A Great Big Lark is a personal blog that I began as a place to practice and experiment with my writing, and to record and flesh out stories I was finding while researching my family’s history here in the Chesapeake Bay region.I enjoy exploring the historical and geographical contexts of my family stories, but I also write about folklore and regional history. Many of my posts are parts of a ‘work in progress’ of connected essays, and some of my posts are just "thoughts."
Showing posts with label minor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label minor. Show all posts
Jail-keeping and Wolves' Heads **
November 7, 2007
While taking a break from working very hard on this quarter's statistics at work today, I found a really cool and amazing thing on a genealogy site....transcriptions of Westmoreland County, Virginia court records concerning John Minor (a 10th great-grandfather from Garway, Herefordshire...the immigrant!) and his wife, Ellinor. This document has his date of birth as 1625, which could be more accurate than my date of 1600. But look! He was in court practically ALL the time, which I guess is not shocking since this also reveals that he was the undersherriff of Sheriff Youell for many years. It looks like he was responsible for prisoners, and for building a jail, providing accommodations for transported indentureds, etc etc which his wife seems to have continued after his death. This is totally fascinating, and I recognize some of the other names in these records as names appearing in my tree, too (Bull, Allerton, Sturman, and even a Thomas Vaughn who maybe he knew from back home?)
John Minor's Court Records
***October 23, 2015. This REALLY needs to be about the wolfs heads!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Coming Soon
An early Irish immigrant has a brush with piracy on the Chesapeake during the 1680s!