Howdy all, after having been involved in genealogy for almost sixty years, I have decided to enlist your help in trying to tear down a brick wall that we have been trying to scale for that entire time. One of my great great great grandmas is profiled here in Wikitree and in many other websites as Alice Amanda White. As I explained on her profile here, the name White is speculative. My mother (now 93) began working on our genealogy in the late 1950s and by the end of the 60s had worked out most of what we now know. Being pre-internet times, much of genealogical communications occurred through regional or area society publications, and my mother participated in several of these. At some point in the 60s or 70s, a distant cousin called her to talk about our Hill ancestors and Alice Hill came up. When asked if mama had any idea of what Alice's maiden name was, she mused that it might be White. This because her son, Henry Felix White Hill, had the names Felix and White in his and they ocurred nowhere else in known family. So she speculated on the phone that maybe Alice's birth name was White and, if so, maybe her father had been named Felix. After the end of the phone call, she didn't think about it any more as it was speculation. However, in a short time she began to see Alice White given as ggg grandma's name in various publications, and believes that the cousin started putting this out there as fact. To this day, I have found no evidence to support or negate this.
Anyway, family oral history says that her husband Amos, was a captain of some kind of vessel that plied the New England/Canadian coastline in the 1820s. While in Canada, he met Alice and they were married, making their home in Canada, where several of their children were born, including gg grandpa Henry. The 1840 US Census shows Amos and his family living in the area of Boston Massachusetts and by 1850 they had moved to DeWitt Co., TX where he was listed as a saddler and they lived there the remainder of their lives.
The family history raises a number of questions, such as how and why did Amos make the transition from ship captain to saddler; why did they leave Massachusetts to move to semi-arid Texas (cheap land?) and primarily, what was his wife's lineage in Canada. Myself, I wonder about the sea captain aspect, if he was a captain, what moved him to become a saddler? Perhaps he was actually a deckhand, married and stayed while in a Canadian port, learning a trade there (possibly from his father-in-law?), before moving to Boston by 1840. Could her family have been Loyalists who moved to Canada during the Revolution, if so, they could have come from anywhere on the east coasst. Lots of avenues of speculation, unfortunately that is exactly what we have on their pre-1840 lives, speculation, not even much circumstantial.
I'm in my early 70s and its very unlikely that I will ever be able to make it to the New England area from TX, much less Canada. So I am asking Canadian-knowledgable Wikitree folks for any help in climbing this brickwall. All we really know is that Amos was from New Hampshire, met Alice in Canada where they married (1825ish), started their family and at some point between 1830 and 1840, they moved to Boston. Any help will be appreciated, even if its negative just let me know. I want to put my brickwalls to bed before I check out myself. If the answer is that there is no way to find out, thats okay too. Biographies for Alice and Amos are in the works, hoping to solve Alice's mystery and their pre-Texas history before posting.
