The Migration Spine
A simplified view of the descent, summary nodes for the major colonial lines, color-coded by era, read top to bottom from the immigrant generation to the living generation.
The line fans into New England
Maternal. Perry / Swift
Paternal. Long / Coogan
The lines converge
The Waypoints
Plymouth, Massachusetts
Four Mayflower Passengers
Degory Priest, Richard Warren, Francis Cooke, and George Soule arrive, the Pilgrim crossing.
Read more →Salem, Massachusetts Bay
Arrives into Roger Williams's Salem dissenting circle, the Puritan crossing.
Read more →Providence & Warwick, Rhode Island
Banished from Massachusetts Bay for religious dissent; becomes one of the thirteen founders of Providence and a founder of Warwick.
Read more →Nantucket Island
Purchases the island for thirty pounds and two beaver hats. The Coffin, Folger, and Macy lines root on Nantucket.
Read more →Falmouth · Fall River
The New England lines
The maternal lines spread across Cape Cod and the South Coast. Swift, Winter, Peckham, Harrison, Perry.
Read more →Fall River, Massachusetts · Warwick, Rhode Island
Long · Coogan · Sullivan · Manion
The Famine crossing. Irish families, dispossessed two centuries earlier in the Cromwellian confiscations, cross to New England: the Longs and Sullivans to Fall River, the Coogans and Manions to the print works and mills of Warwick, Rhode Island. The paternal Long line begins in America.
Read more →Massachusetts
Carol Perry & John Patrick Long
The convergence, the maternal Coffin-Folger line meets the paternal Long-Coogan Irish line. John, Perry, and Patrick Long follow.
Read more →The Three Crossings
Three times the family crossed water that changed everything. Each crossing began a line that survives in the living generation.
The Pilgrim Crossing. 1620
Four documented Mayflower passengers stand in the family tree. Degory Priest, Richard Warren, Francis Cooke, and George Soule, who stepped ashore at Plymouth into a colony of a hundred souls.
The Puritan Crossing. 1635-1640
Stukely Westcott sailed to Salem in 1635 into Roger Williams's dissenting circle; banished in 1638, he became a founder of Providence and Warwick.
The Famine Crossing. 1850s
Two centuries later the Long and Coogan families crossed from Ireland as famine refugees, their lands long since lost in the Cromwellian confiscations. The Longs settled in Fall River, where the census found Thomas Long a teamster in 1900, 1910 and 1920; the Coogans and Manions worked in the print works and mills of Warwick and West Warwick, Rhode Island, and came to Fall River in the 1930s. The paternal line begins in America.
Notable Stops Along the Way
The spine above runs from the founding generation to Fall River and Fairhaven, but the route passes a great deal of documented ground that deserves its own telling, the medieval Coffins of Alwington Manor, Portledge; the Nantucket whaling era that lit the world; the family’s service across the Revolutionary War battlefields; the Winter-Swift homestead at the New Bedford convergence; and the notable cousins along the American arc, Benjamin Franklin and Lucretia Coffin Mott.
The Convergence
For generations the two lines ran in parallel and never met. The maternal line carried the Puritan and New England inheritance. Stukely Westcott, the founders of Nantucket, and the Cape Cod Perrys and Swifts. The paternal line was Irish and Catholic, the Longs and Coogans: Sullivans and Manions: who reached Fall River on the famine ships of the 1850s.
They converged in the marriage of Carol Perry and John Patrick Long. Their three sons, John, Perry, and Patrick Long, are the point where four centuries of New World migration meet two centuries of Irish dispossession: one family carrying both the Puritan and Pilgrim founders of New England and the refugees of the famine.