Chapter 2

Page Last Revised: 01/12/00

 
 

Family Facts?, Fiction and Folklore

The origin and history of the Armstrongs of our bloodline, along with their dreams, accomplishments and failures, are treasures buried in the tomes and folklore of the past and the forgotten memories of ancestors long dead. Uncovering what remains takes effort and persistence and presents certain challenges not normally faced in more conventional treasure hunts. For example, with genealogical research you begin with just a scrap of a map and a couple of informational nuggets. The genealogical explorer must then hunt for other pieces of the map that, in turn, lead through a series of dead ends and wrong turns before begrudgingly yielding one or two more nuggets (but never, unfortunately the whole treasure).

Sometimes, the hunt is almost as interesting as the nuggets you find. My interest in genealogy began with a conversation that I had with my father in November 1976 (see Contributing Relatives Listing, #1). As we will see, some of what he related contained elements of truth, but much had become slightly garbled over the years. Regardless, his memories were still interesting and they became the basis upon which most of my subsequent genealogical research was based. He began by telling me that my grandfather's name was George Armstrong, although he was known as Frank (his middle name being Francis). He also related that my grandfather had two brothers named Rolla and Ransom, and he believed that they both lived at one time in Steel, North Dakota. He vaguely recalled that Ransom was a druggist in that city and that he was named after my grandfather's uncle who, as my father remembered hearing, was hung as a horse thief back in the old Northwest Territory. He also recalled that Rolla's wife was named Amanda (or Mandy) and went on to relate a personal recollection about this lady that can only be classified as unusual. For some reason (that he never knew), Amanda apparently had one of her breasts removed which she had pickled and kept a jar at her home! Apparently, he had visited Rolla and Amanda when he was a boy and this particular memory had stuck with him ever since!

He also remembered that my grandfather had lived for a number of years in a town by the name of Coin, (Page County) Iowa. In fact, he told me, my grandfather had title to six burial plots in that town (he later gave me the deed to one of them which was signed by grandfather Frank on March 5, 1907) (see Reference Listing, #2). I subsequently verified through a lady by the name of Margery Henning that the deed, which is to a plot in the Elmwood Cemetery in Coin, IA, is valid, but she was unable to verify if anyone is buried in the plot. In another conversation several years later, my father also seemed to recall that Frank had lived in Missouri during his early life (Page county is one of the southern most counties in Iowa, and is located on the Iowa/Missouri border).

My father went on to recount that his father had two sisters--one who was named Lillian, and another older sister who he believed was named Mamie. He remembered that Lillian had married a man by the name of Harlan Depew, that they also had a son named Harlan, and that they resided in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He also recalled that they owed a summer home in Clearwater, Florida. Mr. Depew was supposedly a railroad engineer. Several years later, my father repeated most of the above story, but this time he seemed to recall that Mr. Depew was a VIP with the old Pontiac Motor Company before it became General Motors and that they were apparently well-to-do. As I said above,  much of what he told me was incorrect, but it was close enough to give me several leads to follow.

I had a great deal of difficulty tracing the first 30 years of my grandfather's life as well as that of my great-grandfather Alva D. Armstrong (who's name I discovered when I ordered a copy of Frank's death certificate in December of 1976) (see Reference Listing, #3). As a result, I decided to try and follow up on the information given me by my father about the other family members named Ransom, Rolla and Lillian, as well as keep my eyes open for any reference to a Mamie Armstrong. I initially found Rolla in the 1900, 1910 and 1920 Federal Census' for North Dakota and Lillian in the 1900 and 1920 Census' in Michigan. It was through these sources that I discovered that my great-grandfather was born in Vermont and my great-grandmother in Indiana--this was new information, as my grandfather Frank's death certificate had indicated that his parents had both been born in South Dakota. I had spent a great deal of time unsuccessfully attempting to verify the South Dakota source, and now turned my attention to Vermont. It was here that I discovered my great-great-great uncle Ransom S. Armstrong (see Reference Listing, #4 and #5.

As indicated above, my grandfather George Francis Frank Armstrong's death certificate shows that his father's name was Alva D. Armstrong and his mother was Mary Cotton. By July 1994, my research had led me to believe that great-grandfather Alva had probably left Vermont sometime around the middle of the 19th. century and had lived for a time in Michigan (I found two Alvas, ages 16 and 17 in Parma, Jackson County, Michigan, and one A. Armstrong, age 25 in Bunker Hill, Ingram County, Michigan in the 1860 Census. I surmised that at some time around the Civil War he had moved on to Indiana where his wife, Mary, lived and where I had also discovered that his daughter, Lillian, had been born in June 1869 (see Reference Listing, #6). From there he must have moved on to South Dakota where Census records had shown that his son Rolla had been born in 1871 (see Reference Listing, #7), followed by the birth of my grandfather, Frank, three years later in 1874. However, at this time, I had been unable to uncover anything substantive to back up my premise.

Another family source (see Contributing Relatives Listing, #2, and References Listing, #11) had recalled having heard that Frank's mother had died when he was very young and that his father soon after remarried. Apparently a short period of time later, his father also passed away and his stepmother remarried. The story goes that the family relationship became increasingly abusive and that Frank and his older brother (Rolla), who were only about 10 to 13 few years old at the time, both ran away from home. Another family source (I no longer recall who) indicated that they believed that both great-grandparents Alva and Mary had died in Wahkon, MN. As a result, I decided to try and find a professional genealogist to help me pursue these leads.

After writing to several genealogists and reviewing their credentials, I chose a woman by the name of Carol Maki, in Stillwater, MN to assist me. Over the next couple of months she provided me with several good bits of information relative to grandfather Frank and my father. However, in July, she came across a biography on a Jerome B. Armstrong whose life and accomplishments had been summarized in the History of Page County (Iowa) that was published in 1909 (see Reference Listing, #10). The biography also provides information about his father, David, and mother, Sarah (Treadway) Armstrong. In addition, it provided some enticing clues about his brother, A. D. Armstrong who was a civil war veteran from Michigan--was he my great-grandfather Alva?.

Near the end of September 1994, I finally got the break that all amateur genealogist's dream of. Earlier in 1994 I had become a member of an organization known as the Armstrong Clan Association. This organization was established in 1969 (upon Neil Armstrong's historic landing on the moon) at the historical center of the old clan territory, Mangerton in Liddesdale, Scotland, in an attempt to reestablish the Armstrongs as a Clan (albeit a widely scattered one). After some months I contacted the Clan genealogist, William S. Armstrong V of Vancouver, WA, and he forwarded me a half-inch thick packet of genealogical information which went back to great-great-great-great-grandfather Martin Armstrong (see Reference Listing, #13). Not only was I introduced to Martin and his son Elliot, but I also verified that David W. Armstrong and Alva David Armstrong were, in fact, my ancestors! The feeling was one of wonder and excitement and no less enthralling than the best Tom Clancy novel. I was totally engrossed, and went through each page over and over noting geographical verification of my own research, discovering information that was completely new to me, and clarifying, verifying or disproving previously obtained family folklore. For example, I learned for the first time that my great-grandfather Alva was born on August 4, 1842, in West Haven, VT and died on July 21, 1884, in Shenandoah, Page County, IA. I learned that great-grandmother Mary's last name was Colton, not Cotton, and that she was born in Elkhart, Elkhart County, Indiana. I learned that Alva's second wife was named Maria S. Call and that they were married in Shenandoah, IA on November 8, 1881. In addition, I learned that there was no older daughter, but that a younger daughter named Mary had been born in 1876 (perhaps she had been called Mamie?). The information submitted, also indicated that she was born in Elkhart, IN that, if true, meant that they moved from South Dakota back to Indiana some time between 1874 and 1876 (this I later found to be incorrect).

After my initial good fortune with the Armstrong Clan, a number of sources opened to me. I was able to locate a distant relative, M. Virginia Armstrong (see Contributing Relatives Listing, #3), a granddaughter of Jerome B. Armstrong, who was living in Vancouver, Washington with her nephew. She proved to be an enthusiastic genealogist as well as an exceptionally painstaking researcher and was able to provide much of the information that is included in this narrative. She had also developed much of the information that I had been provided by the Armstrong Clan. In addition, she provided me the name of additional reference sources and I subsequently contacted one of them and purchased two genealogical source books that provided even more information. Two other sources had apparently submitted data to the Clan--Mrs. William West of La Habra, CA, and Reta I. Phelps of Prineville, OR. I was fortunate enough to locate Kay West and her daughter, Cathy Owens (see Contributing Relatives Listing, #4 and #5), but was not successful in locating Ms. Phelps. Virginia also gave me the name of another distant relative--Mrs. Gloria McKie, who I subsequently corresponded with (see Contributing Relatives Listing, #6). She is a retired school teacher who proved to be the great-grand daughter of Ellen Albina Armstrong, one of my great-grandfather Alva's older sisters. From her I obtained photographs, copies of family letters, and additional genealogical information that have been incorporated in this narrative.

In 1996, I established the Armstrong Genealogy & History Center web site. Soon thereafter, a cousin named (Nancy) Kaye Powell, contacted me and we continued to correspond regularly. She was followed by several others cousins such as Bill Spencer, Judy Walgren, Glenda Kleppin, and Nancy Thaunt. From them and other sources I have pieced together the following narrative. This is not, however, my narrative, but the combined effort of several Armstrong descendants who have pursued their labor of love without expectation of recompense or recognition. It is our hope that our families and descendants will find at least a fraction of the pleasure in its reading that we have found in its preparation.

Research and Reference Materials

In Chapter 1 we learned something of the Armstrong folklore and history -- how then does our particular Armstrong bloodline ancestry fit into this puzzle?

This segment of Chapter 2 focuses on information passed down to us from past generations and/or pursues interesting flights of supposition and fanciful "What If" scenarios. Make no mistake when reading the remainder of this chapter, much of what is presented has not been proven to be true.  What makes much of it enticing, however, is that while we know some of it to be untrue, other story segments and bits of information surface from widely scattered braches of the family tree which lost contact with each other several generations earlier.

While quite a bit of information concerning the origins of our bloodline is available from various sources, perhaps the most compelling story was provided by Glenda Kleppin Contributing Relatives Listing, #1) in the form of a hand-written history of unknown origin that was handed down through her grandfather, Rolla Silas Armstrong, the older brother of my grandfather George Francis Armstrong. In her Analysis Of Our Bloodline Origins, she presents the information in the above history and from it makes the first real plausible connections of our bloodline to the descendants of Johnnie Armstrong of Gilnockie, Scotland and his descendants, the Armstrongs of Brooksboro, Ireland.

The history appears to be written in the late 1800s as it lists the names of the children of gggrandfather David Wing Armstrong as well as each of their offspring.  Much of the info in this family history is clearly incorrect and some of it even crosses the border of the ludicrous. For example, it states that our line stems from enigmatic Siward, the Strong Arm, through his son Christopher and, in turn, through his son William.  Glenda located a family tree on the Internet that begins with Johnnie of Gilnockie in Scotland and very nearly matches our own.  It is clear that the unknown preparer of our family history had dropped several hundred years and knew little of Siward's folklore or history, and that he had, in fact, substituted the name of Siward for that of the famous border reiver Johnnie of Gilnockie.  The genealogy she compares our history to is also a bit garbled, mistakenly identifying Christie's Will as one of the two sons of the Johnnie's grandson Christopher. Actually, Christie's Will (Col. William Armstrong) was born a generation earlier -- the offspring of Johnnie's son Christopher. As a result, Glenda got a little turned around attempting to match up the two genealogies.  Actually, her bloodline history matches up perfectly with the data extracted from the Chronicles of the Armstrongs -- from Christopher of Bangliesh through Edward of Brooksboro -- which I received from the Armstrong Clan Association (ACA), that highlights the descendants of the Lairds of Mangerton.  This information which I presented in Chapter 1, goes back even further to indicate that we descend from Alexander, the first Laird of Mangerton and that our branch descends through one of the younger sons of Alexander, the 6th Laird.

Glenda's history indicates that William fled to Ireland and that we descend through his son Edward who is said to have married a "gypsy princess."  It goes on to say that Edward's son Martin reportedly emigrated to Pennsylvania where a number of the clan had established a settlement and had joined with a group of Dutch Puritans.  Martin is reported to have married "the lady Elizabeth Elliot" and that they had two sons.  We are said to have descended from Martin's son Elliot who was married to Elinor Phelps.  They apparently lived for a time on Long Island and during the revolutionary war moved to Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain for protection.  Later they settled in East Shoreham, VT, where Elliot was "buried in a little yard walled in with a rough stone wall."

From this point the comparisons to clues provided in other family sources shoots off in multiple directions and the tendency is to try and tackle them all at once, which is, of course, impossible to do in any comprehensible manner.  What I will attempt to do is examine various statements from Glenda's history and tie in information from other sources that appear to either agree or refute the statement.:

1.   Our branch descends from Alexander, the 6th Laird of Mangerton, of the Scottish borderlands.  Our specific bloodline ancestors subsequently emigrated to Ireland .

  • Corroborating Information -- At this time, the only information we have that mentions specific names and traces our bloodline to Alexander, the 6th. Laird of Mangerton, was received from Glenda Kleppin (see above narrative). However, three other historical summaries handed down through other family sources (see ***Version 1, ***Version 2 and ***Version 3) also make reference to our Scot/Irish heritage (see my *** discussion paper which compares and analyzes these three versions).   We do not have documented proof of this information, we do not know who prepared most of these histories, and we do not know where they got their information.  However, there certainly is reason to find this information compelling as knowledge of our Scot-Irish family heritage has been handed down to us from multiple sources.  Further, the information received from Glenda does match up almost identically with descendency information published in the Chronicles of the Armstrongs, in 1900.

While neither confirming or conflicting with the above, both the 1890 and 1909 biographies of Jerome B. Armstrong make reference to our Irish roots.

It is also interesting to note that long before I began researching my family history, I had been told as a child that my father's family was Scot-Irish.

  • Conflicting Information -- Only one source I have come across disputes our Irish connection.  (see Martin References -- #20).  On the top sheet of this packet is a short, typewritten history of Martin which reads as follows:

RN=7280:  A* MARTIN (1750).  Or possibly 1730/45 SCO?  In 1775, he was in Willsboro ESSEX NY where he signed a document with one Gilliland.  In 1786, to (he?) took the Freeman's Oath in Shoreham ADDISON VT, and he appears there in the 1790 Census.  He is said to have come from Scotland to Long Island, NY, with brothers ELIOT and JOHN; to have gone to MA prior to the Revolutionary War, and finally settled in Shoreham, VT.  Citations: USF-2130; ABB874-147; Mrs. Wm H. West of La Habra, CA.

2.    Colonel William (Christie's Will) Armstrong emigrates to Ireland where our last European ancestor, Edward of Brooksboro, marries a gypsy princess.

  • Corroborating Information -- 

  • Conflicting Information -- 

3.    Our Martin is one of five sons born to Edward of Brooksboro and the one who continues our branch in Colonial America.

  • Corroborating Information -- 

  • Conflicting Information -- 

4.    Martin migrated to Pennsylvania where he joins other members of the clan who had joined with a group of Dutch Puritans.

  • Corroborating Information -- 

  • Conflicting Information -- 

5.    Martin married the "Lady" Elizabeth Elliot and they had two sons.

  • Corroborating Information -- 

  • Conflicting Information -- 

6.    Our family descends through Elliot Armstrong and his wife Elinor Phelps.

  • Corroborating Information -- 

  • Conflicting Information -- 

7.    For some time Elliot and his family lived on Long Island.

  • Corroborating Information -- 

  • Conflicting Information-- 

8.    At the time of the revolutionary war they moved to Fort Ticonderoga for protection.

  • Corroborating Information -- 

  • Conflicting Information -- 

9.    Later, Elliot moved to East Shoreham, Vermont where he is buried in a little yard walled in with a rough stone wall.

  • Corroborating Information -- 

  • Conflicting Information -- 

10.  Elliot was born before 8/1772 and married Elinor, the son of Elnathan Phelps on August 7, 1792.

  • Corroborating Information -- 

  • Conflicting Information -- 

The genealogical records that Glenda compares our bloodline history to, identifies Martin Armstrong as one of Edward's five sons (the Chronicles only show three brothers - John, Francis and James, that one of John's sons was named Martin) and that there is a gap of 18 years between the first and second sons (which I find highly unlikely).   These records document the genealogy of Major General John Armstrong (the grandson of one of Martin's brother), who the Chronicles of the Armstrongs report as having emigrated to Pennsylvania from Brooksboro, Ireland in about 1736.  Another source (creat link to Biographical Dictionary of Pennsylvania Legislators located at http:\\www.bdopl.com/bioja.html) indicates that "In Pennsylvania he was joined by seven of his ten siblings."  While this does not indicate when Martin or his descendants traveled to America, it does appear to suggest that we may well be related to this prominent Pennsylvania family (this also links in with the statement in Glenda's history which indicates that Martin was a common name in our family).

  • The question of when Martin or his family members immigrated to Colonial America is not known for certain, and family information concerning this event is unclear. For example, according to Glenda's information it is supposedly Edward's son Martin who immigrated to Pennsylvania with several of his clan members, which could mean cousins, not necessarily members of his immediate family.  According to the several conflicting birth dates of other family members of his generation, it is probable that our Martin was born in the last third on the 17th century and that he likely emigrated to Colonial America toward the end of the century or shortly after the turn of the century.  This would tie in with the following information from other family sources:

  •