In Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck points out, “The pioneers, the immigrants who peopled the continent, were the restless ones in Europe. The steady rooted ones stayed home and are still there.”

He went on to point out that we are all descendent from the restless ones.

Steinbeck did list one exception, the Negroes who were forced here as slaves, but I would point out another – those we today call Native Americans. They were already here when we Europeans arrived, but even they followed their food supply, and escaped adverse weather as they found their way from our common roots in Africa, to the North American continent many thousands of years ago.

How did we get here?
My earliest ancestors to touch the shores of North America arrived from England in two locations.

My tenth generation Newcombe ancestor, Andrew Newcomb, first appeared in records of meetings in 1666, on what are known today as the Isles of Shoals off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire. His first children were born there, or in Kittery, ME, where he, his wife Sarah, and their family lived in the early 1670s. Sarah died shortly after the birth of their seventh child in 1674. Andrew moved his young family to Edgartown, Martha's Vineyard, MA where he married Anna Bayes in 1676. They had eight more children.



Another, John Beebe, arrived in about 1650, probably in Massachusetts, but was soon found in New London, CT, where he married Abigail Yorke in 1659. Four generations later, a descendant, David Beebe, was born in Waterbury, CT in 1781, but by 1830 was living in Ridgeville. OH. His daughter Electa, would become my great-great grandmother when she married Elias Mann, who had come from Massachusetts. Their fifth child, Jerome Napoleon is my great grandfather. It is the story of his travels across our country that I will be telling during the next several weeks, as I trace his steps from Minnesota to Wyoming, and later to the valley where I was born, in Nevada.

Before that, however, in the next few entries, I'd like to fill in some details about the moves made before, during and slightly after, the Revolutionary War and the birth of our country.