These Came to Augusta and Rockbridge

Description

How many of us have wondered, even asked, “Where did I come from?” That might have been asked by this comely lad sometime during the first decade of the twentieth century. I like to think of him at that time as a small boy who was part of an industrious, sheltering family in a stable rural community, literally surrounded by the Presbyterian church, which was the anchor of almost every family with whom he came in contact. These people had been labeled Dissenters. Had they not been Dissenters in Scotland and Ireland they would likely not have become the “Scotch-Irish” in America, yet hard-fought existence, of their community in the would-be counties of Augusta and Rockbridge was gratifyingly successful.

Did you ask that question, Daddy? More than a hundred years later your family is ready to answer it, at least in part, but far more comprehensively than you might have expected when you asked.

This book follows your several families through the hard times in the colonies, to the hard times in Scotland and Ireland, even into involvement with the notorious Campbell clan of Scotland. It introduces other ancestors, mostly English and French, and sketches their lives, beset with war and insecurities in those countries. All of these individuals, on both sides of the Atlantic, were achievers, too, and there were numerous heroes of whom you can be proud. That’s how we came to find and know them; their reputations were left to be discovered.

You’ll be astonished, James Moore Wilson, but pleased, we hope. You were such a wonderful gentleman and the threads of DNA from these ancestors undoubtedly contributed to that which your daughters feel was the near-perfection that we knew and loved.