Manlove Origins, Part 9 - Conclusions

About Using The United States Census. I’ve witnessed couples age by the decade, and their children grow up. I’ve seen families become larger, and then shrink as the kids moved on. I’ve noticed the "head of Household" eventually pass to a new one, and the aged parents placed at the end of the family list - behind the new “Head of Household” and that person's children. And in the next census they would be gone. I’ve watched generation after generation fan out in greater numbers, and realize each one of those names - hundreds of them - belonged to a person who once had hopes and dreams similar to my own. And they are all gone. The census tells a lot. They tell me names, when people were born, who and when they married, how many children they had, where they lived, and when they died. They tell me who could read and write, which ones were retarded, who was insane, and what they did for a living. They told me that the Manloves were all farmers.

Manlove was the line I was following - a male line that carried the name through time, but there were other names going all the way back to the 1600’s: Williams, Robins, Browne, Robinson, Dunning, Caldwell, Egler, and Parsons. Eight generations ending with my Great Grandparents. Her name was Nancy Parson, his was John Henry Manlove. He was born in 1858 and she six years later. The worked a farm until their older age. The 1920 Census finds them living in Connersville as “helpers” in a boarding house. She died in 1923. John Henry was renting a room in a private home for $12 a month according to the 1930 census. He died in 1932 at 72 years.

John Henry was the oldest child of James, who was the sixth offspring born to George W. Manlove and Mary Caldwell. John’s second born was my Grandmother, Dorma. She is the only Manlove I ever met, and the photo to the left is a good representation of how I remember her. She married my grandfather, John Harrison Buckingham, in 1906 and gave birth to my father six years later. John Buckingham was a “body finisher” in an auto plant in Connersville, Indiana. His was the first generation whose profession was listed as anything other than “farmer”.

Manlove Origins, Part 1 - The Patriarch

My paternal grandmother‘s maiden name was Manlove. Twelve generations ago a guy named Mark Manlove got off a boat in America. I know only a few facts about Mark Manlove, enough to draw the sketchiest outline of his life. He was born in the English county of Shropshire in the vicinity of the villages of Wem and Aston around 1620. He married Hannah Williams, also of Shropshire, in 1637. I don’t know what he looked like, how he made a living, or when and why he came to America.

I hadn’t planned to put much time on the Manlove patriarch in America, but got obsessed with the family - a bit of an irony as Mark, Hannah and family have been dead and forgotten for more than three hundred years. The obsession started when I discovered Mark Manlove’s Last Will and Testament on a USGenWeb site. That web site gave names to his children, his son-in-laws, witnesses, etc. I had scanned hundreds of “Public Family Trees” in Ancestry.com trying to make sense of conflicting entries, but his Last Will made it possible to hazard some educated guesses.

I think Mark and Hannah probably arrived in the Chesapeake Bay area in about 1650. There is some evidence the family landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and spent some time in Stamford, Connecticut, before moving on to the lower Eastern Shore of present day Northampton County, Virginia (#1 on map).
The couple had eight or nine children - five sons and four daughters, but two of the daughters may be the same person. Their first child, John, was born in England, as were several others. The public trees differed as to where the children were born, most favored England on the older ones, but the youngest two were likely born in America. It seems possible that Mark and Hannah, along with their several children, left England in the late 1640’s to sail for the New World. I’ve always thought that immigrants in those days were single men, either adventurers or indentured poor. Mark Manlove must have been a man of some means to be able to bring his family over.

The English Civil War was raging through the 1640’s. Shropshire seems to have been a mix of loyalties between Royalist and Parliamentarians, but Wem/Aston favored the latter. The Royalists lost the war, and King Charles I lost his head in 1649. I can’t help to wonder if Mark Manlove’s migration to America was related to the Civil War. Was he a Royalist? I notice many of his associates on the Eastern Shore were also from Shropshire. Did they come over in the same boat? Why so many in one place?

Mark’s wife, Hannah, died in 1658 in Northampton County, Virginia. Most public trees put her age at 28 years, but she might have been as old as 37 - too young at either age. Mark Manlove remarried the year after Hannah’s death. His new wife, Elizabeth Roberts (also from Shropshire), had two sons and a daughter by him.

Somerset County, Maryland was opened for settlement in 1661 and Mark Manlove moved near Pocomoke (#2 on map), but died five years later at 46 years. Mark left the “new” house and five hundred acres to Elizabeth and her three children, and an unspecified amount to his three youngest sons by Hannah.

Elizabeth remarried a few months later to William Greene, who happened to be the witness to Mark’s Last Will and Testament. Many of Mark’s 11 (or 12) children lived their lives around Pocomoke, but two of them, Thomas and William, moved about 90 miles north into Delaware.
GO TO: The Will of Mark Manlove\
GO TO: Part 2