1700-1880
Pennsylvania, Maryland and Illinois:
First Prayer in Congress, September 1774, in Carpenters Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
William Penn came to America in 1682 and established the colony of Pennsylvania where religious freedom was protected. This new promise of religious tolerance in America opened the floodgates for waves of Scots-Irish Presbyterian and German Lutheran immigrants.
The term Scots-Irish refers to the descendants of the Presbyterians from lowland Scotland who had settled in Ulster, the northernmost province of Ireland, in the 17th century. They became known as Scots-Irish because when Scotland and England became unified under one monarch, the Scots were systematically relocated as Scottish Protestant settlers in Ireland’s northern province of Ulster. Scots-Irish families often came to colonial America as groups with their Presbyterian congregation. These groups of immigrants moved together from one locality in Ireland to one locality in America. The Clingans and McCleans probably came as Presbyterians with their pastors as leaders.
Born on the Isle of Mull in Scotland, William McClean immigrated to Pennsylvania about 1733. All of his sons except one became surveyors and were engaged to define at several places the boundaries of Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. Later, when celebrated mathematicians Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon 
were employed to establish what would eventually be called the Mason-Dixon line, they praised the McCleans for the accuracy of their work. One of those sons, Archibald, became their chief assistant and then continued to work on the project into western Pennsylvania for several years. Three generations of Archibald McCleans continued to explore and settle lands in western Pennsylvania. There was one particular land purchase that involved some correspondence between an Archibald McClean (possibly William McClean’s grandson) and George Washington. Washington’s response to McClean’s 1797 inquiry regarding this land transaction has been preserved with all of the George Washington papers and reveals the personal side of our revered first president:
“Sir: I know nothing of the Bond of which you speak. . .If any such is in my possession. . .it must, by frequent shiftings and removals, have got so out of place as to render it impracticable for me to find, as there is no such bond where it ought to be, if I had it.” [site]
After the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the local government in Pennsylvania was restructured from that established by William Penn. The British crown no longer held authority. The Second Continental Congress met in York, Pennsylvania where Archibald McClean, the son of immigrant William McClean, became part of the revolutionary government as a county prothonotary (chief clerk of the court). He was responsible for disseminating and interpreting the laws of this new government, persuading many fairly recent immigrants of diverse cultures and backgrounds to support a revolutionary action. According to a York County historian, “McClean ran order through chaos at a time when a new revolutionary government was being organized on the county level.”
It has been noted that his first official act was to record the Declaration of Independence under his own signature in the county records. Also, his house on Spahr Square in York temporarily served as the office of the Treasury Department during the meeting of Continental Congress. He held a number of key responsibilities in county government until his death in 1786. The York Daily Record in 2001 proudly proclaimed, “If a scholar who had spent some time in careful study of the records were asked to name the person in York County who did most to advance the American Revolution, he could choose Archibald McClean”.
George Clingan and his brothers, in the company of their pastor, had arrived and settled in southeastern Pennsylvania around 1730, about the same time as the McCleans had immigrated. Both of these families lived in neighboring counties for several generations. The Clingan name in Ireland probably was derived from a Scottish form Mac Clingan, Mac meaning “son of” Cling-an, which perhaps originally applied to “one who rings a bell.” In 1782, Archibald McClean’s daughter married George Clingan’s son becoming 3rd great grandparents to my mother just at the time the United States of America was declaring its independence from England.
For at least five generations many Clingans lived in the Monocacy River Valley region which includes Frederick and Carroll Counties, Maryland and neighboring Adams County, Pennsylvania. Having arrived in American only thirty years before the Declaration of Independence the Clingans were proud patriotic families. William Clingan served quietly as a delegate in the Continental Congress and as a signer of the Articles of Confederation. Their patriotism was also evidenced in the naming of their children. The Clingan families tended to name their children after historic figures such as presidents and famous patriots. Mother’s father was given the name Elmer Ellsworth honoring the first Union officer killed in the Civil War.
In 1841, Scots-Irish John Clingan married Catharine Sheley of German heritage in Taneytown, Maryland. Tracing the heritage of Catharine Sheley has met with considerable difficulty because of the many variations in the spelling of her surname. The immigrant John Nicholas Schiel arrived in Philadelphia in 1739 with son Nicholas on the ship Loyal Judith which was described as a “real boatload of Palatines” bringing with them their Christian Reformed faith. The manifest of the ship lists him as Johan Nickell Shield. Various factors including both spoken German and written English versions of the name have resulted in multiple spellings of the name in America. It is possible that originally the name came from from German “schel” meaning noisy or loud as early as 13th century. Maybe it was a Westphalia-German nickname describing a physical characteristic such as wild or clamorous.
Christopher and Mary (Johnson) Parker (c. 1875)
Several generations of German Sheeleys descended from the immigrant Nicholas Schiel. They also lived in the Monocacy region of Pennsylvania and Maryland and affiliated with the Reformed or Lutheran church. Although dates are uncertain, Catharine was one of eight or nine children born to Joshua and Louisa Sheley in Washington County, Maryland in the mid 1800s. Catharine and her husband John Clingan lived all their lives in Frederick and Carroll County, Maryland, just across the state line from York, Pennsylvania. My mother, Mary Catharine, was given her name to honor her two grandmothers, Mary Johnson and Catharine Clingan.
Christopher and Mary Enjoying Their Orchard (1918)
It was not until 1890 that the Clingan family began to move west. Elmer Ellsworth Clingan, the youngest of John and Catharine Clingan’s children, was the first of Mother’s ancestors to migrate west since the trail blazing pioneer days. He came not as a farmer or tradesman but as an urbanized businessman. Elmer’s life-long employment was with American Express who at that time was a major railway shipping agency. After having secured a position with that company in Pennsylvania he journeyed to Illinois, not along the wilderness trails of earlier generations, but probably in the comfort of a modern railroad car. By contrast, Mother’s Parker ancestors, who settled in Illinois about 1870, probably traveled as families by wagon and oxcart from the northern and western counties of Indiana. Mother’s grandfather Christopher Parker established a home for his growing family in Lee County Illinois. There he tended his garden and orchard and found sporadic employment as a maintenance worker on the new railroad line.
Elmer Ellsworth Clingan: Young Businessman
Alora Ellen Parker (1874-1899): Mother of Mary Catharine
We began this story with about a dozen of Mother’s many immigrant ancestors who had come to America before there was a United States. The earliest of these immigrants settled in Virginia around 1610. The Parkers and Fletchers landed in Massachusetts soon after in 1630. A little later in the 17th century several more families arrived in Pennsylvania: the Dutch VanDykes. the German Wimmers, and Quaker Hiatts. Then, in the decades that preceded the Revolutionary War, the Scots-Irish Clingans and McCleans as well as Sheeleys arrived and settled along the Pennsylvania-Maryland colonial boundary. Through the next ten generations these families merged with one another as they intermarried and built new lives and new homes along their gradual westward migration from their original colonial settlements along the Atlantic Ocean. They were pioneers who crossed the Appalachian Mountains into Ohio, eventually moving on to Indiana, and finally arriving in Illinois.
Baby Mary Catharine Clingan (1899)
It was here that Christopher Parker’s second daughter, Alora Ellen Parker, met and married the newcomer Elmer Ellsworth Clingan. They began to raise their family in the tiny town of Nachusa near Dixon, Illinois. Their second child was my mother Mary Catharine Clingan who was born in 1899 just before the beginning of the 20th century.
