ID: Emily (Fairfield) Duncan autobiography, page 3

My Mother
My mother was always proud of her ancient lineage although she did not have any definite record to show of it. However, I have often heard Mrs. Burnett, who outlived my mother by several years, and who was a very remarkable narrator, tell of an incident which occurred while we were living in San Francisco, before my grandfather's [Robert N. Tate’s] estate was settled. My mother's Uncle John [Tate] had come out from England to receive his share of the inheritance and it was during his stay with us that it happened. Mrs. Burnett was so proud of ancestry and so interested in family records that she could always trace her family tree, which to a certain point, was the same as my father's [maternal Cleveland side], and establish her claims by proof. This, to a woman as proud and sensitive as my mother, was sometimes irksome and irritating. But, having no record, she was powerless to reply in kind. However, Uncle John evidently brought with him from England such a record and one day when Mrs. Burnett came to call, my mother brought a large leather bound book with heavy clasps, laid it open on Mrs. Burnett's lap, and, her dark eyes snapping, exclaimed in triumph, "There, beat that if you can." And, Mrs. Burnett always added, "I could not begin to equal it." She said the Tate family lineage was traced back for ages to the old Kings of England. I never saw the book and presume that Uncle John took it back with him to England.

My mother's father, Robert Tate, was born May [31], 1804 in Bishop Wearmouth, Durham [Co.], England. He was apprenticed to a bell hanger and silversmith at an early age until he was twenty-one. In 1830, at the age of twenty-six, he crossed the ocean and landed in New York. He soon found work as a mechanic and his employer recommended to him a boarding house kept by a widow named Mrs. McDonnell who, he said, would look after him and "be a mother to him.” This prediction was not quite accurate as to relationship [Actually, it was Ann McDonnell’s mother, Ann (Mears) Hunniford, also a widow, who was the landlady, according to Tate’s diary; thus, the motherly connotation]. About a year later, Ann McDonnell, only about six years his senior, although the mother of five children [three surviving: William, Barbara, and Robert McDonnell] became his beloved wife. She was of Irish birth, having come to America as a small child with her parents - William and Ann [Mears] Hunniford - from County Armagh, Ireland. My mother [Ann Morton Tate] was born September 2nd, 1832 [in New York City]. Two younger sisters [Mary and Ellen] died in infancy [in New York City] and a brother [unnamed] was still-born [in Illinois], so that she remained the only living child of Robert Tate, although the McDonnell children were always like older brothers and sister. Of these, William and Barbara were the only ones I knew. Robert ran away as a young lad [April 1844] and was never heard of again [not quite: Robert Tate recorded in his diary in January 1868 that Robert went to Galena, Ill., where “he was employed for a time in some one of the many smelting furnaces, and afterwards became second engineer of a steamboat, going on the Mississippi River. We once heard from him, or of him, being at Peoria. He sent his sister [Ann Tate] a periodical. After which we heard no more of him.”] I don't remember having heard the fate of the other two [died in infancy].

In 1839, the family, consisting of my grandparents, my mother - then seven years old -and William and Barbara McDonnell [and Robert was still with them], left New York for the prairie country of Illinois, going by way of the Erie Canal. There they settled somewhere near Rock Island [actually near Dixon in Lee County] and engaged in farming for several years. They encountered the usual trials and privations of the pioneer and at least once during the next decade the husband and father left the family to carry on the farm while he returned to New York to work at his old trade as machinist to tide them over financially. In 1855, having returned to Rock Island, he became interested in a small plow factory being established by John Deere. Having been employed to install machinery in the new factory, he was quick to see its possibilities for the future and succeeded in buying an interest in the enterprise. [Actually, Tate recorded in his diary that he met Deere while working at Andrus & Deere in Grand Detour, Ill., in 1845. In May 1847, Deere, anticipating a dissolution of his partnership with Andrus a month later, invited Tate to become a partner in a new plow factory. Tate accepted. He signed an agreement with Deere June 19, 1847. Upon Tate’s recommendation, the factory was located in Moline, Ill. Tate singlehandedly supervised the construction of the factory while Deere arranged to move his family to Moline. The families even lived together the first year! It was a subsequent plow factory partnership of Tate’s with the Bufords that was located in Rock Island, which is near Moline, Ill.]