Child Migrants to USA - How did Kerenhappuch Wootton get to USA before 1847?

[Minnesotan]

The Oct 1847 marriage date - I would not give up yet and assume it's bad info because you haven't yet been able to find it on an index.

I had exact same thing for one of my Montcalm County Michigan ancestors. I found  wedding date plus POM town/county on a tree with no source info. I requested the original marriage record from Montcalm County Clerk and confirmed that the unsourced family tree was right.

I would contact the person who posted the marriage date on their tree. Plus I would also request the record from the St. Clair County Clerk because their website says they have marriage records starting with 1839. Here is the printable request form. http://www.stclaircounty.org/offices/clerk/forms/MarriageCertificate.pdf

You can't request marriage record online. You'll have to snail-mail the form and enclose a $15 money order as payment.

St. Clair County Clerk's web page
http://www.stclaircounty.org/offices/clerk/MarriageCertificate.aspx

[ScouseBoy]

Sanitary conditions on the emigrant ships, as well as overcrowding, possibly sea sickness, tended to lead to casualties amongst the passengers.  Is it possible that an adult accompanying the child died in transit?

Secondly,  there was a health check on arrival in the USA.  perhaps the adult had been refused admission and immediately returned to England.

[ScouseBoy]

Have you looked for her on the Ellis Island registers?

[Minnesotan]

ScouseBoy -  If Keren traveled to the U.S. alone then she must have pre-arranged meeting up with a relative OR fiancee after arrival. If not that, then I agree with you that she traveled with other(s).

Possible scenarios

1. Keren immigrated because her mother died in England or because mother and father split up.
 
2. The reason paslwigr hasn't yet found out what happened to sisters Jane and Margaret is because they immigrated with Keren and it takes a lot of time to find women with their married names. Or Jane and Margaret died around the same time mother did from a communicable disease such as typhoid/cholera etc.

[Minnesotan]

Have you looked for her on the Ellis Island registers?

At that time if New York was her port of entry she was processed at Castle Garden. I did a few searches of Castle Garden but didn't come up with anything.

She could have come through Boston, plus a few other eastern ports.

[ScouseBoy]

ScouseBoy -  If Keren traveled to the U.S. alone then she must have pre-arranged meeting up with a relative OR fiancee after arrival. If not that, then I agree with you that she traveled with other(s).

Possible scenarios

1. Keren immigrated because her mother died in England or because mother and father split up.
 
2. The reason paslwigr hasn't yet found out what happened to sisters Jane and Margaret is because they immigrated with Keren and it takes a lot of time to find women with their married names. Or Jane and Margaret died around the same time mother did from a communicable disease such as typhoid/cholera etc.

  What I was suggesting is that her accompanying adult may have been taken ill on the ship crossing and died in transit.
Or, that her accompanying adult  was refused entry to the US in the health checks on the dock side, and returned to England.

[paslwigr]

  Minnesotan - I have contacted both of the members on Public Trees about the 8th October 1847 marriage, but not heard from them yet. But, Rootschatter jorose, guided me to a section of Family Search, that to my shame, I didn't know existed and there I was able to see the actual images of the marriages for Port Huron, St Clair. He had already told me he had found a marriage between a Margaret Wootton and a George Bowman, but no sign of one between a Boyd and a Wootton. To be sure I trawled all of them from early 1840's to 1850, but nothing turned up. One good thing is that the above Margaret could be mine. Another kind Rootschatter had already pointed me in the direction of this Margaret and I checked the Public Tree. She is the right age even to the month of birth in England May 1830, but sadly only lived until 1856. There were married March 1849 in Port Huron. On viewing the images, I saw that there was no requirement for the parents of the couple to be named, so I can only tentatively claim her as 'my' Margaret. Nevertheless I have gained loads of information from everyone, that I didn't know before and am so grateful to everyone who has taken time to give me the information.

[Minnesotan]

scouseboy - Yeah my post was not very clear, sorry. I should have included that I agree with your scenarios and that I was adding additional ones.

http://www.castlegarden.org/searcher.php 

And paslwigr - Our disconnect may have finally hit me. The UK has had a centralized marriage registry for a long time. I just learned that fact last week.  If an 1847 marriage cannot be found in the UK marriage registry, the marriage did not happen in the UK.

But there has never been a central marriage registry for U.S. When you search marriage records on genealogy websites it seems like you're searching a centralized registry but you are not. In the U.S. each state maintains its own marriage registry but very few states had them prior to about 1900. State registries do not include vital records events that occured prior to the date they enforced their state's vital records registry law.

Michigan's marriage registry starts with 1905 marriages. You found Margaret's marriage in a small local 'historical' registry but it was not Port Huron's registry. Keren's original marriage record very likely is at the St. Clair County Clerk's office but it has not been indexed yet.  Their contact info is in a previous post. The reason I had encouraged you to request Keren's original record is because her 1847 record could have a lot more or less information on it than Margaret's even though they were both married in Huron just 5 years apart of so. Recording of details varied widely back then.

Once a state established their central registry, earlier records were deemed 'historical'. Those 'historical' records ended up in hundreds of repositories. That's why familysearch.org, every U.S. library as well as state, county and local historical groups all have their own genealogy finding aids. Here is familysearch.org's finding aid for Michigan. https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Michigan_Genealogy.

Familysearch wiki is a good place to go to first before you begin researching in a new region.

[sallyyorks]

To Sallyyorks,
You are right about the biblical names, even though the Wootton family is baptising, marrying, and burying in the Church of England, many of the names crop up in the area. Kezia, Elijah, Job, Samuel etc. The Wootton men, as far back as I have been researched in Shropshire, mid 18th century, all seem to be lead miners or have jobs connected to the lead mines. Kerenhappuch's father John Wootton left Shropshire after his eldest son was born in 1817, and went to Staffordshire where all the other children were born. After that he went to Hertfordshire, where in 1841 he and his two sons are all described as miners. Both sons were connected to mining for the rest of their lives.

Yes miners could move around quite a bit, but Hertfordshire is not really known for any coal or lead mining , though the family and their neighbours, are listed as miners in Tring on the 1841 census.
In about 1837-41 a new rail line was built there and a large cutting for the London to Birmingham rail route. I am thinking that this is why there are so many "miners" listed.
http://gerald-massey.org.uk/Railway_local/index.htm
Might it be possible that the work then dried up in Tring, after the railway/cutting was finished, and that the whole family then went to America for work. Some settling there, Keren and sisters?, but that the father and sons went back to England some time before 1851