Introduction

Mary Catharine Clingan Nelson was my mother. Her strength, her steadiness, her love of family, and her perseverance in adversity were the characteristics that motivated me to pursue a grand search for my family history. Now after about 40 years of a challenging and enjoyable journey I want to share some of this history with you.

A genealogist begins her work by seeking the roots of her parents and then of her grandparents and then her great grandparents. She gradually learns who she is by digging further and further back into history. After many years of searching I found myself almost 300 years back into my mother's history. I will begin my story where my research ended among the immigrants in the early American colonies and then move forward to Mother and her loving grandparents in Nachusa, Illinois.

Alora Parker

Elmer Clingan

Mary Catharine was born in 1899 in Dixon, Illinois. Her name, was derived from her two grandmothers, Mary (Johnson) Parker and Catharine (Clingan) Sheely. Her mother, Alora Ellen Parker, died very soon after Mother's birth and left her father, Elmer Ellsworth Clingan, alone with his baby daughter and two-year old son William. Two years later Elmer had to move to St. Louis, Missouri after being transferred by his employer. He left his children in the care of Mother's eldest surviving sister, Melissa. The daughters of Alora Parker were a close knit family, and most these eleven sisters married and lived most of their lives near Nachusa, Illinois where the Parker family had settled about the year 1870.

Melissa Parker was a nurse, and she was primary care giver for the two young Clingans for a while. Soon the second eldest Parker daughter, Martha, whose two children had recently died, took William into her home in nearby Franklin Grove. Mary was then reared as a ninth daughter and tenth child, by her grandparents, Mary Johnson and Christopher Parker in the railroad village of Nachusa in Lee County, Illinois. She attended the one-room school in Nachusa through the eighth grade but was denied further education because money for tuition at the high school school in Dixon was not available.

One summer, a Chicago dentistry student was working as a temporary time-keeper for the railroad gangs in Nachusa and there discovered Mother's cousin whom he would eventually marry. He also informed his best Chicago pal, John Nelson, that there was another young woman named Mary Clingan, who might interest him. By 1920 both couples were married.

John and Mary Catharine Nelson

John Nelson's parents had been born in Sweden and as immigrants and lived in a very Swedish community on the south side of Chicago. They attended the Lutheran church and celebrated all the holidays with Swedish traditions and Swedish foods. Mother enjoyed their customs and celebrations and learned to cook many of their foods. When her husband's family inquired about her national background, she could only respond, “Well, I guess I'm American.”

I think she really yearned to know more about who she was. More than 70 years later when she had retired, she began gathering the simple stories of her Nachusa life. She wrote little anecdotal accounts of her mother Alora’s family and collected them along with preserved pictures and other memorabilia. I learned from this anecdotal information that Mother's Nachusa family were Americans going back many generations in contrast to her first generation Swedish-American husband.

Mary Catharine Clingan Nelson c. 1932

A short time after Christopher and Mary (Johnson) Parker had migrated to northern Illinois from Indiana, both of Mary's brothers and Christopher's brothers also came to the same area, and with them came threads of information about their Indiana families that survived in the memories of their children. These were the clues that triggered my research which was much encouraged by Mother as long as she lived. She accompanied my husband Bob and me on excursions to the Indiana and the places of her ancestry. These outings began to fuel my enthusiasm for learning more! We had gathered a few bits of information about her grandmother Mary Johnson's family, but we could not find any details about her grandfather Christopher Parker other than the names of his parents, Abraham Parker and Martha Wimmer.

Not having had much contact with her father Elmer Clingan during her growing years she wanted to learn about his family and his heritage. She knew that Elmer had come to Illinois from Taneytown, Maryland, where there were many other Clingans. We traveled there to seek information about her eastern heritage and met a number of vaguely related Clingans. Then we started to dig deeper into church, cemetery, and family records during those visits. Later, continuing the research that Mother had begun, I earnestly studied census and other records, and learned that the Clingans had come to America early in the history of our country. They had arrived in Pennsylvania early in the 1700s becoming part of the founding of the United States.

In later years, I retired and was no longer able to travel the countryside climbing over tombstones in cemeteries, descending to dimly lit courthouse basements, and persuading church members to dig through yellowed and fragile documents. All these activities had been energizing and exciting, but they were in the past. Fortunately, however, genealogists and historians had been busy preserving these valuable resources electronically and making them available to other genealogists including me. With my laptop computer, I could now search the internet in the ease of my comfortable chair. Gradually, in my web surfing, I became aware that many of Mother’s ancestors were early American colonists. I wanted to find just how many were among these earliest Americans, and my project expanded to tracing all the lines of Mother’s known ancestors to the very first immigrants. To establish some boundaries for this seemingly huge project I decided to limit my research to evidence I could find on the American side of the Atlantic Ocean.

In collecting what I could about any persons related to Mother, I accumulated more than 4000 names in my computer genealogy database. I organized them in family groups. Many are names of children within families but usually only one person in each family is in the direct path of Mother's heritage. I discovered about 100 of her ancestors who had arrived in America before the War for Independence. As this portion of my genealogy project comes to a close I ponder how remarkable are all the stories of struggle and survival that eventually brought Mother’s colonial immigrants together in the little community of Nachusa, Illinois nearly 300 hundred years later and 1500 miles from the Atlantic shore where they originally arrived in America. I am fascinated that more than 100 known immigrants eventually merged into one family.

I will tell the story that starts when the first ancestor came ashore early in the 1600s, continues through marriages in each generation and eventually arrives at Mother's birth in 1899. There will be many different trails to follow depending on where among almost 100 immigrant ancestors we begin the saga. Of those ancestors, I selected those for whom there was the best documented and perhaps most fascinating information. It all eventually leads to my mother.

Included in the stories will be some of the background history of our nation and how that history impacted Mother's ancestors from the years 1600 to 1900. I will briefly tell about the first immigrants, what I learned about their former homes, why they came, what happened in their early American world, and how those events influenced what they did. Every family had a different set of experiences, but some of them are especially interesting to us now because of their context in the history of our country. This is Mother's story, but it is also America's story, or at least pieces of America's story. In future posts, I would like to share these pieces of the Great American Story with you one by one.