Family · the lines · Clinnick
the Clinnick line — Devon farm labourers who sailed for the New World
A tight cluster of parishes in the green hill country west of Dartmoor — Inwardleigh, Hatherleigh, Okehampton, Northlew — holds this whole line in its registers. The Clinnicks and their kin the Downs were agricultural labourers there for as far back as the books reach, until one of them, in 1901, put the Atlantic between himself and the fields. The surname is rare; in North Devon it is almost theirs alone.
c. 1810 → now · Inwardleigh, Devon → Welland, Ontario → Saratoga & the Finger Lakes
the Devon wall
Head of the Clinick household at Inwardleigh in the 1841 and 1851 censuses — Thomas of Okehampton and his wife Mary of Northlew, with their children Sarah, Mary, John and Thomas about them. There the trail stops: Thomas's own parents and Mary's maiden name are unrecorded, the rare surname scattering and mis-spelled — "Clineck," "Tatihel" — through the indexers' hands.
the trail ends here
agricultural labourer
Born at Folly Gate in Inwardleigh, a labourer like his father. He married Grace Down of Hatherleigh — and her line runs deeper still: back through the Downs of Hatherleigh, labourers and a gloveress, to a Henry Down of the 1760s, the furthest this Devon country reaches.
the emigrant
Born in Devon — not Cornwall, as the trees long had it — he is the one who left. By way of Ontario he reached the United States in 1901, and died in 1927 at Colonie, near Albany, New York. The 1871 census, taken when he was three, fixes him in the Inwardleigh household and finally pins the family's parentage to the record.
born in Canada
Born at Welland in the Niagara country of Ontario, he came on to the United States with the family in 1901 — the generation that completed the crossing his father began.
Tim's paternal grandmother
Born at Saratoga, a lifelong member of the Interlaken Reformed Church. She married G. Douglas VanBenschoten — the marriage that joins the Devon Clinnicks to the Dutch VanBenschotens, two long rivers meeting in the Finger Lakes.
— your father
Their son, born at Interlaken, who carried the Devon inheritance into the present generation.
— and then you
Who chased the rare name through the mis-spelled Devon registers, corrected Cornwall to Devon, and walked the Clinnicks from a Folly Gate cottage to the shore of the Finger Lakes.
A rare Devon name, almost theirs alone — carried out of the fields and across an ocean.
VII generations · North Devon → Ontario → the Finger Lakes · 1810 → now
Drawn from the Devon parish registers (FreeREG), English and Canadian censuses, and Ontario marriage records. Thomas Clinick's parents and his wife Mary's maiden name remain the open Devon wall.
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