Theodore (Ted) R. Harper’s ancestors came to America relatively
recently and are the first of the G2 Harper’s with a known immigrant
to North America. According to Ted’s family tradition, his ancestor,
Samuel Harper and his wife Mary Reed, lived "near Londonderry."
Also, obituaries of two of Samuel Harper's sons state that they were
born "near Londonderry". (Ted interprets "near Londonderry" to mean
anything from being on the outskirts of the city of Londonderry to
being somewhere in Northern Ireland, as it was all "near
Londonderry" when viewed from across the Atlantic at a later date.)
In addition, Ted’s family records of a couple of generations ago,
mention that Samuel's son and Ted’s ancestor David Harper, came from
Ireland. Based on evidence from censuses, family histories, and
family traditions that include more than one line descended from
Samuel Harper, there is little doubt that Ted’s Harper line came to
North America from Northern Ireland.
Ted’s family tradition also contains the interesting note that
according to "received family knowledge" from the early 1900s, this
family of Harpers came from Northern Ireland, but were "English" and
not "Irish." This was apparently said with pride by elderly aunts,
who intended to assert that although the family was from Ireland,
they were not "Irish," possibly because the native Irish were Roman
Catholic and, besides being Catholic, were viewed as a lower class
of people. (It might also reflect a general prejudice against
the heavy influx of Irish immigrants during the first part of the
20th century.) There is some conjecture that the claims of being
"English" rather than "Irish" meant that Samuel was descended
from a line of Harpers who settled in Northern Ireland but were
originally from Yorkshire in England. This would make historical
sense because the English crown encouraged Protestants from England
and Scotland to settle in Northern Ireland (the so-called "Orange"
Irish) during the 17th and 18th centuries in
order to dilute the power of the native Roman Catholic Irish. This
is the historic origin of the on-going strife between Catholics and
Protestants in Northern Ireland in modern times.
This would also explain the distinction made by Samuel Harper’s
descendants that the family were "English" settlers in Ireland
rather than being settlers from Scotland. The conjecture that
Samuel’s family was from Yorkshire is fairly tenuous however and is
based on the fact that Yorkshire had the largest population of
Harpers in England in the 1700s. The conjecture is strengthened
however by the fact that Yorkshire is on the northern border between
England and Scotland and–politics, religion, and nationalities being
what they are–Yorkshire (English) Harpers (who were probably
adherents of the Church of England) may have felt a need to
distinguish themselves from Scots (who were probably Calvinists,
i.e. Presbyterians.) The two nations were bitter enemies until they
were united under King James I--and many Scots are still not
happy about the union.
Both Samuel Harper and Mary Reed were born around 1795, which is
a rough guess in both cases, based on birth dates of their ten
children. Their last child was born in Ireland shortly before they
emigrated to Canada around 1835. The family cannot be located in
Canadian immigration records, which suggests that they arrived in
New Brunswick and their records were among those lost in a fire that
destroyed New Brunswick immigration records for 1835 and 1836. They
spent about a year in Canada, location unknown, then show up near
Toledo, OH, where Samuel died in 1838. They followed a common path
for European immigrants to the Midwest, coming in through Canada and
then down the Great Lakes.
Six of Samuel Harper and Mary Reed’s ten children are clearly
identified from family records. An amateur researcher, David
Bradford, who has posted on the Internet, is descended from their
son James Wesley Harper. There is strong evidence from census
records that Ted Harper is descended from another son, David Harper,
born in Northern Ireland in 1819.
David Harper lived on the Ohio/Michigan border and married
Harriet Bulter in 1850. One of Harriet's sisters was married to a
lawyer and land speculator who bought a township on the Iowa bank of
the Mississippi, and sent David and Harriett out to Iowa to manage
the town. This became Harper's Ferry, Iowa, named after David.
David and Harriet had two daughters and one son, David Hall
Harper b.1857 in Iowa. David Hall Harper married and moved to
Herman, Nebraska, where he ran a furniture and hardware store that
was destroyed by a tornado that leveled Herman in June 1899. David
Hall Harper and his family then moved to Prosser, Washington, where
they ran another store. David Hall Harper and Harriet had five
children. The youngest, David Herman Harper, was born in 1892 in
Nebraska.
David Herman Harper served in the Army during WWI, but there is
no record of his going overseas. He was married twice. He and his
first wife had two children, the eldest being Theodore R. Harper’s
father, David Hoss Harper, who was born in 1920 and lived in
Washington state. There is no record that David Herman Harper and
his second wife had children.
Theodore R. Harper was raised in Alaska, and moved to North
Carolina in 1992, the first of his clan to move easterly. This was
before Ted’s interest in genealogy, and he was quite startled to
discover the large number of Harpers in the South. Because these
southern Harpers arrived in North America well before Samuel Harper
and his family, Ted assumed that the southern Harpers were only
distant relations. He was quite surprised to get such strong DNA Y
chromosome matches (G2 haplogroup) with Harpers in the
south. | 
