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.

With the recent reopening of the Library of Congress comes the opportunity to catch up on my backlogged list of genealogical and historical texts that are out of print but have not been digitized. One such book is the two volume The Wrights of Bedeque, Prince Edward Island, a Loyalist Family is the definitive source on our Wright ancestry back to our 5th great grandfather William Wright.

We have previously cited the work of Doris Muncey Haslam, a distant cousin also descended from William Wright. William’s full story, provided below, does not contain any new revelations. In particular, Haslam did not determine the origins of the Wright family in America prior to being expelled to Prince Edward Island at the end of the Revolution. (There are other sources which may shed light on this, which we will describe in future posts.)

Haslam’s description of 4th great grandfather Nathaniel Wright also does not significantly differ from previously discovered writings.

3rd great grandfather Lewis Wright is the first of our ancestors to be born on the island. We now have a picture of him (and his second wife, who was not our ancestor), as well as a reference to the shipwreck of our 3rd great grandmother, Nancy Sloane, en route to North America (another in the long list of incidents that nearly precluded our future existence).

The description of 2nd great grandparents John Nelson and Eliza Marshall Wright provides new information on the family’s decision to return to the United States in the 1880s, although the family’s residence in Groton, Connecticut prior to coming to Brooklyn is not mentioned.

The genealogy continues with descriptions of our great grandmother, Laura Wright, her sister Winifred, and our grandmother Ruth.

Haslam’s book was published relatively recently, in 1978. As such, it is the first of the many genealogies I have reviewed that continues all the way down to our generation.

The preface to Haslam’s book includes a description of the process she used to compile the information. Typical of the processes used for these books, she had inherited and accumulated information on the family roots, refining it over many years. She then distributed questionnaires to widely-scattered descendants, asking them to fill out the branches of the family tree. It surely was our grandfather and/or grandmother who provided information for us–our grandfather, being the genealogy enthusiast, probably did much of the work. (Further evidence of their involvement comes from the description of their visit to Yorkshire, given in the section of Eliza Wright, shown above.) Mom does not remember any references to this being done during the 1970s.

Completing the cycle are the descriptions of our uncles and cousins. (Details on our distant cousins in the Norfolk region are also published, at a similar level of detail.)

We’ve discussed the paths taken by our fifth and fourth great grandparents William and Nathaniel Wright, both born in Westchester County, New York and exiled to Nova Scotia and later Prince Edward Island during the Revolution.

The details of the Wrights’ ordeal before getting back on their feet in PEI are harrowing. The following biographical summary appears in a publication of the United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada (sort of a historical organization with an attitude–perhaps analogous to the DAR).

An Island Refuge is a reference to a book by Doris Muncey Haslam, a Prince Edward Island historian and genealogist (and distant cousin of ours) who has written extensively on the Wright family. We will discuss more about her in future posts.

As a side note, the following is from the United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada web page. Apparently we would easily qualify for membership, and we have the option of using the UE designation after our names.