EARLY
ORIGINS OF THE SOUTH FAMILY
I am going to
start my narrative and my blog about individual South family members (on second
try) with the far left of CE South’s fan chart and our most direct ancestor, Thomas
South (1682-1757). For this and my next few posts I will be covering some of
the same territory, but in greater detail, that Julia Griffin gave us in her
wonderful Thanksgiving document titled “Thanksgiving: A Griffin [and South]
Heritage
Below is Thomas’ timeline report made with
Family Tree Maker software which uses information I have for him on the South
Pope Family Tree on Ancestry.com. You will see similar reports on others as we
progress. These reports make a quick way to see what facts we have about
Thomas.
His name and
birth appear in the American
Genealogical-Biographicsal Index, or AGBI,
which Ancestry calls “the greatest single source of material for genealogical
data for the Northeast area for the period 1600-1800.” There is not just consensus on Thomas’ birth
information, but all the South researchers I have seen over the years agree
about that. One of the few books about the Souths is Christine South Gee’s 1963
Genealogical Notes on the South Family which
says of the New Jersey Souths (p. 25) ”The Souths were in New Jersey, probably
as early as 1700. A colony came into New Jersey from New Hampshire about
1667-68 from Piscataqua River in New Hampshire and founded a colony at New Piscataway
near the present New Brunswick. Tradition says that the Souths came with this
colony as well as the Drakes who later intermarried with the Souths. We know
the name of some of these early Souths. Thomas South, miller, lived at New
Brunswick but had a house and lot at Kingston, about four miles from
Princeton.”
What there is
not consensus about is Thomas’ parents. Many online trees provide George South
of Westmoreland, VA, b. 1664 as Thomas’ father, and Ann Sanford as his mother. I had adopted them in both the South Pope
Family Tree and the CE South Family Tree, but after some re-reading of
resources recently, in 2018 I have deleted those links. I cannot locate any
good source for that connection, nor can the other South researchers I have
communicated over the years like Betty South, who has a quite extensive South
database she has worked on most of her life from her homes in Washington, DC,
near the DAR reference center, and in Salt Lake City, Utah. Nor have any of the
several others with similar histories of working on the New Jersey South family
for decades determined that it is even likely that George of Westmoreland was
Thomas’ father.
Bob and Michael
Wilson-South have DNA matches for whom the common ancestor is Thomas South.
Bob, who had his DNA done at Family Tree DNA as well as by Ancestry, is in a
South project on FTDNA where they are studying the details of Souths’ DNA to
see what they can learn. I have asked the director of that project if there has
been any progress on linking the Maryland Souths, who moved to Westmoreland
County, VA, to our New Jersey Souths. I have not received a reply, so I assume
this question remains in the undetermined category; it is likely that the two
groups had a common ancestor back in England, but so far it’s unclear who that
ancestor is.
It is
interesting to me that the Puritans who came to America seeking religious
freedom very quickly restricted the religious beliefs of the colonists, and the
new settlements that followed Plymouth, like the one in New Hampshire which was
followed by the one in New Jersey, were likely motivated both by a wish for new
land and by the wish to find a place with more tolerance than the absolute rigidity
of the Puritans. New Jersey had a history of providing more religious freedom
and tolerance from the times of its Dutch and Swedish settlement. I will go into
that more below.
What Ancestry
refers to as the Family Data Collection (compiled from family records and
Bibles microfilmed in Salt Lake City) is the source of Thomas’ marriage in 1703
to Dorothy Lippinton/Lippington, also born in 1682 in Piscataway. She is also
mentioned in a record of the birth of two of their sons, Thomas and Edmund (see
the snip from Proceedings of the New
Jersey Historical Society (Newark, 1906) below.
This shows the births of
Thomas Jr., also mentioned in the Monnette book, and Edmund, who gets his own
treatment below.
The recording
of Thomas’ cattle mark in 1707 was an important thing for each settler since it
was not common to have separate pens and grazing for animals. The record normally
included a rude drawing of the animal’s head. The History of Union and Middlesex Counties, New Jersey: With Biographical
Sketches by W. Woodford Clayton from 1882, available on Google Books, lists
Thomas as a settler; the date 1707 accompanies his name, so perhaps this is the
date he became a freeholder and took up land in Piscataway. This book also
repeats the story of settlers coming from New Hampshire (no mention of Thomas,
however) on p. 587:
“Name of the Town Piscataqua is an Indian name of
one of the tribes in the State of Maine and also a river called the Piscataqua
River on the line of Maine and New Hampshire. It is recorded that Hugh Dunn,
Hopewell Hull, John Martin, Charles Gilman, Robert Dennis, John Smith, John
Gilman, and Benjamin Hull who came from Piscataqua, New England were granted
Dec 18, 1666, and May 30, 1668 the right as Associates, and they conferred upon
the township the name of the place whence they came, it being known as
Piscataqua for a time after the settlement but now commonly known as Piscataway.”
[Note the Hulls..]
Thomas is also mentioned
several times in the multi-volume First
Settlers of ye plantations of Piscataway and Woodbridge, olde east New Jersey,
1664-1714 by Orra Eugene Monette
published in the early 1930s. I used this resource on our trip to Damascus and
Abingdon, Virginia, a few years ago, finding all the volumes at the Abingdon
Historical Society Center for Washington County, Virginia, history. It is in
this book that Thomas is listed as constable for the two villages where he
served. I, like my aunt Faye South Bristow, and perhaps many others of you, was
disappointed that Thomas did not turn out to be a pirate, forced or by choice,
on the ship Whydah, but Thomas must have
been quite upstanding since he was chosen as constable in two villages near
Piscataway, Perth Amboy and New Brunswick. A constable was a more responsible
position than we might imagine today, one of very few in the community with a
duty to keep the peace and to report on misdeeds like working on the Sabbath or
swearing in public. These things sound a little trivial, but they could result
in public punishment and were certainly handled by the court.
Thomas sold a
200-acre tract of land to Matthias Van Dyke in 1756. The house Van Dyke built
on that land is shown in Pre-Revolutionary
Dutch Houses and Families in northern New Jersey and southern New York by
Rosalie F. Bailey, W. Morrow & Co., 1936 (available on Ancestry.com)
New Jersey, Abstract of Wills, 1670-1817 has an entry for Thomas South, of New
Brunswick Corporation, Middlesex Co, miller,
will dated May 6, 1748. The will mentions his wife Dorothy and sons Joseph and Daniel.
Property was a house and lot in Kingston, an unincorporated village at a point
where the main road used by the Indians, the Dutch, and then the English
settlers met the Millstone River. In the old map below, Millstone River serves
as a kind of underline to the C and O in COUNTY. The will names executors as
wife and son Daniel. It was witnessed by William van Tibaugh and John Dalley,
and proved (executed) Sept. 16, 1747 when Thomas passed.
The transcript
of the entire will (available on the South Pope Family Tree) goes on to add
that if Dorothy marries again or has passed, his property other than the home,
which goes to Joseph, is to be distributed amongst “the rest of my Children Share and Share Alike.” I take that as
recognition that all his children, especially Thomas and Edmund whose births
are recorded above, and any others who are not named in the will, could inherit
and that Thomas is acknowledging that he has more children than Joseph and
Daniel.
SOME
NEW JERSEY HISTORY
I got interested
about New Jersey history, and why some resources referred to East New Jersey
and West New Jersey, so I did a little easy digging.
For one thing,
how close were Piscataway, Woodbridge, and Perth Amboy? The answer, as you can
see on this map, is very close.
To
understand the map, find Piscattaway very near the large C in COUNTY. Between
the O & U is Bonhamtown (more on the Bonhams will be said). Directly south
of the T is Woodbridge, and west of Woodbridge is Perth Amboy, which juts out
into Rariton Bay and The Kills.
I
also wondered about the story of colonizing from New Hampshire—wouldn’t that be
a great distance too? Here is a map of the original colonies, and it surprised
me to realize how close New Hampshire and even Maine would have been from
Plymouth which was slightly northwest of Cape Cod. New Jersey was tucked in
there much closer to Pennsylvania than I had thought about. Realizing that
water travel was the best means of travel back in colonial times, you can see
how people might sail from Plymouth to New Hampshire and Maine, or go around
the Cape to the other colonies and to Staten Island which is close to our New
Jersey roots.
New
Jersey
John Cabot, an
Italian navigator sailing for King Henry VII was probably the first to see New
Jersey’s coast, and it was based on his explorations that English claims to
North America were based. Exploration of the coast continued two decades later
by the Italian Verrazzano, working for France in 1524, a whole century before
Plymouth. In 1609 the Englishman Sir Henry Hudson explored the Delaware and the
Raritan Rivers for the Dutch East India Company. Between 1611-1614 the company surveyed
the area and named it New Netherlands (Netherlands being the actual name of
Holland or the Dutch). The Dutch established settlements in modern-day
Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, and of course, New York. The British began
to encroach from the north, New England, and the Swedes from the South where
they had several settlements on both sides of the Delaware River. The Swedes
caved in to the Dutch under Peter Stuyvesant in 1654, but the Swedes and
Finnish settlers were recognized by the Dutch as an independent group. The Dutch
eventually caved in to the British in 1664 without a shot fired. (Novak, 1-2).
King Charles
II, the Stuart Catholic king of the “Glorious Revolution, gifted all the land
between New England and Maryland to his brother James, Duke of York, who
subdivided his lands and granted to Sir George Carteret and Lord John Berkeley,
two Stuart supporters from the English Civil War the area of New Jersey. In 1676 the colony was
divided into East and West New Jersey, with the southern portion, West, going
to Berkeley and the northern portion, East, going to Carteret. Perth Amboy was
the main town of East Jersey. Berkeley and Carteret, and their successors and
appointees, were known as the Proprietors, allowed to distribute land and
govern their territories. In 1677 one of the ways the Proprietors used to get
more settlement was to enact the “Concessions and Agreement” which promised
religious freedom to all who settled there. It also provided for elections for
representative government. The religious freedom was really important to the
Quakers, who had been uneasy under Stuyvesant and the Dutch, and to the
Huguenots, French Protestants, as well as to Baptists, Catholics, Jewish,
Lutheran, and Puritan settlers. These were rights not available in England nor
any of the other English settlements. The goal was to get as many farmers as
possible to improve the land and pay rents back to the Proprietors. (Novak 3,
4)
Here is a nice
explanation of the differences between East and West Jersey from Middlesex
County:
East Jersey and West Jersey were quite different. For
example, East Jersey tended to have larger plantations (often slave-holding),
while West Jersey was made up of smaller family farms grouped together in small
democratic farming communities. Further, a sizable number of Puritans from both
Scotland and New England had settled in East Jersey, and the laws of that
Province tended to reflect their sterner views on morality (13 crimes could
result in the death penalty in East Jersey). The East Jersey legal code can be
said to be the southernmost advance of the Puritanical New England philosophy
of criminal law. The laws of West Jersey, on the other hand, reflected more of
a Quaker philosophy and were very mild by comparison (with no provision for a
death penalty).(Middlesex County website)
The two
sections had different ways of managing the deeding and rents for the land, and
it was not uncommon to have disputes and even riots. Boundaries were redrawn in
1687, sparking more rioting, and the Crown reunited the colony in 1702. (Novak,4)
Importantly,
Thomas and Dorothy Lippinton/Lippington South are our keys to claim Mayflower
passenger Edward Fuller as ancestor.
The book Mayflower
Descendants through Five Generations: Descendants of the Pilgrims who landed at
Plymouth, Mass.,December, 1620, Vol.4 Family of Edward Fuller (General
Society of Mayflower Descendants, 2nd ed., 1995) has a discussion on p. 105:
"The surname Lippington disappears from the NJ area after 1700, therefore
the later appearance of it as a Christian name is an excellent marker of
descent, and the only possible descent is through the sole surviving child of
Daniel and Hannah (Bonham) Lippington. Lippington South appears as a resident
of Windsor, Middlesex Co., NJ from 1778-1785...The fact that Thomas and Dorothy
South named a son Daniel, after Daniel Lippington, and the existence of a
descendant Lippington South in a later generation...in the same geographical
area, and the name of Thomas South's wife Dorothy, at an appropriate age for b.
in 1683/4, justifies the conclusion that
Dorothy, dau. of Daniel and Hannah, m. Thomas South, and their 4 sons are
descendants of Edward Fuller."
