Name: Betty

Home: Chelmsford, Massachusetts

What country did you emigrate from? Unspecified

When did you emigrate to the U.S.? n/a

How did you arrive in the U.S.? n/a

Why did you immigrate to the U.S.? Hello. I thought you were asking for "an" immigration story and didn't notice until I was filling out the form that you wanted "my" immigration story. Well, not what you wanted, but I'd like to mention that, through my paternal great-grandparents, I have two, different immigration stories. Through my father's maternal grandparents, our ancestors go back to the 1600's in the MA Bay Colony. Through my father's paternal grandparents, "they" were "British Home Children" (in England they were called "child migrants."). They were both born in ~1860 in Liverpool, England, and, in 1874, they were "shipped to Canada" as part of the long-standing "child-migrant scheme." They and their siblings each went to a different home in Nova Scotia. In 1879 they married there, and in 1881 they migrated to Boston, MA, where they raised 13 children. Silas Dean LEWIS was one of the youngest, and soon after he turned 18 he married his pregnant? girlfriend, Clarissa KIDDER, who was 17. They eloped to Vermont and lied about their ages.

My great-grandparents on my mother's side also have very different stories. My mother's paternal grandparents were grandchildren of a family-group which left Sligo, Ireland, in 1823 and migrated to Quebec, Canada. In ~1875 her grandfather came down to Boston, MA, and soon married a woman whose parents had migrated to Boston from Glasgow, Scotland. Her mother was "a foundling" in Boston in 1889, and grew up, married and died, not knowing the truth about her birth-parents. She was adopted at 3 by an older couple, and was re-orphaned in 1899. She spent Age 10 to 20 in "homes." When she got out of the "home" in Boston, she moved to Medford and met the neighbors. George KERR took an instant liking to Mary Anna Clark DEXTER, and on Christmas Eve, 1911, they walked to a minister's home and asked him to marry them. My 4 years of research, based on my mother's research, shows that her mother was probably the grandchild of the couple who adopted her. I believe that their only child, a daughter, married with a 7-year-old son, had an "unwanted pregnancy" in 1888 in CT. And, the parents moved to Boston to hide the pregnancy and the baby. IF this is true, my maternal grandmother traces back to the 1600's in both MA and RI.

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