Genealogical research has been my consuming interest for eight years now. I have boxes and tubs full of material as well as a family tree on Ancestry.com. In a nutshell this is who I come from.....
Quakers, Huguenots, tobacco traders in Virginia in the 1600s, Lumber company owners, Revolutionary War Patriots, War of 1812 soldiers, Civil War soldiers, and a World War I Distinguished Service recipient. In my DNA is a family traumatized by kidnapping and hostage taking in the Civil War, a distant relation to the conductor of the Underground Railroad, Giles Cory who was killed in the Salem Witch Trials for refusing to say his wife was a witch and about whom Arthur Miller wrote the play The Crucible. I descend from a Scottish father who died in the Battle of Dunbar but whose son William Colquon ( Cahoon) was captured and thrown on board a boat for American, who landed in Boston and was apprenticed as a mason and became the brick mason and one of the twenty founding families of Block Island, Rhode Island. He was murdered by Pequot Indians in the start of King Phillip's War but whose sons lived on. One of his grandsons migrated to Virginia and lived at Cahoon's Creek in Nansemond ( now Norfolk) Virginia. His son migrated to North Carolina and that is how my North Carolina line was begun and how it carried the line to me.
I am from North Carolinians, Virginians, Rhode Islanders and Massachusetts residents. Those are the ones I know about so far.
On my father's side, the first known emigrant to America was Phillip Perry who arrived in the early 1600s. He came to the colonies to develop the family shipping business, Perry and Lane of London. He was the uncle of Micajah Perry who was Lord mayor of London. Phillip owned a plantation named Whitemarsh which he later sold to Jim Bridger. DNA tests conclusively place me with his son John Perry, an Anglican, whose son Jacob married into a devout Quaker family, the Clares, in North Carolina.
Quakers came to North Carolina to escape the Puritans who thought they were heretics. The Puritans killed many Quakers, both men and women. At one point forty percent of North Carolinians were Quakers and the Governor John Archdale was a Quaker. One of the early quaker meetings was held at my ancestor Timothy Clare's home in Perquimans. that group founded the Piney woods meeting, which is the oldest in north Carolina. my quaker ancestors owned a few slaves until the Quakers as a national group decided that the system was conducive to abuse and condemned it. At that point my Quaker ancestors freed their slaves and helped as many as possible to escape.
These are my earliest American ancestors, most if them living in the 1600's.
