I am very fortunate that one of my cousins, Cindy Cruz, is an ace genealogist who has devoted her time and talents to researching our shared McWilliams line. I have written earlier about my 2nd-great-grandfather, Benjamin Cruiser McWilliams, who left behind a wealth of stories about his service for the Union cause during the Civil War and his efforts to make something of himself afterward.
The McWilliams family were Scots-Irish, and the original McWilliams immigrant, William, hailed from County Armagh and made his way to Pennsylvania sometime before 1750, eventually settling in Northumberland County in northern Appalachia. By the mid-1700s, the best land in William Penn’s colony was already settled by Quaker landowners, whose descendants worked the land themselves or hired tenant farmers, so later immigrants headed for the hills. It was not long before these Scots-Irish began to intermingle and intermarry with German settlers. It is with William’s grandson, also named William, that this story begins.
William married Frances (Fannie) Knauss in 1843 and began raising a family. With their eldest son, Ben, serving in the Union Army, the family moved to Shamokin, Pennsylvania, where William and his sons found work on the railroad and in the coal mines.
In his memoirs, Ben—now twenty-two years old—described his new start after being mustered out of the Army in 1865:
When I arrived at home, Shamokin, where my parents now lived, I wanted a job of work. My father and one brother was then working on the railroad, while my other two brothers were working in the coal breakers. I went on the railroad for a couple of days and that didn’t suit me. I then got to be car loader at the Enterprise Colliery four miles East of Shamokin. Here I got the best job I ever had in my life.
He continued:
Each coal company had their own houses for their employees to live in. My father moved up to Shamokin the Spring of '66 and was made slatepicker boss at the Enterprise colliery. The coal as it came from the mines went through rollers and was broken up and run through screens which assorted it out into different sizes and dropped out into chutes which run down past the boys, “Slatepickers,” who picked out the slate as the coal passed in front of them. We worked ten hours per day, excepting Saturdays when we worked eight. I stayed here until the sixth day of July, 1866, when I started West.
I went first to Belleview, where my uncle and family lived, helped Sam Knauss [Samuel Knauss, 1840–1924] take care of his grain, then his sister Lib Knauss [Elizabeth Ann “Libbie” Knauss Boyer, 1837–1908] went to Michigan to Andy Billmeyer [Andrew Billmeyer III, 1827–1910], who lived at Clinton, both of them my mother’s cousins. I accompanied her from here there. I stayed there a couple of weeks hunting and fishing, then struck out for Missouri the latter part of August.
This story is fascinating on many levels. First, thanks to Cindy’s research, we gain a clear picture of the hard life this family endured. Second, we see Ben at the beginning of what became a lifetime of moving from one opportunity to the next—a journey that took him from Pennsylvania to Iowa to Missouri, where he eventually became a successful farmer. Third, we see the importance of family. In his memoirs, Ben described traveling throughout the East and Midwest to visit relatives who had moved west, and ultimately his own family’s relocation to Missouri. Finding their names on the FamilySearch tree was like finding buried treasure!
Finally, this is a story about the different stages of immigration. Early settlers in these Appalachian mountains came largely from the British Isles and Germany. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new immigrants arrived from Eastern Europe, including Poland and Ukraine. These successive waves of immigration to Pennsylvania are reflected in my own family history—from Quakers, to Scots-Irish and Germans, and later to Polish immigrants who settled in other parts of the Northeast. These are the ordinary laborers and farmers who built our nation.
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