About the 'East Jersey Bound' research
Origins
The inspiration for the ‘East Jersey Bound’ project came from many directions.
On returning to Scotland in 2015, I was determined to delve into Scottish history in ways that hadn’t been possible for me before. I had some grounding in my first degree in Economics and Economic History and wanted to build on my father’s work on our family tree. The two interests played off one another.
My genealogical research kindled interest in specific aspects of Scottish social, economic and political history, not least in trying to understand more about the Covenanter period. One substantial part of my family lived through the persecutions in Ayrshire and Galloway. I became fascinated by the story of the Sweet Singers, on the fringes of the later Covenanters, who were a thorn in the flesh of the authorities in the early 1680s. This led me to the work of Mark Jardine and Douglas Somerset.
During the COVID years I participated in an excellent course, War, Reformation and Union with the University of Glasgow which covered Scottish history between 1500 and 1715.
DNA as the door to the diaspora
An Ancestry.com DNA test and its associated list of DNA matches brought home to me the sheer scale of the Scots diaspora. So many DNA matches especially in North America… Such matches only take you so far: the further back the possible connection in people’s trees, the less likely these can be verified. But a surprising number piqued my interest where they traced their roots to the Scots colonial venture to New Jersey in the 1680s. Some connected with Sweet Singers who were transported. I thus stumbled on a piece of Scottish history which deserves to be better known, something of a successful counterpoint to the disaster that was Darien.
Many questions filled my mind, such as:
- What was the story behind this venture?
- Who were the emigrants and how were they connected?
- Why did they leave?
- What became of them?
- How far can you get in sourcing records for them?
My first steps were to find and digest relevant literature, notably Ned Landsman’s Scotland and its First American Colony (1985) and earlier books by Whitehead and Pomfret on East Jersey history. Meanwhile I began to develop a database of the emigrants using genealogical software.
Andrew Lind and Laura Doak, my tutors on the University of Glasgow course, persuaded me to turn the subjects of my research into the Sweet Singers and into East Jersey to apply for an MPhil research degree with the University of Glasgow. This seemed like an excellent opportunity to delve further and to create a resource that other researchers could find useful. I have since graduated and my dissertation can be read or downloaded here.
Click on the button below for information on the process of compiling the database and on its contents.
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Scots and East Jersey
The Sweet Singers
Mark Jardine, ‘The Smoke and Utter Ruin of Edinburgh’: The Sweet Singers Await the Apocalypse in the Pentland Hills’, Jardine’s Book of Martyrs, 2011
Somerset, Douglas W. B., ‘Walter Ker and the “Sweet Singers”’, Scottish Reformation Society Historical Journal, 2 (2012), pp. 85–108
Derrick Johnstone, ‘The Sweet Singers: “To See the Smoke and Utter Ruin of the Sinful Bloody City Edinburgh”’, Book of the Old Edinburgh Club, New Series, 20 (2024), pp. 35–50.
My acknowledgements
I have benefitted from the guidance of my University of Glasgow supervisors, Karin Bowie and Julia McClure, especially Karin’s perceptive and thorough feedback and Julia’s stimulating, global history perspective.
Joseph Wagner kindly shared his unpublished St Andrews University PhD dissertation on Scottish Colonisation Before Darien, and led the way on clarifying the ships involved in the East Jersey venture.
Many others have offered leads and steers on relevant aspects of Scottish and Colonial American history including Mikki Brock, Bob Craig, Craig Gallagher, Patrick Hogue, Christopher Langley, Rebecca Mason, David Parrish and Scott Spurlock. It was a pleasure to share knowledge with Linda Fryer about the parallel ventures of the Carolina Company and East Jersey, looking at who were involved as investors. Jacqueline Crane kindly accessed hard-to-find material in the British Library for me.
I must give special thanks to National Records of Scotland who kindly gave me credits on Scotland’s People for online access to Old Parish Register and testamentary records. These were essential in establishing family connections and business networks, and helped to reveal previously unknown connections between some of the East Jersey protagonists. My research on East Jersey was greatly facilitated by the recent project of the New Jersey State Archives to digitise early land records.
Several mentioned above have provided valuable feedback on this website during its development, to whom I should also add Jerry Ozaniec, Tim Peacock, Elaine Petrie, Richard Torrance and Maggie Wilson.
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References
Craig Gallagher, ‘“Them That Are Dispersed Abroad”: The Covenanters and Their Legacy in North America, 1650–1776’, The Scottish Historical Review, 99.Supplement (2020), pp. 454–72, doi:10.3366/shr.2020.0491