Just before COVID, my sister and her family moved to a new city. It was time. She wasn’t sure where they were going to go, she just knew it had to be somewhere else. It needed to be a city of a certain size for them; not too big, not too small. It needed to have a certain level of sophistication and be relatively near my brother-in-law’s parents. They looked at a variety of places but ultimately fell in love with a house that was in none of the towns they were considering. So that is where they went. I recently asked her why she chose it out of all the other options. “It just felt right,” was her answer.
I am currently wandering around North Carolina visiting places where the ancestors of my family who moved to Alabama were from. I started writing this from Roxboro where ol’ William “Buck” Hester was born before he took his son Roling down to Russellville in 1818. His wife Amy Malone was born here too. That day, just as the sun was setting, I visited the Hester Cemetery out on Gordonton Road where Buck’s parents, Robert Jr. and Elizabeth Nancy McCrary as well as his grandparents Robert Sr. and Elizabeth Nancy Normand are buried. Their graves are unmarked because they likely had wooden markers which have long since rotted away but they’re there. So are many of their descendants.
Earlier that day, I was a little further east in the town of Oxford in Granville County, which was where Amy’s father eventually moved, and her mother and grandparents were from.
It turns out that of all the places she could have gone, my sister moved to a town about 30 miles away from Oxford and 45 miles away from Roxboro. She had no idea there was so much family nearby when she moved. None of us really knew, I’ve just recently discovered it myself. “It just felt right,” is what she told me.
Before that, I was much further east in a town called Columbia where one of my 8th great-grandfathers had lived. His name was Godfrey Spruill, Jr., and had been born in Scotland in 1650. He and his father Godfrey Spruill, Sr. came to the New World and settled in the eastern part of the state on the southern shore of the Albemarle Sound. A different 8th great-grandfather Henry Thomas Norman II had come over from Cornwall, England and he and his wife had settled on the northern shore of the Sound. These two families joined up when their children Mary Spruill and Henry Norman III got married. Eventually, they made their way west because their daughter Elizabeth Nancy Normand was one of the people whose unmarked grave I visited in the Hester Cemetery in Roxboro.
My grandparents Eunice and Morris who lived in Lynchburg, Virginia used to go to Nag’s Head, North Carolina to go to the beach. My family often went with them when we were kids. It’s just up the shore from where the Wright Brothers first flew their plane in Kitty Hawk. While I was in Columbia and Hertford in eastern North Carolina, I realized that I was less than forty miles away from Nag’s Head. I don’t know why Nag’s Head became the place our family always went and loved. There are plenty of beaches that are closer. I guess it just felt right.
In response to something I wrote, a friend told me about the “thin places” that are a part of Irish Celtic lore. They are, according to that belief, areas where the boundary between this world and the spirit world is thinner. They are often found in sacred spots, but they can also occur where people have inhabited the same patch of earth over several generations.
My ancestors have been in this part of North Carolina for well over 300 years. It turns out that my sister is just the latest in an impossibly long line to move here.
I’m writing about a lot of people. I know. It’s even confusing for me. Michael wants me to include charts with each of these posts, so maybe I’ll try to do that. I need to figure out how to isolate specific twigs. The further back I go, the worse it gets. Before I started writing about this, I never thought about how many people populate our family trees. To give you an idea of just how big a crowd it is, the four 8th great-grandparents I just mentioned are just four out of 1,024 of them. We all have that many. Every single human being on the planet has exactly that number.
There is an enormous amount of information to be found on genealogy sites online these days. It took my grandmother years of research to prove her lineage back to someone who fought in the Revolution. I can now do it with a few clicks if I know where to start. So many people have contributed to the collective knowledge that as soon as you get back to an ancestor that someone has already researched from a different branch, suddenly your tree explodes. If you can hook into a line of aristocracy, you can sometimes go back impossibly far.
While it’s true that some people moved to the New World to escape religious persecution, far more people came here simply to make money. My family, on both sides for the most part, all originate in the British Isles: Scotland, Ireland, and England. Some came because they had no money, and some came because they wanted more. I have yet to find evidence of any who were being persecuted for their beliefs.
Godfrey Spruill, Sr. was a second son. He was from Glasgow in Scotland. He had an older brother named John who probably inherited everything, as older brothers tended to do. Godfrey was forced to figure out a way to earn a living. In about the 1670s, I’m guessing, he and his son Godfrey, Jr. came to North Carolina. However long it took them once they got here, Junior eventually became one of the more successful people in the area. He owned a large plantation that grew mainly tobacco. He was also the first doctor in North Carolina. For that to have been the case, he must have gone to school while he was still in Scotland
I figured that there was probably a lot of wealth and status in the people before him, so I just started clicking on different lines to see where I could get. He didn’t disappoint. Through Godfrey, I can trace my way back to Robert the Bruce who was King of Scotland from 1306 to 1329. He is one of my 22nd great-grandparents. That doesn’t put me anywhere near the front of the succession line. We each have 16,777,216 22nd great-grandparents. Sixteen MILLION. I have a solid bead on just two of mine. Robert was married twice but my 22nd great-grandmother was Isabella of Mar. They had one child, a daughter named Marjory, and from her it all trickles down to me.
Robert the Bruce’s claim to the throne came through his 4th great-grandfather (my 28th!) David the First of Scotland. HIS grandfather (my 30th) was the Duncan who was killed by a guy you may have heard of named Macbeth on August 14, 1040. It was a Friday.
By the way, we all have well over five hundred million 30th great-grandparents. I probably share this lineage with a goodly percentage of the world’s population including almost everyone reading this. Given the sheer multitude of people involved, I am certain that I am probably descended from Robert the Bruce through any number of different lines. Something else we all share is a little inbreeding. After a few generations, it is impossible to avoid. Nobody remembers who is related to whom.
My personal genetic history arises almost completely from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe. There are some German and some French, but that is hardly surprising given the history of England. Both of my parents no matter how far apart, geographically, they started, are originally from the same place. My mother may have seemed exotic to my father when they first met, but maybe something stronger was at play. Perhaps their attraction for each other came from a deeper understanding that they were, in essence, the same. It was the genetic similarity that attracted them to each other without their knowledge.
How much of what we do is influenced by those that came before us? My parents had to travel thousands of miles to meet each other but had their ancestors not traveled so far, they could easily have grown up in neighboring villages. My sister had to travel a long and torturous route only to end up in a place where our forebears have been for centuries. To relax and unwind, my grandparents started us all going to the shore, back to where we first landed on this continent three hundred years before.
We are all connected to each other far more deeply than I ever imagined. My genetic makeup is not purely Northern European. One of my 5th great-grandparents was Indian or Sri Lankan. It’s hardly surprising given my mother’s side of the family’s connection to India. I would be fascinated to find out who that person was. Through that person, an entirely different part of the world gets grafted onto my tree. Who were they? What were their lives like?
While I was near, I drove into Lynchburg to see if my Aunt Helen’s gravestone had been placed in the cemetery yet. We were warned last year that there were severe supply chain delays with granite when we ordered it, and they were right. Still no stone. Grass has started to grow over the spot where she was buried. By the end of the summer, nobody will be able to tell she is there until the stone arrives. Lichens have already started to appear on my grandparent’s memorials. As years pass, those hardy little organisms will start to break the rock down and take them over. Many of the older stones in the Hester cemetery are already hard to read. How much longer will they last?
There’s a big standing stone in the center of the eight plots in Lynchburg that simply says, Hester. The first time I saw it, I found it jarring to see my name in a graveyard. Like Ebeneezer Scrooge looking at his marker, it seemed like a dire warning. Now I feel oddly comforted by it. Out at the Hester cemetery in Roxboro, three-quarters of the graves have stones that say Hester on them. I walked through a whole field of Hesters.
It feels right somehow. I can’t quite explain why, but it all feels right.
It takes the gift of awareness and spirit to connect to those “thin” places. Lovely that you have both and nurture them. Wonderful story...onto Scotland? 😉
Wow! Absolutely fascinating!