How would Richard Ambrose of Maryland end up in a deal with people way up north in Halifax, Yorkshire?

There is no record of any Richard Ambrose in or around Halifax, but he was a Maryland merchant. He was probably the Maryland side of the deal. He had a partner who had to spend at least some of his time over on the English side: the mariner John Harrison. Was Harrison from Halifax?

With a name like John Harrison, it seems as though you could find him wherever you looked, but that’s not true. Harrison was not a rare surname, of course, like the Halifax area’s Ramsden, Maude, or Watterworth, but even so, most English parishes would not have had any Harrisons, because Harrison was a northern English name. Harrison was especially concentrated in, yes, Yorkshire.

And even in Yorkshire, most parishes did not have a John Harrison specifically who was of the correct age.

But if you look in the parish where we find the partners Harrison made the deal with, George Ramsden and John Parkin, and the people Harrison transported to America, Isaac Maude, Richard Askew, and the rest, you find more than one John Harrison of the right age to have captained, or owned, the ship.

There was a John Harrison who married Jane Maude in 1638. He would have been about 60 in 1674 when John Harrison transported Isaac Maude to Maryland. Another John Harrison in Halifax married Anne Hartley in 1626 but died a year and a half later. Anne was pregnant, though, and when the boy was born in October, 1628, she named him John, after his father. Sadly, she died before young John reached his second birthday, leaving him an orphan. Did the young orphan John Harrison go to sea and eventually, at age 45, command the ship that took Richard Parkin across the sea?

For the parish of the partners Parkin and Ramsden and most or all of the transportees to also be one of the small percentage of English parishes with a John Harrison of the right age is not likely to be a coincidence. We don’t have to know which of these John Harrisons was Richard Ambrose’s partner to be reasonably confident that one of the John Harrisons of Halifax brought our Perkins Family to America.