Four Hundred and Three

Four Hundred Three happens to be the number of years that one branch of my family has been resident on the continent of North America. (Four Hundred Two years is documented for another branch).

Since the late 1970’s, I’ve been smitten by the hobby of Genealogy. My mother’s father and his sister had started the project years ago, making notes on 3×5 index cards, and collecting newspaper obituaries and the like.

When my great-aunt Hazel passed away in 1978, all of this was put into boxes and sent to me, for some reason the rest of the family decided I was more likely to do something with it.

I was quite lucky in some respects, a large part of my maternal grandmothers family had been studied extensively by a professional genealogist, Annette Paris Highsmith, and the results were published in 1971 in a book named “Highsmiths in America: Descendants of Daniel Highsmith of Halifax County, North Carolina: With Appendices of Unconnected Highsmith Families”.

Unfortunately, there were only 1,000 copies printed, and most of them perished in a warehouse fire sometime in the late 1970’s. A few rare copies exist in odd libraries or private hands, but I did manage to get a microfiche copy in the mid 90’s.

All of us were educated in school to believe that America as we know it was settled by the Pilgrims, who landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts, in 1625.

Well, it just ain’t so! The pilgrims were late comers, and there was a colony established and beginning to grow a few hundred miles south at Jamestown, Virginia. This colony was settled in 1607, nearly died out a few times, once in 1609/10 and again in 1623/24, but it was the first permanent colony on the continent, and deserves more attention that it has received.

My first documented ancestor to settle on the continent was a John Powell, likely born in Kent County, England in 1595, who arrived at the Jamestown Colony in 1509 as part of the nine-ship third supply. The flag-ship of this little navy, the Sea Venture was damaged in a hurricane while in transit, and ended up stranded in Bermuda, but the Swallow, on which my ancestor was a passenger, aged about 19 years, made it safely to port. Another ship, the Catch, was lost in the storm.

Amazingly, the survivors of the Sea Venture were able to build two new ships, the Patience and the Deliverance using Bermuda Cedar and fittings from what was left of the Sea Venture. It’s said by some that the struggle for survival of these brave souls was the basis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Not being a Shakespeare fan, I couldn’t tell you, but perhaps I’ll make myself read it.

Another ancestor also arrived in Jamestown aboard the sailing ship Swann, however, a year later than John Powell. Thomas Boulding III, born in 1579 at Stratford-on-Avon arrived in Jamestown in 1610 aboard the Swann, and lived to 1665 where he died at Gloucester, Virginia.

Unlike Plymouth, Massachusetts, the settlements at Jamestown were purely economical and driven by business. They were an effort of the Virginia Company of London, a group of stockholders and investors funding the settlements in hope of making huge profits from finding gold or other precious resources in the new lands. It turned out the big money-maker would be tobacco.

Times were very tough – this was the colony of John Smith and Pocahontas, and the local Indian tribe, the Powhatan were very much angry with the colony. When Chief Powhatan cut off the food supply, 90% of the 500 colonists died, and by May of 1610, only 60 were left alive, luckily, including my ancestor John Powell.

Great progress has been made in excavating the old Jamestown settlement, and perhaps one day I can get there and poke around.

I have always enjoyed history, and when you mix it with genealogy, you find yourself following little known paths down swirling little eddies of time. When you find your family intersecting with major events in history, it gives you a little thrill.