The Kinsmen

Prologue: The Kinsman Journey to Virginia and the New World

History is shaped by the people and the events within their culture that influence change. Events can be subtle, such as climatic changes, which can ultimately alter the course of history or natural catastrophic disasters that influence conditions within an environment to bring about unwanted change. A less dramatic but significant event was an historic worldwide plague that brought social reforms and effected a reconstruction of ideals.

Religious beliefs always influence the people within a culture, so much so, that if change occurs it would be the most important event of its time and lead to widespread war. Sometimes the greatest of these historic events are caused by the intervention of the human kind whether acting alone or in concert with others with an outcome that yields long lasting results.

Throughout history there have been single individuals with strength of vision who have influenced change.

In the year 1066 AD, an event occurred that transformed the course of history forever. It was the Norman Invasion of England launched by the visionary William, the Duke of Normandy to become King William I of England. The British historian R.W. Southern has argued that “. . . William’s conquest represents the single most radical change in European history between the Fall of Rome and the 20th Century.”

Historians and teachers of history all agree that the changes brought by the Normans had a profound impact on the church, culture and language of the British. In the centuries that followed the first battle at Hastings on the eastern shore of England, the Normans moved west to conquer Wales and Ireland.

William’s ancestry can be traced to Rollo, a Viking chieftain who invaded France and was given the duchy of Nuestria to be called Normandy –home of the Normans. Today there are millions of people who descend from William the Conqueror as does every English monarch that has followed him including the present Queen Elizabeth and her descendants.

According to the recent publication, Royal Ancestry: A Study of Colonial and Medieval Families by the renowned genealogist Douglas Richardson, 250 families descended from King William are identified as immigrating to the American colonies in the 17th century from England. It should be noted that William’s wife, Maud of Flanders, was a descendent of the Emperor Charlemagne, which affects the descent of some of the same members of the Conqueror as kinsman to Charlemagne.*

The Kinsman is focused on those 250 families of immigrants and their interrelationships that settled in the Tidewater region of the Virginia colony and along the Potomac River.

This book further investigates these families’ genealogical histories, and with the use of many sources allows the reader to envision the families in their historical environment, both in Medieval England and the United States of America.

*kinsman: those of the same blood relation by descent or marriage.

Compiled by Sandi B. Johnson, Historian

This document has been compiled by Sandra B. Johnson as an example of the interrelationships that merged the Anglo-Saxon and the Franco Norman Families. The Anglo Norman of England ARE the English of the present time.