Settling, Part II

How did they get employed, find a home, etc?

This next part will take a little explaining...

Lots of people were moving out of the cities to the wilderness in the west where they could get free or cheap land and get away from all the rules and laws, people and crime and where they could grow and trap their own food, and where they could raise their kids in a more wholesome environment.  In a lot of ways, their motivations were probably the same motivations that parents have today.  When enough people moved to an area, they would need to get more organized about getting rid of garbage and protecting people from criminals and building schools and roads, and would form new states.  Wisconsin became a state in 1848.  So there was a lot of new construction going on and a lot of cheap land to encourage people to come out to the state.  In one part of the state two rivers, the Fox and the Wisconsin, almost meet.  I think they are about one mile apart.  The Fox River goes to Lake Michigan.  The Wisconsin River goes to the Mississippi River.  Back then, rivers were like our Interstate Highways today.  They were very important for selling and shipping goods into the interior of the country.  So factories or importers would ship things (books, clothing, rifles, axes, whale oil (?), etc.) to customers in the West (like Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, etc.) by putting them on a ship up rivers and down rivers and across Lake Michigan and up the Fox River in Wisconsin.  Then everything would have to be unloaded and carried a mile to the Wisconsin River (carrying things across land is called "portage"), where it would all be loaded on to a new ship that could take the goods to the Mississippi and to all the states through which that river flows.  And even though that was alot of work and took alot of time, it was the best and cheapest way to get things from the East to the "West" (at least as far as the Mississippi) and was extremely important for people that lived out there.  By the way, the traffic went both ways.  Lots of animal furs were sent from the wild frontier back East along this same route.  Wouldn't it be great if the two rivers were connected so one ship could make the entire trip?

Eventually, a canal was built to connect the two rivers.  Lots of workers were needed to work on the canal, and homes and farms and towns were needed for the workers and their families to live there for a long time.  So cheap land was offered to attract lots of people to this area.  The Cushings must have decided that this would be a much better place to live and raise a family than the town where they lived.  Also, I think that some of Catherine's family, the Caseys, were coming over from Ireland, and in Wisconsin they could all live near each other.  (I'm guessing this because there were two Casey brothers who came to Wisconsin with their families at about the same time as the Cushings and lived very near them.)   I think that that is why the Cushings moved to Wisconsin.  The town that was built near the canal was called Portage.  The Cushings and Caseys lived a few miles north in an area known as Fort Winnebago.  You can read about most of this on my website, too.

Settling, Part I

How did they survive when they arrived?

How did they get employed, find a home, etc?

 
I don't know what they did when they first arrived.  It could be that there was family in the area.  We think they came to Canada in about 1841 and Dennis (a son) was born in Massachussetts in 1845.  I really know nothing about where they were or what they did between those times.  When Dennis was born in Stoughton (about 12 miles southwest of Boston), his father, Dennis Cussen from Ireland, was working as a cooper for a whale oil producer.  So next time you hear about the whaling ships and burning whale oil in lamps, remember that your family used to work in this industry.  Apparently he built barrels to hold the whale oil so it could be stored and shipped.  I know that lots of people in Stoughton were employed at the boot factory, including some of the older Cussen boys.  So my guess is that the family headed overland from Canada to Boston, where lots of Irish lived, heard about jobs that were available in nearby Stoughton, and found a place to live there.  Mary was born there in 1847, so we know they lived in or near Stoughton for at least a couple of years.  Being new to the area and having come from overseas, and being Irish, they probably did not have much money, so Dennis and Catherine and their ten children probably lived in an apartment, or a small house, or maybe the older kids lived in other houses.  They were from the Irish countryside, so I imagine they worried constantly about whether it was safe for their younger kids to play outside, or whether their older kids would get involved in crime or gangs, or whether they'd get beat up because they were Irish.  And I think that other family members from Ireland wanted to come to America, but it was too expensive near Boston.

Why and How Did They Travel to America?

Why did they immigrate to America?

Let's see if I can give you some quick answers.  I wish I knew more about the family that came to America.  It might seem to you that I know alot, but for every question I can answer there are ten that I can't.  One of the fun things about genealogy is that you gather as much factual information as you can, but then have to imagine the rest because there are many things we just won't ever know.

Why did they immigrate?  One reason was probably the way they were treated in their own country.  They could not own land and had to pay an Englishman rent for the land they lived on.  They probably had to pay a tithe to support the Church of Ireland, which was not their church.  Although the great potato famine was still two or three years away, there were probably plenty of crop failures and destitute Irish in pockets around the country, so they knew that more and more Irish were having a hard time.  Mostly, they probably thought that they had a little money and an unknown opportunity across the sea and they saw a very dismal future for their children in Ireland.  So they decided to put themselves in God's hands and leave behind everything they knew (the Cushings had been in that area of Ireland for at least a couple hundred years) and try to make a new life for themselves (and mostly for their kids) in a wilderness across the ocean.

How did they travel to America?(boat, etc.)
What was their port of entry?

 
I'm attaching that Cushing history document that I mentioned in my last message.  It's more than you want to know right now, but it says a little about their ocean voyage and where they went.  The last page I'm sure was added many years later by Paul, but I'm just keeping it as I received it.

Family Stories: RJ and Uncle Leon

Any interesting family stories? 

Interesting family stories ...   Hmmm.  I suppose the most interesting story is probably how your great great grandfather John worked his way up from a poor kid from a broken family to become a very successful businessman and has a building named after him at Notre Dame.  I'm sure your mom knows that story.  My mom points out that John's father, Francis, must have put a very high value on their Catholic faith and on the importance of education, since he struggled so hard to send his son to Notre Dame, that Catholic school so far away.  Look around at your cousins and aunts and uncles and you can see that these are values that have been passed down to us from them.  The whole family is like a story, too.  Learning about your family is like taking a personal walk through history, which makes history a lot more interesting for me.  I think the story of Francis and his trouble with the law is interesting.  You can see that on my web site.  There are some small interesting stories.  Your aunts would probably have some good stories.  Some of my more interesting tidbits are about your great great grandaunts (great great grandfather John's two sisters, Kate and Mary).  Actually, about their husbands ...

Kate married Leon Jenkins, a Portland police officer who later became the Police Chief and then the Commissioner of the Portland Police department.  I recently found out that Uncle Leon was a very innovative  Police Chief who was responsible for modernizing the Portland Police.  He was the first to use a new technology called radio for police communications back in the 1920s.  Later he tried organizing Police Chiefs around the country to agree on how to write police reports so they could understand crimes in other cities and this work later led to the founding of Interpol, a famous international police department.  But Uncle Vin remembers taking the train from Chicago to Portland to visit, and Uncle Leon would meet them at the station with a paddy wagon (a big police truck where they can lock up lots of trouble makers and take them to the police station) and the kids would get locked in the back while Uncle Leon would turn on the siren and the flashing lights and take them on a ride through town.  I'll bet they were the only ones that enjoyed being locked in a paddy wagon!

Mary married Roderick MacKenzie, oldest son of the so-called King of the Canadian Railway, Sir William MacKenzie.  Sir William (with a partner) was responsible for building the transcontinental railroad across Canada.  Roderick managed some of the railroad construction, but it sounds like he was kind of a wealthy investor who lived much of the time in the United States.  The family story is that Mary (Mary Elizabeth, aka "Lizzie") used to sell flowers at a stand in front of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, where Roderick used to stay, and they met there.  Roderick (or RJ) loved horse racing and used to travel around the country racing his horses.  After the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, he bought lots of property and in 1908 he bought the Pleasanton Racetrack and renovated it into one of the most famous race courses in the world.  He led the effort to make the racetrack the centerpiece of a new Alameda County Fairgrounds.  (I think it's still there.)  After a few years, he sold the racetrack.

Well, that's probably much more than you wanted to read.  I hope there's something in all those words that you can use for your report.  I assume you know that my family history web site is at http://www.cushings.com/roots/ .

BTW, your great great grandmother Harriet Webber Cushing was a Webber.  The Webbers are one of the oldest American families, here since at least 1650, more than 100 years before the United States!  You can read about them on my web site, too.

I'm sending you a genealogy of the Cushings from Ireland down to you.  I've included your closest Cushing cousins to make it more interesting to you.  Genealogy charts and reports are pretty easy to make, so maybe you and/or your mom can tell me if you want something different.  You might also need to tell me if I made a mistake somewhere.

Good luck with your report.

Family Artifacts?

Any family artifact or heirloom?

Artifacts or heirlooms?  Hmmm.  The closest we have would be some old photographs, but there aren't many of those.  Does your mom have a copy of the slide show that was shown at the Cushing reunion in 2006?  I could probably post those on line for you to look at.  I might be able to put them on a CD for you, but I'm very busy getting ready for a trip, so I can't promise that very soon.  Maybe one of your cousins or aunts.  I had hoped to find other Cushing families with heirlooms when I created a Cushing web site about 10 years ago.  Although I did meet many Cushings that we are related to, it turns out that our branch of the family is the only one that knew about the whole family and how they came from Galbally.

Getting From There to Here

Do you have any documents showing our  immigration from Ireland?

I have not found any official documents showing immigration from Ireland.  We're not quite sure of where they immigrated to.  It turns out that while England was trying to eradicate the Irish in Ireland, they also had a huge, mostly unoccupied territory called Canada.  To fill it up with British citizens they would offer really cheap boat passage to Canada and cheap land, so lots of Irish people took boats to Canada, then continued on to the United States.  Some simply crossed the border, while others took boats.  Since our Cushings lived in the Boston area in the late 1840s, which is not that far from Canada, I think they probably came by land to the United States.  (From Canada.  Of course, they traveled by ship across the ocean to Canada.)  Travel across the border was not very well controlled.  There may be a ship register somewhere that shows them on their way to Canada.  There's probably no record of their entry into the United States.  There's probably a court record of Dennis' citizenship.  But I haven't found any of these documents, yet.  (Maybe someday you'll find them!)  If you like, I can send you our oldest family document, titled "Family History (exclusive of Darwin's age of monkey!)".  My dad thinks it was written either by your great grandfather, Paul, or his brother, Jerry, in about 1929.  We're guessing that he must have sat down with his father, John, and written down everything John knew about his family history.  It's about 20 pages long, but if you don't have a copy I can scan it and send it to you.

The Cushing Name

How did the name get changed from Cussen to Cushing?

Dear my favorite name-withheld-to-protect-our-privacy young person,

I can only guess at why the name was changed.  Try to imagine yourself as an immigration clerk or as a census taker in the middle 1800's.  You were probably hired for your job because you could write, because you'd had a few years of school, probably no more than a fifth grader today.  So you walk a half mile from farm to farm and ask all these questions about names and birth dates and when they came to America, and whatnot.  They're farmers, so maybe the smells of animals, dirt, and hard working men & women is offensive to your city bred nose.  And you must certainly think that these people are far less educated than you, so you wouldn't need to ask them to spell anything for you.  If they can spell.  So you go to this farm house and ask your questions, and someone with a very thick Irish brogue says "Cussen".  You can't quite make out all the letters from sound, but you've never seen the name Cussen and you've heard of Cushings, since at least one Cushing family from England had been in the US since 1638.  (As you know, they weren't even states yet, just colonies.)  So you write Cushing.  The Cussens, meanwhile, wanting to be Americans, might just adopt that name to be "more American".  Lots of names were changed this way.

Another factor was probably that the "Cussens" were Irish.  For many years the English tried to take control of Ireland.  (I don't know the exact dates for these actions.)  The Irish (in Ireland) were forbidden to attend school.  The Irish language was banned.  They were forbidden to own property.  Their land was given to Englishmen and Scots (northern Ireland), to encourage these others to populate the island of Ireland.  Their religion was banned, and replaced by the official Church of Ireland.  All of this was an attempt to exterminate the Irish people and their culture.  So in this environment, you can see that it was difficult for Irish to get an education.  (I hear they had secret schools to educate their children, anyway.)  Most Irish in the early 1800s probably could not spell their names, so there are many different spellings, even in Ireland.  Cussen and Cushen were common, and I've seen Cushing in some records.  It just depended on who wrote it down.  When Dennis Cussen, your great great great great grandfather (sometimes we say 4th great grandfather), married Catherine Casey in Galbally, Ireland, the priest spelled his name Quishian, so I suspect this was close to the way it was actually pronounced.  If someone with a heavy Irish accent told an American clerk with a fifth grade education (by today's standards) that his name was "Quishian", it's easy to see how the clerk might not know quite how to spell that and might write down Cushing.  I believe that the most common spelling in Ireland today is Cussen.

That was a long answer to a short question.  Since we can only guess at the real reason, you get to choose what you think is the best explanation!

The Cushings Come to America

A few months ago, one of my younger cousins, give or take a few "removed" 's, wrote to me asking for information on the Cushing family history for a Heritage Report she was doing at school.  She had some great, very practical questions, and it made me think about the information we have and speculate on what we don't have.  Since I rarely take the time to write narratives about our ancestors, I'll share here what I wrote, in the next couple of posts.  These answers were intended for a ten year old audience, but the story is suitable for any age ...