My Story | Thomas Gunn (1605) F

AN AMERICAN FAMILY

I was born in 1942, about the time everything started noticeably changing. It had been going on for some time, I am sure. But America when my Dad was young was still an agricultural country, and perhaps not generally recognized as a particularly significant one. More people lived in rural areas and on farms than in cities, and the Great Depression was just coming to an end. The War to End Wars in the early years of the century had not in fact ended. There was a pause of a couple decades and then it had started up again.

My parents were recently married and Mom was expecting her first child (me), so when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 Dad at first resisted the urge to join the military. In the end he didn’t really have a choice. He volunteered in 1944. They took one look at him--a tough, muscular, athletic ex-boxer, though older than they liked (he was 22)--and they told him he was going to be a Marine.

I occasionally have a memory and images of riding a train, the one that took me and Mom to see Dad in San Diego. They had told the men to say goodbye to their loved ones because they would not be returning. They thought the men would fight more effectively if they had no hope of living through the war. A few months later he was among the Marines landing on the shores of Okinawa at the start of the biggest and bloodiest battle of the Pacific War. A year and a half later he was back home. He would find that Post-War America was very different from the America he had known in his first 22 years.

I always enjoyed his recollections of his childhood. The family was poor, though he wasn’t aware of that. The only time he wore shoes, he told me, was when he went to school. They lived mostly on what his mother grew in her garden, on the many rabbits and chickens they always had, and the cow. The cow would be bred in early spring and the calf would be slaughtered just before the following winter. Grandpa was a wagon driver in early years, and later occasionally a night watchman. That, and selling a few eggs, brought in enough money for the things they could not produce on the farm. Dad was the youngest of 5 children.

One of the stories I liked best was a game he and one of his sisters played. They would dig a hole in the ground, climb in, and pretend it was a car--with a stick for a steering wheel. They had no money for store-bought toys. Another story was of Dad at the age of 10 years or so walking the cow for 8 miles to a new farm.

Post-war America was rapidly becoming a country where most people worked in factories and lived in cities. Dad was a pressman in a paper factory and earned enough to build a house, and buy an electric refrigerator and stove, and a new car. America was the only major country to survive the War with no damage to its productive infrastructure--it had suddenly become the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world--and it was obsessively involved in saving the world from Communism. Why? Because the best motivator in religion and in politics is to have an enemy. If not real, then invented. The Cold War was on. It lasted until 1991, when we woke up and discovered there was no bogeyman under the bed. But that’s my story, and here in this site I am telling the stories of my ancestors.

How it began:

It started with my grandfather and his 2nd cousin, Jack. My grandfather’s grandfather and Jack’s great grandfather, William Alford, one of the original white settlers of southwestern Michigan, had a past that was only partially known by the family, leading, as such situations sometimes do, to stories told to the children about their ancestors that were not always entirely true.

They said he was born in Massachusetts (not true), he was part Mohegan (not true), he fought in the War of 1812 (true), his father was a Revolutionary War soldier (true), who played a fife and was present at the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown (probably not true). They even got his date of birth wrong. Some 60 years after his demise at the age of about 56 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, they placed a tombstone over his grave declaring his date of birth to be 1799. Not true; he was actually born in Franklin County, Vermont, probably in or near the town of Georgia, about 1794.

At least, as we know now, that’s where his family was living then. In any case, when he was married on the 19th of January of 1830 he declared himself to be 29 years old. But it seems he may have exaggerated his youth, and that he was really more like 34 or 35. After all, his bride was only 13, so there was some cause for him to appear younger than in fact he was.

They were married in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, She was Martha Ann McCullough, the seventh child (there were 12 siblings) of the physician Patrick McCullough and Mary Hamilton, immigrants to Canada recently arrived (1828) from County Monaghan in Ireland. Great Great Grandma Martha was extraordinary in her own right, Married twice, she produced 16 children and outlived her husbands and most of her children. She died in 1909 at the age of 93. In photos of family reunions of the time she’s always in the center, surrounded by her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, clearly the beloved and honored matriarch.

It may have been Jack (John Keith Adams) who pulled my grandfather Irwin Simpson Gunn into an interest in the family’s history. Jack’s family name was Adams, but his grandfather was an Alford. That grandfather, George Wallace Alford, was orphaned when his father, George Washington Alford (the 2nd child of William and Martha), was killed in the Civil War and his mother and two siblings died of Cholera. He was adopted (not formally) by the Franklin Adams family.

It’s not surprising that Jack wanted to know about his grandfather and the Alford family. Whatever the motivating factors were, by the 1950s Jack Adams and Irwin Gunn were communicating with each other by mail and in occasional meetings regarding their common Alford family relationship, and especially about the curious mysteries surrounding William Alford. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the tools then to penetrate the enigma.

Neither did my aunt Viola, grandpa Gunn’s oldest child, who ended up with the correspondence between Jack and Irwin and apparently with a desire to positively identify an ancestor that would qualify her to become a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She launched a determined search of the Gunn and Alford family histories and even began to fill out an application to the DAR. But she was ultimately unsuccessful. William Alford was a dead end and she was unable to reveal the Gunn family line back more than two generations. Toward the end of her life she passed on all the information she had gathered to her favorite sibling, the baby of the family, my father. That’s how I ended up with it in the mid 1990s.

I had some advantages that my aunt and my grandfather did not have. I had a research degree, a PhD, and most important of all, I had the internet. Today, in the second decade of the 21st century, there is an enormous amount of genealogical information on the internet, information that is constantly growing, and that includes scans of original documents dating back hundreds of years. That has enabled me to accurately trace back the Alford and Gunn family lines to the earliest days of the European settlement of America.

THE ALFORDS

Jack, Irwin and Viola tried for several decades to discover the origins of William Alford. Very little was known for certain. And much of what they thought they knew has turned out to be untrue. If his wife (Martha McCullough) knew, she apparently wasn’t talking. Though William was a landowner in Canada, he was an American. The story was that he was in the War of 1812, in the Battle for Detroit, and was wounded and taken prisoner by the British. We can only speculate how and why he ended up purchasing, with cash, farmland in Ontario, and starting a family there..

Martha was not entirely silent on the subject of her first husband, however. In a deposition dated 13 July, 1853, Martha makes the following statements: "She was the widow of William Alford deceased who was a private in the Company Commanded by Captain Weber and subsequently by Lieutenant Bucklee in the (large blank space here) Regiment of New York Militia Commanded by Col Sherman B. Benedict of Ogdensburg, New York, in the war with Great Britain declared by the United States on the 10th day of June 1812. That her said husband served as a volunteer for the run of six months and that he entered at Frankfort, near Utica in the month of June 1812 and continued in actual service until discharged honorably at Ogdensburg on or about the 7th day of January 1813. And this deponent further says that her husband William Alford also served as a substitute as she has good reason to believe. As will appear by the Muster Roll of the said Company of New York Militia the Certificate of his discharge being lost. She further states that she was married to the said William Alford on the 19th day of January 1830 in the Township of Guelph in the County of Waterloo Upper Canada." [Note 1]

Note: Records from Record Group 93 M246 in the National Archives show a William Alford in the War of 1812, in the 46th Regiment (Coxe's) New York Militia. But there was indeed a Company commanded by Captain Jacob P. Weber (Roll Box 221, Roll-Exct 602) and a New York Infantry Regiment commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas B. Benedict. [Note 2]

From John "Jack" K. Adams (of Ypsilanti, Michigan) in a letter to Irwin Simpson Gunn dated November 1959: William first shows up "in Eramosa Township, Ontario (that's near Guelph) on June 30, 1827, at which time he purchased 100 acres of land [on lot 17, 2nd concession] from a Robert MacCormack for the sum of 38 pounds (English) and took possession shortly thereafter. On Jan. 19, 1830 he married Martha McCullough, daughter of Patrick and Mary (Hamilton) McCullough.” Martha was not quite 14 years old when they were married; William was about 22 years older!

Leona Hinds, who corresponded with Jack Adams in 1959/60, notes that William “paid McCormick the full price in cash and never at any time had a mortgage on his place [and that] implies that he came with considerable capital in his pocket and it is an established fact that about the only way he could get cash was to deal in improved lands.” We will probably never know quite what the circumstances were.

Note: Benedict Alford (who is probably William's father) and Benedict's half-brother Ashley were engaged in land speculation in Lower Canada (Ontario) in the 1790s. There is documentary evidence of this. In 1792 Benedict was the 11th of 40 petitioners for land in York, Lower Canada, Litchfield Township, "10 Miles square (1200 acres each) Bordered on the south by Grand River and on the north ....; on the West vacant Crown lands." [Note 3] Given this circumstance, the fact that William ended up owning and developing land in the same part of Canada 20 or 30 years later might not be so surprising.

William Alford’s participation in the War of 1812 is not in doubt, nor is his residence and purchase of land in Ontario. But what about his life before the War? Who were his parents?

In one of his letters Jack Adams wrote the following to my grandfather: “William Alford has always been an enigma to all that have tried to figure out who his parents were, or where he came from. My grandfather, in an insurance application stated that he, William, died in 1849 of pneumonia. It has been suggested that he was other than Caucasian, a great uncle of mine who I corresponded with many years ago said that William's mother was a Deborah Crouch and was half Mohegan, but Uncle Jim was totally illiterate and what info he gave me was from memory. His wife did all his writing for him. In any case we never found anything to substantiate this idea.”

In fact, Seth Alvord and Deborah Crouch of Colerain, Massachusetts, did have a son named William, who was born in 1795. So for a while it looked like the mystery had been solved. But not so. This William was a medical doctor who settled in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Our William did not have medical training and was a farmer in Michigan. There were other, similar, false leads.

It took me several years before I found the lead all of us had been hoping for. We knew from stories that have come down through the family that William’s father was a soldier in the Revolutionary War. And we knew that William himself was in the War of 1812 and that he enlisted in a New York infantry regiment. With that information I began looking for an Alford of the right age and geographic location that could be a reasonable candidate to be William’s father.

A likely one was Benedict Alford, who was born in 1757 in Windsor, Connecticut and died in Troy, Ohio in 1838. This Benedict lived for a time in Vermont, where he served as a private and later a sergeant in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont militia regiments during the Revolution. By the early 1800s the family had moved on to New York, first to Willsboro (just across Lake Champlain from Burlington, Vermont), and a few years later further west to Genesee. So the dates, locations and circumstances are right.

Benedict and his wife, Huldah, have several sons. Benedict and Ammi are well documented, but a third son is not specifically named. This mysterious third son and Ammi both lose touch with the rest of the family. Benedict and wife Huldah remain with the oldest son and they eventually move to Troy, Ohio. There Benedict applies for continuation of his veteran’s pension, and it’s in the records of those pension files that I found the key that Jack and I had been searching for.

From the Genealogical Abstracts of Revolutionary War Pension Files, Vol. I, A-E, as abstracted by Virgil D. White [Note 4] we find this: "Benedict [Alford], S8016, CT, MA and VT Lines, appli 22 Feb 1826 Orleans City NY aged 69, b 1757 Windsor CT, lived Williamstown MA until 1783 thence VT 2 yrs thence to Burlington VT 3 yrs thence Ferrisburg 7 yrs thence to Georgia VT 6 yrs thence to Willisborough NY [this must be Willsboro on the west bank of Lake Champlain] 14 yrs thence to Cayuga Cty NY 2 yrs & had lived in Orleans Cty NY 15 yrs [must be Orleans County where Ridgeway is located], son Benedict Alford, JR. stated sol d 1839 & wid d about 1yr later, son Benedict Alford, Jr. lived in Troy OH in 1859 aged 73 & he made reference to 2 brothers one in MO & the other in Lower Canada, in 1826 sol's wife was 69 & a daughter & her 2 fatherless children & a motherless grandchild were living with sol, sol's bro George Alford lived Monroe City, MI in 1826."

In fact the brother, Ammi, who Benedict Jr. thought had moved on to Missouri had instead returned to Vermont and raised a family there. It’s the brother that had gone on to Canada that is of interest here. At the end of the War of 1812, William, along with other Americans, settled in the northern portion of Ontario. Now all the pieces fall neatly into place. It’s circumstantial, so it’s not proven, but it’s believable and likely that William is the missing third son referred to by brother Benedict in the pension files.

But this is not the end of the story. There is another mystery.

William is listed in the Eramosa Township Census of 1828 (Reel M7746) as owning 22 acres of cultivated and 100 acres of uncultivated land. He is listed in the 1832 census as head of a household with 1 male over the age of 16, 1 male under 16, 1 female over 16 and another female under 16. He is listed in the 1833 census with 15 acres cultivated and 80 acres uncultivated, and as head of a household with 1 male over the age of 16, 2 males under 16, 1 female over 16 and another female under 16. He is listed in the 1837 census as head of a household with 1 male over the age of 16, 2 males under 16, 1 female over 16 and 3 females under 16. For 10 years William was an established landowner and family man in Ontario, Canada.

William Alford lived on, and improved, his farm until March 12, 1838, at which time he sold it for 125 pounds to his sister-in-law. This move seems unexpected and sudden. However, something significant was happening there in Ontario just at that time. In the year 1837 a man named William Lyon McKensie, an ancestor of Mackensie King, Prime Minister of Canada (1935-1948), instigated an armed rebellion against the Provincial Government of Canada, and the hot-bed of this affair was in Eramosa where William lived, and one of the leaders was a neighbor, a man named Benham. The Rebellion failed and many of the participants were caught. But the treason trials were not held until March of 1838. As it turned out nearly all of them got off with suspended sentences and the like [though two were hanged], and the reforms that McKensie was trying to get were eventually made a part of Canadian law, and McKensie is looked upon now as a hero.

Jack Adams: “William sold his farm to Martha's brother James's wife, Ann (Loghrin) McCullough, just four days after the trials were held, and what further makes us believe that he was forced to leave the country was the fact that there was no effort made to register the deed in Ann's name until 1853. We have tried, without success, to link William directly with the Rebellion, but apparently he wasn't a "wanted" man, but evidently felt the need to go elsewhere, else why would he leave a farm he had improved on for 11 years, not to mention that he sold it for less than the market price for the times. Also selling it within the family, and not making a record of the sale is indicative of some sort of shady deal. You said that they settled in Alamo, which they undoubtedly did, but there is no record of William owning any land in Kazoo [Kalamazoo] County between 1838 and 1849, at which time he died. [In fact, William and Martha purchased 80 acres in Section 14 of Kalamazoo County on 7 May, 1838. It was sold after William's death in 1849.]

William may have felt the need to leave Canada simply because public opinion had turned against the Reformers and also against many of the American settlers because the United States gave asylum to rebels who made their way to the border. [For more information just do an internet search for 'Rebellion of 1837' and you'll get several informative sites.]

Whatever the reason, the family story is that he put his wife and six children aboard a sleigh and headed for the Michigan border. He ended up in newly opened territory in Kalamazoo county, where he purchased land and where I would be born 104 years later.

Their 13th child, my great grandmother Helen Caroline Alford, was born in Alamo Township of Kalamazoo County in 1847. She first married John Slack and they had one child, Will. John Slack died in 1875 and a year and a half later Helen married my great grandfather, Christopher Conrad Gunn. Both husbands were veterans of the Civil War.

Great grandpa Gunn had two brothers in the War, Perry and Chauncy, but he was too young to get into it himself, at least not until January 1864 when he was only one month shy of being 16 years old. Apparently he lied about his age because he was successful in enlisting into Company E of the 6th Ohio Infantry. He was in the campaign of 1864 under General Sheridan, participated in the battle of the Wilderness and was on the Richmond raid, “fighting all the time”.

TODAY

I was born in 1942. That means I’m old, and that means I’ve seen and experienced “a lot of world”. What I didn’t expect to experience was being captivated by looking into the rear-view mirror. What I mean is that a curious thing has started happening in the last few years. When I look in the mirror I see my father. Sometimes I see my father’s father. It’s not just a physical resemblance between me and them, it’s things I say, a word or phrase, a gesture. It’s a bit disturbing to tell the truth. Makes me wonder how much of them I have in me. Makes me wonder how far back that goes. Is it possible that something of my 7th great grandfather still lives in me? Is that where my wanderlust comes from, the urge to travel, to move on to a new place?

NOTE:

1. Probate Papers of William Alford March 1854

2. Benedict's Regiment Roll Box 15 Roll-Exct 602

3. Sealed 1 Nov 1792, Alured Clark, Lt. Gov & Commander in Chief, Lower Canada.

4. The National Historical Publishing Company, Waynesboro, TN, 1990). Pages 30 and 31.