I Finally Found One!

I have known since I was a small child that my maternal side, my mother's families, have deep roots in Virginian soil.
At least the last 5 generations had been born and raised in Virginia.  That was a fact passed down orally in the family.

Seems nobody in my mother's families nor her cousins had the genealogy bug.  Sure, there were "stories" that got passed down but nobody had any proof of anything, nor seemed interested in proving the stories were fact.

But little did I know beyond those generations how deep my maternal family trees had been planted in American soil until I began this genealogy quest in earnest.

I quickly was able to dive back into history 200 hundred+ years.
Progress slowed once I got back into the 18th century however.

By year three of digging I had compiled a list of my immigrant ancestral lines that all arrived in the 17th century(pre-1700).  Jamestown was founded in 1607 so all these ancestors arrived within the first 100 years of the English occupation of the New World.

These are my earliest ancestor lines in my direct descent for each surname with the date of, or at least an approximation if records haven't pinpointed, their entry year to America.

Now these are only those ancestral surnames that arrived in Virginia.  I do have some other early arrivals(pre-1700) in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts too. I also have a handful of 18th century arrivals too.


ALLEN-1635 to Virginia Colony
ASTON-1628 to Jamestown/Virginia Colony *
BANNISTER-1635 to Jamestown
BATHURST-1680 to Virginia Colony
BOWMAN-1666 to Virginia Colony
BURTON-1624 to Jamestown
CHAPPELL-1635 to Jamestown
CLEIBORNE-1635 to Virginia Colony
CRIPPS-1664 to Virginia colony
DICKSON/DIXON-bef. 1688 to Virginia Colony
DUDLEY-1637 to Virginia Colony
DUKE-1638 to Virginia Colony
FLIPPEN-bef. 1699 to Virginia
FOSTER-bef. 1675 to Virginia Colony
FOSTER or FORESTER-1648 to Virginia Colony
GARNETT-1610 to Jamestown *
GAYNEY-1622 to Jamestown/Virginia Colony
GREVILLE-1620 to Jamestown *
HARRISON-1632 to Jamestown/Virginia Colony *
HAYES-1637 to Jamestown
HOLLOWAY-bef. 1635 to Jamestown
HOSKINS-1624 to Jamestown *
HUDSON-1635 to Jamestown
HUNT-1635 to Jamestown/Virginia Colony
MASON-1613 to Jamestown/Virginia Colony *
MATHEWS-1622 to Jamestown *
MEADOR-bef. 1635 to Virginia Colony
MERIWETHER-1652 to Virginia Colony *
MILLS or MYHILL-bef. 1647 to Virginia Colony
MOULSON-1663 to Virginia Colony
PUCKETT-1665 to Virginia Colony
RAGSDALE-bef. 1644 to Virginia Colony
RUDD-1698 to Virginia Colony
SEWELL or SEAWELL-1637 to Virginia Colony *
SHEPPY/SHIPPY-bef. 1633 to Virginia Colony *
SNEAD-1635 to Jamestown
STITH-1656 to Virginia Colony *
STRINGER-Before 1644 to Virginia Colony
TAVERNER-1618 to Jamestown
VASSER-1635 to Jamestown/Virginia Colony
WADE/WAAD-1655 to Virginia Colony *
WHITE-1651 to Virginia Colony
WOMACK-before 1655, no port listed but settled in Henrico County(Richmond area)


The Jamestowne Society(a private genealogical society for people with ancestors who were early settlers to Virginia)has a list of criteria it uses to see whether your direct ancestor qualifies you for membership in this "club".

As far as my list above goes all the surnames with astericks are currently qualifying ancestors.  Ten ancestors, whom, if I wanted to spent the time and money on gathering records for, would gain me membership in that club.

Though I've got lots of direct ancestors who came to Virginia very early on in it's settlement by the English I had yet to find one of the original 105 settlers who made the voyage on the first fleet of three ships in 1607 to the shores of the new world.

Until now......

Meet my 3rd Cousin, 13 x removed, George Percy.
George's 2 x Great Grandfather was Richard Neville, 2nd Baron of Latimer.
Richard was also my 15 x Great Grandfather, so our common ancestor.

Born the youngest son to Henry Percy, 8th Earl of Northumberland and Lady Catherine Neville he had to make his own way in life due to primogeniture inheritance laws in England.

A graduate of Oxford he made the military his vocation.  He served in Ireland and fought in the Dutch struggle for independence from Spain in the early 1600's.
He was also interested in the world of exploration as it was an exciting time as England tried to play catch up in this arena in the first decade of the 17th century.
He bought shares in the Virginia Company and signed on to venture to the New World in 1607, embarking onto the flagship, Susan Constant, piloted by Christopher Newport.

George Percy was there during the infamous "Starving Time" in the Winter of 1609-1610 and survived.  He kept journals of his experiences during his time in Jamestown which were published.
You can read excerpts from his journals HERE .

George Percy left Jamestown 22 April 1612 to return the England due to ill health and I suspect the tenuousness of life in the colony then.
He sold his Virginia Company shares in 1620 and went back into military service serving for the Dutch forces in their war against Spain.  There is debate on where he died and when, those most seen to think he died around 1627 somewhere in the Netherlands area.

He did marry while in Jamestown to Anne Floyd, and they had a daughter, Anne Percy, who married John West, a subsequent Governor of Jamestown.
Incidentally, John West is also my 6th cousin 13 x removed, through our common ancestor of Richard de Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick.

You will notice that in the portrait of George Percy he is missing part of his middle finger on his left hand.  The story goes that he lost it during one of the battles in the Low Countries against the Spanish.

So the digging continues and I hope to unearth more ancestral connections to explore.

Sluggy

Summer Road Trip of 2013 Day 8 -It's Family Day

I want to show y'all some relatives of mine.....albeit distant relatives or relatives by marriage.


I have a direct ancestor named Mary Hunt.
Mary Hunt was born 15 May 1695 and died abt. 8 Mar 1763.
Mary is my 7th great grandmother on the maternal side of my family.

By her third marriage after she was widowed twice, she has connected me to a slew of famous and esteemed persons in our country's early history.  She never had any children by her third husband so I am not blood relation to any of these people, but am related through marriage.

Here is the wife of the brother-in-law of my 7th great grandmother......

Here is the brother-in-law of my 7th great grandmother.....

Here is the 3rd great grandfather of the husband of the niece of the husband of my 7th great grandmother....

And  this is the 3rd great grandmother of the husband of the niece of the husband of my 7th great grandmother.....

This is the nephew of the husband of my 7th great grandmother.....or would it be the step nephew of my 7th great grandmother.....

My 6th great grandmother(Mary Hunt's daughter by her second husband), was also the cousin-in-law(or would it be half cousin or step cousin?) of that man.

This is the 3rd great grand niece of the husband of my 7th great grandmother........

And here's the husband of the 3rd great grand niece of the husband of my 7th great grandmother.....

 I point all this out because today on our Great Summer Road Trip of 2013, I'll be visiting the childhood home of the 3rd great grand niece of the husband of my 7th great grandmother......

She became somewhat of a controversial women of her time in history.

Sluggy

May I Introduce to You.....

Someone unknown to me until now, a distant cousin on my Baker family tree, sent me an email last evening through Ancestry.  In it, he provided some information that provides confirmation on my Baker line of ancestors via DNA testing.   This news means I can now introduce you to one of my long, long, long ago ancestors.
She was not a Baker but the Bakers of my Great Grandmother's family links her to my generation.
At least that is how it appears at the moment.  There are still unresolved questions about the blood line.

I proudly introduce to you who appears to be my 10 x Great Grandmother, Sarah Isgar.....

 

 

Daughter of William Isgar and Elizabeth Sainsbury Isgar

Born abt. 1625 in West Lavington, Wiltshire, England
Died 17 Sep 1677 in Groombridge Estate, Speldhurst, Kent, England

Nice looking gal, huh?


And here is her husband Phillip Packer, my 10 x Great Grandfather......

Born 24 Jun 1618 Speldhurst, Kent, England
Died 24 Dec 1686 Groombridge Estate, Speldhurst, Kent, England

And here is their son, Philip Packer, my 9 x Great Grandfather.....

Born abt. 1656 in London, England.
Died 1739 in Burlington county, New Jersey, USA


There's a story behind all of this of course.
A story involving love, bastardy, climbing the social ladder despite the English caste system, intrigue, exile, the fight for Irish rule of Ireland, the reign of Stuart King, Charles II of England, being a  victim of primogeniture, Quakers, Mormons and gunsmiths.
And William Penn kinda figures into it as well.

Some day I'll get around to rambling on about it.

Sluggy

 

Where the Past & Present Intersect

I went out today to get some exercise since the weather is not beastly hot like the past 4 days have been.
And where does Sluggy go to exercise?
A local cemetery to take pictures of headstones for F.A.G. of course! 8-)

Call me crazy but I find it relaxing to wander about a green space on a beautiful day and snap pictures of grave markers of stranger's dear departed relatives and ancestors.
It was also a nice drive down a windy country road into a very tiny town with a huge church and large gorgeous cemetery.  This area was a booming place, filled with lots of people back 100 years or more ago, so there are lots of little and some massive graveyards tucked away all over the place in this part of PA.
I signed up to be a volunteer photographer for F.A.G.  Somebody makes a request for a photo of a headstone for someone listed on the website and every volunteer within 50 or so miles gets an email alert for that request.
You wouldn't believe how many email alerts I get a week!  There are so many graveyards in this area it's crazy!  I think there are more people these days here living below the ground than above. lol

And there are very few people taking volunteer photos so I have a wide open playing field if I can find the cemetery.  Heck, I could do this as a fulltime job there are so many requests for photos.  Too bad the pay is lousy....ok, the pay is VERY lousy, as in, NO pay. ;-)

I'm making this my project-to document with photos and memorials on the website-this entire cemetery.
There are some memorials already listed on F.A.G. for this boneyard, but by no means is it complete.

By posting those headstones/markers on the Find A Grave website, it might help some other amateur genealogist track down a missing piece of their family line.
This is me, giving back for those who have helped me on my journey into my past.

I caught the caretakers out mowing today so I got a chance to ask about how the cemetery was sectioned off/mapped out.  He showed me the very VERY old pages of the graveyards layout with the surnames handwritten.  They have no files in a cabinet, no computerized lists....these papers are the only records for the graves!  They are so old and brittle and almost a medium brown in color from age.  This was no archival paper by any means when they were new.  I wonder what they will do when/if these maps ever wear out or get destroyed.  Hopefully there is another set of them tucked away in a safe somewhere.

These maps are very important information so I am not traipsing all over looking for a particular person's grave to photograph for a request from the F.A.G. website.

And to make my trips back there more productive, I was allowed to photograph the maps.  What a coup!
This will help me tremendously to get all the burial records up on the site that are missing.
Score one for this amateur grave sleuth..... ;-)

I took about 100 photos today so I am off to see which ones came out clear and start cropping and getting them in a folder, ready to load to Find A Grave.

I also had a very unsettling incident in the cemetery today.  I am not one to believe in ghosts and stuff like that but.....
I could have sworn at one point, as I was turning my head as I walked to the next headstone, out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a figure dressed in a white suit, standing about 50 ft. away from me.  It was a shadowy figure and other than the cut of the pants appearing to be empire period style(hey! I'm an old costume designer....I know this shit!lol), I couldn't make out any distinguishing features of the clothing or the face.
I quickly turned and did a double-take and there was no one there.  And the hairs on my arms were standing straight up.....eeeesh.....

If it hadn't been a bright beautiful day, I might have freaked out.  But I was surprisingly calm about the whole thing.
So go ahead and tell me it was the hot sun playing tricks on my mind or Sluggy has been drinking or taking "funny" medications today or she's stressed out and just losing what little is left of her mind now.
I know I saw it.....so shaddup! 8-P

Sluggy

 

It's Here, It's Here!

I so feel like Navin Johnson from the old movie THE JERK.
If you are a person of a certain age, you know what I am talking about.
The scene from the movie when the new telephone books come in and he finds his name in print and goes bananas.



The mail came yesterday and you probably heard me doing a dance of joy from where you are.
If not, you felt the earth move at least cause when I dance, everything shakes.lol

Anyway, WHAT you ask got me so excited?
Getting this.....

This is a book called "I Wrote You Word".  It was published back in the 1990's as part of a historical series having to do with Virginia history.
This is a collection of the letters that Private John Lee Holt wrote home to his wife while he was serving as a soldier in the Confederate forces during the War of Northern Aggression.
Or what yankees like to call it, The Civil War. 8-(

John Lee Holt was born in Campbell County Virginia in 1829, the eldest son of James Holt and Sarah Mason Holt.
He was a school teacher as well as a tobacco farmer in the Summer months.
He enlisted in July of 1861, at the age of 32, 2 days before the Battle of Bull Run.
He left a wife of only 2+ years and a 16 month old son to go off to war.
John Lee Holt, being a literate man, in a time when so few were, was quite the prolific letter writer.

These letters were bound into print in a small edition of 1000 books.  Each one is numbered and signed by the great granddaughter of John and Sarah.

I have been waiting and watching to find this book at a price I was willing to pay.....and knowing me, you KNOW it was quite frugal.
I finally found a used and rare bookseller in Indianapolis who made this available for purchase online.
And after sending a check away, what seems like eons ago, my book finally arrived and I did my best Navin Johnson impersonation yesterday.

So why did I want this book so badly?
Well, ya see......he is kin.
John Lee Holt was my 2 x Great Grandfather's Nephew.

If you want the twisted branches of the tree play-by-play......

My 2 x Great Grandfather is James Harper.
His brother is John Harper.
John Harper married Elizabeth Frances Holt.
Elizabeth is the sister of Nancy Holt.
Nancy Holt is the second wife of James Holt-who is the father of John Lee Holt.
James' first wife, Sarah Mason Holt, John Lee's mother died in 1862.  James Holt decided to marry him a "trophy wife"-Nancy was 31 years younger than her husband and 7 years younger than her stepson John Lee Holt.  She only lived another 1-2 years so there were no additional children added to the family from this union.

I haven't looked into it yet, but I may be related through John Lee's mother, Sarah Mason, as well, since I have other branches of my tree that intermarried into the Mason clan in Campbell County too.

Anyway, let's just call him kin and move on, shall we?

I have just begun to read the book so I will leave you with a photo of John.....

This is a photo of a brooch John Lee Holt had made for his wife......or in his words....
"I have had my likeness taken in a breastpin for you & will send it to you the first opportunity as I do not wish to send it by mail"

Off to dive into the world of John Lee Holt now.....

Sluggy

Synchronicity Continues To Make Itself Known In My Life

As I continue to dig around into the roots of my family tree, I turn up some really fascinating stuff.
Ok, it's fascinating to ME at least.  The Hubs continues to roll his eyes and walk away whenever I start talking to him about it all.  He just doesn't 'get it'.
No interest in personal history. at. all.

But he could sit and watch the "World War II Channel" (aka the History Channel) for days without blinking.
Ok, I lied.....he'd switch channels between the History Channel, various Sports Channels and various Political Channels for days.  He has what I call "Male ADHD".

Anyway, back to my original train of thought.....researching family history.
Sometimes the digging leads you places you never imagined you would go.  Here's a for instances case of this.....

My Grandmother(father's mother) married a second time before I was born.  I knew this man as my paternal Grandfather when I was growing up, until he died when I was 7.  We had a special bond, he and I.  I'll explore this in a post for another time.

Even though I learned eventually that he was not blood related, when it came time for me to set up my family tree on Ancestry, I didn't think twice about including him on one of the branches of our family history.
Here's one of the few photos I have of him.  He's the one holding the baby(me)....

His name was David Noll Paul.
But he went by the name Dave.
Or as I called him "Potty Dave".  There's a story there too. ;-)

As I plugged in the information I had, I turned up quite a large family tree and relations who had already dug far back into their line.  I followed back the documentation into the early 1800's and found that in the recent past, his family came from a coastal area of NC in Beaufort County, going back a few generations.
The hairs raised on my arms as Hubs and I have taken 3 trips now down to various destinations in Beaufort County NC and it's our favorite area down there to visit.

Dave as he called himself was a man of the sea, who spent his life working on tug boats.
I found that when not farming, some of the men in his line had also made a living at sea and that this family lived in that area of NC over 3 generations.

When the documentations ran out, I then followed the family information back even further, since it had been put online by someone already who had done that research.  These clues led me to information online(documents held by Colby College as well as family history info) that stretched back to the first of his family to have come to the New World and it made me stop and catch my breath.  It's an exciting story.

The 1st settler hadn't come to North Carolina or even anywhere near there.  He had sailed............to Maine!

Dave Paul's ancestor had been a 13 year old cabin boy named Robert Paul.
Not this kind of cabin boy.....

But this kind.....

 He was part of the crew on the ship "the Martha & Eliza" that had sailed from Northern Ireland bound for Newcastle, Pennsylvania.  The year was 1741.  The ship was loaded with a group of Scot-Irish Protestants(the proper term being Ulster Scots)escaping religious tyranny and famine in Ireland.  the Ulster Scots were not Irish, but Protestants from northern England and Scotland who had been forced to emigrate by James I in the 1600's, to "civilize" aka "make less Catholic", the population of Ireland.  This was part of James I's Great Scheme to colonize Ireland.

This group of passengers bound for the New World, were part of a plan called the "Grand Design", which would have set up a community among the religiously tolerant Quakers in PA.  This ship of passengers was joining a group of relatives & members already in PA.

The ship was a 90 footed 2 masted bark, often referred to as a "snow".  It probably looked very much like this one.....

Unfortunately for these folks, the ship sailed into a hurricane early on in the voyage and was dismasted.  Without it's sails, the ship drifted way off course and eventually floundered off of Grand Manan Island(which is now in Canada, but was part of Maine back then).

Not this shipwreck.....

But more like this one.....

The captain of the ship, Capt. Rowan, left the passengers on islands there, then took some of his crew in a long boat to the mainland at Pemaquid and left the survivors on the islands to fend for themselves without provisions or shelter.  Eventually sympathetic townspeople made trips out to the islands to rescue the passengers but only a  handful of the 200 who sailed from Ireland made it to safety on the mainland.  Most of these were women and children.  Only 14 of the passengers are named in documents from the era and one of them is Dave's ancestor, Robert Paul.
And then to just add confirmation to all this, I found a news article from 2006, about a Maine woman who was creating a musical show about the shipwreck and had taken up doing the research into this event as well.
If you are interested, you can read about that HERE.


Robert Paul eventually settled in Bristol, ME and married one of the other survivors from the shipwreck, Jane Patterson, who had been a babe in arms on that fateful voyage.  They went on to have ten children.  Robert Paul didn't return to the sea after the shipwreck.  He went on to help survey the lands of midcoast Maine.

Then between 1840 and 1859, Robert's grandson, James, migrated to coastal NC, where HIS great grandson David Paul was born in 1902.
And like Dave Paul's 3 x great grandfather had started out, he turned to the sea to make his living.

The freaky part is that, as a child, I had a psychic connection to Dave Paul, my grandfather, I also have a similar connection with mid-coast Maine that goes to my core.

I went to Maine for the first time in 1980 to work summer stock theater during college.  That is when I met my friend Brenda, who was also working at the theater.  She is a native Mainer through and through.  I got acquainted with the state because of her over the next couple of summers.  And I have felt drawn back to this region of Maine over the years and visit as often as I get the chance.  I have held a not-so secret wish to have a summer cabin in Maine when I retire since 1981.

Now don't try to tell me that my connection with my 'fake' Grandfather and Maine and the Beaufort area of NC were not in my DNA and part of my destiny!
Because if you do, I'll put my fingers in my ears and loudly sing this song.....



Sluggy