Excerpt

FROM THE FOREWORD

By definition, a story has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. This story, however, has only one part, the middle. There was a beginning, of course, but it is unknown except in the Judeo-Christian story of Adam and Eve or other similar stories about the beginning of life. When you are asked, “Who was your first ancestor?” how do you answer? If you go back far enough, all four families in this story have common ancestors, but this pre-historic knowledge can never be discovered. You trace your ancestors back as far as you can until finally you give up the search.

As for the end of the story, it is yet to be written. It is possible for each of the four families to die out naturally, but that is unlikely in the foreseeable future. The final chapter of these four families may happen in some catastrophic event that leads to the extinction of the human race. And that story will never be written.

So here you may read the middle part of the story and nothing more.

Is this story unique? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that all the people mentioned here are/were real people who lived their own lives. Each one of us is a unique person, never replicated before or after. Yet the story of these four families is not really much different from the stories of millions of other groups of four families in America. The experiences of these families were repeated by many, many others who came from Europe, moved towards the midwest in the 19th century for available land, and then scattered to the four corners of the earth as later generations were born and married and followed educational and job opportunities wherever they might lead.

FROM CHAPTER ONE

One evening in 1699 Edward Hartley sat down at the table with his wife of six years and made a pronouncement. “I have decided that I shall take thee and thy child to America to begin the new century.”

Sarah was not surprised, for they had been discussing this possibility ever since they were married. It just may be that she was more surprised that it had taken him this long to make up his mind to leave their home in the midlands of England and venture forth to the new world.

The Hartley family had become Quakers during the early years of the new religious movement. In the 1640s, George Fox had preached a message of God’s imminent light being available to all who believed, and drew many followers in the decades that followed, especially in Lancashire and other midland counties. In 1652, Fox climbed to the top of Pendle Hill, very near the home of 24-year-old Roger Hartley, where he saw a vision of God calling him “To sound the day of Lord.…And the Lord let me see…in what places he had a great people to be gathered.”1

The earliest Hartleys2 of this branch that have been positively identified are John Hartley (born about 1600) who married Grace Hartley (b. 1606, perhaps a cousin) in 1626. One of their children was Roger (born in 1628). He married Alice Vipont about 1655, and they raised their family of 6 boys and 4 girls in the village of Marsden, just south of Pendle Hill in Lancashire. [See Map in Appendix C1, p. 462] When Edward was born in March 1666, his birth was duly noted in the minutes of the Marsden Monthly Meeting of the newly organized movement. [Appendix A3, p. 151/Appendix B1, pp. 161ff]

It is not known whether Roger Hartley faced persecution and jail-time because of his faith, but no doubt he knew some who did. The very early Quakers were aggressive in their attitudes and caused much irritation to the leaders in their communities. Because the Quakers held equal respect for all people, they often refused to follow the custom of taking off their hats when in the presence of a person of higher social or political position. Likewise, the use of “thee” and “thou” to address people sounded very disrespectful to those who were accustomed to the more typical “you.” Arrests were common in the years before 1660, but continued after that even though the Friends tried to tone down their confrontational approach.

In 1681 a new opportunity opened up for many Quakers. A son of an English aristocratic family, William Penn, had become a Quaker leader, and he managed to convince King Charles II to pay an old debt to his recently deceased father by granting him a major piece of land in the new world, all of the land beyond the Delaware River. Penn would have named the new area “Sylvania,” but the king, as a way of honoring young Penn’s father, attached the name of “Penn” to “Sylvania,” and that name stayed with the territory.

William Penn immediately began to seek out people to go to America to inhabit Pennsylvania. The primary purpose was to establish his “Holy Experiment.” He wanted to show that a government could be set up on the basis of the Golden Rule and that peace and good will would prevail. He also hoped to sell enough land so that it would prove to have been a good investment for him.

While Penn may not have recruited as many immigrants as he had hoped, hundreds and thousands of Quakers did heed the call and boarded ships in the 1680s and 1690s and headed to America. Other people, the ubiquitous land investors, purchased tracts of land in Pennsylvania but never settled on them. They sought to sell their acres to others and make some money in the process.

There is no record of the discussions that took place as the Hartley family considered moving to America. The evidence suggests that Edward did not go alone, but that his brothers also made the adventure. At least Henry went with him, and probably Anthony and James.