How Colonial Chesapeake Ancestors Lived
When Genealogy Reveals Little, Research and Restorations Show Why
Sep 30, 2009
Family historians often hit a brick wall after a few generations. If they are lucky enough to trace their ancestors to about 1800, they will very probably hit a brick wall upon entering the eighteenth century.
Frustrated genealogist can take heart, however, if they trace their ancestors to the colonial colonies of Maryland and Virginia surrounding the Chesapeake Bay. At least there are two well-researched and presented restorations of typical farms at St. Mary’s City and Colonial Williamsburg. The plantations or small farms represent the type of houses and conditions in which most Chesapeake Bay region farm families, indentured servants, and slaves lived.
Tracing Colonial Period Ancestors: An Example of Genealogical Research Problems
Many people eventually find others who are researching their family surname. Some share their research with others having the same surname.
For example, some family history researchers with the surname Foster believe their immigrant ancestor settled on the James River just downriver from Jamestown soon after the Virginia colony was founded. Genealogists have combed the records and claim that Richard Foster is the original Virginia immigrant.
However, the records show that there were at least five Richard Fosters in early 1600s Virginia. In addition, no one has been able to connect the dots between these men and later Fosters that they have documented as their ancestors. Several Fosters who lived in Gloucester and Essex counties by the mid-1700s have been pointed out as the earliest families.
Some Foster family historians feel that they have found every document and that the likelihood of turning up anything about the one or two generations that would link their mid-1700s ancestor to Richard the immigrant is unlikely. They are probably right for more reasons than one. The number of newcomers alone who are inserted in the mix is daunting: from 1650 to 1750 the Chesapeake region population is estimated to have grown from 13,000 to 380,000 people.
Colonial Williamsburg researcher Anne Smart Martin has found that in the mid to late eighteenth century one out of eight men in a county that was the subject of her study cannot be found in any official document of the period, such as wills, inventories, deeds, and tax limits. She comments that women and slaves are not the only people missing from documentary view in her essay “Common People and the Local Store,” published in 1995.
For Foster researchers, records alone don’t tell the story. For example, there were two men named, once again, Richard Foster who died in late eighteenth-century Virginia, one in Surry and the other in Gloucester, Virginia. Both had a son named Peter. One family history researcher claims they are the same. Another feels this is unlikely, based on circumstantial evidence and family lore. There is no concrete proof.
Godiah Spray Tobacco Plantation at Historic St. Mary's City
The Spray Plantation at St. Mary's City, recreated as the first capital of colonial Maryland, is presented as a typical 17th-century plantation. The family is fictitious, but their depiction is based on the inventory of a real Maryland planter, Robert Cole.
Cole came to the colony because he saw economic opportunity there. He grew tobacco and his plantation was close to a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay to provide a means for shipping to England. Nearly all of his, his family’s, and his indentured servants’ time was spent in activities directly or indirectly related to subsistence and tobacco cultivation. Although a middling sort farmer, owning about 500 acres, he lived in a one room house with a sleeping loft and a lean-to entrance. Cole was quite unusual in that, of the hundreds of settlers to the region, his was the only inventory upon which the working plantation re-creating a seventeenth-century Chesapeake settler ancestors life could be built.
One or more of the immigrant Richard Fosters lived in similar conditions to Cole, or with even less material comfort. It’s no wonder that there are not documents of the sort genealogists demand as proof.
Great Hopes Plantation at Colonial Williamsburg
On the edge of Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Area, Great Hopes represents a middle class plantation around the time of the American Revolution. The Richard Fosters who died in the late eighteenth century with sons named Peter were early American people of this sort who lived on such a farm. At that time, the large majority of people lived their lives in conditions similar to (and most were less comfortably than) the inhabitants of Great Hopes, like Richard Foster of Gloucester, Virginia.
They grew tobacco, corn, wheat, and some cotton. They tended livestock, including cattle, pigs, sheep and goats. A few had oxen and horses. Poultry were too prevalent to inventory. The common Virginia house was one room deep with a loft, similar to the homes of their peers a century earlier.
Genealogy Has Limits and an End
A visit to Spray or Great Hopes plantation may be as close as a family history researcher can get to knowing who his ancestors were. No matter the surname, colony Chesapeake settlers lived, for the most part, a sparse existence. Literate people and the tools of the literate were also sparse, making the search for documentary evidence a futile pursuit or at best a search for the proverbial needle in a haystack.
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