In our recent examination of the extended ancestry of great grandfather George Sechler we skipped over a small but interesting detail. Six generations above George, in his mother’s mother’s quadrant of his family tree is his fourth great grandmother Hannah Wright (1692-1768) and her father Jonathan Wright (1635-1689), from Flushing, Queens, New York. This gets our attention because George married Laura Wright, from Prince Edward Island, whose family came through Oyster Bay and Queens before being exiled after the Revolutionary War. Could this be another branch of the same Wright family?
Wright is a common name that comes up in several places in our family tree. Janelle has her own branch of Wright ancestors who, fortunately, are not linked to ours (but are linked to the family of Orville and Wilbur Wright with common ancestry in England in the early 1500s).
The process of determining whether people with the same last name are distant cousins is relatively simple–as long as you can keep finding successive fathers on both sides you will either eventually find a common ancestor or the trail of fathers will run out on one or both sides. There is no need to look at mothers because it is the last name, unchanged from father to son, which suggests the possible link. For people of english colonial background the trail typically runs out in the 18th or 17th century. (Famous families like that of the Wright brothers often go back further because so many people have researched them.)
A few months ago I came across an article from the Historical Society of Newburgh, New York. I subscribe to this site because of our Hynes ancestry from Newburgh, just to see if anything interesting might come up. This particular article was about an engineer and entrepreneur from Newburgh, William Wright (1818-1903).
William Wright is responsible for a long list of public works projects of the 19th century. It was William Wright and his company The Wright Engine Works of Newburgh that built the large engines that pulled rail passengers across the Brooklyn Bridge when it opened in 1883.
When I saw this article, I wondered if William Wright could be connected either to our (Laura Wright’s) line or Janelle’s. It took an hour or so to determine enough basic information about William Wright (such as his parents) to begin tracing him back. His ancestry did not match either Wright branch.
A few weeks later when I found Hannah Wright and her father Jonathan in the Sechler family tree, I retrieved my my trace of William Wright’s ancestry and tried again. This time I quickly found a link to the Sechler family, shown below.
So we have two unrelated Wright branches in our ancestry (three counting Janelle’s). Unrelated to Laura Wright’s ancestors from Prince Edward Island, but via George Sechler’s ancestors, we are fifth cousins with William Wright, who built the engines that pulled the trains across the Brooklyn Bridge. Our common ancestor is our eighth great grandfather Jonathan Wright. William Wright was the same generation as George Sechler’s father, Aaron Sechler. Although William Wright lived in Newburgh, this has nothing to do with our Hynes and Gordon ancestors from Newburgh.
Bridging the Silences 