new pages

["Spirit One Email" <laurel@spiritone.com>]

Dear cousins,

This link www.clansinclairusa.org/ev_scand.htm  is a new one from the
History index and now gives you the Sinclair connections to Scandinavia as
they come to my attention.   What do you know that could go here?

This is one little trivia link of interest about the "Sinclair Chains"  is
now working. http://www.clansinclairusa.org/clan_fam_dir.htm#CHAINS

Now there is another history link that seeks to answer the question posed
last year "Why did the Sinclairs leave Scotland?"
www.clansinclairusa.org/ev_Diaspora.htm       So a list is developing at
this site with examples for each entry.   People left usually because things
at home were bad and an opportunity for improvement came along.   So to
balance this, I will add at some time just how bad it was at home for the
people without land and no hope for the future.

 It occured to me that these are reasons that a man or a husband and family
would leave but what of single women.
   There are stories of Scandinavian and other nationalities where the women
came as "mail order brides"
   Sometimes marriages were arranged in the mother country and the bride
perhaps unknown to the groom came to be married.
   The French had "the King's Girls"  (that doesn't sound quite right?) who
came as a group under chaparone to Nova Scotia and then married the bachelor
of their choice.
   The Hudson's Bay Company's families hired single English (any Scottish)
teachers for their young daughters.  They usually didn't stay single long.
    My Finnish grandmother was hired out on a farm in the Arctic Circle when
whe was but 11.  Next she was down around Helsinki as probably a servant in
a country ruled by Russia.  She saw opportunity in going to America but had
no idea of her destination here until a woman on the ship convinced her that
there was work in Wisconsin.
    My neighbor, Marguerita, whose great grandparents were from the
Netherlands, grandparents, South African settlers, and parents immigrants to
Chile, returned to the Netherlands where she married and went as a settler
to Indonesia.   The Japanese put her in a concentration camp.  After the war
she learned her husband had deserted her so she collected her 3 children in
the care of a German family, and came to live with her brother in Oregon
rather than return to the Netherlands and the shame of being deserted.

   So you see these are all examples of how women initiated their journey
from other countries.   What stories do you know of reasons Sinclair women
left by themselves?

Laurel
Portland, OR


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