Family Trees

It has been years since I did any research or detailed work on my family trees. Recently I made an attempt to update them with the marriages of cousins and births of their children, but going by what I know or remember alone leaves much to be desired. I’ve always wanted time to do some in-depth research in archives or tramp around cemeteries to find the final resting places of those I know by name only. If I ever get that opportunity (once the kids are grown!), then maybe I can finally join the Daughters of the American Revolution as well as the Daughters of the Confederacy. (Mmh…now I know why those women are always pictured as old and grey-headed.)

Family trees are so interesting, even though they ultimately show us little to nothing about the people listed on them. Mostly names and dates, you can’t know who a person was from that. However, it is fun to imagine.

For instance, I recently pulled out my George family tree to refresh my memory for the blog I posted last week on that family. First, I found I knew further back in that line that I remembered. My first record is Isaac George, born in 1539 in Chelmsford, Essex, England, which is a village forty miles northeast of London. 478 years ago!

I don’t know anything else about Isaac except he married and had a son named Richard who married and had a son named William who married and had a son named Nicholas. This Nicholas came to America - Lancaster, Virginia to be precise. This is a little town between the Chesapeake Bay and the Rappahannock River. I don’t know when he came, but sometime after his son Nicholas was born in England in 1640 but before his death in Lancaster in 1661. So, very early on in American history.

The second Nicholas’s son William was born in Lancaster. He married and had a son William who married and had a son William who married and had a son William. (In case you’ve lost count, that’s four Williams. People say genealogies in Scripture are confusing, but at least they didn’t given their children the same names generations in succession!) This final William was born in Lancaster in 1756, nineteen years before the start of the American Revolution. This is the part of my family tree that gets interesting.

From information I found online, he did fight during the American Revolution in the 8^th Virginia and was even at Valley Forge. After the war, he went to Nova Scotia with the fishing and boating industry. There, in 1791, he married a woman named Africa Rogers in Guysborough, Nova Scotia, Canada. She was from North Carolina.

Here is where I get curious. Looking Guysborough up online, it was originally a small settlement of Acadians on Chedabucto Bay in the southeast part of the island. The Acadians were run out by the English in the 1750s. Following the American Revolution in 1783, it was re-settled by Black Loyalists and named after Sir Guy Carleton, commander of the British forces and Governor General of Canada in the 1780s. Black Loyalists…a woman named Africa. Can you see where I’m going with this? I don’t know if it means anything. Perhaps her family was also in the fishing industry (although she appears to be from a county in the middle of North Carolina and nowhere near the coast). Or maybe it was just a very pleasant place to live. I don’t know, but it does make me a little curious.

Anyhow, this William certainly had no intention of staying in Canada although most of their nine children were born there before they moved to Lincoln County, Tennessee (on the border of Alabama) somewhere around 1808 or ’09.  That includes the son I’m descended from, Thomas, born in 1803. He would have three wives in succession, and I descend from a son of the third wife, Owen. (Or, perhaps, Thomas Owen. It’s a little unclear if Thomas and Owen are two distinct people or one named Thomas Owen.) Owen would marry and have a son named Thomas who married and had a son named Felix Bert – my great-grandfather. Either Owen or Thomas moved to our hometown of Lewisburg in the later 1800s.

Family trees may be lists of names and dates, but I find them fascinating and full of curious entries that sure do spark imaginary/pseudo historical stories I would love to tell.

Mmh…perhaps I’ll do that, too, when I’m a grey-headed Daughter of the American Revolution.