It is in George Madison Bodge's Soldiers in King Philip's War (1891), the standard register, compiled from the Massachusetts Archives, and it is specific. Bodge prints the lists of men impressed in the several towns where Captain Davenport's company was raised, returned between 25 November and 3 December 1675. The Woburn list runs to thirteen names. Carter is the first.

From Woburn. John Carter, William Johnson, James Convars, John Cutler, William Peirce, John Baker, Zachariah Snow, John Polly, John Preist, John Berbeane, John Shilden, Thomas Hale, John Bolen, Caleb Simons, Peter Bateman, Jerimiah Hood.Bodge, from Massachusetts Archives vol. 68

Two things follow from that. He was impressed — conscripted, not a volunteer. And three of the men standing beside him on the list came back wounded: Bodge's roll of Davenport's casualties names Caleb Symons, John Backer and Zachary Snow, all of Wooburne.

The list of that company's slain is headed by a single name — Capt. Nath: Davenport, and Bodge records where he was standing when it happened: “Capt. Mosely and Capt. Davenport led the van.” Carter's company went in first.

The night before18 December 1675

One of the men who was there wrote it down.

Dec. 18th we marched to Petaquamscot with all our forces, only a garrison left; that night was very stormy; we lay, one thousand, in the open field that long night. In the morning, Dec. 19th, Lord's day, at 5 o'clock we marched. Between 12 and 1 we came up with the enemy, and had a sore fight three hours. We lost, that are now dead, about 68, and had 150 wounded.Contemporary account, in Bodge

This is also the war the Angel of Hadley is supposed to belong to — the phantom soldier who saved Andrew Warner's town in 1675. He did not exist. The two regicides hidden a few doors away did.

Rebecca Nurse was seventy-one, devout, and widely respected, which is exactly what made her case notorious. The jury returned not guilty. The accusers erupted; the judge invited the jury to reconsider a single ambiguous remark she had made; they came back with a conviction. Thirty-nine neighbours signed a petition on her behalf, which in that atmosphere was a dangerous act. She was hanged on 19 July 1692.

Her sister Mary Esty was hanged on 22 September, among the last eight. Knowing she would die, she petitioned the court — not for herself. She asked that no more innocent blood be shed, and proposed that the accusers be questioned separately and the confessors re-examined, because she was certain they were lying and would be found out. It is one of the most extraordinary documents of the whole episode. It changed nothing in time to save her, but the executions stopped that autumn.

A third sister, Sarah Cloyce, was accused, imprisoned, and survived.

The sisters come down opposite sides of this family

The descent from these two is not one line that happens to pass through a famous household. It is two lines, and they run down opposite halves of the record.

Rebecca Nurse descends to the maternal side — through her son John Francis Nurse, then Sarah Nurse, then four generations of Twisses, then the Hodges, ending at Alice Williams, who died in 2020. Mary Esty descends to the paternal side — through her son Isaac Eastey Jr, then the Cummings, the Porters, Lyman Beecher Warner, Hattie Mabel Warner, Beulah Lucretia Gore. Eleven generations one way, ten the other. They do not touch again until the last marriage in this record.

So two women hanged nine weeks apart in 1692 spent the next three hundred years travelling down separate branches of the same family — Massachusetts and Vermont and Iowa and Oregon on one side, New York and Pennsylvania on the other — and their descendants met in a hospital corridor in Portland in the 1970s without knowing it.

There is a third line. Their brother Edmund Towne (1628–1678), whose record carries 107 sources and who died fourteen years before the trials, also carries the descent, down the maternal side alongside Rebecca. That makes William Towne and Joanna Blessing ancestors three times over — through Rebecca, through Edmund, through Mary — which is more lines of descent than any other people named on this page. Ten others are ancestors twice; the Townes are the only ones who are ancestors three times, and the only ones anybody wrote a story about.

Two of the three children who carried this family forward were hanged as witches. The third died in his bed and is the reason the other two are not the whole of it. Where the two sides had already met sets out the other convergences.

When the war ended, Congress had land but no money, and paid its veterans in western acres. The Ohio Company of Associates — largely New England officers and soldiers cashing in military warrants — founded Marietta in 1788, the first organised American settlement in the Northwest Territory. It was not a drift. It was a government finding a way to settle its debts, and it moved a whole generation of New England families over the mountains in twenty years.

Twenty-two ancestors died in Ohio between 1797 and 1861, and four of the same generation died in one Ohio county. Ebenezer Nye — the Connecticut soldier who had been paid continuously through Yorktown — went out to Marietta in 1790 and on to Rainbow in 1795, where he preached, held civil office, and donated the ground that became the village burial place. He was then buried in it. His sandstone marker still stands, and the Marietta DAR marked the grave.

Ebenezer Porter (1732–1827) of Ipswich was among the last of the party to reach Marietta in July 1788, and died at Little Hocking at ninety-four. Lydia Cummings and Solomon Fuller are buried in the same county.

You can watch that journey happen in the birthplaces of his fourteen children. Thirteen of them were born at Ipswich, Essex County, the last in January 1784. The next, Mary Polly, was born in New Jersey in March 1787. Sixteen months later the family was at Marietta. The family did not decide to go west so much as it was already moving.

The Revolution did not just end for this family. It relocated them, and everything west of here follows from it.

Twenty-four ancestors died in Vermont, in records running from the 1740s to 1853: Halifax, Bennington, Guilford, Weathersfield, Hardwick. It was the cheap frontier for crowded Connecticut and Massachusetts families, and both New York and New Hampshire claimed it, having sold overlapping titles to the same acres.

In 1777 the settlers stopped waiting for a ruling and declared an independent republic. Vermont was its own country for fourteen years, with its own currency and its own postal service, until it joined the union in 1791. Several of these death records still carry the jurisdiction as it stood: Bennington, Republic of Vermont. Some ancestors here died as citizens of a country that no longer exists.

The man who kept the bar1766–1781

Not an ancestor — an uncle by marriage. Fay married Ruth Child, whose sister Prudence Child is the direct ancestor. The two women share the same parents, John Child and Hannah French, and the same nine siblings. So Fay is the husband of a sixth great-aunt: no blood, one marriage away, and in the room for all of it.

Capt. Stephen Fay Sr. (1715–1781) was an innkeeper in Westborough, Massachusetts, selectman four years, assessor five, innholder from 1754, and in 1766 he moved to Bennington and took over the Green Mountain Tavern, built three years earlier. History knows it by the sign that went up outside: a stuffed catamount mounted on a post, turned to face New York and grinning defiance at its claim to the land. The building carried that name for a century, until it burned in 1871. The Catamount Tavern.

It was not a bar that happened to have revolutionaries in it. It was the headquarters — of the Green Mountain Boys, of the fight with the New York land claimants, and then of the Revolution itself. Ethan Allen lived there, on and off, for years after 1766. When the settlers decided in 1772 to send men to negotiate directly with the royal governor of New York, they sent the landlord: Captain Fay and his son Jonas rode to confer with Governor Tryon.

Fay was sixty-two when the fighting reached his town. He did not carry a musket. He sent five sons, John, Elijah, Benjamin, Joseph and David, to the battle of Bennington on 16 August 1777. John did not come back. The family account records what happened when the news was brought to the tavern, and it is worth having in full:

“What! has he misbehaved?”

“No, sir. Worse than that — he is among the slain. He fell contending mightily in the cause.”

“Then I am satisfied,” replied the venerable sire; and in his deep grief, bowing his head, he exclaimed, “I thank God that I had a son who was willing to give his life for his country. Bring him in and lay him before me, that at my leisure I may behold and survey the darling of my soul.”

recorded of Stephen Fay, Bennington, August 1777

Supported — a nineteenth-century family memorial, not a contemporary document. The tavern, the 1772 mission and the five sons at Bennington are independently recorded; the exact words at the door are the part that rests on the memorial alone.

The man who wrote the constitution1777–1783

Benjamin Carpenter (1725–1804) came to Guilford in 1770 from Rhode Island, where he had been a magistrate. What he did next is carved on his gravestone, which reads less like an epitaph than a résumé:

“Hon. Benjamin Carpenter, Esq. … a field officer in the Revolutionary War, a founder of the first constitution and government of Vermont, a councilor of censors A.D. 1783, a member of the council and Lieutenant Governor of the state in A.D. 1779, left this world and 146 persons of lineal posterity March 29, 1804, aged 78 years, 10 months and 12 days.”

gravestone, Guilford, Vermont

That constitution is not a footnote. Vermont's, drafted in July 1777, was the first constitution in North America to abolish adult slavery, and the first to give every man the vote without requiring him to own property. A direct ancestor of this family was in the room.

He is seven generations back — closer than the Salem trials, closer than King Philip's War. And the last clause on the stone is doing something quietly enormous: 146 persons of lineal posterity. He counted. Everyone reading this page is in that number's continuation.

And Vermont is where the Gores were waiting

Amos Gore went up from Norwich, Connecticut to Halifax in the 1750s. His son Ebenezer was born there in 1793, and his grandson Emerson in 1824. Three generations in one Vermont town, and then the whole line picks up and leaves for Iowa, and after Iowa, Oregon.

And the two Vermont lines are the same line

These two men look like separate finds. They are not. Benjamin Carpenter's daughter Lydia married Amos Gore, the Gore who had come up to Halifax from Connecticut, and their son was Ebenezer Gore. Meanwhile Prudence Child, the sister Stephen Fay did not marry, had a daughter Mary Flagg, a grandson Elijah Haven, and a great-granddaughter Mary Polly Haven.

Ebenezer Gore married Mary Polly Haven. The Lieutenant Governor's grandson married the tavern keeper's great-grandniece, and every generation after that, Emerson, Edward, Beulah, carries both. The constitution and the barroom arrive in the same person. Both of them were born in Halifax, Vermont, four years apart.

And then the couple that joined the two lines did not stay together to the end of it. They went as far as Iowa. Ebenezer died at Charleston, in Lee County, in 1850 — the same year Congress passed the act that would give his son 640 acres of Oregon. Two years later Emerson left for the Rogue River Valley without his mother. Mary Polly Haven does not appear in Oregon at all. She died in 1872 at Morganville, in Clay County, Kansas, seventy-five years old and some fifteen hundred miles from the son who carried her line.

Unproven — both death places are in the tree and neither carries a narrative source; six records apiece, and nothing that explains how a Vermont-born widow reached central Kansas. It is the thinnest well-formed story on this page, and it is here because the alternative is to pretend the family went west together.

Stephen Fay's line did the same thing, in the other direction and a generation earlier. His widow Ruth Child outlived him by twenty-one years and did not die in Bennington — she died at Gallipolis, Ohio, in 1802, at eighty-seven. The Catamount Tavern is on the Vermont frontier in 1766 and the Ohio River in 1802. Same restlessness, one lifetime.

Emerson and his twin brother Emery were cabinetmakers, and better with machinery than that suggests. Three years before they went west, the two of them were granted U.S. Patent No. 6,571 for a wind wheel — a vertical-shaft machine, two tiers of angled sails turning about an upright timber shaft, carried on a tapered eight-sided trestle and driving a toothed ring gear at the base. Most American windmills of the period turned on a horizontal axis like a Dutch mill. This one does not.

Twenty years later, in Oregon, Emerson patented a gang plough praised for being manageable “by a boy of twelve.” It was said the only real difference between the twins was that one was a Baptist and the other a Presbyterian.

Mary Elizabeth Gilmore was born in Pennsylvania, granddaughter of the Covenanter migration and daughter of Robert Gilmore the Marine, which is how two of these five crossings finally meet in a single marriage. She lost her father young and her mother not long after. She had read the whole Bible before she was seven. She married, was widowed almost immediately, her first husband, a Mr. Rose, died within a year, and supported herself as a schoolteacher.

She married Emerson Gore on 20 September 1849. Her son by her first marriage, Lewis Albert Rose, went west with them.

They left Charleston, Iowa on 27 April 1852 in an ox-drawn train of about forty wagons and reached the Rogue River Valley on 27 September. Six months. Mary was pregnant the entire way.

Emerson's father Ebenezer had died at Charleston two years earlier. The family had been inching west for two generations, Vermont, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, and he did not live to finish it.

When the cattle stampeded and the wagon ran toward a bluff:

The land itself came from the Donation Land Claim Act, signed six weeks before they set out planning it: 640 acres to a married couple who reached Oregon Territory and worked it. And the Act did something almost no American law did in 1850 — it required the husband and wife to each hold half in their own name. Mary Elizabeth Gilmore Gore, who had been widowed at nineteen and taught school to feed herself, owned three hundred and twenty acres of Oregon outright, in an era when most married women in the United States could own nothing at all.

They arrived into a war. The Rogue River Wars were running, and in the summer of 1853 the Gores built a fort on that claim, at what is now the junction of Highway 99 and South Stage Road, south of Medford. It sheltered “settlers for miles around at times of Indian excitement,” with their families, stock and possessions. One recorded panic turned out to be men chasing a bear.

The drawing is not a picture of a building. It is a measurement, made by someone who wanted the thing recorded before the last of them died. It gives the stockade as 160 by 80 feet, built of logs 20 and 26 feet long, buried four feet deep in the ground, and then, beneath it, does something no photograph could: it lists everybody who lived there.

List of Pioneers who lived here in 1853-4-6. First line: “Emerson E. Gore, wife and 3 children — L. A. Rose, Annetta J. Gore, Walter S. Gore '52.” Second line: “Emory E. Gore — bachelor, 1852.”

Those are people already on this page. L. A. Rose is Lewis Albert Rose, Mary's son by the first husband who died within a year of marrying her. Walter S. Gore is the boy born on 3 December 1852, three months after the wagons stopped — the one who grew up to write down the buffalo and “Whoa, Buck,” and to become Medford's first school principal. He was an infant inside this fence. Emory is the twin, and the co-inventor on the 1849 patent at the top of this page, listed here as a bachelor.

The rest of the column is the whole neighbourhood — the Hoffmans and their six daughters, Dr. McKinnell and his wife, the Geiger brothers, a string of bachelors, and a line that stops you: “Mr. Frick, wife and baby (buried within stockade) '53.”

The Gores farmed beside an Indigenous village and, unusually, got on with their neighbours. Mary nursed the sick and fed them. Emerson played the violin.

Then one day during the troubles an armed party came to the house. They did not attack. They came inside, sat down in a circle around Emerson, and the chief motioned for him to play.

So he played. He played until his arms gave out, and he did not stop, because he did not think he was permitted to stop, until the chief finally signalled that he could. Then they left.

Family memory holds that the music was part of what kept them safe. When the war came in 1854 the account records that the Indians “took up their luggage, went past Father's home, took the trail over Jacksonville hill” — passing the Gore place untouched, with every opportunity to do otherwise. Of Mary, the chief had said simply: she has a good heart.

Early years were thin — six weeks living on beef without salt, salt at a dollar an ounce, seven dollars for a squash. Emerson farmed, did carpentry on the buildings of Jacksonville, and ran a sawmill on Bear Creek with Emery until the flood of 1861–62 carried it off. The family went on to orchards, livestock, shops, schools and banks. Walter, the boy born three months after the wagons stopped, became Medford's first school principal.

Robert Gilmore and his brother came out of the north of Ireland “of Scotch-Irish descent and Scottish Covenanters in religious belief, fleeing from persecution to gain religious liberty in the new world,” and settled in Mercer County, Pennsylvania. He was a blacksmith. He married Nancy Smith, who was some twenty-nine years his junior, and took her on a wedding journey of forty miles on horseback to a house she could not find — it was hidden behind a stump until they rode around it, and she was, the family says, dismayed.

Mary Elizabeth was born on 6 February 1827, when her father was sixty-eight and her nearest sibling was five years older. On 14 June 1828 he died of cancer of the face. She was sixteen months old. Whatever she knew of the stowaway crossing, Tun Tavern and Captain Mullan's Marines, she knew at second hand, from a house he was no longer in.

What she read

Because she was so much younger than the rest, she became her mother's constant companion, and her sweetest memories were of walking in the woods with her. She had two books. Her earliest textbooks were a single spelling book and the Bible, which she had read through before she was eight years old. A second account in the same family record puts it earlier still — that she had read the Bible in its entirety before she was seven.

In the yard stood a chestnut tree too large for her to reach anything on. So she sat underneath it and watched the squirrels drop the nuts, and ran and picked them up. It was, she wrote, her only way of getting those particular chestnuts.

Her sister Jane was four during the War of 1812 and could already read, which most of the pioneers could not. Jane sat on a bench in their father's blacksmith shop and read the newspaper aloud to the men who came in with work.

These stories are hers and her granddaughter's, from the family record. Mary taught school in Mercer County to earn the money for her own wedding. She had a number of very lovely calico dresses, and spun and wove her household linen. When Lewis Rose died in Iowa two years later, leaving her with a four-month-old son, she went back to teaching to support them both — walking the boy to her mother every morning and collecting him after school.

Ten names. Hers is the last of them, and it stands alone — the Hoffmans, the Van Dykes and the Wrights are all listed as couples or families. Emerson is not on the tablet. Mary is.

The congregation was organised in William Hoffman's house on 22 November 1857 by Rev. Moses Allen Williams, the missionary whose diary that same year records calling on Emerson Gore at his sawmill. Williams went on to plant Presbyterian churches at Phoenix, Eagle Point, Medford and Klamath Falls. Thirty-six years later he buried her.

Now compare it with the stockade

Read the ten names on that tablet against the list of families written on the 1934 drawing of the Gore stockade, four sections above, and the same households keep coming back:

And two of the ten are sisters

Keziah Van Dyke, third name in the second column of the tablet, was born Keziah Gilmore on 6 February 1809 — Robert and Nancy's third daughter, and Mary's own sister. She married S. D. Van Dyke in 1834.

They did all of it together. Mary's memoir opens the crossing with “we, the Van Dykes and us, started to cross the plains”; the stockade roster lists “S. D. Van Dyke, wife and son John G., 1852” a few lines below the Gores; and in 1857 both sisters put their names to the same church. When Mary was widowed in Iowa and teaching school to feed her infant son, it was with Keziah that their mother was living, and Keziah's house where she left the boy each morning.

The two of them were born on the same day of the year, eighteen years apart.

She did it twice. Eighteen years after Jacksonville, Mary was among the founders of the First Presbyterian Church of Phoenix, organised in 1875 with Moses Williams again as its first pastor. She taught its Sunday school.

That church stood on the parcel where the Phoenix Historical Society Museum is today — land afterwards sold to the Phoenix Cemetery Association. Which confirms, to the yard, the sentence in the family record: she was laid to rest “in the little cemetery back of the little church (Presbyterian) she had helped to found” on 18 October 1893.

The church was behind her. It still is.

The Gaelic Irish lines in this family do something none of the others do. They stop — abruptly, at births clustered between 1720 and 1821, half the depth of every other origin. English lines run twelve generations back. Irish lines die at six.

The reason is a fire. On 30 June 1922, at the opening of the Irish Civil War, the Public Record Office of Ireland burned in the Four Courts, taking the censuses of 1821 to 1851, half the Church of Ireland parish registers, and nearly every will and probate record — seven centuries of documents. The 1861 and 1871 censuses had already been pulped by the government; 1881 and 1891 went for paper salvage in the First World War. No Irish census survives intact before 1901.

Under the Penal Laws most Catholic parish registers do not begin until 1820 or later, so beneath the fire there is a second wall where there was never anything to burn.

It is not one thread. It is three, running down three separate lines that had never met — one from Oregon, one from Ayrshire by way of a Rhode Island mill town, one from Ulster by way of western Pennsylvania. Each of them produced musicians for roughly a century before any of them married into the others.

First line · the Rogue River Valley1850s–1984

Emerson Elijah Gore (1824–1910) played the violin — for his neighbours, and on the day an armed party sat down in a circle in his house and the chief motioned for him to keep going.

His sons had a quartet, furnished music for occasions across the valley, and were active in all the church music. William H. Gore directed many church choirs.

Hattie Warner Gore (1873–1966) married Emerson's son Edward in 1899 and became the valley's musical institution in her own right. She taught piano in Medford for forty-three years, contributed to music publications while she taught, and wrote the concert reviews for the Medford Mail Tribune for twenty years. She represented the State Federation of Music Clubs locally and kept one of the largest private collections of concert programmes in the state, running back to 1882. She was also the first woman to serve on the Medford School Board, for three terms, and sang in the Presbyterian choir into old age.

Her daughter Beulah Lucretia Gore (1911–1984) also taught piano. Mother and daughter, the same instrument, the same trade.

Second line · Pawtucket1841–1919

Robert Linton, son of Hugh Linton (1804–1866) and Agnes Mitchell (1821–1879), was brought to America as a boy when his parents settled at Pawtucket. His father Hugh was born in Ireland around 1804, so this line runs Ulster, then Scotland, then Rhode Island: Scots planted in Ireland, back to Scotland, and gone again inside two generations. He is the one person in the last crossing who did not choose it. He was a child.

He went to the Pawtucket public schools, and when they were done with him he went into cardboard. He stayed an employee until 1870, learning every process, and then, at about twenty-seven, went into business with his brothers as Linton Brothers, coating paper at a plant on Front Street. The brothers are named on his memorial: James Linton (1840–1915) and Hugh Linton Jr (1846–1918), with a fourth partner, Edward Jollie. There was also a sister, Janette (1832–1885).

Linton Brothers … were the first makers of a coated paper stock to stand printing and waterproofing tests.Contemporary biographical sketch of Robert Linton

Read that again. Not the first in Pawtucket — the first. The firm went on to make what the sketch calls “a perfectly surfaced paper made especially for fine hair line effects required by modern printers in both lithograph and half-tone printing.”

Which gives the portrait above a second life. That picture is a half-tone. Look closely and you can see the screen. The man in it spent forty years making the paper that printing like it required, and the only surviving likeness of him reaches us on exactly that stock.

Seven living children

He married Elizabeth Smith (1846–1938) in 1870, the same year he founded the firm, and the sketch records them as “the parents of seven living children, three sons and four daughters.”

Living is doing quiet work in that sentence. The memorial records two more: Mabel Thompson Linton, born and died in 1876, and John Linton, born and died in 1878. Two babies, two years apart, neither of whom saw a first birthday. A biographical sketch written to describe a successful manufacturer had no room for them, and the gravestones did.

The eldest son, Robert Wilson Linton (1871–1949), went into the business with his father and succeeded him as its head in 1908, which is what the sketch means by a man “rounding out a long life of usefulness.” It was written while he was handing it over.

And the band

A history of the Pawtucket Band, a brass-and-reed ensemble incorporated in Rhode Island in 1880, lists its successive conductors as William Gilmore, William H. Apelles, T. J. Allen, A. D. Harlow, Mr. Russell, Robert Linton, and Jesse Linton. So the man who made the paper also stood in front of the town band, and a second Linton took it after him. band list: supported · single source

And Jesse Linton turns up again, in a different book entirely. The Slater Trust Company's Pawtucket, Past and Present of 1917 lists the officers of the Pawtucket Glazed Paper Company, incorporated January 1914:

Hugh Linton, president and treasurer; Hugh E. A. Linton, vice-president; Jesse Linton, assistant treasurer; Carroll M. Linton, secretary.Pawtucket, Past and Present · Slater Trust Company, 1917

Four Lintons running one paper mill, and a fifth, M. N. Linton, running the Hope Paper Company down the road. The family stayed in the trade Robert had learned, and stayed in it in numbers.

Third line · Cornell and Corvallis1947–1978

And from a line with no Gore blood, no Oregon and no Rhode Island, a Pennsylvania Campbell four generations out of County Down, William Alexander Campbell (1913–1999) was Director of Bands at Cornell for nineteen years and then chaired the Music Department at Oregon State.

Where they meet

Beulah Gore, the piano teacher, married Samuel Albert Mushen — Robert Linton's great-grandson. That is lines one and two, a Medford piano bench and a Pawtucket bandstand, joined in one marriage. Their son's marriage brought in line three.

The Gore twins1849 & 1869

Cabinetmakers in Vermont, and better with machinery than that suggests. On 3 July 1849, three years before they went west, Emerson and Emery Gore were granted U.S. Patent No. 6,571 for a wind wheel — the drawing at the top of this page. A vertical-shaft machine, when almost every American windmill of the period turned on a horizontal axis like a Dutch mill.

Twenty years later, in Oregon, Emerson patented a gang plough praised for being manageable “by a boy of twelve.” The full account is with the Gores.

Robert Lintonfrom 1870

And in Pawtucket, at almost exactly the same time, a Scottish-born boy who had come up through the cardboard mills founded Linton Brothers and did something the trade had not managed:

…the first makers of a coated paper stock to stand printing and waterproofing tests.Biographical sketch of Robert Linton

They went on to a paper made for the fine hair-line effects that lithograph and half-tone printing demanded. And the sketch is careful about how he knew it — not a machine, but a method: his experience “enabled him to acquire a system that few paper manufacturers in the country possessed.”

Two different kinds of invention

That distinction is worth keeping. The Gores have a number. Patent 6,571 is a public document with drawings, filed and granted, and anyone can read it, which is exactly why it survives as the oldest image in this family's possession.

Linton has no number. No patent has been found in his name. What he had was process knowledge held inside a firm — the kind of invention that never becomes a document, only a product and a reputation, and that disappears completely when the people who knew it die. It is the commoner sort, and the sort family histories almost never manage to record.

Except here it did leave one trace, and you are looking at it further up: the only surviving portrait of Robert Linton is a half-tone — printed by the process his paper was made for.

William Alexander Campbell, son of James M. Campbell (1874–1933) and Margaret E. Ross (1884–1952), was born on 2 February 1913 at Dayton, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, which is not a coincidence of geography. It is the same small town where his grandfather Alexander B. Campbell, born in Ireland in 1828, had died four years earlier; and his great-grandfather Alexander Campbell, born in County Down in 1796, died just up the road at Rural Valley. Three generations of Campbells stayed inside one Pennsylvania county after coming off the boat. William was the fourth, and the one who left.

He died on 25 November 1999 in Benton County, Oregon — three thousand miles west, in the same state the Gores had reached by ox wagon a century and a half before him.

What the marriage joins

He married Alice Louise Williams (1924–2020), the same woman who was admitted to the Daughters of the American Colonists on Andrew Warner's service, nine generations up.

So look at what that wedding actually connects. She carries Crossing I: the Great Migration, Massachusetts Bay, the Connecticut Valley, Hartford and then Hadley after the quarrel about baptism. He carries Crossing IV: Lowland Presbyterians planted in Ulster, out of County Down, down the Scots-Irish corridor into western Pennsylvania, and four generations in Armstrong County.

Those two streams entered the country a hundred years and six hundred miles apart and had no reason ever to touch. Andrew Warner was laying out house lots at Hadley in 1660. The Campbells were still in County Down. It takes until the twentieth century, and these two people, for the lines to run into each other, and everything on this page is downstream of that.

The join above is a marriage. This is the geography that made it possible, and the second join that came out of it.

When Campbell took the Oregon State post in 1966 the family moved to Corvallis. Their daughter later came west to Oregon to be near them, and studied nursing at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.

The other side of the family was already there. Beulah Lucretia Gore, the piano teacher, Hattie's daughter, and her husband Samuel Albert Mushen both died in Multnomah County. The Gores had come into the Rogue River Valley by ox wagon in 1852 and their descendants had drifted north to Portland over the following century. Their son read for his degree at Stanford and then came back north to medical school at OHSU.

Which is where the two of them met.

What actually arrived at that hospital

Everything on this page. One line had crossed on the Mayflower in 1620, founded Hadley over a quarrel about baptism, hidden two regicides, been hanged at Salem, fought at the Great Swamp and Oriskany and Yorktown, taken western acres at Marietta, waited three generations in Vermont, and driven an ox wagon into southern Oregon — arriving with a violin, a quartet, forty-three years of piano lessons and a Pawtucket bandstand behind it.

The other had been planted in Ulster, left County Down for Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, stayed there four generations, gone to war in the Pacific, and then crossed the continent one more time to run a music department — arriving from the opposite direction, three thousand miles and three hundred years later.

They met in a teaching hospital in Portland, which is the only place on the continent both of them had reached.

He served in the United States Army in the Second World War. Then he spent thirty-one years running two university music programmes.

From 1947 to 1965 he was Director of Bands at Cornell — nineteen years, at the head of the Big Red Bands; Maurice Stith succeeded him in 1966. That was the year Campbell came west to Oregon State University, hired to lead the Music Department after Robert Walls stepped down. He chaired it from 1966 to 1978.

The university's own archives describe what he did there: Campbell “broadened the department's music curriculum and improved physical facilities, to include a music listening center.” In 1967 the department established Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Arts degrees in Music, with three areas of concentration — applied music, music history and literature, and theory and composition. He handed the department to David Eiseman in 1978.

The record has two halves. One runs back through the Gores and the Warners and the Porters; the other through the Campbells and the Hodges and the Twisses. They meet at the bottom, in the last generation, in a hospital in Portland in the 1970s. That is the story the page has been telling.

It is not the first time they met.

The nearest point is a single marriage in Suffolk. John Webster Sr (1605–1646) and Mary Shatswell (1606–1694) of Ipswich are ancestors of both parents — ten generations up one side, twelve up the other. Mary Shatswell's record carries 67 sources, which for a woman born in 1606 is unusually well kept.

And they are not the only ones. Four more couples sit within a generation of them, each an independent convergence: Nicholas Batt and Lucy Newberry of Devizes, Sir William Mallet and Lady Alice Young of Somerset, an older Webster couple a generation further back — and William Towne and Joanna Blessing, whose two daughters were hanged at Salem in 1692. That is the same couple twice over: this record descends from Rebecca on one side and from Mary on the other, which is why both sisters appear here as direct ancestors rather than one of them.

Read the fourth column

Look at where these people were born. Ipswich, Sudbury, Norwich, Caister-on-Sea, Great Yarmouth, Devizes. Suffolk and Norfolk, over and over, in the fifty years before the Great Migration. The two halves of this family were neighbours in East Anglia, and in several cases the same household, long before either of them saw the Atlantic.

They then spent four hundred years apart — one line into Massachusetts and Vermont and Iowa and Oregon, the other into Ulster and Pennsylvania and New York — and arrived at the same hospital corridor without knowing any of it.

Essex County, Massachusetts. Of the best-documented people in this tree, thirty-five died in Essex County — more than three times the next county. Newbury, Andover, Topsfield, Ipswich, Rowley, Beverly. It is the same county as Salem, and it is where this family's paper trail is thickest by a long way. If you wanted to stand in one place and be surrounded by these people, it would be there.

The most-documented person here is not the most important one. That is Giles Leach (1632–1705) of Bridgewater, with 183 sources — forty-four more than anyone else, and he does not otherwise appear on this page. The reason is arithmetic: his son John had thirteen children. Source counts measure how many descendants went looking, not how much a person did. Read every number on this page that way, including the ninety attached to Lothropp and the ninety-five to John Gore.

And one who did nothing at all, at length. John Halstead (1535–1632) has 139 sources, the second-highest in the tree. He was born at Burnley in Lancashire, died at Burnley in Lancashire, and lived ninety-seven years in between without going anywhere. On a page about people who left, he is the control group.

Twenty-two claims were considered for this record and did not survive: false ancestors, deaths in colonies that did not exist yet, portraits whose wigs post-date their subjects by a century, an inflated militia rank, a famous legend with no event behind it, four pairs of records that disagree, and six things still claimed but not shown.

They are listed in full, each with where it came from and how it fell, on a companion page. Ruled out →