Having previously traced the ancestry of great grandfather Henry Edson Swan back to Silas Swan and Silas Kenworthy (Vermont, Ohio, Minnesota and California), we now move back to earlier generations. Our Swan ancestry goes back to colonial Massachusetts and Yorkshire England as shown below.
(Another link we have to Yorkshire, England is in the ancestry of great grandmother Laura Wright. Her grandparents William Marshall and Mary Gummersall were both from Yorkshire.)
Richard and Robert Swan can be found in Ancestors of Alden Smith Swan… by Josephine Frost, published in 1923. They are noted for their roles in King Philip’s War (1675-1676), one of the final attempts of the Indians of southern New England to drive out the English settlers.
The Swan ancestry diagram also provides hints to another interesting branch of the Swan family. The name Ingalls appears twice–Sarah Ingalls was the wife of the first (Captain) Joshua Swan, and Mary Ingalls was the wife of the second Joshua. (This is not uncommon–there were not very many people in these early colonial settlements and there were often parallel families linked by multiple marriages since there weren’t very many choices of eligible partners. Other examples in our family history include recurring links between the Sandford, Howell, and Topping families in 17th and 18th century Long Island. This can, but does not necessarily, imply marriages between remote cousins.)
In addition to its repetition in the Swan ancestry, the Ingalls name is very familiar. This feeling of familiarity is reinforced by the fact that when the Swan family tree gets close to the Ingalls family the amount of information available in Ancestry goes up by a factor of ten, something that happens when there is a famous family that has been heavily researched. Could we be related to Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of Little House on the Prairie?
The following diagram provides the answers.
The diagram shows that, yes, our grandmother Margaret Swan was a seventh cousin of Laura Ingalls Wilder (thus we are seventh cousins twice removed).
The diagram also confirms that there were two connections between the Swan and Ingalls families. Two of the children of Henry Ingalls and Mary Osgood both started lines that linked with Swans (the two Joshua Swans noted above). This means that Sarah Ingalls married Joshua Swan (1644-1757) and, later, Joshua Swan (1745-1845) married his second cousin (once removed) Mary Ingalls.
Finally, the diagram shows that the two paths between the split and reunification of the Swan and Ingalls lines were not of the same length. The leftmost path in the diagram has an extra generation from the center path. This results in a bit of confusion:
- Henry Ingalls and Mary Osgood, our eighth great grandparents, are also our ninth great grandparents.
- Laura Ingalls Wilder is the seventh cousin of both our grandmother Margaret Swan and our great grandfather Henry Edson Swan, and we are either 7th cousins 2x or 3x removed, respectively.
For simplicity, from here forward, we use the most direct path (the center path) to identify our remote ancestors. So Henry is considered to be our eighth great grandfather and we are Laura’s seventh cousin 2X removed.
Knowing the connection(s) from the Swan to the Ingalls family opens up new world of distant ancestors to investigate. Ninth great grandfather Edmund Ingalls was a significant ancestor as shown below.
Edmund Ingalls and his wife Mary Osgood were from Lincolnshire in central England on the North Sea (eastern) side. 1628 was quite early in the timeline of English settlers in the new world. The Mayflower was only 8 years earlier, and most of the our other ancestors who go back to the original American colonization era made the journey at least a decade later in the late 1630s or early 1640s. We can also see that Edmund was one of the original founders of Lynn Massachusetts.
Armed with this new information, we can now watch reruns of Little House on the Prairie with a new perspective.
Bridging the Silences 