Samuel Rodman appears to be a first generation immigrant from Northern Ireland in the mid-1790s, but who is his wife? It seems her name was never recorded anywhere. At first I assumed he most likely married another Scotch Irish settler or someone from New England, probably Connecticut, as there were many of those in the region where he settled. He was one of the founders of the town of Burns (named after Robert Burns) in Allegany County, but he lived in nearby Sparta, Ontario county, before that. I recently noted that his son William S. Rodman lived to be listed in the 1880 census, which was good, because the 1880 census lists the places of origin of parents for the first time. It said William's mother was from New Jersey. Such entries are not always correct, but they are correct often enough to justify further research with the assumption that the information is correct unless one can prove otherwise. This was very helpful, because a local history listed some of the immigrants to Sparta who were from New Jersey. There were four early immigrants from there. Using that information and doing research on the internet, I narrowed the probable parents of Samuel's wife down to one couple, William Magee and Hannah Quick (the eldest child of Samuel Rodman named her second son William M. McCurdy). Magee turned out to be an interesting character in his own right. He landed at Philadelphia in 1784 but married in Greenwich Township, Sussex (now Warrren) County, New Jersey in 1788. He moved to Sparta with his two brothers and their families around the same time that Samuel Rodman did, and they did not live very far from each other. They are listed near each other in the 1800 census (although the spelling of Magee's surname is McGee--a common thing for that time period). Being satisfied that the Magees were the best prospects to be parents of Samuel 's wife, I decided to trace the ancestry of Hannah Quick. At first I thought she was English, but research soon revealed that the surname is actually found in New Amsterdam/New York, intermarried with many other Dutch families. The Dutch spelling was Kwik, or a variation thereof. Furthermore, I found that the Quick line from which Hannah probably descends were direct descendants of Joris Rapalje and Catalyntje Trico, whom Russell Shorto in his book "The Island at the Center of the World" calls "the Adam and Eve of New York."