My Mother’s Side of the Family

“Michael Clark of Barbados”, “The Ancient Planter of Virginia”, and (perhaps) “The Pilot of the Mayflower”.

Since I'd spent so much time on all those fusty old Pennsylvania Dutchman in my lineage, it was time for me to organize a few notes for my mother and uncle re: their father's colorful ancestors.  My Grandfather Bernie Talbott is one of the few interlopers in our family tree of non-German ancestry:

Well, first a few more fusty old Pennsylvania Dutchmen to get out of the way first:

My 7th-great-grandfather Heinrich Gipple (1717-1789) and his wife Christina Deyer (1720-1804), my maternal grandmother Helen Rice’s 5th-great-grandparents, was born in Idar, Rhineland-Pfatz and emigrated to Manheim, Lancaster County with a group of Dunkards in the early 1700s, and was one of the original members of the White Oak Church.  His 2nd-great-grandaughter, and my 3rd-great-grandmother Susanna Gibble Hummer (1836-1923) married David Witmeyer (1832-1861), whose father David Witmeyer (1800-1851) had emigrated from Germany to Manheim, Lancaster County, in the early 1800s.

Actually, this branch may prove most interesting to further research, as many of the Dunkards came through my German wife’s hometown of Schwarzenau ... which is also right over the hill from Elsoff, whence all the Hiesters emigrated to Berks County. Funny aside: Despite their legendary status as a Pennsylvania political dynasty, my father-in-law once said some of the Hiester descendants visited Elsoff after the war, and all he could remember about them was that one of them had a harelip.

But here’s where the plot thickens.

My 10th great-grandfather Robert Adams (1577-1628), my maternal grandfather Bernie Talbott’s maternal 8th-great-grandfather, was from the Island of Anglesea, North Wales, and came to America on the "Bona Nova" in 1620 to join the Martin’s Hundred Plantation.  The Society of Martin's Hundred had obtained a grant for 80,000 acres from its parent company in 1618 , and in October of that year about 250 settlers departed for the plantation, arriving in Virginia about January or March, 1619.  Martin’s Hundred was the hardest-hit of all the surrounding plantations in the Indian Massacre of 1622, which killed 347 people, one-quarter of the entire population of the Colony of Virginia, forcing the remaining settlers back to the fortifications at Jamestown.  He was a member of the House of Burgesses 1623-24.

My 11th great-grandfather Richard Farris (1596-1637), my maternal grandfather Bernie Talbott’s maternal 9th-great-grandfather, was from London, Middlesex, England, and he emigrated in 1636 to Henrico Shire, Virginia, one of the original shires of the Virginia Colony, and lived on Robert Hallom’s Curles Neck Plantation for only about a year before his death, but he and his second wife Sarah Hambleton (1616-1677) had arrived with their daughter Sarah Elizabeth Farris (1634-1689), who became my 10th-great-grandmother.  Sarah married Robert Woodson (1634-1707), a Quaker planter who had been born and lived on the Flowerdew Hundred Plantation.

My 10th great-grandfather Zachariah Moorman (1620-1702), my maternal grandfather Bernie Talbott’s maternal 8th-great-grandfather, was born on the Isle of Wight to a family of Quakers.  While yet in his teens he enlisted in the army and became a captain under Oliver Cromwell, following him through the Irish campaign, and after the conquest of that Island, remaining for a time near Belfast, where he met and married Mary Chandler (1624-1668), daughter of one of Cromwell’s officers William Candler (1608-1680), who remained in Ireland but had issue who emigrated to America and fought in the Revolution.  After his wife’s death at 44, and likely due to religious persecution of Quakers, he and his remaining family set sail from Southampton on the ship "Glasgow" in 1669; after a stop on the Island of Barbados in the West Indies, they eventually arrived near what is now Charleston South Carolina and established the first permanent colony there. The Moormans didn’t stay long, moving and settling in Nansemond County Virginia that same year.  Zachariah Moorman’s daughter Sarah Moorman (1657-1710) had married fellow Quaker Micajah Christopher Clarke (1656-1706), whose entire extended family was on the same voyage and settled together.  Zachariah Moorman’s great grandson, my 6th great-grandfather Charles Moorman (1715-1788) freed all his inherited slaves in his will.  His daughter Elizabeth Moorman (1738-1809) married my 6th-great-grandfather Christopher Johnson (1731-1807), who served in the Revolutionary War.

An interesting twist to the foregoing is that Micajah Clarke’s father Michael Clark (1629-1678) stayed in Barbados, and became known, as one does, as “Michael Clark of Barbados”, unusual in being a Virginia landowner who never actually lived in Virginia.  But perhaps even more interesting is that his father, my 11th-great-grandfather Edward Clark (1592-1666), was listed as “the Ancient Planter of Virginia” 1614-16, and again in Feb 1623. In 1624, he was awarded 200 acres by the Virginia Company, as a result of his late father's service.  He evidently returned to England, resettling at his birthplace of Thriplow, Cambridgeshire.

People often forget that the Atlantic Ocean has always been a two-way street.

Now, that “late father’s service” may have, in fact, been John Clark (1575-1623)’s piloting the “Mayflower” in 1620 to drop off the Pilgrims.  This is unconfirmed (and as one can imagine, a source of acrimonious debate in genealogy fora), but it would be pretty neat to say definitively that he was my 12th-great-grandfather.  Note that after returning to England after dropping off the Pilgrims, he decided to go back over to Virginia (he'd already piloted a voyage to Jamestown and back in 1610!), and died in Jamestown in 1723, so it's plausible.  Fun fact:  Clark's Island in Duxbury Bay near Plymouth is named after him.

My 7th-great-grandfather Gervaise "Jarvis" Gilbert (1680-1739), my maternal grandfather Bernie Talbott’s maternal 8th-great-grandfather, was born in Leeds, West Yorkshire, and migrated to the Middle River Hundred in Baltimore County, Maryland, around 1699.  "Jarvis" Gilbert’s son Benjamin Gilbert Sr. (1729-1792), my 6th-great-grandfather, went on to provide supplies in the Revolutionary War, and is thus listed in the DAR records as preforming “Patriotic Service”.

Back to The Indian Massacre of 1622 , which killed 347 people, one-quarter of the entire population of the Colony of Virginia, forcing the remaining settlers back to the fortifications at Jamestown; it was a really big deal. My favorite writer P.J. O'Rourke had some choice commentary on that whole era:

"Of the five hundred some colonists who arrived in Jamestown between 1607 and 1610, 440 of them died, mostly from starvation. The initial settlers landed too late in the year to plant crops and didn’t know much about planting anyway. Their only piece of good fortune was not being immediately evicted by the local landlords, the Powhatan Confederacy. This was an organization of about thirty Algonquian-speaking tribes that had formed a military alliance against Siouan-speaking tribes to their north and west under the leadership of Wahunsenacawh, father of Pocahontas. The Powhatan were well aware of the three rules of real estate. None of them lived on the location, location, location of Jamestown. The peninsula on the James River at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay was mosquito infested, too swampy for farming or hunting, and, wetland though it may have been, suffering a drought that left the colonists nothing to drink but brackish river water. ... The Jamestown colonists did not arrive with the equipment, supplies, or inclination to found a self-sustaining colony. The Jamestown business model was to export valuable commodities. But they couldn’t find any. They shipped a load of clapboard to England. The London investors who had funded Jamestown were not best pleased. They sent a stiff note along with their 1608 (inadequate) resupply of the colony. According to the historian James Horn, preeminent expert on Jamestown, the investors insisted that the colonists send them enough goods to pay for the cost of the resupply voyage plus a lump of gold, proof that the South Sea had been discovered, and somebody from the Lost Colony of Roanoke. And a partridge in a pear tree. Jamestown would go down in history—and down was the direction it was headed—for many American firsts. The kind of firsts you wish America hadn’t had. ... The Jamestown colonists were the first Europeans to invade the inland of our nation, sending raiding parties up the James River to steal Powhatan crops and occupy Powhatan land. In 1622 the Powhatan Confederacy made the first successful large-scale, tactically coordinated attack on Europeans, killing 347 of them. The colonists were pushed back into the original Jamestown fortifications. The Powhatan hoped the colony, if it remained at all, would be reduced to a small trading post. The Powhatan thought the colonists had been taught a lesson. The colonists—not a first—hadn’t. Warfare, sometimes acute, sometimes chronic, continued against ever more numerous and better-armed Jamestown forces. Meanwhile the colonists were deploying our country’s first weapons of mass destruction. Although, to be fair, they didn’t know that their germs and viruses even existed. ... All the tales of American Indian fighter heroics (whether your hero is Crazy Horse or Davy Crockett) turn to ashes in the mouths of the tellers when facts are considered. The New World was conquered by coughs, sneezes, and craps in the woods. The historian David Stannard, in his thoroughly disheartening book about the death and destruction of the Western Hemisphere’s aboriginal inhabitants, American Holocaust, estimates that the Powhatan Confederacy numbered about 14,000 people when Jamestown was founded. But the germs had arrived before the germy. The region’s population had already been reduced by diseases spreading from the first European contacts in the late fourteenth century, perhaps drastically reduced. By the end of the seventeenth century only about six hundred Powhatan were left, a mortality rate of more than 95 percent. Germs were the A-bomb. The Indians were militarily skilled and fighting on their own turf. Without germs the British colonists would have met the same fate that the American colonists dealt the British a hundred years later. And the U.S.A. would be a different country. (Although, given the demographic pressures in Europe, still plagued by illegal immigrants. But they’d be you and me.) In 1677 a treaty established what amounted to America’s first Indian reservation. This was land “reserved” for surviving members of the Powhatan Confederacy. The Treaty of 1677 was honored the way treaty rights on Indian reservations continue to be—making fraud instead of fighting the way to get Powhatan land."

One of the reasons I’m not a big fan of fiction is that I find history to be infinitely more interesting.