My great great grandparents, John and Ann Kaye Briggs, emigrated from Yorkshire, England in 1839 with their five children. At the age of 10 Thomas was the eldest of the five with the youngest being only one year old. With that many young children the trip from Liverpool to New York on the Shakespeare could not have been very pleasant, nevertheless they all arrived in one piece and went over land to St. Louis. They had a difficult time settling into their new home, a situation made nearly impossible when John died in 1841 during a typhoid epidemic. Ann then moved her children to Illinois where she had relatives. She remarried and she and family settled as much as possible into a rural life in still rough country.
The three oldest children, Tom, Swain, and Joseph were curious lads (who referred to themselves as the “wandering boys”) went exploring on their own. Swain and a cousin traveled by steam boat from western Illinois into the Nebraska territory. In 1851 Joseph and Thomas joined a wagon train in St. Joseph, Missouri heading to Oregon along the Oregon Trail. Only Tom survived the trip as Joseph died along the Trail west of today’s Rock Springs, Wyoming. He was 20 years old. The cause of his death is unknown but it was almost certainly either accident or cholera (which killed thousands of travelers along the Trail).
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