Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:

It’s Saturday Night again –

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along – cue the Mission Impossible music!):

1)  Which of your ancestors was the LAST immigrant to your current country?  When did they arrive?  Where did they arrive?  Why did they migrate?  

This is a difficult question when you aren’t really sure which of your ancestors was the last to arrive in the continental United States.

In terms of surnames, I think the RALSTON branch of my tree has the ‘last’ immigrant: David Franklin Ralston. According to other researchers, David Franklin Ralston was born in Ireland in 1785 and migrated to Pennsylvania in 1803. I haven’t researched David Ralston enough to be able to support these two facts with documentation. Additionally, the FamilySearch profile and the WikiTree profile also lack such documentation.

However, the Ancestry source, Irish Passenger Lists, 1803-1806 includes three passengers named David Ralston, with one of them being 15 years old. The fifteen year old David Ralston arrived from County Tyrone in May 1803.

While I consider David Ralston my ‘last’ immigrant, some could look at my tree and make the case that I have an ‘immigrant’ ancestor who came much later than David Ralston.

My ancestor, William Gillies Harding was born in 1804 in New Brunswick. William Harding was listed on the 1851 census of Kings County, New Brunswick. By 1860, he and his family were living in Black Hawk County, Iowa.

I don’t count William Gillies Harding as an immigrant ancestor because his father, WIlliam Harding was born in 1772 in Orange county, New York. William Gillies Harding’s grandfather, William Harding, was a Loyalist and moved with his family to New Brunswick about 1783. Since my HARDING line was in New York prior to the revolution, I do not consider William Gillies Harding to be an immigrant ancestor, even though he technically would be.