We have a pretty good understanding of our Wright ancestors back through the Prince Edward Island generations, but we have not yet looked at the generations prior to the American Revolution. The Wrights’ immigration to Connecticut in the 1880s was the family’s second immigration to New England. What can we say about the first?
Family genealogist Doris Muncey Haslam surely tried to answer this question, but failed to come up with a definitive answer. Her summary of the life of fifth great grandfather William Wright takes us to the limit of what she was able to discover…
Sources agree that William was born around 1743, which is consistent with the timeline that he married and had son Nathaniel before the Revolution. Various versions of the Wright family tree available on Ancestry show that William is believed by many to have descended from the Wright dynasty in Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York just across the Long Island Sound from Westchester County (between New York City and the southwestern Connecticut border). However, these trees are suspiciously lacking in evidence, and this appears to be an instance of the common situation where many family genealogists copy each others’ family trees without adequate supporting evidence. If it was easy to link William Wright to the Wrights of Oyster Bay, Doris Haslam surely would have done it.
But with the hint of a possible link to Oyster Bay, we can turn to a 1923 genealogy, The Wright Family of Oysterbay Long Island, compiled by Howland Delano Perrine in 1923 for clues.
The details of the Perrine genealogy provide no direct link to our William Wright of Westchester (nor any pattern of consistency with the speculated relationships shown in most of the trees on Ancestry). But neither does the Perrine genealogy disprove the possibility of a link from Oyster Bay to Westchester, as it focuses on a specific group of Wrights in Oyster Bay, so is not comprehensive.
The introductory chapter of the Perrine genealogy does contain the following helpful observations…
…As my researches progressed the work became more and more difficult by reason of there being two families of the name “Wright” on Long Island at the same period, and settled but a short distance apart, viz. : the Wrights of Oyster Bay, and the family of Jonathan Wright of Flushing, separated by only eighteen miles. The public, church and other interesting records were full of items relating to both these families, and, to add to the difficulties and confusion of the work, intermarriages had occurred, and so, with the similarity of the name, making it very difficult, and in some instances almost impossible to properly sift and correctly distinguish the data. Neither of these Wright families were in any way related, the Oyster Bay family hailing from County of Norfolk, while the Flushing family hailed from County of Essex, in England.
This Jonathan Wright, of Flushing, was born in 1620, came to America on the ship “Safety,” and landed in Massachusetts Colony in 1635, first settling at Saugus, and subsequently making a final settlement, some time prior to 1664, at Flushing, becoming very prominent in the affairs of that community. Later a large number of that family crossed Long Island Sound, and settled at various localities in the present counties of Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess, as did, about the same time, some of the Oyster Bay family, and thus again we find the old records intermingling; intermarriages occurred, adding further to the difficulties of the searcher…
from The Wright Family of Oyster Bay, Long Island, compiled by Howland Delano Perrine, 1923
Whether Perrine was looking for our William Wright or some other Wright(s) from Westchester and/or the Hudson Valley, it is evident that he did as exhaustive a search of potential Wright roots in this area as anyone had done to that time, given how common the Wright name is, and given the complications of two separate Wright families having settled in there in the years prior to the Revolution. Perrine’s conclusions seem to justify a reasonable confidence that either the Oyster Bay Wrights (under patriarch Nicholas as identified later in Perrine’s book), or the Flushing Wrights (under patriarch Jonathan) were the the original ancestors of William in New England.
Both of these ancestral lines trace back to settlements in the area of Lynn Massachusetts around 1635. Nicholas Wright’s clan came to Lynn from Norfolk England, then migrated to Sandwich MA (on Cape Cod) before settling in Oyster Bay. Johnathan Wright’s clan came to Saugus MA (next to Lynn) from Essex England and later migrated to Flushing.
This is about as far as we can take it–we have two primary theories on the Wrights’ first immigration to New England, both in 1935. We do not have proof of any specific lineage to William Wright of Westchester and P.E.I., and we must leave open the possibility that neither theory is correct, so I will label these two theories as “strong candidates” and leave it at that.
The following is my best-estimate summary view of our Wright roots in New England.
Click here to see the ancestral migrations map updated with this information.
Bridging the Silences 