In summary:
- Birth of a son, Thomas Shannon, in London, 1730, to Alexander Shannon, grocer, and Ann Ansell, who is christened in an Anglican church.
- A Thomas Shannon establishes a family in colonial North America beginning in the mid-1750s, marrying and christening children in an Anglican church in Delaware, with later generations marrying into Anglican, English families. Possibly the same Thomas who migrates to Georgia in 1773.
- The name Alexander as a middle name is recorded in several descendent family lines.
- Genetic testing of the paternal line indicates a strong association with the population in and around London, England corresponding to a well-documented record of intermarriage with families from that same region.
I spent many long years looking for evidence of our lineage in Northern Ireland without success. However, we do find earlier generations of Shannons living in London as well-placed merchants apparently integrated comfortably into the local society and economy who do seem to match what we know of our immigrant ancestor, Thomas.
A man named Daniel Shannon worked as a silk dyer in London in the early 18th century. He was married in 1697 to Margaret Brown and had two sons, John and Thomas, both christened in a local Anglican church (Church of England).
A generation later, a grocer named Alexander Shannon married to Ann Ansell had two sons, Thomas and John also christened in a local Anglican church. Thomas was christened in 1730. These families conform to exactly the basic social context we find Thomas in during his lifetime in North America other than the obvious change from very urban to very rural.
Silk dyers and grocers were not trivial positions in the era from late 17th to early 18th century. This was the very beginning of modern consumerism, at the very epicenter of the British Empire in its early expansion period. These would have been solidly middle class professions, which would indicate a family background of some degree of wealth. At that time individuals had to buy their way into these professions, and that required some sort of investment on the part of a family.
The names Daniel and Alexander are probably middle names. Christian names in English tradition at the time were usually just the first name, but an unofficial middle name, reflecting some family association of some kind, could also be used by someone for various reasons. If your Christian (first) name was John and you lived in a more densely populated area, you might go by a middle name, Alexander say, to avoid confusion in the local records.
The name Daniel doesn’t appear in the early generations of our family in North America, but the name Alexander does appear in later generations usually as a middle name. There is a John Alexander Shannon, as well as a daughter named Alexandria in the Tippah County branches and a William Alexander Shannon among Aaron (1796-1865) Shannon’s children. One of the other Shannon branches related to ours by YDNA also has an Alexander.
Proving any of this beyond a reasonable doubt will probably remain impossible. But the available evidence provides a compelling argument that this is the family our Thomas was from. Church affiliation is significant because it indicates a very different cultural association from most Scots Irish elsewhere. In both places, we have a Shannon family with common names and age ranges operating within the same atypical social context. Thomas was born into an English mercantile social context and his descendants remained connected to that population for generations as they marched across the Southern frontier.
Daniel Shannon left a record of filing for bankruptcy. Nothing more has been found on him so far. There is nothing that connects him to Alexander other than the commonality of names from christenings – John, Thomas and then Thomas, John. These are common names but appear in precisely the pattern we would expect of a family relationship. Daniel’s son John might have been ‘John Alexander’ and uses his middle name as an adult in business to avoid being confused with other John Shannons around.
Since London was the hub of the growing British Empire, it was also the beating heart of international mercantilism. Alexander Shannon was a grocer at the very docks on the Thames river where most of this activity was concentrated. This must have been a quite lucrative location, the very delivery room for the birth of modern commercialism.
At some point, however, Alexander made an investment which did not work out as he planned and he was left with a debt he could not repay. His name is mentioned in the paper of record in relation to debtors prison. What happened afterwards is not known. The name Alexander Shannon does not appear again in that area afterwards. But it isn’t difficult to imagine any number of subsequent scenarios that might have resulted in his son, Thomas, ending up in Delaware, then on to the Virginia colonial frontier and finally into Georgia.
The conditions leading to Thomas’ migration to North America could have been an indenture, or it could have been as an agent for some larger mercantile association of some kind. By whatever process, he ends up as a planter at a location in Georgia with easy access to international navigation, on the Savannah river near a fortified location.
Was Thomas on the production end of a textile operation? Supplying indigo or cotton to a market operation would explain an investment in his unique migratory pattern. How much about agriculture in a sub-tropical frontier region could a man such as Thomas have known about? He is obviously working from knowledge acquired from contacts, not from his own personal experience. Thomas almost certainly was a member of a wide network of interrelated people. Even indentured servants could have wealthy contacts they could take advantage of once their indenture had been served.
Frankly, I don’t believe most of the people who pushed out to such frontiers were doing so entirely of their own accord. I think nearly all of the first generation of settlers on colonial frontiers had investors and assistance from a system organized to feed produce into a growing global economy. They were essentially paid to go somewhere and once there they were met by someone who taught them the basics of growing the new crops they were expected to produce. No sane person approaching middle age with a large family would have invested their entire fortune into such a dangerous situation in an entirely alien and foreign part of the world on wild eyed speculation. There was clearly some kind of extensive well-funded plan behind all of it. Wealthy people wanted the frontier developed and were applying great economic pressure on the lower classes to achieve that goal for them.
Historic Analysis:
Documentation for the family of Thomas Shannon (1730-1794) line in the American South indicates a much higher level of integration into an English cultural context than a Scots-Irish one, conforming to the genetic data discussed above. The marriage records we have are all to families of Southern colonial English descent – Carey (not proven), Perkins, Cockerham, Chambers, Rowell, Baugh, are all well documented back to early colonial settlement in Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas.
Genetics indicate a concentration of ancestry for this lineage around the region of London, England.
The question is when did this pattern begin? It seems odd that a man with a common Scots family background would immigrate to the colonies and immediately become more associated with English colonists and their cultural community than with the many Scots-Irish communities around. When did our Shannon lineage become so English centric culturally?
An understanding of the historic context such families were immersed in is important. There was a large movement of population from the Scottish Lowlands into Northern Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries and then on into North American in the 18th century, along with all the associated religious and political strife involved. This was the historic origins of the well documented protestant Scots-Irish migration that played such an important role in subsequent American history.
However, a somewhat smaller migration of members of the same Scots population southward into England, particular London, occurred at about the same time but went largely ignored historically. Many of these people went into military, legal or clerical, careers. Most, however, were members of the mercantile class taking advantage of the sudden huge influx of global commodities pouring into Britain and Europe as world trade began expanding exponentially following in the wake of the age of discovery and early colonial trade. This was generally the period when the Scottish Stewart kings assumed the English throne, leading to civil wars and revolutions and finally the act of union bringing Scotland and England together under a common ruling authority in 1707.
Those who found occupations as various kinds of merchants during this time were typically the younger sons of gentry class families. The economy did not immediately allow for the upward mobility of the lower classes into a middle class lifestyle. That was still a few generations away. But it did allow for increased opportunities for the younger members of landed families with the resources to take advantage of it.
Most occupations began with apprenticeships which had to be paid for. Indentured servitude was also a way to become employed in some mercantile trade, but typically at a lower, working, level. Some occupations required more wealth to buy into than others. So, the kind of merchant occupation someone participated in reflected where they were financially among the landed gentry class.
Typically, older sons inherited their father’s estates, and younger sons inherited the financial means of beginning a professional career in some field. These were the ‘middling sort’ who could acquire great wealth if successful. Frequently, those who inherited land would marry into successful mercantile lines in order to save their floundering estates. As the colonial system developed, there were ever more people who would sell their ancient estates in Great Britain in order to migrate across the Atlantic and become invested in the rapidly growing new world.
Members of each merchant order were always prepared to assist those who they considered members of their class to succeed in whatever occupation they aspired to. Being a member of a particular class order certainly did convey a high degree of privilege and access which others were simply not allowed.
Most of those participating in such ventures worked through extensive family connections to manage the risks involved. Established mercantile families would employ family members, usually young men, to work as agents sometimes far afield in the colonies to ensure the fulfillment of agreed upon consignments or to assist in the production of the required commodities involved. Contacts in other occupations could provide valuable intelligence about the likely profitability of a particular venture or give early information of a potential opportunity.
Of course, there was still the very real possibility of failure with consequences that could be quite dire. There were few well developed high level economic controls. Very few economic theories even existed early on. Economic regulation of any kind was virtually unheard of. These economies tended to be self-regulating, bouncing unpredictably through cycles of boom and bust. Debt drove the entire process, borrowing capital and investing it in a risky venture was about the only path to success for most. Buying an interest in a future shipment of foreign goods could be quite expensive, but could pay off exponentially if successful. It could also land you in debtors prison otherwise. And those prisons were kept quite full of those who had wagered poorly.
Debtors prison was essentially a system of legal hostage taking. Someone who owed money could be held in prison until someone else paid off the debt by whatever means possible. These prisons became so crowded that occasionally parliament would have to step in and essentially issue pardons for those who might have the ability to work the debt off. Often, this was the source of many indentured servants. Indentured servants were not universally from poor or destitute backgrounds. Many had valuable skills and education that others could use for their own gain and were happy to pay up front the cost of freeing them from their debtors. The link from merchant to debtors prison to indentured servant was quite common.
Everything we know about the early generations of our family seems to suggest just such a mercantile background. Farming along the Savannah river in Georgia seems an odd decision to make for someone migrating through Virginia from an urban environment such as central London. Establishing a large and growing family on the frontier was not cheap, it required what would have been an enormous capital investment at the time. It was also quite dangerous, plunging into a region with no developed infrastructure, no legal institutions, no health care, no education, with every sort of directed violence and workplace accident ever present.
Bad Genealogy Rant: Thomas Shannon (1730-1794) and descendants. 