England did not start creating its global empire until the very late 1500s.
Before that, it was largely a nation of farmers. As the British population grew, the soil started to wear out. For two years, beginning in 1315, there was a nationwide famine that decimated the population. Then in 1348, the Black Death struck killing many more. In 1381, the peasants revolted. They were subdued, but the old system based on feudal agreements between landed aristocracy and local workers started to fall apart. Instead, English textiles and manufacturing became more important, and a rising class of merchants and traders appeared.
There was already a great demand for spices, tea, silks, and other luxury items from the East but trading for them relied on torturous overland routes. With the rise of the Ottoman Empire, even those avenues started to close. In the 1400s the Portuguese began finding ways to trade with the Indies via the sea. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias made his way around the Cape of Good Hope at the bottom of Africa proving that there was an ocean route to India. He put up a cross in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa marking how far he’d gotten. When we were kids, we would go to a beach called Kowie in Port Alfred not far from there. I remember going to see the cross or at least a reconstruction of it. In 1498, Vasco da Gama sailed to India.
Convinced that there was an easier way to get there, Christopher Columbus persuaded Isabella of Spain to finance his voyage west which, of course, landed him in North America in 1492. The English king Henry VII sent the first British explorers out to North America in 1497. The expedition, led by John Cabot, landed on the coast of Newfoundland but did not establish a colony. Cabot returned to England and then went back again the year after but then he disappeared. There were some other attempts, but none were successful. The English contented themselves with raiding Spanish and Portuguese ships which were bringing tons of gold back from the new world as well as slaves up from Africa. It wasn’t until Elizabeth I granted Walter Raleigh a patent in 1584, nearly a hundred years later, that the first English colony in North America was established. It failed. The first settlement that survived was the one that Captain John Smith founded in Jamestown in 1607.
At about the same time, the British East India Company was formed in 1600. It, like all the expeditions to North America, was privately funded. The Crown didn’t financially back any of them, it only dispensed permission. The Jamestown venture was paid for by a group of merchants who formed the Virginia Company. Only when the venture became successful did the Crown take control of it. In 1624 they renamed it the Colony of Virginia.
India with its riches was always the aim. All these people were looking for financial gain. People still believed that there was a Northwest passage to the subcontinent and that the land they had discovered to the west was only a narrow island. Most of them were not looking for farmland. They wanted gold. The Spanish explorer Hernando Cortés expressed what the rest were thinking when he said, “I came here to get rich, not to till the soil like a peasant.”
There were groups that came over to escape religious persecution, the Pilgrims being the most famous example. I have yet to find any evidence, however, that anyone in my family was fleeing anything. Instead, my family seems to have come to the New World to make a living. Many of them came over very early on.
Robert Mayfield was born in Gloucester, England in 1630 and died in Virginia in 1692. His son Robert Mayfield, Jr. was born in Gloucester County Virginia in 1655 so Robert Senior had to have come over before that. Several generations later Agnes Elizabeth Mayfield married Francis Hester, Jr. and got into my direct line.
Edward Garland was born in 1629 in London and his wife was born in 1634. Their daughter Elizabeth Garland was born on February 5, 1654, in New Kent, Virginia. Elizabeth marries Francis Hester, Sr. which is how they get into the Hester branch.
Richard James was born in Caine, Wilshire in 1591 and dies in British Colonial America in 1638. His son-in-law Sir Henry Thomas Norman is the grandfather of Henry Norman, III who married Mary Spruill who is descended from the Godfrey Spruill I wrote about in my last post.
There are many more branches of my tree with people who made the journey over from Britain to the New World near the beginning. One of the earliest was James Pope. He was born in Northumberland, Virginia in 1630 about twenty years after the Jamestown colony was established. You can walk between the two communities in 35 hours or simply sail around the headland in Chesapeake Bay. James Pope is an eighth great-grandfather of mine whose line descends through the Boyd family until Mary Ann Boyd marries James Jennings Wilson who was my great-grandfather Fred Wilson’s grandfather.
Visiting the Jamestown Settlement and Williamsburg, Virginia these days is a bit like going to a colonial theme park. The area surrounding them is filled with fast-food restaurants and chain hotels. It’s hard to get a sense of what life then was like from what we are presented with. People dressed in costumes of the period lack the hardened resolve those early settlers must have had to survive. At five o’clock, when the parks close, this lot can all head out to Denny’s for a meal.
A large branch of this part of my family was from St. Peter’s Parish in New Kent, Virginia. The church, itself, was established in 1679 and built between 1701 and 1703. Most of its early records were sadly lost during the Civil War. On January 6, 1759, the rector of St. Peters married Martha Custis and Colonel George Washington.
Francis Hester, Sr. was born in Oxford, England in 1650 and died in St. Peter’s Parish in 1720. His wife Elizabeth Garland was born in New Kent in 1654 and when her husband died moved north to a town called Louisa where she lived for nearly twenty years more with her son, Robert. Both Robert H. Hester and his wife Rachel were born in New Kent as was their son Francis Hester, Jr. who I mentioned earlier. (see the first chart)
St. Peter’s church is still standing and is quite beautifully preserved. I couldn’t find any stones that I recognized in the graveyard. None were old enough. Unlike Williamsburg, there is little development that I could see surrounding it in New Kent. Everything looks very well maintained and, from what I saw, there are plenty of wealthy plantations
The area must have started getting crowded back in the day because Francis Hester, Jr. after his wife died moved west with his son Robert Sr. and wife Elizabeth Nancy Normand. They went to what is now Roxboro, North Carolina. They, and their son Robert Hester, Jr. and his wife are the ones buried in the unmarked graves in the Hester Cemetery. Robert Jr.’s son William “Buck” Hester will then make his way south into Alabama looking for new land to open up.
I am amazed that there are so many Hester generations that were completely capable of forging new lives in utterly alien places. The Hesters, themselves, were all landowners who seemed to increase their holdings with each successive generation. As they pushed west and then south, of course, the Native Americans, whose land they were moving into, were, in turn, pushed further and further off.
The Powhatan people occupied the land that John Smith took in Jamestown to create his first settlement. The Pamunkey people were living in the area around New Kent. The ancestors of the people we now think of as Catawba, Cherokee, and Creek lived in present-day Roxboro, North Carolina. The Muscogee, who the British referred to as Creek, descended from the civilization that built the mound cities throughout the south, and lived in Alabama. By the time Buck Hester moved down to Alabama, the Cherokees had been pushed down there as well. The second homestead the Hesters built was right up against the Cherokee Reservation.
In 1838 and 1839, seven years after my great-great-grandfather John Chesley Hester was born in Russellville, President Andrew Jackson forced the Cherokees there to relocate to the west of the Mississippi River onto land that nobody else wanted. He made them walk to Oklahoma in what has become known as the Trail of Tears. 17,000 people were forced to go. Over the course of the 1,200-mile march, nearly 6,000 of them died. While that was happening, the Hesters worked the land the tribe had left behind.
When the American Revolution broke out, the British forces were divided between their holdings in North America and their occupation of India. The plunder of India was well underway and as no gold or jewels had been discovered in the American colonies, they chose to concentrate their forces in India. Had they chosen otherwise, the Revolution probably would not have succeeded. Britain let the Americas go.
In time, they would lose India as well, but not before it was well and truly looted.
Driving around these rural areas where my ancestors lived, I am constantly amazed at what a thorough job we have done in transforming the landscape. Very little remains of what was here when my British family first arrived. We cut down all the trees. All of them. The forests I drove past this week are all well less than a hundred years old. As soon as they mature, we cut them down again to make paper and picnic benches. Rivers have been diverted or submerged or dammed. We’ve filled in swamps and changed the shape of the coastline.
I respect just how brave and industrious my ancestors were, while at the same time being appalled at the price they paid for their success. Human beings have an uncanny ability to view certain fellow human beings as less-than. The Native Americans didn’t build cities the way the English did, so that meant that they weren’t really people in the invaders’ eyes. They were animals that could be herded away.
The Australians only voted in 1967 to consider the Aboriginal people human. Before that, they didn’t. The Germans did not consider the Jewish people to be human and, therefore, justified their extermination of over six million of them. Apparently, with enough effort, we can justify anything.
We all live under a system that esteems success. That our success often comes at the cost of another’s failure is something we have all learned to live with. It might be time to start to rethink that. How much success does an individual person need?
We founded this country with the idea that we all deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That our Founding Father’s definition of “we all” only meant white landowners doesn’t mean that our definition shouldn’t expand to actually include everyone else.
That last paragraph probably caused a lot of ancestral grave-spinning down here in the South, but so be it. It’s time.
Like the graph very much. Is it an app or are you just brilliantly creative? We have lots documented for most of my ancestors. One branch, Hurd, came in late 1600s’ from England, the rest a combo of Ireland, England and Germany in the mid 19th century. Our people headed to the Firelands in Ohio in the late 1700s’ and Lake Erie (Cleveland/Sandusky) via Canada. Your color wheel is easier to follow than the “tree with branches” approach.