My boyfriend is related to Orville Wright and would like to know where the family originated from. Before they lived in America. He was told that he is Irish but wants to know for sure. Any help would be appreciated. You can contact me at sashawolfwalker2000@yahoo.com Thank you.

Ruth

Which Orville Wright. If you mean Orville and Wilbur of airplain fame. They are of English descent and related to Sir John Wright of Kelvedon Hall, South Weald, Essex, England. For other info contact me at geraldhayes767@hotmail.com

Orville and Wilbur Wright family come from England. The predescending relatives were of course Ohio, Viginia, PA, NY, MA and England. Have a cousin that has the family tree for her side and the Wright's are part of her tree. Wilb ur married a Koehner and they Wright's and Janney's founded Waterford, Loudoun County in VA. Koehner's are from Loudoun County as well but they married in Ohio

Hate to tell you Coach, but your cousin has got some things mixed up about Wilbur and Orville Wright in the tree that you received.

Wilbur and Orville Wright of Dayton, the so-called Wright Brothers of Flying fame, never married and, therefore, both died without issue. Two older brothers Reuchlin and Lorin both married and have living descendants today. Their sister, Katherine, married so late in life that she never had issue either. Their Mother's family, the Koehners, were indeed from Virginia, but the Wright men were from Ohio. Their father, Bishop Milton Wright spent some time in Indiana before bringing the family back to Ohio to live in Dayton, but his father had been born in VT and raised in Ohio and before that the family had been from Vermont and Massachusetts (Northampton, MA), not PA, VA or NY.

Their immigrant father was Deacon Samuel Wright of Springfield and Northampton, MA. [(1606 - 1665) a founding father of both towns]. Dea. Samuel Wright, his father, John Wright, Esq. [(1569 - 1644), Clerk of the House of Commons (1613 -1639)] and Grandfather, Lord John Wright of Wrightsbridge (1544 - 1624) were all baptized at St. Peter's Church in South Weald parish, Co. Essex, England and were descendants of John Wright, (ab.1488 - 1551) Lord of the Manor of Kelvedon Hall, in Kelvedon Hatch, Co. Essex, England. These Wrights were not from Virginia or Pennsylvania and never spent time in NY except to travel through it to get from VT to Ohio.

Hope that helps clarify things a bit. I can point you to many references for these statements if you wish to have them to provide to your cousin. They are too numerous to list in an e-mail like this one.
Mike Wright

I think you are correct about Wilbur and Orville not being married but do not know for sure. Mrs. Wright-Nee Koehner was the mother of Wilbur and Orville and did not marry her sons;)

Has the descendancy of Deacon Samuel Wright been confirmed as John Wright, Lord John Wright and John Wright of Kelvedon Hall?
I have read of numerous efforts to determine and verify Deacon Samuel's ancestral line, but it has always been noted as unverified in the past.
John

That is what I was told as well and that my branch of the Wright's goes back to Sir John Wright, father of Sir Thomas Wright. This also goes back to the Wryte's of Normandy. 3 brothers were part of the kings army and were awarded lands in different parts of the UK. They were all related and each had descendants that went to the USA. Nicholas Wright and Elizabeth Wright seem to be very poular names.

John,

In my mind the answer is YES and NO. Yes I think we have proven it, but NO we did not prove it with documentation, but rather with a combination of circumstantial documentation and Y-DNA evidence. Let me explain what our thinking is to-date.

There still are not three pieces of solid documentation of a connection between Deacon Samuel Wright and John Wright Esq., Clerk of the House of Commons from 1613 - 1639. There are three circumstantial pieces of documentation that we are relying on for support of the proposed connection. The most solid of which is a baptismal record of "Samuel son of Mr. Wright" at St. Peter's church dated June 29 or 30 1606(the Roman numerals XIX or XXX could be interpreted to be either number, even in the original document). The reference to "Mr. Wright" instead of "John Wright of the Bridge" distinguishes the barrister, John Wright, Esq. (1569 - 1644) from his father, "John Wright of the Bridge" or "of Wrightsbridge" (1544 - 1624) well enough in these parish records that it is certain John Wright, Esq.'s third son was named Samuel. His first son was John, who followed him into the Law, and the second was Nathaniel, whom some, including myself, believe is the Nathaniel Wright mentioned in an undated Charles I MSS as having given oath in behalf of his brother, Samuel, for travel abroad.

The third corroborating documentation evidence to this baptismal and Kings MSS is an entry in the Cambridge University Register noting the 1624 matriculation into Emmanuel College of one "Samuel Wright, of Essex - possibly s. of John Wright, Esq."

The circumstantial parts of all this include the fact that we have found documentation showing that Nathaniel and Lydia (nee James) Wright's eldest son, Samuel, (b. 1614) never left England and that John Wright, Esq. also matriculated the second class of Emmanuel College in 1583, but instead of following his University training into the Puritan ministry, for which purpose Emmanuel College had been chartered in 1581, he is documented to have got himself admitted to Gray's Inn in 1586 to begin the study of the law. The Inns of Court were, in those days, both finishing schools for young noblemen and sons of country gentlemen as well as the top tier training centers for the study of the Law. Apparently John Wright took his law studies seriously enough to become a lawyer and later called to the Bar as a barrister and Justice of the Peace before attaining the post of Clerk of the House of Commons in 1612 by the favor of James I (who paid his salary.)

On the other hand, it would seem Samuel did take his Emmanuel College Puritan ministry training seriously and, if John Wright, Esq was his father, likely came into some disfavor with his father because John Wright, Esq. was no zealot in religious matters, and had little political room for a family member who was a zealot. In fact as Clerk of the House of Commons John Wright walked a very thin line for a very long time between the House's predomenently Puritan membership and the interests of his employers, Kings James I and Charles I. All this required him to pay lip service to the Anglican Church, while affecting tolerance of the Catholic Church and avoiding being too openly tied to Protestant causes, whenever it suited his quest to fulfill his secular ambitions. Those ambitions depended nearly totally on the favor of King and Court.

Given the kind of pragmatic man-of-the-world his father was and the religious idealist Samuel was, I can see a substantial motivation for Samuel to take his family and emigrate to New England. There would have been the same real religious/moral conflicts going on within his family as were going on in early Stuart England at large. This was particularly true during the reign of Charles I, with whom his father, John Wright, Esq., seems to have had enough courtly favor to have requested and promptly recieved a letter from Charles I to the effect of commanding that the Benchers of Gray's Inn (its governing body) allow John Wright his place as a Bencher, even though he had never fulfilled the required "readings" for entry to the senior levels of Inn governance. John Wright's only reason for wanting to become a Bencher was so that he had the power to more effectively look after the interests of his son, John Wright, Jr., who had just entered the Inn as a student. Nepotism and influence peddling at it's best!

To the Samuel Wright we see operating in Springfield and Northampton, MA with such a high moral compass, such coziness of his father with the Catholic loving Charles I and the wheeling and dealing with "the scones of Satan" would have been a nearly intolerable insult to his Puritan religious zeal. Quite enough, I think, to have driven him away from his family and across the seas to get away from such total corruption.

Be that as it might, the real proof of the ancestry of Dea. Samuel Wright comes from the degree of match between the Y-DNA of descendants of Thomas Wright of Wethersfield, CT and descendants of Deacon Samuel Wright of Sprinfield and Northampton. They are both members of the very small haplogroup of E1b1b1a2 with a +1 12 marker match that seems quite characteristic as a means of separating their descendants from each other and from all other Wright Y-DNA lines. The ancestry of Thomas Wright of Wethersfield back to at least John Wright of Kelvedon Hall (ca 1488 - 1551) is well documented. That Thomas and Samuel were third cousins is consistent with the type of mutation pattern seen in the 67 Y-DNA marker comparisons of their proven descendants. Ergo, they are both Kelvedon Hatch Wright descendants.

So, combining the circumstantial documentation evidence with the DNA evidence, we seem to have at last arrived at an overwhelming body of evidence that points nearly irresistablly to John and Martha (nee Castell) Wright as the parents of Deacon Samuel Wright.

Now, there are still other possibilities, such as a descendant of John Wright the Younger. But, as with Nathaniel Wright's son, Samuel (who was John Wright, Esq's nephew), the birth date is not a good fit for having been the Deacon and we know far too little about this son's life to form a decent counter-proposal favoring him.

Despite the DNA evidence in hand, we continue working on the documentation angle. For instance, we are still looking for what we now have come to believe is a long lost parish record book in a county quite outside Essex where we believe Samuel and Margaret Wright lived prior to emigrating to New England. We had hoped to find the parish record of their marriage and the birth of some of their children in that register.

If the register has not been destroyed over the centuries, it is probably in private hands and they may not even know what they have or have reasons for not wanting it to be found. I am about at the point of calling it quits in looking for this register among the private sector after 5 years of off-and-on efforts. Finding such records would be the final proof we would need to say we have this proven by documentation, quite aside from the DNA evidence.

Someday I am going to get around to finishing and publishing the book on all this parentage research that I have been working on for 12 years. It will, I hope, be better referenced (with both positive and negative references) than anything heretofore published, enabling future generations of genealogists to quickly come up to speed on this family group from original documents without spending years tracking down all the sources.

This is the best we have so far. Hope what I have given out answers your question in an adequate fashion. If you wish to take me to task on any of it, please feel free. I have enough additional data on all this to drive even the most entheusiastic among us into a complete stupor.

TaTa,
Mike Wright

Fantastic efforts and the logical speculations from the religious and professional choices some of the characters made would make sense to many. The Wright's in Kelvedon Thatch/Hatch even had a church built on their property. Sir John Wright and Sir Thomas Wright lived there and I believe that somewhere not far down the line two of the sons married the Beaupre sisters. I do not have the tree as I lost it when my computer crashed but it was pretty neat stuff. Not a DNA tract that some have concluded but interesting stories just the same and it all leads to the fun speculations that no matter what the name is the truth can be stranger than fiction.

Coach,

Actually the St. Nicholas Church on the estate of Kelvedon Hall predated the Wright Manor building by at least three centuries. Before the estate came into the possession of the Wrights, it belonged to Waltham Abbey and was a monastic estate where a chapel was built of stone by the monks on the site of an existing wooden Anglo-Saxon house of worship that had been dedicated to St. Nicholas. Next to it, they built a wooden hall for their living quarters. The Abbey held the property for two and a half centuries until the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII in 1538. In that same year John Wright (ca. 1488 - 1551) bought the tenancy of the former monastery estate from Henry VIII's Lord of the Ongar Hundred, Sir Richard Rich, for 493 pounds and change. He greatly expanded the living quarters that stood next to the Chapel and called it Kelvedon Hall. In that place he had four sons and three daughters, John the Elder, Robert, Myddle John, John the Younger, Margaret, Ann and Elizabeth. So far as we can determine, none of the descendants of John the Elder, in whose family the estate remained for the next 400 years, ever left England. Robert Wright is the ancestor of Thomas Wright of Wethersfield, CT. Myddle John Wright is the ancestor of Deacon Samuel Wright of Springfield, MA. We know of no descendants of John the Younger going to America either.

The present Kelvedon Hall manor home dates to the middle of the 18th century when the the wooden Hall was replaced by a greatly expanded one built of brick. The Chapel was incorporated into the new building and rebuilt, but by the middle of the next century it had been replaced as the village place of worship by a newly built church building on the main road in Kelvedon Hatch and thereafter the Estate Church fell into disuse, slowly deteriorating to its present sad condition. In 1922 the last Wright heir of the estate sold the property to a girl's school which operated for a time using the Hall as a dormatory, but not the chapel. After some unfortunate deaths at the school, the estate once again reverted to private ownership and is maintained today as a private residence on nearly all of the original 460 acres of land that constituted the Estate in 1228 when it was granted to Waltham Abbey.

And that, in a nutshell, is the story of the Kelvedon Hall Chapel, formerly known as St. Nicholas Church.

As for marriage into the Beaupre family, I have no knowledge of that and I am unaware of any Sir John and Sir Thomas Wrights ever living at the estate of Kelvedon Hall. There is no evidence that Henry VIII ever knighted John Wright (1488 - 1551), though it appears that he was granted a crest and arms, which were confirmed, with variation, to the grandson of Myddle John Wright of Wrightsbridge by Elizabeth I in 1590 (20 June 32 Elizabeth I). None of these actions entitled the men of the family to use the title "Sir". They remained yoemen beholden to the King's man, Lord of the Ongar Hundred. In the late 1600s Henry Wright, a descendant of John the Elder and Lord of Kelvedon Hall, was made a Baronet but so far as I know he was never knighted. His son inherited the title but by the late 1700's the title they held was extinct, without a direct male heir or female heir to carry it on. The property passed into the hands of a nephew by marriage and the Baronet title went dormant.

I think the information you have referenced was compiled long ago when a number of facts regarding this family group were far less well known and the history of two or more Wright lines were mixed together, inappropriately, as it turns out.

When I started my research into the origins in England of Deacon Samuel Wright of Springfield, I ran into a huge mass of existing published data that had been propounded for a hundred years as fact, only to find when checking the supposed sources, that most of it was wild speculation that had been around so long everyone had forgotten it was just speculation. It had taken on the cloak of "truth" which did not bear up to research inquiry.

As I said in an earlier post to this subject, if it turns out that you are from the Kelvedon Hatch Wright line, I have a great deal of information that has been checked against original sources in England and I have taken great pains to weed out the speculation from the facts and tried to present them both within their appropriate contexts.

Many very good genealogists have worked on this family's history over the last 130 years. Even though there are a number of things they misunderstood, it was not for lack of trying. It was from a lack of ready access to appropriate records. Genealogical research was really hard work even as recently as 20 years ago.

Thank God things are different now. We live in an age now where information flows like water around the world and where preserving records of the past has become an obsession for many classes of people, not just the biographer, historian and genealogist. Over the last 20 years I have watched as the amount of that information on the Internet has grown from absolutely nothing, to nearly everything except the most obscure references, which deficiency Google is trying hard to eliminate.

You still have to do a lot of work, but now more of your time can be spent reading and researching rather than spending time traveling to a place where reading and research are possible.

Even with that advantage I have spend many months in England poring over dusty registers, manuscripts and ledgers all over the middle counties and East Anglia trying to find the tidbits that are scattered here and there which, when assembled into a whole, paint an understandable picture of who these men and women were who started us on the path that leads to who you and I are today.

With the added dimension of Genetic Genealogy now at our fingertips, today is a great day to be working as a historian and genealogist because, if we are lucky (and these Wrights are lucky) we now have the power to check our documentation work with a completely independent research technique, and also step beyond history and genealogy and travel back into anthropological regions of our origins that were never before accessible to mere historians and genealogists. What all this reveals is, as you say, stranger than fiction and every bit as exciting as any good book can be when the people in your past can be brought back to life by what they left behind in the records.

But then a note of caution is warranted here. What I have found is that the reanimation of our ancestors is a slow and tedious process, with many false starts and blind alleyways to be traversed before anything remotely resembling truth comes to light. This is no place for rash assumptions or hasty judgments. So, as you travel on your path of ancestor discovery, be cautions, be prepared to work hard at it, and be prepared to forget everything you think you know about them and let their records speak for themselves.

Best of Luck, too!

Mike Wright