Family Trees and What-Not

I began looking into my family tree a couple weeks ago. With a little help of a “Zoology” file from my Mama’s closet, and a lot of help from a well known geneology website, I have taken my side of the tree all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.

That wasn’t the part that surprised me. I was fairly certain that my heritage was predominately Scotch-Irish. Most every person on my tree was born in and also died in Virginia. I have learned this past week that it wasn’t just Northern Ireland that my ancestors came from. It was England and Wales, too.

The part that really surprised me was WHEN they came to America. Every one that I have taken back to an immigrant arrived here BEFORE the United States became the United States! That’s just cool!

Even cooler (or at least more interesting), is what happened to the families once they arrived in America.

My ancestor, John William Rees, was an immigrant from Wales in 1684. They came as Quakers, seeking religious freedom in the new land. He purchased land in Philadelphia directly from William Penn. That would be the William Penn. The one Pennsylvania got its name from. He adopted the last name of Jones when he got here.

This was just the kind of cool ancestral information I was hoping to find!

This Meeting House was built in Philadelphia (Merion) by the earliest Welsh settlers to the area. The Quakers met here to conduct business and have fellowship with one another.

But it gets more interesting than that. My great-grandfather was Rufus Jones. He was pretty famous in his own right.

By the time Rufus came along the family had settled down in Virginia. The picture above was taken in Franklin County. I remember stories about my grandmother, Rufus’ daughter, standing watch with her sister down the lane to watch for revenuers. I guess they had a plan worked out for her to run home so her Daddy could hide the evidence.

Look how far we’ve come!

So how did William Jones, my immigrant ancestor, beget Rufus Jones, my bootlegging great-grandfather?

I don’t really have an answer for that. But I’m curious. So. Now I’ve got the origins of my families’ life in America (at least for that particular line), and what became of us (ie. Rufus and my immediate family). Now I get to fill in the middle with stories and pictures. I hope there will be pictures.

I’m still looking for my Cherokee bloodline. I was always told I had a little bitty bit of Cherokee blood and I have always been super proud of it. Especially as a kid. I’ll keep looking until I find it.

And another note: I am not ashamed of what I have found and I hope I won’t be ashamed of what I do find in the future. This may be the chemical makeup that made me, but in no way do the actions of my forefathers dictate what my own actions will be.

Have you done any hunting into your ancestry?

What sorts of interesting stuff have you learned about your forefathers?

Tagged as: ancestry, bootlegger, family tree, Franklin County, Meetinghouse, Merion, moonshine, Pennsylvania, Quaker, still, William Penn