| Notes |
- According to Dictionary of Scottish Immigrants to the U.S.A. by Donald Whyte, our Robert Strayhorn was born in Ayrshire, Scotland.
- According to the Biographical History of Chester and Delaware Counties by Cope and Ashmeade (the copy I have seen was entitled Historic Homes and Institutions and Genealogical and Personal Memoirs of Chester and Delaware Counties -Ed) published in 1901, Vol 2, page 394, "Robert Strahorn was a Scottish dissenter, who left his native land in order to escape religious persecution, and landed in America in April 1775, about the time of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. He enlisted three times in the Continental army, serving through the entire war, and never receiving a wound. He participated in some of the most memorable events which marked the struggle for independence, and was a sharer in many of the greatest of the hardships which fell to the lot of the devoted patriot army. He accompanied Washington when the latter, on that never-to-be-forgotten Christmas night, crossed the Delaware in order to surprise the Hessians at Trenton, and he shared all the sufferings of the winter at Valley Forge. Robert brought his two sons, Nathaniel and Samuel with him to America in 1775." -Ancestry.com UK
Robert "heroically ate rats with Washington at Valley Forge." from Ninety Years of Boyhood the autobiography of Robert E. Strahorn, Robert's great-great-grandson.
"I also have a Robert Strayhorn who was born in 1733 in Scotland and had two sons Nathaniel and Samuel who were born in Ireland before emigrating to the America's in 1775, where he settled in the New London, Chester, PA area. Nathaniel married a lady by the name of Olympia and had 5 children Hannah, Samuel, Thomas, Elizabeth, and Peter. Of these folks, I have little else other that Nathaniel married in Montgomery CO PA. Robert's son Samuel, had descendants who settled in Ceder Rapids IA, Hardin CO IA, and other places in IA, as well as in New London PA, and Dakota territories as well as Cecil CO MD. This line contains 157 people and it is my belief that Eva Armitage compiled it." -Ed Reynolds, Rootsweb Archiver > STRAYHORN > 2000 > 0962906061
- The timing and circumstances of Robert's purported residence in Ireland are uncertain, as Ireland was not mentioned in either of the two published sources, neither the Cope and Ashmeade nor the Donald Whyte volumes. And yet Ulster, Ireland and Ayrshire, Scotland are only thirteen miles apart, and workers traveled often between the two provinces. Robert's occupation was listed as a 'weaver' when he arrived in Philadelphia, and linen weaving had been a robust industry in Ireland, but was in recession by the mid 1700s due to competition from less expensive mechanized American cotton weaving. So far we have found only a single reference to a Robert Strayhorn/Strahorn in Ireland, in a 1761 newspaper article.
The 1790 US Census records Robert Strayhorn in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania with nine household members. It is not clear who in additon to Nathaniel, Samuel, and Margaret the additional household members were, although it was common to take in renters if one had the space.
- Robert was recorded in 1793 as one the owners of a distillery in Buckingham, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
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Abt 1733 - Abt 1805 (~ 72 years)
