Ok, so maybe this is not Old Robert Rule. It is Ross Poldark from the Masterpiece series Poldark. However, the Rule line of our family is from Cornwall, England, and the majority were miners, just as in the series. Besides, there are no pictures of Old Robert.
In my research, I ran into a Facebook group that is made up of members that are researching their Rule roots in Cornwall. It gave me lots of good advice as to where to locate birth, marriage, and death records of the family in Cornwall. One of the members also linked dad into their information and traced the Rule male line back to Robert Rule, who was buried in 1619. The group affectionately calls him “Old Robert”.
Our line of the Rule family all lived in Cornwall, mostly in Camborne, until William Henry Rule Sr. (born 1831) and his family came to the United States and settled in Michigan. There were many Rule families in Cornwall, and because of the naming conventions, all of the males had similar names. The majority of them were miners in the tin mines.
William Henry Sr. married Caroline Heither on April 9, 1855 in Camborne. They had four children in Cornwall, Joseph, Caroline Jane, William James, and William Henry. Joseph and William James died by the time they were four. The family came to Michigan and had two more boys, another Joseph and David.
William Henry Sr. is buried in Michigan, but all three of his sons and their mother Caroline ended up in Butte. My brother Bill and I found Caroline’s grave, and William Henry Jr is buried with his wife Louise Wechsung Rule and my dad’s oldest brother Ernest Dominick. As for my great-grandfather William Henry’s siblings, Caroline Jane married and ended up in Alaska during the Yukon gold rush, David married and lived in Butte, and the family story about Joseph is that he disappeared from Butte and no one heard from him until his death in 1915.
I did do some snooping around to try to find out what happened to Joseph and found a great story in the Butte newspapers about a Joseph Rule murdering someone for insulting his wife, maybe this is our Joseph.
Below is the direct line of male Rules from Old Robert to my dad, William James.
