Amateur Genealogy and the Power of Google
I had some time to myself last evening and didn’t feel like working, so, for reasons that aren’t important here, I embarked on bit of research.
I was interested in discovering where in the UK my family last called home before crossing the Atlantic to the New World. I wasn’t terribly interested in doing a full genealogy in one evening — and didn’t really want my evening research project to become an on-going burden — so I focused on my paternal descendants, the ones responsible for my last name.
I began with enough knowledge to take me back to the American civil war. And, because my civil-war era descendant was an officer in the Confederate Army, I knew from the regimental history that he hailed from Brunswick County, VA. So, I started Googling.
I wasn’t expecting much.
But thanks to others who have made genealogy their hobby, and then published their findings online using services like ancestry.com, I quickly found a great deal of information.
Within minutes, I had identified my line of anscestors back to a John Manson, who lived in York County, VA around 1700. And I was further able to determine that his father also lived in York County, VA and was a land owner who married one Elizabeth Chapman, but I wasn’t able to determine his first name.
Interestingly, I found two descendants named Thomas Manson. The first was born in 1757, and his son, Thomas James, was born in 1804. (My full name is Thomas Marshall Manson.)
Seemingly at a dead-end, I discovered that the fine folks at Virtual Jamestown have been busy putting their records online. While they don’t have court records done yet (which would have been the most helpful resources), they do have a searchable database of indentured servants who came from Britain the New World between 1654 and 1686.
I ran a search.
And I found one Thomas Manson, who came to Virginia as an indentured servant from the English port of of Bristol in 1674.
Now, Manson is Scottish name, and the Mansons were a sept, or division, of the Gunn clan. According to a couple of sites that specialize in heraldry, the Mansons come from Caithness, in extreme northern Scotland. By the census of 1881, Mansons were spread all over Scotland. Most remained in the north, but significant pockets had come south to Glasgow and Edinburgh. It’s reasonable to assume that after the English civil war that drove so many Scots to the New World, Mansons were, even then, coming down from the Highlands.
In 1674, most ships to Virginia started their journeys in London. But if one wanted to get from Scotland — most likely Glasgow — to the New World, traveling to London would have been difficult and expensive. Instead, it’s far more likely that a Scot setting off for Virginia would take passage by ship down the coast to a port like Bristol.
So, given the continued use of Thomas as a first name down through the generations, it’s not an unreasonable guess that the Thomas Manson who came to Virginia in 1674 as an indentured servant was my great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather.
Unfortunately, even that conclusion doesn’t answer my question. I still don’t know where Thomas Manson came from. Did he come down the coast as I’ve assumed? Or did he live in Bristol or even somewhere else? And if did come down the coast from Scotland, where in Scotland did he live? And why did he leave?
Those questions will be left, I suspect, in the cloud of history. But I’ve written all of this for three reasons: First, to memorialize my research. Second, to testify, once again, to the power of the Internet. And third, to thank all of the real genealogical researchers who spent days determining their family trees and then had the generosity to publish their work online.
All in all, it was an interesting and fun way to spend a couple of hours, and I’m glad I did. Whether or not my conclusion about the first Thomas Manson is correct, I learned a lot.