Crookham | Scots-Irish?

William Crookham married Mary Philips in 1752 in the Old Swede’s Church (Swedish Lutheran) in Philadelphia, a multi-cultural colonial city.

Mary Philips was likely a Welsh Quaker who married outside of her religion. Mary Crookham can be found in the Quaker Meeting Records for the Chester and Goshen Monthly Meetings, both in Chester County west of Philadelphia, which was part of the Welsh Tract and Philips, during 18th Century Pennsylvania was a Welsh surname.

Where William Crookham was from is a murkier question as there are little to no additional records found for William outside of the Quaker records which reference him as the husband of Mary Crookham.

Settlers of Pennsylvania

The proprietor of Pennsylvania, William Penn aggressively advertised his tract of land across England, Ireland and on the continent and succeeded in attracting both Germans and the Scots-Irish settlers, who migrated shortly after the first wave of Quakers.

The Germans arrived first, mostly from the Palatinate, and they formed the foundation of what would become the Pennsylvania Dutch.

The Scots-Irish arrived to Pennsylvania second, beginning in 1717. They originally came from the borderlands of England and Scotland before following James I call to colonize Ulster County in Ireland the previous century. In 1752, the same year that Crookham married Mary Philips, the governor of Pennsylvania complained that “it looked like Ireland was sending all of its inhabitants to this country.”

Of these two groups, I chose to explore the Scots-Irish as the possible origin for the Crookham family for this post. This choice is based on my own DNA Results which suggests very little German heritage, and a greater proportion of British Isles heritage.

The Scots-Irish originally came to North America along the contested border between Maryland and Pennsylvania. Landing near Lewes, New Castle, they travelled north into Chester County, before migrating west into Lancaster County. Several Presbyterian Churches were established in the Susquehanna River valley. They moved into what would become Cumberland County, which included Carlisle Pennsylvania, before moving into the Juanita River Valley near Bedford County. When the 1796 treaty was signed with local Native American tribes, several moved across the Allegheny Mountains into Allegheny County, Westmoreland and Washington Counties.

Crookhams in Colonial Pennsylvania

In 1758, Mary Crookham applied for admittance into the Goshen Monthly Meeting in Chester County with her three children: James, Deborah, and John. In 1763, Mary is moving between monthly meetings and requests admittance on behalf of her two younger children, Deborah and John, suggesting that James is no longer living with the family.

In the 1780s, James Crookham is working as a blacksmith, suggesting that his teenage years were spent living with a blacksmith as an apprentice. Apprenticeships usually started when a boy was a pre-teen or teenager. If James were born shortly after the marriage of William and Mary, this would make him 10 years old in 1763, and one possible explanation for his omission is that he would have started his apprenticeship. As an apprentice, he would have lived with the blacksmith, rather than family, who would have provided his room and board.

He would have served for about seven years learning the trade before his release. Upon being released, he would work as a journeyman, traveling around working with other blacksmiths to learn a broader range of skills before establishing his own shop as master craftsman. His release from his apprenticeship and start as a journeyman would have been in the early 1770s prior to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.

In 1770, James Crookham applies for a removal to the Warrington Monthly Meeting in York County, suggesting that he is released from his apprenticeship and beginning the journeyman stage of his career. In 1775, the Quaker meeting in Warrington recorded that he left the area with unpaid debts and a forged pass from the magistrate. As a journeyman, he would have been an employee for a short periods of time, suggesting that his employment was never guaranteed.

No records have been located documenting his apprencticeship and its location. It could have possibly been in Chester County, where his family lived when he started his apprenticeship, or in York County, farther west across the Susquehanna River, where the Warrington Monthly Meeting was located.

The Warrington Monthly Meeting is located about 20 miles southeast of Carlisle, PA, where, during the war, Crookham served as an artificer and bombardier. After the war he settled in the north part of Bedford County which became Huntingdon County, near the Juanita River. He lived here, marked in the Septennial Census as a Blacksmith, and purchasing 300 and 400 acres of land through Land Warrants as a result of his service in the Revolutionary War. By 1810, he is recorded as living in Allegheny, PA.

The path of James Crookham’s life: youth in Chester County, young adulthood in York County, military in Cumberland, adulthood in Huntingdon, and seniority in Allegheny County is the same path as the Scots-Irish frontiersman, although admittedly, a decade or two after the colonizing Scots-Irish cut the path into the frontier.

This affinity for following the path of the Scots-Irish suggests the possibility that William Crookham had been a Scots-Irish immigrant who married a Welsh Quaker girl that he met in Chester County, PA and that his son left his mother’s Quaker community and followed in the footsteps of his father’s community.

Lancashire, England

A basic search of the surname in the British Isles during the 18th Century returns multiple Crookham records from Lancashire England. Lancashire is in Northwest England, and contains both Manchester and Liverpool. Lancashire is one of the five English counties considered part of the Anglo-Scottish borderlands. Lancaster County, PA was named for Lancashire County, England. Lancaster County in Pennsylvania is between York and Chester Counties. This reinforces the idea that the Crookhams were a Scots-Irish family that originated from the borderlands of Scotland and England.

What is unusual is that while the Scots-Irish usually travelled with extended families along their migration path, William Crookham appears to have travelled alone and his children, James and John went their separate paths. James followed the Scots-Irish into Western Pennsylvania, as detailed above, while John Crookham moved to Pasquotank County, North Carolina, where another large community of Quakers lived.

Sources:

Schaeffer, Anne D. “EARLY SCOTCH-IRISH SETTLEMENTS IN PENNSYLVANIA.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 1943, pp. 141–147. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27766559. Accessed 24 July 2021.

U.S., Quaker Meeting Records, 1681-1935 | ancestry.com