Genealogy Story – My Hill Relatives

My father’s sister, Dorothy (known to me as Aunt Dot), married Robert Clinton Hill (known to me as Uncle Bob), the brother of my father’s best friend in high school, Harold Hill (also known to me as Uncle Harold, even though he was not a blood relative). Since I’ve written extensively about the Russell side of the family tree, I thought I should write about the Hill family as well.

Both my father’s Russell ancestors and my mother’s Pierpont ancestors came to America (specifically to the Massachusetts Bay Colony) around 1630 during the Great Migration which ran from 1620 to 1640 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puritan_migration_to_New_England_(1620%E2%80%9340)). Approximately 20,000 individuals, mostly in family units, came during this time. However, when the English Civil War began in 1641, the rate of migration dropped sharply.

The original Hill family member to come to American, John Hill (1598-1647), had been born in England. He, together with his wife and young son, John B (1624-1688), also migrated around 1630, first to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in Boston, but about 1640 moving up the coast to Dover, New Hampshire. The Hill family would remain in New Hampshire or nearby Maine for the next several generations.

While there were many children in each generation after John B, the line that led down to my Uncle Bob all had names beginning with the letter “J” for the next several generations. In order, these were another John (1665-1718), Joshua (1698-1774), Joseph (1743-1797), and James (1774-1847). Finally, in the 1800s, the line of J’s was broken with the birth of Oliver (1801-1883), then Sylvester (1823-1897). Sylvester also moved away from Maine to S. Weymouth, MA. (See http://www.genealogy.com/ftm/r/a/b/David-E-Rabing/GENE3-0008.html for complete details of each of these individuals.)

Sylvester married Mary Ann Fessenden in 1847 and had four children with her. When she died in 1861, he remarried Aurelia Randall the following year and had six more children with her. One of these was Frank Clinton Hill (1876-1963).

Frank married Georgia Knussman (1880-1930) in 1901. Georgia had been born in Connecticut but her father, George, was a German immigrant, and her mother, Mary, was the daughter of two Irish immigrants. That made Frank and Georgia’s children half-English, one-quarter-German, and one-quarter-Irish. Frank and Georgia initially lived in Wallingford, CT where Georgia’s parents lived, but then moved to Waterbury, CT. They had four children – Frank (b. 1912), Edith (b. 1914), Robert (b. 1916), and Harold (b. 1919).

My Aunt Dot and Uncle Bob met when my father and his sister began living with their grandparents (my great-grandparents) in Waterbury in 1937. The Hill family lived right around the corner and Dot and Bob, besides then being close neighbors, also shared a common birthday, 13 October 1916. They married the following year – 1938. Initially, she just moved the one block and the newlyweds shared the house with Bob’s father (then widowed), his older sister Edith, and his younger brother, Harold. That’s not a typical living arrangement for a newlywed couple, but it seemed to work out for all involved.

Over the next decade, they had two children (Carolyn and Bob) and moved several times. Meanwhile my father continued living with his grandparents, then served in WWII. His grandparents both died while he was in the service, so when he finished his service in 1946, he could no longer return “home”, so he lived for a few months with his sister and her family – which, very conveniently, was just a few blocks away from his new fiancée. My parents married a few months later and moved into a home in Wolcott. Harold married six months later and for the first part of his married life he and my Aunt Gloria lived in an upstairs room in my parent’s house while their residence was being completed at the other end of town. Harold and Gloria had three children (Bruce, Debbie, and Craig). In 1952, Dot and Bob also moved to Wolcott into a new home on Laurel Lane. With all three families in the same town, we were all pretty close growing up and I spent a lot of time with all my Hill cousins.

The close physical ties of being in the same town did not last forever, but the family ties remained and we all still met when we could. Aunt Dot and Uncle Bob moved to Florida when he retired, but our house in PA was a stop each year on their annual visit back to CT where they stayed with my parents for a few weeks. Uncle Harold divorced Aunt Gloria in 1960 and he eventually remarried and moved to Southern CA. That whole generation has now passed on. Also, all three of my Hill male cousins have died at younger ages than I am now, the most recent being my cousin Craig who died just last year due to the effects of his exposure to Agent Orange while serving in the military in Vietnam. But I still remain in touch with my cousin Carolyn via email and with her daughter (my cousin once removed) Jennifer, my “cousin” Debbie, and Craig’s wife Paula on Facebook. Family is still family!