US Marine Corps - The Black Vault

2 Amphibians Came To Conquev
They kept moving west across the New Country until the Pacific Ocean
barred further western movement. Then they churned up and down the
Pacific Coast.
The particular Turner progenitors with whom we are concerned migrated
from Westmoreland in Northwest England prior to the middle of the
1720’s and settled on the Chesapeake Bay side of the Eastern Shore of
Maryland. They received a 12-mile square land grant in Caroline County
between the Choptank River and Tuchanoe Creek. This is about 50 miles,
as the crow flies, due east of the capitol in Washington, D.C.
The Turners had been farmers and millers in England and they were
farmers, millers and traders in Colonial Maryland. They also were Protestant
and members of the Church of England. John Turner, great grandfather of
Richmond Kelly Turner bit into Methodism in 1765. This outraged the
elders of the clan, who gave John the hard choice of reconverting or losing
his land heritage. He was a good alligator, gave up his land heritage, and
stayed a Methodist. This decision entailed a short move westward in Maryland
to Talbot County on Chesapeake Bay.
In 1827, a little over a hundred years after the Turners had first settled in
the New World, young farmer John Turner,’ grandfather of the Admiral,
up anchored from Maryland and moved west. He first settled south of
Columbus, Ohio, near Circleville, and then in 1833 in Whitley County in
northeast Indiana. Here, on 10 April 1843, Enoch Turner, father of Rich-
mond Kelly Turner, was born.
In 1844, the John Turners moved on westward to Iowa. Five years later
the big decision was made to undertake the long overland trek to California
after a preparatory winter period at Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Departing on 3 April 1850, in company with a family named Blosser, and
proceeding via Salt Lake City, the John Turners with six children arrived in
Stockton, California, in late August 1850. They brought supplies for the
gold mines in what were the latter days of the “Gold Rush.” For some months
after arrival, John Turner continued in that freighter trade, although the
older sons engaged in gold mining on the north bank of the Calaveras River,
near San Andreas, California. The family then reverted to farming, first on
a section of land in San Joaquin County (where the town, Turner, named
for the family lies on Route 50), and then, 20 years later, near Woodville
in Tulare County in South Central California.
Enoch Turner, the sixth son and eleventh of John Turner’s twelve children,
3Born Talbot County, Maryland, 27 October 1800, married Mary Bodfield, 27 August 1821.