The cost to Mann was not only in the people it lost but in what those people took with them. The parishes were not just losing population — they were losing the families who had served in the Keys, administered justice in the courts, kept the registers, maintained the chapels, and carried the language. When the Corletts of Orrisdale chartered a ship to Ohio, a family that had farmed that land for generations was uprooting itself. When the Cannells and the Sayles boarded the Ocean, they were carrying the island's religious culture across the Atlantic and leaving a gap in the parishes that could not be filled by people who had not grown up in those parishes, who did not know the names of the fields, who could not speak the language of the wells and the keeills and the calendar customs.
William Brew, one of the founders of the Manx Society at Cleveland.
The society was formed in 1851 by five men with characteristically Manx names, James Christian, John Corlett, William K. Corlett, William Cubbon and William Brew, to assist and take care of the poor immigrant from the Isle of Man who arrived with an empty pocket or in feeble health. It holds an honoured place among the pioneer bodies of its kind in America.
The community it served had grown quickly. The first Manx families reached the Cleveland district in 1826, and in 1827 something like seventy families, about two hundred people in all, arrived in Ohio.
William Christian, recorded among the settlers transported into Virginia in 1652.
A patent of that year for land in Northumberland County, lying north upon the Potomac River and east upon a branch of it dividing the tract from land commonly called the Fort land, was granted on the transportation of forty persons, and William Christian is named among them.
The Manx Christians of Virginia have a documented origin three years later. In 1655 two brothers, William and Jonathan Christian of Maughold, went out to the colony, and a family of Cottiers from Lezayre went at the same time. The two families afterwards intermarried. The Christians acquired considerable tracts of land in Virginia, and descendants of the family came to be possessed of an ample fortune.
William K. Corlett, one of the five founders of the Manx Society at Cleveland, and of the family whose letters are the best record of the emigration.
The society was formed in 1851 by James Christian, John Corlett, William K. Corlett, William Cubbon and William Brew, to assist and take care of the poor immigrant from the Isle of Man who came with an empty pocket or in feeble health, and it holds an honoured place among the pioneer bodies of its kind.
The Corlett correspondence is the fullest of its kind to survive. Of the private letters written home by the Manx emigrants, those of a William Corlett are reckoned the most complete and the most informative, and they stand beside the diaries of Thomas Kelly of Doolough and Daniel Caley of Jurby as the principal first-hand sources for the settlement.
The family kept its name in Cleveland into the twentieth century. Dr William T. Corlett, who lived from 1854 to 1948 and was a grandson of the original immigrant, won an international reputation as a specialist in diseases of the skin.
