Since I wrote the post about genealogy writing, it's really bugged me that I didn't write about our Virginia trip. Mother and I had planned for years to make it to Virginia, where many of our family members first landed in America long before the American Revolution. We knew it would be one of our toughest trips to find actual information, but we had high hopes.
Starting out at my home in Troy, we drove south through the Hudson Valley, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland on our way to Virginia. We took a little side-jaunt to look at The National Shrine of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, America's first Saint of the Catholic Church. The only reason we knew this was here (besides the billboards on the highway) was from a historical information marker at the Mason Dixon Welcome Center at the Maryland state line.
Our first stop of the trip was Culpeper, Virginia, land of our forefathers. We arrived to our Airbnb in the early evening and had some great dinner at a local Italian Restaurant, which just happened to be situated in the parking lot of the Culpeper County Library, our destination for the next morning.
We woke up to a bucolic view of deer in the early morning fog outside our living space....so soul-refreshing and appropriate for the first day of my vacation.
We spent our first full day head-down in the Culpeper County Library, which had an amazing amount of information. I immediately found records for the early Masons, who intermarried with the Broderick, Underwood, Wood, and Hammett families. AND, I was able to identify the approximate location of their land near the Little Fork Church. The families seemed to exchange land back and forth. I know these lines are related by marriage in my own family line, but it obviously goes back further—perhaps they even came to America together? The James Mason and wife Mary in this document is my 5th great grandfather.
Over the course of our time in Culpeper, I found multiple legal documents showing the movement of my Mason ancestors. Mom was a little less lucky with any of her line, but that was to come later in our trip. Towards the end of our time in Culpeper County, we drove out to Little Fork Episcopal Church, the one point of reference from the old maps that is still in existence today, and which roughly marks the southern end of the land which the Masons inhabited.
The general area of what would have been Mason land, view from the church
Even though I found many legal proceedings that tied the Masons with other families in our line, I still have no solid proof of who Martha Bomar Wood was (was she a Bomar by maiden name, or was that her middle name?). The Woods are connected the Masons somehow, but exactly how still remains a mystery. And the full extent of the Hammett/Underwood/Broderick/Mason connection remains to be discovered.
After our time in Culpeper, we made our way to Richmond, where we would spend a couple of days at the state library. All along the way during this trip, we got to eat some amazing food and enjoyed spending quality time together.
I took many, many photos of page after page of queries in quarterlies, deeds, wills, and other similar references. Looking back now, I realize how little work I've done to follow up on all of these leads. Once the trip is over, life just seems to speed on ahead without a second look back.
We also hit the Central Rappahannock Regional Library, where I found an amazing Mason family chart in the vertical files... which, honestly, I couldn't identify as being our Mason line. But it was interesting nonetheless.
While we were in the Richmond area, we took a moment to pop over to Hollywood Cemetery, where two presidents are buried: Monroe and Tyler. The primary reason for the stop, though, was to get a better view of the James River, which we'd passed repeatedly on our treks to and from the library.
After we left Richmond, our final jaunt of the trip was to Accomack County to walk in the shoes of our Robinson ancestors. From what we can tell, they were our earliest immigrants to America—way back in the 1600s. We had made plans to stop at the Custis Tombs, where our earliest known relative is buried—Elizabeth Robinson who married John Custis II. Then made our way to a little place for mom's birthday lunch, Mallard's at the Wharf in Onancock.
View of the little inlet of Chesapeake Bay, view from the Custis Tombs
The Wharf where we had birthday lunch
After these diversions, it was time for one last dive into library records, this time at Eastern Shore Public Library... a most fortuitous stop! There was a book there that gave detailed maps of land that had passed from family to family... it followed this land for generations and we were able to trace our direct lineage back to the land they first lived on in the new land! After studying these detailed maps, we were able to drive over to the very quaint and barely-lived-in area of Deep Creek, where my 8th great grandfather Tully Robinson and 8th great grandmother Sarah West lived off of land they had been given by her father, John West. Tully had lived and died in Deep Creek.
I did also trek across this field looking for the burial place of Tully Robinson. I found no markers.
These were the last stops of our trip, before driving the remainder of the Delmarva Peninsula to our final Airbnb, ordering dinner delivered, and playing rounds of Yahtzee with Kef and Dad over video chat in celebration of mom's birthday.
One of my favorite things about taking genealogy trips—besides getting to spend this great time with my mother—is feeling as if I've tread on the actual ground that my ancestors stood upon, toiled over, and eventually left in order to end up in Texas.
It's hard sometimes to think about your ancestors being part of the colonialization of the Americas, displacing other people from their family's land and heritage, being party to the abuse of privilege that gave us all of the benefits that we enjoy today. At the same time, you get a glimpse into the courage it must have taken for them to depart for lands unknown, and strive ever onward for the sake of their own family's wellbeing and the legacy they would be a part of for generations to come.
Comments
Post a Comment