Malvern Family History Society

Coming to America – Elaine Baker

It is common knowledge in my family that my great grandfather, Christopher Ward Bailey (Kit) and his sister Martha Bailey had spent time living and working in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Kit didn’t appear to have stayed in the USA for long; he married my great grandmother Elizabeth Ann Oates in Burnley, Lancashire in January 1884 on her twenty-first birthday, then spent the rest of his life as a farmer at various farms owned by the Devonshire estate around Skipton in Yorkshire. Martha stayed longer in the USA; she kept the reference letters from her American employers so we knew that she had worked in Middletown, Connecticut and Boston, Massachusetts. She returned to England in the 1890s where she became a house mother at one of the children’s homes attached to the Burnley Union Workhouse.

In 1980 my mother visited New England on holiday and whilst there decided to try to find out when her grandfather and great aunt had emigrated to the USA. Boston seemed the logical port of entry; after all, she had a photograph of Kit taken in Middletown, Connecticut, the references for Aunt Martha and a photograph of her taken in Boston. My mother visited the Massachusetts State Archives and was disappointed to learn that unless she had a better idea of when they had emigrated, from which British port and ideally which vessel, she would be looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack because of the numbers of ships and immigrants that had arrived in Boston. However, although it would have added another piece to the family history jigsaw, it wasn’t really vital, and the search was dropped.

In November 2006 Ancestry allowed free access to its US immigration records. Out of curiosity we decided to see if we could find Kit and Martha emigrating from England between 1875 and 1880. We chose those dates because their father had died in October 1875 (their mother had died in 1871), and we had previously found Kit and Martha in the 1880 USA census living in Connecticut. There weren’t too many Baileys and we soon found Christopher Bailey and Martha Bailey travelling in Intermediate Class on the SS Nova Scotian arriving in Baltimore from Liverpool via Queenstown, St John’s, and Halifax, on 15 May 1880.

Baltimore in the late nineteenth century was a bustling city with rows of red brick terraced houses and a harbour lined with coal wharves, canneries and packing houses for produce grown on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and the seafood caught in the Chesapeake Bay. When people consider nineteenth and early twentieth century European emigration to the USA they usually imagine the huddled masses seeking a new life via Ellis Island in New York, with the Statue of Liberty looking benevolently on them. However Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore rivalled New York as a port of entry in the nineteenth century, Baltimore being second only to New York for the number of immigrants. Just as New York had Ellis Island, Baltimore had Locust Point. As the ships approached Baltimore from Chesapeake Bay via the Patapsco River the immigrants were greeted not by a torch bearing lady, but by the flags flying over Fort McHenry, a sight that had inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem The Star Spangled Banner 70 years earlier following a particularly heavy British bombardment of the fort during the War of 1812. In 1868 John W Garrett, president of the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad executed an agreement with the North German Lloyd steamship line to provide a regular service to Baltimore. Exports from Baltimore such as lumber and tobacco would go to Bremen, and immigrants would come to Baltimore on the return voyage. The railroad would advertise special immigrant fares in European countries that would include steamship passage to America as well as train fare to one of the western states. The newly arrived were processed at the purpose built immigrant pier at Locust Point. The B&O Railroad not only served the pier to transport the new citizens to the west, but it owned the pier as well. The new arrivals waited in fenced-in areas to pass physical examinations and have their papers checked under the watchful eyes of the immigration officials. The B&O had constructed two large buildings at Locust Point that served as terminals for both the steamship lines and the railroad, so that, in many cases, immigrants proceeded directly from the pier to waiting B&O trains, destined for New York, Chicago, Detroit or St Louis. The immigration station closed in 1914 as war with Germany loomed on the horizon. Today Locust Point is still a major freight terminal, although little remains of the immigration pier.

However the couple we found arriving in Baltimore on the Nova Scotian couldn’t be our Kit and Martha. In the manifest Martha was described as wife, but Aunt Martha never married. Our Baileys were brother and sister, not husband and wife. Kit was described as a clerk, but he had been brought up on a farm which had been tenanted by his grandfather and latterly his father for 70 years, and he had aspirations to be a farmer. Not only that, the ship had docked in Baltimore, at least 300 miles from where we knew they later worked, and both Baileys according to the manifest, had told the shipping line that they were ultimately destined for New York, not Connecticut. But this couple were the right age, and what were the chances of finding another Christopher and Martha Bailey travelling together on the same ship? We were puzzled to say the least. Then everything fell into place. As we looked again at the passenger list wondering whether or not we had found the Baileys we were searching for, we recognised another name on the manifest just below Martha’s: George and Phoebe Brann, travelling with their children Bertha and Herbert, destination Kansas. Amongst family papers, we had a letter sent to Aunt Martha from Phoebe Brann in June 1880 in which she described her new life on the Prairies.

We had previously wondered what the connection was between the Branns and Baileys; were they friends from Yorkshire where the Baileys had grown up or relatives? Now we knew; they had met on board ship travelling to a new life in America.

From 1989 to 1991, David and I had lived in Bel Air, a small country town about 25 miles north of central Baltimore. We knew that Baltimore had been a major immigration point from 1870 to 1900, so we shouldn’t have been so surprised to find the Baileys immigrating there. Although many of the landmarks and buildings from 1880 were destroyed in the 1904 fire that devastated the downtown area, today’s Baltimore street-pattern remains the same as it did in the nineteenth century. We realised that over the last 20 years on our regular visits to Baltimore we may have trodden the same streets as my great grandfather and his sister albeit more than 100 years apart.

The Baileys headed northwards to their new life in New England, whilst the Branns travelled westwards for a new life in Kansas. We have learned to keep an open mind when searching for our ancestors who may, on occasion, have been economical with the truth about their circumstances and intentions. As for Phoebe’s new life in Kansas, well that’s another story for a later date.

References

First Stop Baltimore, Baltimore Sun newspaper, 2 July 1986
The Door Opens, Maryland Magazine Autumn 1989
Point of Entry: Baltimore, the Other Ellis Island by William Connery