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The
Connelly family of Clark County, Illinois, came to America in the 1700s,
as documented in an absorbing book, “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish
Shaped America,” by James Webb.
The information piqued my
interest since I had always wondered why the Connellys (variously spelled
Conley, Conneley, Connelley, you call it) had arrived from Ireland before
the potato famine in the 1800s, and why of all places had they come to
Pennsylvania?
There is still doubt as
to whether the ultimate ancestor, John, was born in Ireland or in
Pennsylvania. We do know he was born 28 June 1744. He died most likely in
1799 in Crab Creek Township, Wilkes County, North Carolina. The family
bible (I have seen a photocopy) lists only his birthdates – not place of
birth.
According to Connie
Weatherly of Tulsa, OK, who descends from Josiah Connelly’s first
marriage, “handed down orally is the belief he was born in Ireland and
married Sarah Wilson on the boat coming to America.”
I was surprised to learn
not only was John not from County Cork or the south of Ireland, as all my
relatives had suggested, but most likely from the north. And although it
cannot at this point be proven, it is most likely the Connellys originally
came from Scotland, moved to Northern Ireland, came to America, made
journeys through North Carolina and Kentucky up to Indiana and Illinois,
and finally ended the family journey in California – my father Alanson
Parker Connelly leading the descendants of the clan right up to the shore
of the Pacific Ocean.
Eleanor Stratton Howard,
a Connelly researcher who gave me the first information on the family,
contributed the research to the Clark County Genealogical Library at
Marshall, IL, and also offered information for the “History of Westfield,
Illinois, and Northwest Clark County” (H. Kesler, 1981). She says:
“The ancient name was
Connally and signified a light. . .The Connellys were chiefs in
Fermanagh, Ireland, and had possessions in
present-day counties of Galway, Meath and Donegal . . .Josiah
settled five miles southeast of Westfield in Parker
Township . . . Josiah died in 1870and was buried in the
Connelly Cemetery, which he had donated from his farm. Three
of his sons, William, Martin and Madison, married and
raised their families in the neighborhood where Josiah
first settled.”
Webb spends a great deal
of time discussing the Scottish natives and their many battles. Finally,
though, land was opened up in Northern Ireland in what was then called the
Ulster Plantation. Groups began leaving the hills and glens of the
southwestern Scottish lowlands. He writes:
“…we can imagine these
families headed out from their heather-covered, denuded
hills for the coastlines, where they would catch the boats
that took them a few miles across the stormy North
channel of the Irish Sea and into the new world that awaited
them in Ireland’s Ulster Plantation. The men would be
dressed simply in wool sweaters and plaid trousers
of their day, the women in ‘linen skirts with a plaid
draped over their heads and pinned across their bosom and
falling to their knees.’ Some would be shoeless. They
would be carrying few possessions; weapons,
certainly, and perhaps a few days’ supply of the ever-vital
oatmeal to be mixed with milk into porridge or with water
into gruel.”
The author points out
that they would likely travel among a group of families and would settle
in pockets of farmland. He calls them the “dreamers and daredevils of
their lot.” They would continue this clannishness in America; indeed, the
Connellys are much entwined with the Hammonds, marrying back and forth,
and with the Bucklers (Alanson’s sister Sally Connelly married my mother’s
[Maude Buckler] brother, Bruce).
Unrest in the Ulster
Plantation brought four great surges of Scots-Irish migration from the
1720s to the beginning of the American Revolution in 1775.
As the author writes:
Each (surge) was brought
about not only by events in Ireland, but also by a series of incidents and
incentives in different American colonies that affected both the pace of
their migration and the locations they chose for settlement. The first
large migration, from 1720 to about 1730, brought them heavily to
Pennsylvania. The second, concentrated in the years 1740 and 1741, drew
them to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and brought with them many of
those who had already settled in Pennsylvania . . . By the time this
migration was complete, as many as a half million Scots-Irish immigrants
and their American-born descendants were living in a cohesive geographic
area in the mountainous areas of modern-day Pennsylvania, Virginia, West
Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina. It has
been estimated that as much as one-third of the entire Protestant
population of Ireland left for America between the years 1731 and 1768
alone, and this ratio was much higher for the Scots-Irish since few
Anglicans were leaving Ulster.
The author points out
that the Ulster Scots chose Philadelphia as a port of entry because of its
dedication to religious freedom, and because the New England and New York
communities were not welcoming. They were “a quick-tempered but sensual
and playful people” who “dressed provocatively, acted with a volatile
belligerence, drank to excess, engaged in constant and open competition .
. . and adamantly defied the attempts of outsiders to control them.”
The new arrivals
eventually made a migration to the mountains that the author calls
historic. “Hardscrabble settlements grew up all along the spine of the
Appalachians.” This “highway” traveled nearly 700 miles.
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