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* Greenhow / Melton / Crook research home*

Updated August 20, 2007
On my mother's side, I'm researching the Melton family who left Virginia into the mountains of what became West Virginia where they joined with the Lanham and Turley families. Most of the Melton line stayed in West Virginia, but Alvin Grant and Hester Jane Turley Melton moved west to Illinois, settling in Dekalb County in 1919.

"...A series of bad harvests, beginning in 1837, continued into the Hungry Forties. England suffered a wheat famine, Ireland a potato famine... The price of bread soared. A new Poor Law (1834) had ended the outdoor relief for paupers that had been begun in the time of Queen Elizabeth I. The workhouses that took its place (described in Dickens' novel 'Oliver Twist') were more dreaded than jails. Wages were miserably low. A tremendous migration began from the British Isles to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States..." - Encyclopedia Britannica

England sent the Greenhow, Pitt, Barchard and Booth families overseas in the 1840s, with the James and Mary (Long) Greenhow family and the Henry Booth family settling in Dekalb County and the William Pitt and Joseph Barchard families stopping in Chicago first before also traveling west to DeKalb. Mary was apparently so impressed with the Illinois countryside that she convinced her sister, Anne and Anne's husband Edward Batty, to emigrate from England in 1856 to the farmlands of Ogle county.

... A the end of the 1860s, Sweden was struck by the last of a series of severe hunger catastrophes. The agriculture which was still only partially modernized had been struggling with difficult times. Now came a series of crop failures. 1867 thus became "the wet year" of rotting grain, 1868 became the "dry year" of burned fields, and 1869 became "the severe year" of epidemics and begging children. Sixty thousand people left Sweden during these three "starvation years"... The Swedish mass emigration would not have been possible without the Swedish railroads and the organized passenger traffic over the Atlantic. At this time no Swedish line carried passengers directly from Gothenburg to New York. The Swedes therefore had to use British or German ships. The emigrant route started with the train ride to the big port of Gothenburg, where the complete passage, such as Gothenburg-Chicago, of the British Wilson Line, which brought the emigrants to Hull in England. A train took them across the country to Liverpool or Glasgow; from there the Inman Line or some other company's ships sailed them to New York. The whole voyage Gothenburg-New York need not take more than three weeks in 1870.



Sweden sent the Anderson and Carlson families to Dekalb in the mid to late 1800s, where they settled in Winnebago, Boone and Dekalb counties. Greta Andersdotter married Gustav Carlson, while his siblings married into other local families around the end of the 1800s, and Greta and Gustav's children married into the Greenhow and Schandelmeir families.


Illinois families: Anderson, Barchard, Batty, Bochman, Booth, Carlson, Conness, Euhus, Gibson, Greenhow, Haller, Holmes, Hyser, Lanier, Luepkes, Melton, Mellor, Paulson, Pett/Pitt, Robison, Schandelmeir, Stone, Swanson, Wilson, Wood.

West Virginia families: Bailey, Burford, Jordan, Lanham, Melton, Reece, Turley, West.

On my father's side, I'm researching the Crook family of Missouri, which traveled from Grant County, Kentucky and previously from Virginia after the Revolutionary War.

***

Charles Steven Crook

 11823 Middlebury Drive
Tampa, Fl 33626
United States
jsetlif1@tampabay.rr.com


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