Morris Miners

Although married to Ellis Greenhalgh (Greenalch) by the time she immigrated, my 3x great-grandmother, Esther, was the first of our Morris line to come to the US.  Esther was born in 1828 in Burtonhead, Cheshire, England.  She and her family were in the US by the 1870 census and she was in Cameron County, PA, widowed and remarried by the 1880 census.  I haven’t been able to confirm the immigration date or port of entry, but family stories suggest it was in the mid-1860s.  Her brother, John, also immigrated to the US and lived in Cameron County by 1880 and had moved to a nearby county by the 1900 census.

I have little else to go on except that her parents were Welsh and that after her marriage, the family moved to Germany for a time, looking for work.  Her son, John, was known as “Dutch” because he was born, around 1860, in Germany, or rather Prussia as recorded in the 1861 English census.  However, by the time he was in the US, he reported his birthplace as England.  Looking at the 1861 census, because it records birthplace, it seems the family must have moved frequently, probably looking for work, because the children were all born in different locations.  They were miners, so that skill must have transferred easily within Great Britain, over to Germany, and finally, to the Pennsylvania mining areas. 

I’ll continue to look for material that will help me build a more complete story of Esther’s life in the US, but, really, the next big step will be trying to locate records in England and Wales.  I’m holding off on that for a bit.  I’ve got way too much in the US to work on right now.