Remembering the Heroes - Part II John (1849-1939) & Maria (1853-1945) Proctor

Earlier this month the totally unexpected discovery of a picture of my great-great paternal grandfather, John Zinn, prompted a post on our immigrant ancestors as family heroes. Although it was not on my immediate agenda, I made a trip to the Hackensack public library looking for the newspaper the picture appeared in and, I was sure, other new information about my Zinn ancestors. Of course, in research little goes as one expects and the trip turned up absolutely nothing. I should have remembered that Hackensack didn't have daily newspapers in the 19th
century and the only weekly papers didn't have photographs at all, much less the one I was looking for.

However subsequent to that I made another discovery, not quite as dramatic or groundbreaking (in my little world), but still important. One of the genealogy websites that I subscribe to had added a number of Trenton newspapers from the 1880's through 1922. This opened up a fertile and very accessible source of research on my maternal side.

My mother was the daughter of Mary Proctor and James W. Winder both of whom were born in England and came to this country as children with their parents in the 19th century. Both families, who I am sure didn't know each other in England, settled in Trenton, New Jersey - a city closely connected to the pottery industries in England. They became relatively prominent residents of New Jersey's capital city so that a search for their names turns up a fair number of articles.

I am gradually working my way through the Proctors, John and Maria (pictured above on their 54th wedding anniversary in 1929) came to the United States in 1881. They made the trip with their three children, all under the age of five, and with Maria about six months pregnant. They had six more children in this country so with a family of nine, one of their names is in the newspapers of the era on a regular basis. John Proctor himself was one of eleven children and, as far as I know, the only one to leave England. The conventional wisdom is that they left England for economic reasons which is probably true although I wonder why they were the only ones to leave. While John and Maria lived in Chesterton in Staffordshire, their families (Proctors and Lingards) have very deep roots in the neighboring village of Audley.

English census data lists John as a carpenter or joiner and a number of his ancestors were wheelwrights. According to one source, a wheelwright was a much more skilled trade than being a carpenter. In any event, John apparently started out as a carpenter in Trenton, but gradually expanded into becoming a general contractor. Starting in the 1903-05 period there are numerous newspaper listings of the building contracts he has been awarded. Once I finish the research I will try to analyze the scope of his work, but it seems like he had a fairly sizable business. I also found that his son John Lingard Proctor apparently played some baseball in that same period, at shortstop - a position that I also have some experience with - it must be in the genes. I was surprised to learn that John himself was pretty active in politics beginning after he had been here only about 10 years.

I still have a lot more to go through here and since John and Maria lived until the 30's and 40's, I hope the site will continue to add more years. Unlike the case of my Zinn ancestors, I have been to both Audley and Chesterton - worshipping in the church where John and Maria were married, walking on the street they lived in and, hopefully, taking a picture of their house. The morning we left Audley in 2000, I tried to put myself in John's position as he loaded his three children, his pregnant wife and their belongings into a wagon on the way to the train on the way to Liverpool and ultimately America. Neither John nor Maria could have had any idea what they were in for, what it would be like and it would it work, and yet they did it - which makes them heroes in my book.