The Northen family blog began in September of 2013 and has covered a lot of territory. At this point there us a pretty good outline of the basic threads of the family back to the point at which they arrived in the United States and the places where I have hit roadblocks seem more or less impassible with the help of a professional genealogist. I know that with so much information it is hard to see how all of the pieces fit together, so what I would like to do is to step back and just take a very basic look at what we know about where my side of the family came from in a relatively short post.
Starting with me, here is the family tree back four generations, i.e. to my great-grandparents. For the sake of convenience, I have highlighted my grandparents who more or less comprise the four main lines of the family tree: Northen, Lewis, Wilkins and Ryman. Though it is reductionist those are the lines that I am going to refer to because I think it might be the most useful and least complicated if grandchildren ask the basic question, where did our family come from?
Northen. The Northen family came over in 1636 when John Northin sailed to Virginia from London on a ship called the Plain Joan. So that branch of the family is English. John landed in York, Virginia, but his on Edmund moved up to Richmond, County Virginia in the 1650’s and there have been Northens there ever since. This is the branch of the family with red hair which is where the rumor that we were Irish must have come in.
Lewis. Lewis is a Welsh name and John Lewis who came to Virginia some time in the 1650’s from Monmouthshire which was in Wales. So that branch of the family is originally Welsh. It is the only branch of the family really related to anyone famous in this country as far as we know. Several family members were in the House of Burgesses (the first government in Virginia) and there are also connections to George Washington’s mother Mary Ball and to Merriweather Lewis of Lewis and Clark fame. They have all lived in the counties that make up what is called the Northern Neck of Virginia.
Wilkins. Though Wilkins is an English last name, we come to a dead end after Ed Wilkins. There seems to be no information. This really should be called the Sitzmann branch of the family, which is German. The first person to the United States was John Joseph Adam Sitzman, known as Adam. He was born in Bayern area of Germany (i.e. Bavaria) before Germany was unified country and came over in 1848. He landed in New York, but then moved on to Wisconsin, where he married and lived for a number of years. Eventually, he ended up in Plymouth County, Iowa where the family established itself. This the real pioneer branch of the family that literally traveled in wagons across the prairie. It is the only branch of the family that was Catholic, but it is where derived the Catholic religion that we were raised in.
Ryman. The first Ryman to come to the United States was Melchior Ryman (also spelled Reimann) who was born in Bern, Switzerland. So the Ryman branch of the family is Swiss. He came to the United States in 1863. He Americanized his name to Michael and moved to Liberty County, New York. He eventually ended up in Brown County, South Dakota. So that is where the South Dakota connection comes in.
That is the broad outline of the family. It is an oversimplification but a good starting point for passing along family information.
Northen History 