Scotland Saints

More of my posts these days are to report on small DNA matches to me who also have GILLESPIE in their family tree. No matter how small the DNA match, I check what I can of the match's family tree to see where the Gillespie name might fit in. Even though I have yet to confirm with genealogical proof that the Gillespie surname is the source of the DNA matches I mention here, these slim matches have nevertheless lead to some unexpected, interesting, and even amazing stories. Here is yet another.

This story starts in 1820 in western New York with a man named Joseph Smith. Smith had a religious vision that lead to the establishment of a new American church in 1830, one called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and known by the public as Mormonism. By 1838, two native Scots living in Ontario, Canada, converted to the new religion, which they then introduced to Scotland on a trip back to visit family. They began preaching in Glasgow in 1840, and one decade later, several thousand Scots had joined the new religion.

Now for the Gillespie matches. The family trees of two small DNA matches to me trace back to Robert Easton (b 1751) and Ann Gillespie (b 1760). This couple apparently lived in New Monkland, Lanark, Scotland, an area 11 miles northeast of Glasgow and part of a municipal burgh called Airdrie. Large beds of coal and ironstone were mined from this area throughout the 19th Century. Here is one description of nearby Coatbridge in the 1840s:

"There is no worse place out of hell than that neighbourhood. At night, the groups of blast furnaces on all sides might be imagined to be blazing volcanoes at most of which smelting is continued on Sundays and weekdays, day and night, without intermission. From the town comes a continual row of heavy machinery: this and the pounding of many steam hammers seemed to make even the very ground vibrate under one's feet. Fire, smoke and soot with the roar and rattle of machinery are its leading characteristics; the flames of its furnaces cast on the midnight sky a glow as if of some vast conflagration. Dense clouds of black smoke roll over it incessantly and impart to all the buildings a peculiarly dingy aspect. A coat of black dust overlies everything."

Robert Easton and Ann Gillespie had a son, Robert Easton, Jr., born in 1796. In 1814, Robert Jr. married Elizabeth Laird, and they had 10 children before Robert Sr. died in 1849. According to the 1841 Census of Scotland, his occupation had been in the coal mines.

Now comes the amazing part, or the beginning of it. On 2 Mar 1850, a ship called Hartley sailed from Liverpool with 109 Latter-Day Saints on board, including Elizabeth Easton and two of her children. On 2 May 1850, the ship arrived in New Orleans where the passengers then traveled up the Mississippi River to St. Louis. There they met other of Elizabeth's children who had departed for America earlier. The family worked in coal mines as they had in Scotland until they had what they needed for the trip west to establish Zion. They traveled on what is now called the Mormon Pioneer Trail, which extended 1300 miles from Nauvoo, IL, to the Salt Lake Valley in Utah.  Some of the Eastons settled in Utah, and others continued to California.  Elizabeth Easton died in Gilroy, Santa Clara, CA in 1860 at the home of her son, George -- over 5000 miles from the coal mines of Monkland, Lanark, Scotland.

So for all my wondering about the religious associations of our Gillespie clan, we have never considered that a faith started in America might have also contributed to Gillespie migration away from Scotland. But maybe converting to Mormonism was more about existing religions of the time giving little help or hope to those living in poverty and despair, while a faraway vision espoused the idea that earnest goodness was enough to recognize simple people as saints. Whatever the true impetus for launching such a remarkable journey, the power of believing in something better had everything to do with finding Gillespie DNA traces among LDS descendants today.

Reflecting on this story gives me pause in our own trying times. With or without theology, what is it that inspires us to endure the worst and believe in the best, to reach beyond ourselves and our circumstances into the unknown? If the only promise of life is that being alive makes a difference, then the ancestors embraced that promise with their own determination. I want to be in that number.