Fifty Years of Payne Journeys to North America,
1872 to 1921
| Introduction
Although my grandfather was born in Chicago in 1892, and I have known for some time of his sojourns in Canada both before and after the Great War, there have been tantalising clues to various other forays that members of the Payne family made away from the the part of the English Midlands which had been their home for over two hundred years. Apart from the few shreds of documentary evidence which have survived in the family papers, the text of an interview conducted by my father with his great-uncle Hallam in 1959 has been an important source of information. One of the difficulties of using such second- and third-hand evidence is in the assessment of its reliability, and finding evidence to support the 'family legends'. It has taken some years, but the discoveries have been accumulating, and the following account is a summary of what has been found to date.
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A letter to Henry from the
civil and mining engineer J.T. Woodhouse in early 1870 refers to an enquiry
by Henry regarding land in Church Gresley which had belonged to the Payne
family until the late 1830s. It is possible that Henry was either
trying to locate surviving family members, or perhaps hoping for an entitlement
to some long-lost inheritance. He also applied for a copy of his
birth certificate in April 1870, from the registrar in Burton-upon-Trent.
Two years later he left for Baltimore, Maryland, on the first of what would
be several journeys by the Payne family seeking their fortunes in North
America ...
