Title : Distant Relatives
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Distant Relatives
Continuing on my sketching journey of ancestry and immigration.
My great-grandfather Colburn built both of these houses in the Washington Park section of south Providence, not far from where the huge gas tanks sit along Narragansett Bay. He built the one on the right, and lived there while he built the other on the left - his eventual home for the rest of his life. He described himself as a carpenter when he was a young immigrant, and later as a builder. For a period of time he served as the building inspector for the City of Providence. In a much shorter time than my other immigrant great-grandparents, he had established himself in middle-class America.
The Colburn side of the family always seemed so far away to me, although they lived in the same city as all my other ancesters and at the same time. Unlike the Lynches, O’Connors and O’Keefe’s, they were not from Ireland. Clinton Colburn emigrated from northern Nova Scotia in 1889 along with his future wife, Alberta Ripley. They were the children of huge rural families whose roots in North America went back for generations.
The Ripleys came to Canada as part of group referred to as the Yorkshire Emigration. They were granted land to settle in Nova Scotia, and arrived in 1774. Coincidently, the name of the ship that the Ripleys took to the new world was called Providence. Through the years the Ripleys intermarried with Loyalist families (relocated Americans who had supported the British in the Revolutionary War) as well as Scottish immigrant families. Through my research, I have found to my dismay, that some of those Loyalists and early settlers had slaves.
The Colburns have been in North America just as long, or maybe longer. Richard (Colbourne) served as a defender of Fort Cumberland (in New Brunswick, Canada) in the Eddy Rebellion of 1776. For his military service, he too, was granted land to settle. Where he was from, has not been definitively answered. Perhaps he was originally a Loyalist from America, or maybe a "New England Planter” (Amercan settlers who kept moving north) or an immigrant from England or Scotland. Through the Colburns, I’m distantly related to US President Millard Fillmore - too bad he’s universally considered one of America’s worst.
The distance from this side of the family is easy to explain. When Clinton and Alberta’s young daughter, Edna (my grandmother) married an Irish-Catholic, John Lynch, all hell broke loose. Even among immigrants there was class and religious anxiety (the Colburns were Protestants). Returning home after eloping, Edna was practically kidnapped - forbidden to leave the house with her new husband for a couple of days. Over the years, things eased a little, but the Colburns remained remote in the Lynches’ lives. They existed mostly though my grandmother's mythic stories of her relatives from the wilds of River Philip, Nova Scotia.
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