In June 1890, George Edgar Reay (age 34), his wife Mary Isabella Dryden Reay (29), and their two daughters Constance (2), and Anna (1) emigrated from England to southern Idaho in America.

I. Why did they want to leave England?

In 1890, George Reay was well set up in life. Just four years earlier he had married a pretty and talented young wife from a family with independent wealth, and now they had two small baby girls. The art work, silver service, and inherited paintings in this young family's home showed that they lived in a comfortable life style, and that they were the descendants of several families that were used to even better things. George was also surrounded by an extensive family. He had come from a long line of well-to-do farmers. George's grandparents,
.                                        John Reay (1790-1869) and Susanna Winter Reay (1798-1882), were some of the first persons to have their formal portraits taken, when photography was just getting started. Their farms at Kenton are now part of suburban Newcastle on Tyne, in the Westerhope district, in Northern England, but in 1869, when George Reay's grandfather died, the seven family farms owned by John Reay and Susanna Winter Reay were primarily livestock farms, which raised sheep, horses, and some cattle. Many of the horses were riding horses rather than the draft animals used on most farms.

In 1869 George's grandfather left these family farms to his oldest son, George's father,
William Reay (1822-1890) and his wife Alice Davidson Reay (1826-1917) , pictured below.
. 

In 1890, when George and Minnie (as his wife Mary Isabella was called) had decided to emigrate to America, they worked and lived on one of these family farms; George's parents William Reay and Alice Davidson Reay lived on another, and another family farm was run by George's oldest brother John.  George's older sisters Isabella and Polly and his younger brother William (grandfather of Maurice Reay and Maureen Clarke) all stayed in Northumberland (Northern England) their whole lives. So why did George and Minnie leave this family and heritage and move to the dry, remote, sage-brush covered hills of the Idaho-Wyoming border?

Victorian England still had many older traditions that look strange to Americans more than a century later. One of them was the tradition of landed or wealthy or titled people to leave their entire estate to the oldest male of the family. Often the second (and later) sons went into business, or chose the church, or the army, or service abroad in the extensive English empire of the time. The year 1890 brought the death of George's father William Reay, and with that death all the family lands went to George's older brother John. That did not mean that George and Minnie had to leave their farm or change their life style. But the choice was to be a tenant farmer with annual payments to the owner of the farm. Tenant farming is not like a lease of land in America. A tenancy is an inheritable right; with the tenancy passing from father to son for one or more generations. The owner of the land can remove a tenant only if the owner plans to personally move onto the property and personally work the farm. But ownership of property brought not only an income, but a certain status in the class conscious Victorian society, so George and Minnie decided to leave a farm they felt should have inherited.

One option open to George and Minnie was to emigrate to an English speaking area with the possibility of owning their own land. The choices were numerous. England was about to defeat the Dutch for the control of South Africa, Cecil Rhodes had opened Rhodesia, Kenya had rich farm land and was under British control. India held good possibilities for government service, but not for extensive estates because of the developed and numerous local population. New Zealand, Australia, and the Dominion of Canada were other choices. So why choose Southern Idaho?
 

II. Why did they choose America?

Almost all immigrants to America have had family or friends or contacts already here who had described what to expect, who provided a specific destination, and who gave them some initial support on arrival. This was also true for George and Minnie -- they joined Minnie's older sister, Elizabeth Hansell Dryden Wilson (called Lizzie). Minnie and her older sister Lizzie never really knew their father, George Dryden, since he died in 1863 at age 47 leaving his wife with the two young daughters, ages 5 and 2 to raise alone.

      George Dryden (1816, 1863)            Elizabeth Sarah Hansel Dryden (1827,1913)
                                                Minnie' parents

But the Drydens were a prosperous family of Newcastle shipbuilders with a proud family heritage and they had enough wealth so that George Dryden's widow, Elizabeth Sarah Hansel Dryden could live comfortably for another 50 years and send her two daughters to good finishing schools. (Large oil portraits of Elizabeth Hansel Dryden's maternial grandparents, James and Mary Burne, were brought to America by George and Minnie, and are now with John Reay in Bellingham, Washington.) Lizzie was trained in music, and Minnie in art and literature. Minnie was the more refined and gracious of the two sisters, while her older sister Lizzie must have been the more adventurous. Lizzie married an independent minded, Oxford-trained engineer, Charles (C.B.) Wilson, and their daughter Jeanne Wilson LeBailly was born in Newcastle shortly afterward in August, 1882. When Charles and Lizzie Wilson decided to follow one of Wilson's classmates to Idaho in 1883, they left their 1-year-old daughter Jeanne in England under the care of Lizzie's mother, granny Dryden. By 1887 the Wilsons were well enough established to send for Lizzie's mother and their daughter. Granny Dryden and her brother James Hansell brought her 5 year old grandaughter Jeanne from England to Idaho in 1887, and were accompainied by C.B. Wilson's brother Dr. William Wilson. This group joined the Wilson's Bar-W cattle ranch in southeran Idaho in the valley now flooded by the Blackfoot Dam. Thus by the time that George and Minnie Reay decided to leave England for America in 1890, they were joining a small community which included Minnie's mother, uncle, her only sister and brother-in-law, and niece who were already living in the area.
 

III. How did they travel to Idaho; what did they find when they got here?
 

George and Minnie Reay and their two daughters Constance and Annie left Liverpool, England on the steam ship Eturia, arriving in New York City on May 18, 1890, several months before Idaho became the 43rd state in the Union. They traveled by railroad as far as Wyoming, and then went by stage or wagon across the Idaho border (rather than from the Snake River valley).

The picture above shows their farm, located below some basalt cliffs on the south shore of what is now the Blackfoot reservoir. (The site of the house is now under water, as the farm had to be sold in 1903 when the Blackfoot reservoir dam was built.) To the right in back are George and Minnie with Annie in front; to the left are daughters Constance and Alice in back, with the young sons Dryden and Jack in front. Note the log construction with no foundation.

The community of this extended family was a very different setting from the soft green farms of England. Bands of Indians would frequently travel through the area. In general they were always friendly to the settlers, but they had the habit of entering a house without knocking and helping themselves to any food on the ranch that they needed without asking. However, they almost always returned such "borrowed" food in kind on a later visit. It is not clear just what other profession besides ranching Minnie's brother-in-law C.B. Wilson was engaged in that would keep him away for up to a week at a time. However, he did have the fastest team of sleek black horses in the area, and a fast light-weight wagon and frequently drove them at night. Charles Wilson was also an outspoken and avid Democrat in a solidly Republican state. About the time that the community was broken up by the building of the Blackfoot dam, the Wilsons were divorced and Minnie's mother, sister, and niece lived as a family unit until the death of Granny Dryden in 1913 in Shoshone, Idaho. (Some family gossip suggests that the divorce of C.B. and Lizzie Wilson may have been the result of a STD passed from C.B. to Lizzie.)   The following formal family portrait of George and Minnie's family was taken about the same time, before the move to Blackfoot.

                             Reay family                                            Constance
                              about 1898                                 Minnie, Alice, Annie, George
                                                                                      Jack (J.M.),  Dryden
 

IV. The Blackfoot years.

George and Minnie moved from their dry ranch in the hills to irrigated farming in Blackfoot, Idaho in 1903 when the flooding of their property by the reservoir forced the sale of the ranch.  Their son J.M. started his schooling in Blackfoot's newly constructed Irving School.  After a winter in a rented house they bought a 40 acre irrigated farm on the north side of Blackfoot (now a residential neighborhood) where they remained and actively farmed until  WWII.

In the 1890's Idaho's government was still in a primitive condition, even though Idaho had become a state.  For example, the births of George and Minnie's children were not registered, and no formal birth certificates were ever issued.  By the time of WWI when Alice, Dryden and Jack served in the armed forces it was difficult to prove their American birth.  To compensate for this, and to have some formal documentation to use in later years, their son Jack Reay obtained a letter from the doctor who attended his birth in Soda Springs in October 23, 1896, and had it notarized.

In 1936 George and Minnie decided to return to England to visit the family they had left 46 years earlier. To do so required a passport.   Even though they had voted regularly in local elections, they, like many immigrants of the time, had never taken out American citizenship.  The government therefore refused to issue them U.S. passports, and they had to write to the British consulate in San Francisco to obtain British passports for the trip.  The following picture was taken at that time.

                     George Reay (1856-1947)     Minie Reay (1861-1945)    [1936 photo]

George's and Minnie's health remained good well into their eighties. A family story asserts that George could jump a fence the height of his nose at the age 60, but as he grew older George's eyesight began to fail and forced him to stop farming.   After WWII Minnie and George moved to Salem, Oregon where they were cared for by their children Edgar and Annie until their deaths in 1947/45.
 
 

V. The children of George and Minnie Reay.

Minnie Reay was a refined and gracious lady all her life, and the contrasts between her education and training in England on one hand, and her wild surroundings in early Idaho on the other, carried over to her children as well. Minnie and George's oldest daughter Constance learned to ride and became well known as a crack shot with a rifle at an early age, but she always remained a refined, gracious lady who was very conscious of her English heritage and family relations. As soon as Constance could write she began a correspondence with her aunt Polly (George's sister) in England, that would last from the turn of the century until aunt Polly's death in the 1940s. The pictures above of George's parents and grandparents were due to Constance's request for them in 1922. After the death of aunt Polly in 1941 Constance began a regular correspondence with her cousin Marjory Robson (daughter of George's younger brother William) in Newcastle. This correspondence lasted until the 1970's and Constance's death. Since the 1970's the correspondence has continued primarily between John Reay of Bellingham, U.S.A and Maurice Reay of Bellingham, Northumbria (Marjory Robson's nephew). Constance was the family historian, a strongly opinionated matriarch,  a pharmacist by profession, and lived in Portland, Oregon. She left no children.
 

George and Minnie's second daughter, Annie, on the other hand, was a warm, generous and friendly woman who never looked back on her English heritage, and was an American in spirit as well as fact. She lived in Salem, Oregon as a widow for many years and also left no children.
 

The third daughter Alice was the first child born in America. She was a nurse during WWI, was widowed twice, lived in Salt Lake City with her first husband, John Sullivan, and in San Diego with her second husband. Interestingly she chose to be buried  in Blackfoot, Idaho where she was raised. She had no children.

Left:  George Reay with his second son Jack (in WWI army uniform)
  Center:  George and Minnie's oldest son Dryden (in WWI navy uniform)
     Right:   George and Minnie's third daughter Alice (in WWI nurse uniform)
 

Minnie once commented that coming to America soon changed her luck from having girls to having boys, since their last four children were boys. George and Minnie named their first son (and fourth child) Dryden after Minnie's family name. Dryden was in the navy during WWI, farmed 40 acres of irrigated land very near his parents farm on the north side of Blackfoot, Idaho, and for the last decades of his life, carried mail in Blackfoot. He was an avid fisherman. His daughter Patricia Bowman lives in Blackfoot and his son Alton lives near Seattle.

The second son (and fifth child) was baptized John Maurice but went by the names Jack or just J.M.   More details of his life are given in a later section. His only child John lives in Bellingham, WA.

The third son Edgar sold life insurance, lived in Salem Oregon where he owned a large number of old rental homes, was the Oregon state chess champion one year.  His daughter from a first brief marriage, Marjorie Jones, lives in Ventura, California.  Edgar's son Richard Reay of Portland Oregon continued the work of his aunt Constance as the family historian, and Edgar's daughter Marilyn Giles lives in Salem Oregon.

         Alton Reay                     The 4 Reay brothers,  Edgar, Alton, Jack, Dryden

Minnie and George's youngest son Alton and his wife Julia lived in Pocatello, Idaho.  A 1937 auto accident led to Alton's early death with a chest malignency. Alton's daughter Jerry Ann Bates (and husband Bob) live in Spokane.  His  son Jim Reay lives in Billings, Montana, and is preparing a biography of Alton for this file. .

VI. Reunions of the grandchildren of George and Minnie Reay.
 

The first Reay family reunion of George and Minnie's grandchildren was held in the summer of 1939 at the farm of Jack and Vera Reay, near Blackfoot, Idaho. The cousins in this picture of the event are (left to right): Jerry Ann, Marilyn, Patty, and John, Jim, and Richard.

The second Reay family reunion of George and Minnie's grandchildren was held in the summer of 1990 in Bellingham, Washington.  The cousins in this picture of the even are (left to right): Jerry Ann Bates, Marilyn Giles, Patty Bowman, Jim Reay, and John Reay, Richard Reay in front.

[Please send comments, corrections, additions for this web site to John Reay;
 117 Hawthorne Road, Bellingham, WA 98225  or
  tel: (360)-733-1195,    fax: (360)-650-7788,     e-mail: reay@wwu.edu]