Cornish Genealogy and A Diaspora Profile: The Thomas Phillips Allen Family — Perranzabuloe to Ishpeming — From Cornish to Yupper.
Many of my ancestors were a part of the Great Cornish Diaspora. While each left Cornwall for their individual reasons, it is interesting to note that not all followed in each others’ footsteps, but rather set out for a wide ranging set of locations across the United States and, at times, Canada.
The following is one example.
Thomas Phillips Allen was born 17 September, 1865 in Perranzabuloe, Cornwall to Mary Phillipps and Thomas Allen. Thomas Phillips Allen was one of seven children and the youngest son.
Thomas became a tin miner and in 1894 married the first of his three wives, Elizabeth Ann Wicks, in Redruth. In 1905 Thomas left his wife and young son, Jacob, and immigrated to Kofa, Yuma County, in the Arizona Territory. Now a ‘ghost town’, Kofa, an acronym for King of Arizona, was an early gold rush town that was home to the richest single gold mine in the American Southwest. Stories of those riches may well have reached St. Teath Parish and been what enticed Thomas to emigrate.
The mines in Kofa played out by 1910 and lo and behold in the 1910 United States Census, Thomas had moved all the way from the played out gold mine of Arizona to the copper and iron mines located in Negaunee, Marquette County, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In 1914, Thomas married a Cornish girl, Bessie Trebilcock, in Negaunee, but Bessie dies less than a year after their marriage. Then in 1917, Thomas married another Cornish girl, Elizabeth Jane (nee Tomms) Southey from Redruth.
Thomas Phillips Allen’s marriage certificate.
In the ensuing few years, Thomas’ nephew, William H. Huddy, of Probus, and his wife, Lillian Barron of Truro would follow their uncle to the mines of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan as would his nephew Clifton Huddy of Perranzabule, and his son, Jacob Allen, from his first marriage, who had been living in Illogan.
Thomas and Elizabeth had a son, Lloyd, and a daughter, Lucille. One of their four grandsons would be Paul Dean Urquhart. On May 28, 1971 Paul, a helicopter pilot, would be shot down during his second tour of duty in Vietnam in the sky above Thua Thien Province, Vietnam. To this day Paul remains MIA/KIA (missing in action/killed in action) and his remains have never been recovered.
My cousin’s name from The Wall.
Keeping Cornish: I made many wonderful and valued discoveries while I was researching the Allen and Huddy families and their lives in Upper Peninsula towns of Negaunee, Marquette, Ishpeming, Palmer, and Iron Mountain.
One of our typical pasty parties!
However, as much as I enjoyed finding the documentation and history surrounding these ancestors and meeting ‘new’ cousins, the best was that I happened upon Lawry’s Pasty Shop. Located in Ishpeming and Marquette, Michigan and with deep Cornish roots of their own, they make a pasty that is the closest to my Nana’s that I have ever found! Plus they pack them fresh and send them to me through the post!
