FOR TIDEWATER DAVENPORTS AND THOSE WHO MAY BE: DNA Bill advises that two Davenports with Pitt County, North Carolina, roots have matched with a descendant of William Davenport, Lancaster County, Virginia, 1708-1771, meaning that they had common ancestry. Given that Lancaster County was within TIDEWATER DAVENPORT bounds, some background on the family has been requested. TIDEWATER DAVENPORTS, in our typology, include those Davenports who first appeared in the Lower Northern Neck of Colonial Virginia. The Northern Neck is that part of Virginia given to Lord Fairfax by Charles II and included all that vacant land between the headwaters of the Rappahannock, the headwaters of the Potomac, and Chesapeake Bay. The lower (southeast) end of the Northern Neck, ultimately the counties of Northumberland, Westmoreland, Lancaster, and Richmond, all having at least one side bounded by tidal waters, was settled c1660 by John Davenport, who was a man of substance, for he transported himself to Virginia, bought land already patented and improved, and was quickly involved in public affairs. He was an uncommon Davenport as a Virginia settler. His descendants, quality people by Colonial Virginia standards, prospered there, but did not procreate in numbers as did the Pamunkeys. While Tidewaters were not Great Planters, they were aristocrats and had roles in public affairs both in their home counties and at Jamestown and Williamsburg. Steadfast members of the Established Church, their births and deaths appear in parish records. A Tidewater Davenport settling in Pitt County, North Carolina, has a logical, historically valid rationale, for these Virginians were water travel dependent, i.e., they were forced to use water transportation. Look at a map and you'll see that the Lower Northern Neck was virtually isolated from the rest of Virginia as to land travel which had to be initially to the northwest, which was savage Indian country into the early 1700s, and when the Indians were gone, there remained a long, long way around by land to get anywhere else in Virginia--when a ship or boat could quickly traverse the Potomac or Rappahannock, then Chesapeake Bay to Yorktown, thence a few miles to Jamestown or Williamsburg. A trip from the Northern Neck to Pitt County, North Carolina, was shorter and easier by water than by land--a matter of sailing the Chesapeake to the Atlantic Ocean, then south to one of the inlets in the Outer Bank into Pamlico Sound, then to and up Pamlico River to Tar River, and you were in Pitt County. There is much data in surviving Colonial Virginia records relative to these Davenports, but it has never been pulled together. In our Pamunkey files, we have copies of all Davenport mentions in all articles included in Swem's Index, a monumental work by the late librarian at William & Mary, who did an every name indexing of all historical and genealogical publications concerning Colonial Virginia up to the mid-1960s, if my memory serves. At least half of those items concern Tidewater Davenports (less than ten percent concern Pamunkeys) and would make a logical, substantial starting place for creating a Tidewater Davenport Family History. Such a history is bound to be prestigious, for these Davenports arrived in Virginia as Gentlemen and thrived as such until the Revolution, when at least one of them was a gunsmith of note. The Captain William Davenport killed by the Indians as an emissary of the State of Georgia seeking a peace treaty appears to have been a Tidewater, but he was not the Captain William Davenport of the Light Horse who spent the Revolutionary War extracting food, forage, and other supplies from the citizens of the York River Basin, which included a sizable number of Pamunkeys. Light Horse Captain William was a Tidewater. If the Tidewaters get organized and want to mount an effort to develop a family history, the Pamunkeys will be glad to share their Swem's Index research done by Billy Bob at the Library of Virginia four years ago. No need to repeat the Davenport sweep. We can work out a way to make our files available. John Scott Davenport Holmdel, NJ