Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Would the Real Mourning Winn Please . . . ?

Mourning Winn, the name of both women and men that may or may not be ancestors in our family tree, has perplexed me for some time now.

I had her descended from Edmund Bacon, the notable English nobleman who migrated to the New World in the 17th Century. If the Bacon theory held, it would have taken our tree well into the Middle Ages. Mr. Bacon even has pictures! But this lead turned out to be a false one!

Along comes PJ Sisseck, who I am convinced is our distant blood cousin, also descended from Mourning Winn. Here's what I know . . .

* There is a Mourning Winn in our ancestry. And she is a woman.

* There also are other Mourning Winns, that have found their way into trees that could feasibly link to ours: One born in 1763, also a woman, with a line that goes to Mr. Bacon. But there are male Mourning Winns, and I have dismissed them, and other women, from any of my theories.

* Mourning Winn married a man named either James Glenn, or James Gunn. This lack of clarity also adds to the confusion. We are going with the James Glenn theory.

PJ has done ample research into Mourning Winn. She knows the true info from the false. I consider her our resident Mourning Winn expert. As we progress through this research, we come into contact with many, many others, with lines tracing to someone named Mourning Winn. These two are potential cousins, and my study so far indicates that all of these people represent many different lines processing from Mourning Winn, our Mourning Winn.

This latest, most reliable Mourning Winn theory, courtesy of cousin PJ, makes her the end of the line for us. That is, we know very little about her parents. She was born in Virginia in 1668. Her mother's name was, likely, Catherine. We do not know about her father. Settlers of Accomack County, Virginia, we easily conclude that her family were Scotch immigrants, like so many others in that region - like Mourning's eventual husband, Mr. Glenn, who was himself born in Scotland.

The imagination takes off. Did her father die on the voyage to the New World? Did he die in Scotland, thus prompting Catherine to carry Mourning and other possible siblings to a new life? Was she half native American? Was Catherine Native American?

If Scottish, was Mourning from Stirlingshire, the homeland of the Glenns?

And isn't the name itself, "Mourning Winn," just a little bit tantalizing?

She died in 1750, in Virginia. She and James had four children of which we are aware: James, David, Mourning and Tyree. For most readers of this blog, descendants of Elias Martin, the ancestral line goes as follows:

Mourning Winn, 1668-1750, mother of,
Mourning Glenn, 1702-1775, mother of,
Christopher Harris, 1725-1794, father of,
Sarah Harris, 1747-1796, mother of,
Obediah Martin, 1770-1822, father of,
Elias Martin . . .

. . . and the rest is history.