There is always some come confusion when the terms American and football cross paths. But this site is not about the bruising derivative of proto-rugby that would emerge from the privilege of the US college, i.e. "Public" school, system but the beautiful game know to those across the North Atlantic as soccer. It arrived early in the States. By the early 1880s it was already being played to Association Rules extensively in Rhode Island and across the state line into southern Massachusetts, in New York and New Jersey. And those ad hoc arrangements became formal in a first iteration with the formation in 1884 of the American Football Association. It was initially confined to clubs in New York and New Jersey, although soon extending to New England, and had a particular but obvious flavour. Its three initial office holders were James Grant,  President, Thomas Hood, Vice-President, and Robert Craig, Treasurer, who himself very soon would become a longer-running president, with names more than indicative, just as elsewhere in the Americas, North and South, in Canada, Argentina and Chile. And its relationship with the football authorities in Britain was equally so. With regard to the latter point I claim no credit for its identification and spotlighting. That has been done by three American historical researchers, Ed Farnsworth, Tom McCabe and Kurt Rausch, like the old jokes, the Englishman, the Irishman and the German, and summed up in the paper, "The Noxious Scottish Weed: North American Soccer and the Laws of the Game", a crux of which is deferral not to the FA in London but the SFA, the Scottish Football Association. Here is the link:

http://www.ussoccerhistory.org/the-noxious-scottish-weed-early-north-american-soccer-and-the-laws-of-the-game/

https://www.ussoccerhistory.org/the-noxious-scottish-weed-early-north-american-soccer-and-the-laws-of-the-game/

Yet, with regard to the former point there is something that I can add. All three names of the AFA's first officers are Scots, as was its first historian, Charles K. Murray, Charles Kerr Murray. He, before turning to the pen, had at the turn of the century been a full-back in AFA clubs in New York and New Jersey. Indeed, he would die in Newark but had been born in 1874 in Arbroath. However, even Murray does not add much with regard to James Grant. Little more is known, at least so far, than that he came from the New York club, where in 1885 a J. Grant is recorded at centre-forward. It was Scots in origin with many of its players drawn from the Big Apple's large Scottish and Scots-Irish Diasporan population, which had emigrated after football exploded in the Auld Country from 1872 but in the decade to 1884 the number of James Grants living in and around New York is in double-figures with nothing so far to narrow that number down.

However, the same does not apply to Thomas B. Hood, Thomas Buchanan Hood, and Robert Craig, Robert L. Craig. Hood was one of two brothers both involved administratively and playing in early New Jersey soccer. The other brother, John, was five years younger, and known as Jack. The two had seemingly arrived in the Unites States with their parents, father, Thomas, and mother, Jane, nee Thomson  and three other brothers over several years in the 1870s, and perhaps early 1880s. Thomas Snr, a machinist, Jane and only twenty year-old Thomas Jnr, then a bleacher, apparently red-haired and born about 1860, are recorded already living specifically in Kearny, Soccer Town USA, in 1880. Indeed the brothers' team would be Kearny Rangers. But none of the other children seem yet to be there. In fact Thomas Snr may already already have been in America in 1871 as the children and possibly Jane are recorded as living with Grandmother that year, only following in the years later. And that was in George St. in Paisley, which is where all the family, father, mother and children had been born.  Thus it seems that the Hoods had been drawn across the Atlantic by cotton, the big employer in both Paisley and Kearny being  Clarks Thread, the Kearny mills supporting its own in-house team, ONT, Rangers immediate rival. And Thomas at least would remain in Kearny. In 1893 and still living with the family (Only Jack, a night-watchman had moved out but still remained in the town) he was now a "letter carrier" and 1920 and 1930, having married Anne, also born in Scotland, he was still a postman. And it has to be assumed, although no date is known, he died in Kearny apparently unrecognised in terms of his contribution to the beautiful game.

Craig proved a little more tricky. Whilst his later life is relatively transparent his early life was not so. Robert Craig would die in 1919 in Essex County, New Jersey, in other words in Newark but just the other side of the Passiac River from Kearny. And he can be seen there in 1915, 1905 and 1900 with his young son, Alexander. He is a widower, having in 1897 married Henrietta Mungle, born in Blackburn by Livingstone, who would die in August 1898, possibly in or as a result of childbirth. In both censuses Robert is described as "Naturalized", so American but born in Scotland, respectively forty-eight and fifty-two years old, so born in 1852 or 1853, and a carpenter. And those birth years might be confirmed by the arrival of a Scots Robert Craig in New York in March 1882, with alternatives in 1883 and 1880. However, it is his trade, which is maybe the clue to his precise Scottish origins. A Robert Craig with a father, Alexander, a labourer, perhaps the source of his American grandson's name, and born in Kilmacolm in Renfrewshire and a mother, Isabella, in Glasgow came into this World seemingly in Kilpatrick in Dunbartonshire. In 1861 he is recorded in Dumbarton itself aged nine and a scholar. Moreover, a decade later there he is still in Dumbarton aged nineteen, boarding, an unmarried  journeyman joiner.  But then he seems to disappear. Perhaps he was on his way already to the States, appearing by 1885 with five other Craigs including a John, possibly his younger brother, in Patterson, New Jersey. It lies ten miles of both Kearny and Newark, was a soccer town too, and Patterson FC , the club Craig originally represented. And whilst John would seem to move on, marrying late, in 1900, and in Ontario in Canada, where a sister, Isabella also, had seemingly already moved to twenty years earlier, Robert seems to have stayed and, as his playing days were coming to an end, continue his football passion formed in Dunbartonshire through the AFA and eventually leave Patterson to settle permanently in New Jersey's capital, dying there in 1919 at the age of sixty-seven also seemingly unrecognised.