Journeying from Holland, the Edison family originally landed in Elizabethport, New Jersey, about 1730. In Colonial times, they farmed a large tract of land not far from West Orange, New Jersey, where Thomas A. Edison made his home some 160 years later. Their fortunes fluctuated with their politics. Like many well-to-do landowners of that time, John Edison, a great-grandfather of the inventor, remained a Loyalist during the revolution, suffered imprisonment and was under sentence of execution from which he was saved only through the efforts of his own and his wife's prominent Whig relatives. His lands were confiscated, however, and the family migrated to Nova Scotia, where they remained until 1811, when they moved to Vienna, Ontario. Edison's grandfather, Captain Samuel Edison, served with the British in the War of 1812.

     In Ontario, Edison's father, another Samuel, met and married Nancy Elliott, schoolteacher and daughter of a minister whose family had originally come from Connecticut where her grandfather Ebenezer Elliott had served as a captain in Washington's army.

     The younger Samuel now became involved in another political struggle - the much later and unsuccessful Canadian counterpart of the American Revolution known as the Papineau-MacKenzie Rebellion. Upon the failure of this movement, he was forced to escape across the border to the United States, and after innumerable dangers and hardships, finally reached the town of Milan, Ohio, where he decided to settle.

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