First Families of Virginia

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View of the main facade of Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County, the ancestral home of the Lee family of Virginia. Along with the Byrds, Carters, Washingtons, Harrisons and others, these families were at the core of Virginia's plantocracy for centuries. Stratford, State Route 214, Stratford Hall, Westmoreland County, VA HABS VA,97- ,4-21 (cropped).tif
View of the main façade of Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County, the ancestral home of the Lee family of Virginia. Along with the Byrds, Carters, Washingtons, Harrisons and others, these families were at the core of Virginia's plantocracy for centuries.

The First Families of Virginia (FFV) are a group of early white American settler families who became a socially, culturally, and politically dominant group in the Colony of Virginia, of the British Thirteen Colonies and later on the present day Commonwealth of Virginia, of the United States of America. [1] The first families of Virginia also descend from European colonists, specifically the British 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 back to the US colonial period.

Contents

The American Revolution cut many of the FFV's ties with Great Britain, despite this, some of the First Family members of Virginia were well known American loyalists to Great Britain, whereas others were American patriots (or 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 of the American South. Though most younger sons of the First Families who migrated west did so to Kentucky or Tennessee, some younger sons of the First Families some relocated into the Cotton Belt to start their own plantations. With the emancipation of slaves during the American Civil War and the consequential loss of slave labor, the FFV’s plantations struggled to turn a profit.

The First Families, albeit poorer than before, maintained social and political leadership in Virginia through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, adopting modern agricultural technology and coopting rich "Yankees" (people from the American North) into their upper-class, rural horse-estate society. [3] However, mirroring the exact misfortunes of other White Anglo-Saxon Protestant social groups in the United States, the political and financial influence of the First Families in Virginia also suffered a decline in the 20th century.

British heritage, second sons

Mann Page II of Rosewell, painted by John Wollaston. The Rosewell plantation was called one of the "finest homes in colonial America" and built of bricks imported from England (Great Britain). Mann Page II (1718-1778).jpg
Mann Page II of Rosewell, painted by John Wollaston. The Rosewell plantation was called one of the "finest homes in colonial America" and built of bricks imported from England (Great Britain).

The English colonists, later on the British colonists, who eventually became the First Families who had emigrated to the new Colony of Virginia, of the Thirteen Colonies. Their emigration took place from the settlement of Jamestown through the English Civil War and English Interregnum period (1642–1660). Some royalists had left England on the accession to power of Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads. 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 white settlers for the British Crown led to the term "distressed Cavaliers", often applied to the Virginia slavocracy. 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 white 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 colonial 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 white colonial Virginia families were based on marriage among each other. 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 by Simon de Passe Pocahontas by Simon van de Passe 1616.jpg
Pocahontas by Simon de Passe

Pocahontas (1595–1617), an American Indian woman, was 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 killed by Englishmen when Samuel Argall abducted her on April 13, 1613. [5] She was Educated among the English settlers of Virginia and converted to Christianity during her captivity in Henricus. Pocahontas married English 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 Native American from Virginia to assimilate into western culture, become Christian, marry an Englishman, and bear a known child from such a marriage (there were no doubt mixed-race children born to lower-class European colonists and Algonquian women, although they may have been neither married nor Christian). She became an important symbol of friendly Native American-English colonial relations of the Jamestown colony. By virtue of many fictional accounts, her marriage was romanticized and became part of the mythology of early US 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 who claimed Native American descent to circumvent the racial Act's one-drop rule and remain classified as white. [8]

Organizing the First Families

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 First 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 Annie Lash Jester (a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists) 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:

See also

References

  1. ↑ Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, ed. (April 1915). "The F. F. V.'s of Virginia". William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine. Richmond, Virginia: Whittet & Shepperson. page 277.
  2. ↑ Gutzman, Kevin R. C. (2007). Virginia's American Revolution: From Dominion tor Republic, 1776–1840. Lanham: Lexington Books. ISBN   978-0-7391-2131-3.
  3. ↑ Fishwick, Marshall (1959). "F. F. V.'s". American Quarterly. 11 (2): 147–156. doi:10.2307/2710671. JSTOR   2710671.
  4. ↑ Keegan, John (2009). The American Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. p.  334. ISBN   978-0-307-26343-8.
  5. ↑ Deyo, William "Night Owl" (September 5, 2009). "Our Patawomeck Ancestors" (PDF). Patawomeck Tides. 12 (1): 2–7. Archived from the original (PDF) on July 14, 2014. Retrieved July 6, 2014.
  6. ↑ Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (2007)
  7. ↑ F. W. Gleach, Powhatan's world and colonial Virginia (1997)
  8. ↑ Kevin N. Maillard, The Pocahontas Exception: The Exemption of American Indian Ancestry from Racial Purity Law, 12 Mich. J. Race & L. 351 (2007).
  9. ↑ Wyndham Robertson, Pocahontas, alias Matoaka, and Her Descendants, Richmond VA: J. W. Randolph & English, 1887
  10. ↑ "Details for Roster ID 152". Historical Rosters Database. Virginia Military Institute. Archived from the original on October 9, 2015.
  11. ↑ Lt. Col. Powhattan Bolling Whittle, Victorian Villa: Sims-Mitchell history
  12. ↑ Blight, David (2002). Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Paperback ed.). Belknap Press. ISBN   0-674-00332-2.
  13. ↑ Lindgren, James M. (1991). "'Virginia Needs Living Heroes': Historic Preservation in the Progressive Era". Public Historian. 13 (1): 9–24. doi:10.2307/3378156. JSTOR   3378156.
  14. ↑ front matter of 4th edition, vol. 1: ISBN   0-8063-1744-2, vol. 2: ISBN   0-8063-1763-9, vol. 3: ISBN   978-0-8063-1775-5
  15. ↑ Quisenberry, A. C. (1913). "The First Pioneer Families of Virginia". Register of Kentucky State Historical Society. 11 (32): 55–77. ISSN   2328-8183.
  16. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, ed. (April 1915). "The F. F. V.'s of Virginia". William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine. 23 (4). Richmond, Virginia: Whittet & Shepperson: 277. Retrieved February 11, 2011.
  17. ↑ Fischer, David Hackett (1991) [1989]. "The South of England to Virginia: Distressed Cavaliers and Indentured Servants, 1642–75". Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 219–220. ISBN   9780195069051. Another unlikely 'FFV' was the wayward Pilgram Isaac Allerton, a London tailor's son who emigrated in the Mayflower to Plymouth Colony and resettled in Virginia, ca. 1655, where he married into Berkeley's ruling elite.
  18. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 "Questions and Answers". Notes and Queries. VI (2). Manchester, New Hampshire: S. C. & L. M Gould: 244–245. February 1989.
  19. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Purvis, Thomas L. (1997) [1995]. "First families of Virginia". A Dictionary of American History. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers. p. 136. ISBN   9781577180999. Among the most prominent of these lineages are those of the Bland, Blackwell Braxton, Breckenridge, Byrd, Carter, Chapman, Corbin, Fitzhugh, Harrison, Lee, Lindsey, Ludwell, Nelson, Randolph, Washington, and Wormley families.
  20. ↑ Perry, James F. (May 21, 2009). "The Life and Times of Abraham Childers (1750-1849)". University Press of Kentucky . Retrieved July 10, 2026.
  21. ↑ The William and Mary Quarterly
  22. ↑ "Custis Family".
  23. ↑ Bruce, Philip A., ed. (1894). "Mutiny in Virginia, 1635". Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. 1 (4): 419, 2nd footnote.
  24. ↑ Hatfield, George Elliott (1988). The Hatfields. Big Sandy Valley Historical Society. p. 17.
  25. ↑ "Harris Family of Colonial America".
  26. ↑ Lexington, Eleanor (May 29, 1921). "Castle in Wales". Daily Arkansas Gazette. p. 10.
  27. ↑ Payne, Brooke (1937). The Payne's of Virginia. Richmond, Va: W. Byrd Press. ISBN   9780598483539 . Retrieved June 26, 2018.{{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
  28. ↑ Prewitt, Richard A. (1979). Prewitt–Pruitt Records of Virginia. R. A.Prewitt. Retrieved July 26, 2026.
  29. ↑ Scadding, Henry (1987) [1873]. "Biographies". In Armstrong, Frederick H. (ed.). Toronto of Old. Toronto, Canada: J. Kirk Howard/Dundern Press Limited. p. 376. ISBN   9781550020274. The Robinsons were one of the first families of Virginia where they settled about 1670, before becoming one of the first families of Upper Canada.
  30. ↑ "The Stanton Family". springborohistory.org. Retrieved September 26, 2025.
  31. ↑ Boddie, John Bennett (1974). Colonial Surry. Genealogical Publishing Com. ISBN   9780806300269.

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