Nine crossings,
three centuries.

Annie E. Ware, 1885 to 4 October 1958, married Bert Sproul on 16 August 1905. Her parents were Charles Louis Ware Sr., born at Pittston in 1843, and Catherine H. Crowley. Ware itself is an English Yankee name with no anglicisation behind it. The Catholicism comes in through the Crowleys, of Ballyhooly in County Cork, who were in Bangor by about 1833, before the Famine.

So the Sprouls arrived in 1729 as Ulster Presbyterians, recruited specifically because they were Protestant, and 176 years later married into a Cork Catholic family. Every Sproul burial in Mount Pleasant Catholic Cemetery in Bangor follows from that one marriage. The earliest is 1939, and the Diocese of Portland's own cemetery database shows no historic Catholic Sproul presence in Maine at all.

Closed as a false lead: Arnold Ware Sproul, who died at Chelsea in 1998, carries his own maternal grandmother's maiden name and is unrelated.

Esther L. Tozier, 2 January 1922 to 10 May 1996, married Lionel Sproul. Her parents were Walter Chase Tozier, 1873 to 1934, and Edith Berl Pinkham, married 13 October 1900.

The Tozier line goes cold at Walter. The Pinkham half runs three further generations back to Samuel Pinkham, born at Boothbay in Lincoln County in 1799. Richard Tozier of Newichawannock appears in the literature as the standard New England Tozier progenitor but is not connected to this family on any evidence, and Stackpole does not carry that male line forward at all.

Estelle Melanson, called Stella, was born at Corberrie on 8 April 1888. She married George Blin at Weymouth in 1909 and moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, which is why she appears in the 1910 United States census. She naturalised on 15 January 1937 and was living in Bangor by the 1950 census. Her father was Raymond Melanson, about 1836 to 11 June 1914, a farmer at Corberrie, who married Marie LeBlanc of Church Point in 1867. Raymond's death record says he was born at Meteghan and his marriage record says Corberrie. Both are villages in Clare, and the conflict is not resolved.

Her brother, Dr. Amedee Raymond Melanson, born at Corberrie in 1882, sat in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly as the member for Yarmouth from 1920 to 1925.

George Blinn's father was John Blinn, 1850 to 29 June 1919, a Corberrie farmer, and his mother Matilda Gaudet, who died in 1890. Above them stand Alexandre Julien Blinn, 1821 to 1863, and Rosalie Belliveau; Etienne Blinn and Scholastique Boudreau; and Julien Blin, 1759 to 1843, a French navy master cooper who reached St. Mary's Bay in 1787 and married Francoise Thibodeau, who had been born in Boston during the Expulsion. A French male line marrying straight into Thibodeau, Boudreau, Belliveau and Gaudet.

Isaiah Wilson's 1900 history of Digby County, written while Raymond was still farming at Corberrie, traces the Corberrie Melansons to Amand Melanson, who married Anne Boudreau at Windsor on 9 August 1768, during the return march. Amand Melancon is a grantee in the Basterache Concession of 18 May 1775, the founding land grant of Clare. Corberrie itself was founded in the spring of 1829, and Clement Melancon arrived about 1830 with his brothers Pierre and Cyriacque.

One detail worth keeping: Wilson records that in 1885 Raymond Melancon and John Blinn built a sawmill company together on Lake Wentworth. Stella's father and her future father-in-law were business partners twenty-four years before their children married.

The line runs back through the Obey family of Penobscot County to Thomas Aubut and Obeline Dube, married on 29 February 1848 at Saint-Jean-Baptiste parish, L'Isle-Verte, in Quebec. Their son is recorded both as John William Obey and as William Aubut, 1859 to 1923, born at Holden, Maine, and his son was John Joseph Obey, born at Bradley, Maine on 28 September 1887 and died at Bangor on 22 December 1983. John Joseph married Mary Elizabeth Call at Bangor on 29 June 1910. One further generation stands between them and the twentieth-century marriage that carried this line into the Sproul family, and she is left out of this public record because no death record has been found for her.

PRDH indexes every Catholic act in Quebec from 1621. A search by parental role pulled the four parents out of the 1848 act and confirmed them across three databases: the groom's parents were Pierre Frederic Aubut, 1783 to 1849, who died at L'Isle-Verte a year after the wedding, and Marie Felicite Morais or Morin, born 1785; the bride's parents were Magloire Dube, baptised 1796, and Esther Labourliere dite Laplante, 1805 to 1886. The act records Thomas 27 ans et Hombeline 20 ans, which fixes Obeline's birth at 10 March 1827. It was a double wedding: Thomas's sister Sara married Narcisse Delisle the same day, which is why Frederic appears twice in the record as father.

Francois Aubut was baptised on 27 May 1731 at Saint-Martin church in Les Biards, diocese of Avranches, Normandy, now part of Isigny-le-Buat in the Manche. He was a cod fisherman. He first crossed the Atlantic at sixteen with an uncle also named Francois to fish the Gulf of St. Lawrence, went home, crossed several more times, and then in 1755 sailed from Granville aboard le Prudent and landed at Gaspe, this time to stay. He married Marie-Louise Elisabeth Dupuis at Notre-Dame de Quebec cathedral on 18 July 1757 and died at Riviere-Ouelle on 9 November 1815. His family is documented in that one Normandy village back to 1598, and only three generations separate him from the Thomas who married in 1848.

Mathurin Dube was born about 1631 at La Chapelle-Themer, diocese of Lucon, in Bas-Poitou, today the Vendee. Seven unbroken generations run down from him to Obeline. His 1670 marriage contract survives, drawn by the notary Romain Becquet, and names his parents Jean, or Yvon, Dube and Renee Suzanne. That is a primary document, not a compilation.

Two of the roughly 770 Filles du Roi, the women the French crown sent to New France between 1663 and 1673, are ancestors. Marie Campion married Mathurin Dube in 1670, and Anne Gasnier, the woman who personally placed the Filles du Roi, was present at the signing of the contract. Jeanne Savonnet, on the Aubut maternal side, arrived at Quebec on 31 July 1670 aboard La Nouvelle-France, married Jean Soucy dit Lavigne of the Carignan-Salieres regiment, and outlived three husbands.

How they reached Maine: L'Isle-Verte, then Saint-Basile in Madawaska, New Brunswick, where a son was born in 1853, then Holden, Maine by 1859. That is the Temiscouata portage route, and the Madawaska stop is documented. The lumber motive is an inference, since no occupation record turned up, though Holden and Bradley are Penobscot lumber towns. The surname anglicised from Aubut to Obey along the way.

Sarah Plummer, 1761 to 1816, married Captain William Sproul in 1782. Plummer is a Great Migration surname and the family reached Newbury, Massachusetts in the 1630s, but the line does not reach an English parish, and that is the standard authority's own admission rather than a research failure. Sidney Perley opens The Plumer Genealogy of 1917 by saying that wherever Francis Plumer's abode or whatever his nationality, records have not removed the doubts that tradition has originated. Any online tree giving Francis Plumer a Woolwich baptism is repeating a story. What is documented is the American end only: freeman at Ipswich on 14 May 1634, founder at Newbury, died 1673.

Sarah's own parents were never proved, but there is one Plummer household in Bristol headed by a man with a very strange first name: Bedfield. He signs the 1768 Bristol town protest four places from three Sprouls, he appears in the 1790 census two households after Robert Sproul, and his stone reads Mr. BIDFIELD PLUMMER, Oct.r 3d. 1818, Aged 52. Bedfield is a Plumer-of-Newbury family name. Samuel Plumer married Mary, daughter of Samuel and Elizabeth Bitfield, about 1646, and old Bitfield's will entailed his Boston house on his grandson, after which the surname descends as a given name: Bitfield Plumer born 1697, 1726 and 1742. Outside this one family it is not a personal name at all. Perley also records a Rowley Plumer settling at Walpole in 1758, and Walpole is a parish of Bristol, ten years before Bedfield appears there.

Mary Elizabeth Call, born at Bradley on 28 August 1889 and died at Orland on 22 January 1974, married John Joseph Obey at Bangor on 29 June 1910. Her parents were John F. Call, died 1912, and Sarah E. Call, died 1944, proved through the Diocese of Portland's cemetery register, which places both Calls and the Obeys in Mount Pleasant Lot 131.

Correcting a natural assumption first: the Terrys are not a Long Island or New York City family. The line reaches Reuben Terry, born 30 June 1756, said by family tradition to have been born at Enfield in Connecticut, and who died at Pittsfield, Massachusetts about 1850. The source is Stephen Terry's Notes of Terry Families in the United States of America, Hartford 1887, compiled from living family members. That tradition took a hit: Enfield's birth register is demonstrably active in 1756, it records two other Terry births that year, and it contains no Reuben Terry.

Through Reuben's daughter-in-law's Crandall line, a 1949 printed genealogy carries the descent to Elder John Crandall, a documented founder of Rhode Island, baptised 15 February 1617 or 1618 at Westerleigh in Gloucestershire, son of James Crandall, a yeoman of Kendleshire. He was a Baptist and later a Seventh Day Baptist, was jailed in 1651, and died at Newport and Westerly in 1676. Through his son's wife Elizabeth Gorton the line reaches Samuel Gorton, founder of Warwick, who died in 1677.

Also in this branch: Adam Biggart, an Ulster immigrant spliced in at Hoosick Falls in the nineteenth century, and five brothers of one Berkshire stone-mason's family who served in the Union army.

Anthony J. DeCosta, born 1903 in Bermuda and died in 1967, was a box maker in a factory at New London, Connecticut. He was in Connecticut by April 1922, aged about nineteen, and he is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania. His race is recorded as W in the 1940 census, and that is not a default: the same enumeration districts contain households marked Neg and C. His parents are unknown. He married Elizabeth May Terry, born 1902 in New York, at New London on 7 April 1922, and she brings in the Terry and Crandall lines above.

The 1940 census sheet for New London Ward 3 was located by pulling every enumeration district in the ward, downloading all 94 sheets, cropping the name column and reading them by eye, because no free 1940 name index survives. It lists five children, four of whom were unknown to the family until that sheet was found: Lois May, 14 August 1925 to 30 June 2016, who married Little and then Zook and was invisible for years because Find A Grave's surname search matches only a final surname; Esther F., 25 January 1928 to 23 April 2013, who married Vital; Paul Anthony, 21 February 1929 to 21 March 2011, who served in the United States Navy aboard the USS Little Rock at the end of the Second World War, played the bugle calls, and was later a bricklayer and a crane operator for the Reading Railroad; and Ruth Helen, 15 December 1935 to 21 June 2011. A fifth sibling, born about 1932, is not named on this page because no death record has been found for her. Paul's obituary is what identified the whole sibling set.

A page by page sweep of every Royal Gazette issue mentioning Costa from 1895 to 1932 found a St. George's family written as plain Costa rather than DeCosta, which is why earlier searches missed them. Antonio de Costa, called Tony, farmed at Echo Heights and then at Longbird Island farm in St. George's Parish, and the paper says he went out of the farming business in order to take his family to the United States, especially to have his children educated. He returned from New York on 10 April 1922, three days after Anthony married in New London. His son James was living in America that year, and a James DeCosta married at New London in June 1923. His named children were James, Sophia, Emily and Joseph.

On the Portuguese question, still unproven. Most Bermudian DeCosta families are Portuguese, from Madeira or the Azores, recruited as agricultural labour from 1849. But this family was Anglican, not Catholic: Sophia married at St. Peter's in St. George's and James was a Salvation Army bandmaster. So the register to seek is St. Peter's, not the Catholic church at Hamilton.

Carl Wilhelm Stecher Jr., 22 July 1935 at Alloway in Salem County, New Jersey to 22 October 2025 at Bangor, married Ruth Helen DeCosta. His parents were Carl W. Stecher Sr., born 1911 at Mullica Hill, New Jersey, and Ida M. Swanson, born 1916 in Pennsylvania.

Above them stands Robert W. Stecher, born 11 April 1877 at Neustadt in the Oberamt Waiblingen, Wuerttemberg, and died in January 1955 in Gloucester County. Robert was the immigrant, not a New Jersey-born second generation as this research assumed for a year. He was the son of Jakob Wilhelm Stecher, born 1848, married at Heutensbach in 1875, died 1921 at Neustadt, and Karoline Friz, born 1853 at Heutensbach, and the grandson of Johann Jakob Stecher of Rietenau. He married in Germany in 1901, their eldest daughter Louise Emily was born at Neustadt on 2 August 1905, they came in through Ellis Island soon after, and Robert naturalised in Gloucester County in 1913.

Louise came from the same village. Louise E. Unger was born at Neustadt on 28 November 1880 to Christian Heinrich Unger and Christiana Margarita Haeussermaenn, who never emigrated and died at Neustadt in 1926 and 1918. That is the answer to an old puzzle: the New Jersey records contained no trace of her family because her family was never in New Jersey. The proven negative was the clue, not the dead end. Every place in this branch sits inside a twenty kilometre circle in southwest Germany, at Neustadt, Waiblingen, Backnang, Heutensbach, Rietenau and Allmersbach, and all of it is in Lutheran church books.

Two earlier theories are now dead and should be recorded as dead: the Rudolph Stecher family of Riverside had nothing to do with this line, and the marriage was never in Philadelphia.

Oscar Swanson, born 20 June 1883, reportedly at Visby on Gotland, died at Philadelphia on 25 November 1936. He married Anna Senski in 1914. Their five children were Rose, Ida Marie, Alfred, Anna Marie and Theresa Josephine, which finally explains the family arrangement in which three Swanson sisters married three Stecher brothers. The honest caveat is that Oscar is absent from the Swedish census index even though 402 people born at Visby in 1883 are indexed there. Either the family left before 1890, or Visby is wrong.

Anna Senski was born at Philadelphia on 3 January 1889. Her line runs back to Michael Senski Sr., born 15 August 1868 at Resmin, also written Radzim, in Kreis Tuchel, West Prussia; to Johannes Jacob Senski, baptised 1814 at Kamin; and to Andreas Senski and Catharine Gurke of Wordel. Two of Johann Jacob's marriages are proven outright from Pomeranian parish indexes.

Those villages are in Poland today, in the Kujawsko-Pomorskie voivodeship. Whether the family were Poles under Prussian rule or German settlers was open for a long time, and the answer came from reading two sets of records directly. On the American side, the mother tongue columns of the 1910 and 1920 United States censuses, checked against neighbouring households on the same sheets so that a blank column could not be mistaken for an answer. On the Prussian side, the Gemeindelexikon fuer Westpreussen, the published returns of the census of 1 December 1905, downloaded from the Kujawsko-Pomorska Biblioteka Cyfrowa and read page by page by eye rather than by machine.

Resmin, Michael Senski's birth village, was recorded with 78 Catholics, 78 of them German-speaking and none Polish-speaking. Not a majority, the whole village. That is the signature of the Kosznajderia, a German Catholic island inside a district that was 65.5 percent Polish-speaking overall in 1910. Wordel, the wider Senski and Gurke home village, is the honest complication and is not being hidden: it was 655 Catholics, 195 German-speaking and 459 Polish-speaking, about 70 percent Polish. The family sat on a language boundary, and the German group in Wordel is the group they belonged to, but the boundary is real and any Wordel marriage could have crossed it.

The verdict, on four independent lines of evidence: German-speaking Roman Catholics of the Kosznajderia, living on what is now Polish soil. The Koschneider surname list, the German national parish and German Catholic cemetery in Port Richmond, the American mother tongue columns and the 1905 Prussian village census all agree.