The First Families of Virginia are a group of early settler families who became a socially and politically dominant group in the British colony of Virginia and later the Commonwealth of Virginia.[1] They descend from European colonists who primarily settled at Jamestown, Williamsburg, the Northern Neck and along the James River and other navigable waters in Virginia during the 17th century. These elite families generally married within their social class for many generations and, as a result, most surnames of First Families date to the colonial period.
The American Revolution cut ties with Britain but not with its social traditions. While some First Family members were loyal to Britain, others were Whigs who supported and often took leading roles in the Revolution.[2] Most First Families remained in Virginia, where they flourished as tobacco planters, and from the sale of slaves to the cotton states to the south. Indeed, many younger sons of the First Families were relocated into the cotton belt to start their own plantations. With the emancipation of slaves during the Civil War and the consequential loss of slave labor, Virginia plantations struggled to turn a profit. The First Families, albeit poorer than before, maintained social and political leadership. Marshall Fishwick says that by the 1950s, "the old-time aristocracy [had] not given up, or sunk into decadence as Southern novelists suggest." They adopted modern agricultural technology and co-opted rich "Yankees" into their upper-class, rural horse-estate society.[3] However, mirroring the fortunes of other White Anglo-Saxon Protestant social groups, the political and financial influence of the First Families in Virginia has declined over the last century.
English heritage, second sons
The English colonists who eventually became the First Families emigrated to the new Colony of Virginia. Their migration took place from the settlement of Jamestown through the English Civil War and English Interregnum period (1642–1660). Some royalists left England on the accession to power of Oliver Cromwell and his Parliament. Because most of Virginia's leading families recognized Charles II as King following the execution of Charles I in 1649, Charles II reputedly called Virginia his "Old Dominion" – a nickname that endures today. The affinity of many early Virginia settlers for the Crown led to the term "distressed Cavaliers", often applied to the Virginia plantocracy. Some Cavaliers who served under King Charles I fled to Virginia. FFVs often refer to Virginia as "Cavalier Country". These men were offered land or other rewards by King Charles II, but most who had settled in Virginia stayed in Virginia.
Many such early settlers in Virginia were called Second Sons. Primogeniture favored the first sons' inheriting lands and titles in England. Second or third sons went out to the colonies to make their fortune, or entered the military and the clergy. Tidewater Virginia evolved as a society descended from second or third sons of Englishmen who inherited land grants or land in Virginia. They formed part of what became the Southern elite in Colonial America.
In some cases, longstanding ties among families in England were carried to the new colony, where they were reinforced by marriage and other relations. For instance, there were ancestral ties between the Spencer family of Bedfordshire and the Washington family; a Spencer secured the land grant later purchased by the Washingtons, where they built their Mount Vernon home. These sorts of ties were common in the early colony, as families shuttled back and forth between England and Virginia, maintaining their connections with the mother country and with each other.
A thin network of increasingly interrelated families made up the planter elite and held power in colonial Virginia. "As early as 1660, every seat on the ruling Council of Virginia was held by members of five interrelated families," writes British historian John Keegan, "and as late as 1775, every council member was descended from one of the 1660 councillors."[4]
The ties among Virginia families were based on marriage. In a pre-Revolutionary War economy dependent on the production of tobacco as a commodity crop, the ownership of the best land was tightly controlled. It often passed between families of corresponding social rank. The Virginia economy was based on slave labor as the colony became a slave society. The landed gentry could keep tight rein on political power, which passed in somewhat orderly fashion from family to family. (In the more modern mercantile economy of the north, social mobility became more prominent. The power of the elite was muted by newcomers who gained wealth in the market economy.)
Pocahontas
Pocahontas (1595–1617), a Native American, was the daughter of Chief Powhatan, founder of the Powhatan Confederacy. According to Mattaponi and Patawomeck tradition, Pocahontas was previously married to a Patawomeck weroance, Kocoum, who was murdered by Englishmen when Samuel Argall abducted her on April 13, 1613.[5] Educated among the English of Virginia and converted to Christianity during her captivity in Henricus, Pocahontas married colonist John Rolfe at a church in Jamestown on April 5, 1614. Rolfe had become prominent and wealthy as the first to successfully develop an export cash crop for the colony with new varieties of tobacco. Their only child, Thomas Rolfe, was born on January 30, 1615. He married and had a family: his descendants married into other elite families.
Pocahontas was much celebrated in London, where she was welcomed with great ceremony at the Royal Court. She died young but became legendary as the first Indian from Virginia to become Christian, marry an Englishman, and have a known child from such a marriage (there were no doubt mixed-race children born to lower-class colonists and Algonquian women, although they may have been neither married nor Christian). She became an important symbol of friendly Native American-English relations of the Jamestown colony. By virtue of many fictional accounts, her marriage was romanticized and became part of the mythology of early American history.[6][7]
Crucially, Pocahontas became a focal point in all First Family genealogies. So great was the importance of Pocahontas in these family trees that, upon the passage of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, First Family lobbying resulted in the "Pocahontas Exception", which allowed white people claiming native descent to circumvent the Act's one-drop rule and remain classified as white.[8]
Organizing the FFV
In 1887, following the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, Virginia Governor Wyndham Robertson wrote the first history of Pocahontas and her descendants, delineating the ancestry of FFV families including the Bollings, Clements, Whittles, Blands, Skipwiths, Flemings, Catletts, Gays, Jordans, Randolphs, Tazewells, and many others.[9] Excluded from this history were 'natural children', mixed-race descendants of unions with slaves.
Families often used surnames as given names, as in the "Johns" of Johns Hopkins University, or where a surname might die out because the last holder only had daughters, Cole Digges was the grandson of William Cole. A mother's maiden name might also be used as a middle name, to document that part of the person's ancestry; or even middle and first as is the case with John Tayloe Lomax, John Tayloe Washington,[10] and John Tayloe Corbin. For example, Lt. Col. Powhatan Bolling Whittle of the 38th Virginia Infantry, Confederate States Army was an uncle of Matoaka Whittle Sims.[11]
In 1907, the Jamestown Exposition was held near Norfolk to celebrate the tricentennial of the arrival of the first English colonists and the founding of Jamestown. Preservation Virginia, formerly known as the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, was founded in Williamsburg in 1889 to memorialize Virginia history.[12] In the 20th century, Preservation Virginia emphasized patriotism by highlighting the Founding Fathers that hailed from Virginia.[13] To commemorate the 350th anniversary of the first settlement at Jamestown, the Order of First Families of Virginia published genealogies compiled by F.A.S.G. Annie Lash Jester and Martha Woodroff Hiden in 1956. The same pair published a second addition in 1964 (also during Virginia's Massive Resistance crisis). The third edition was compiled and edited by Virginia M. Meyer (1974-1981) and John Federick Dorman (1981-1987). The fourth and current edition, in three volumes published between 2004 (vol.1) and 2007 (vol.3)by Baltimore's Genealogical Publishing Company in collaboration with the Order of First Families of Virginia.[14]
Notable families
Some notable family names include:
- Allerton[15][16]
- Archer[17]
- Ashford
- Bacon
- Baskerville[17]
- Belcher
- Bentley
- Berkeley[15][17]
- Beverley[15]
- Billingsley
- Blair[15][17]
- Bland[15][17][18]
- Bolling[17]
- Branch[17]
- Braxton[17][18]
- Browne[17][15]
- Buckner [17][18]
- Burwell[15][17]
- Byrd[15][17][18]
- Capps[15][17][18]
- Carter[15][17][18]
- Cary[15][17]
- Chiles
- Christian[19]
- Conway
- Custis[20]
- Dalton
- Dameron/Damron
- Dandridge
- Eldridge
- Fairfax[15][17]
- Farrar[15][21]
- Fitzhugh[15][17][18]
- Gooch[15]
- Graves[17]
- Harrison[15][17][18]
- Hill
- Hopkins[17]
- Howell[22]
- Jameson
- Jefferson[17]
- Jenings[15]
- Kennon
- Lee[15][17][18]
- Madison
- Marshall
- Mathews[15]
- McLean
- Nelson[15][17][18]
- Norvell
- Pace
- Page[15][17]
- Payne[23]
- Randolph[15][17][18]
- Robinson[15][17][24]
- Rolfe
- Saunders[17]
- Scrivener
- Selden
- Sharp
- Shifflett
- Skillern
- Spencer[17]
- Stagner
- Starnes
- Stith[17]
- Taliaferro[17]
- Tayloe[15][17]
- Taylor[17]
- Terrell
- Tucker
- Waller[17]
- Warner[15]
- Warren[25]
- Washington[17][18]
- West[15][17]
- Wise
Portrait gallery
Landon Carter I
Robert Carter, Portrait at Shirley Plantation
Colonel William Fairfax (1691–1757)
Benjamin Harrison V Portrait
William Henry Harrison by James Reid Lambdin
Official Presidential portrait of Thomas Jefferson (by Rembrandt Peale, 1800)
Col. Richard Lee I "The Immigrant"
Thomas Lee of Stratford Hall
Francis Lightfoot Lee, signer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence
Warner Lewis II and Rebecca Lewis, John Wollaston
Col. John Page by Peter Lely
Mann Page and His Sister Elizabeth, John Wollaston
Peyton Randolph
Speaker John Robinson
John Tayloe I of the Old House
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Estate Gallery
Bacon Family, Bacon's Castle Surry County, Virginia, oldest documented brick dwelling in the United States
Browne Family, Four Mile Tree, Surry, Virginia
Burwell Family, Carter's Grove, James City County, Virginia
Carter Family, Nomini Hall, Westmoreland County, Virginia
Wellford-Carter Family, Sabine Hall, Richmond Co, Virginia
Hill-Carter Family, Charles City County, Virginia
Lee Family, Stratford Hall, Westmoreland County, Virginia
Madison Family, Belle Grove, Carolina County, Virginia
Page Family, Rosewell, Gloucester County, Virginia
Tayloe Family, Mount Airy, Richmond Co, Virginia
Taliaferro, Wellford, Burgh Westra, Gloucester, Virginia
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See also
References
Further reading
Notes on sources
External links
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