Pamunkey Cousins, Here is the latest from Jersey Doc. More to follow soon. Nevada Jack >Colleagues: > > It's high time and then some that we got the train back on the track >and returned to the subject of Davis Davenport and our search for his origin. > Several new generalities qualify our efforts. > > In the context of the King William Quit Rents of 1704, several recent >studies, including Professor Baird's, indicate that Davis' first appearance >thereon in the King William County list was more common than unusual, for >approximately sixty-five percent of those identified as quit rent liable >freeholders had no previous appearance in Virginia patent or other land >records. Patent records, you'll recall, include the extant headright lists. >Hence, Davis' status vis-a-vis identification is the most common one for >Seventeenth Century Virginians, i.e., roughly two-thirds of Virginia >landowners or leasers recorded in 1704 have yet unknown antecedents. Their >only identifications may well be among the parish records in the British >Isles. > > Publications of the past twenty years of British colonial records of >convict transportees as well as gentry and merchants sailing to and from >Virginia, the only records seemingly maintained with any degree of >consistency, all indicate that there had to have been more commoner emigrants >from the British Isles to Virginia who paid their own ways than heretofore >credited. Reliance solely on extant records has heretofore given historians >a distorted view of Virginia's Seventeenth Century population. True, there >was a large underclass of convicts and indentured servants (poor people who >went into servitude for at least four years to pay for their passages), but >there was also a sizable freeman, yeoman class, men and women who arrived in >Virginia, unrecorded either in Britain or Virginia. It was these people who >apparently composed the majority of the freeholders identified in the Quit >Rents of 1704. (They were a majority only in freeholder numbers, for the >gentry held the majority of the acreage.) Historians have largely discounted >any upward mobility in social class other than the rare exception in Colonial >Virginia. As a result, heretofore portrayals of Virginia population before >the Revolution have been those of extremes, emphasizing the gentry and the >under class. > > The presence of this heretofore unacknowledged group of middle class >immigrants has been revealed by the computer studies made by the Williamsburg >Foundation in association with the College of William & Mary. Heretofore, >the magnitude of such a data analysis as well as the vagaries of the records >on both sides of the Atlantic discouraged broad, sweeping studies. Baird's >study, which I reported on superficially, worked with the Williamsburg >Foundation data base. (Tom Duda has been reviewing Baird's thesis. If he >found aspects bearing on our quest that I overlooked, I hope that he will >enlighten us.) > > The point of all this is that the probabilities that Davis Davenport >was an emigrant to Virginia who paid for his own passage are now higher than >the probabilities that he was illegitimate, the son of two >transportees--which was admittedly a force fit. While I do not abandon the >Tom Davis-Ann Davenport concept, I now devalue it and put it on the shelf as >a concept of last resort. > > Thanks to the research of Robert Hiland McKeon, a descendant of >Quaker Joseph Davenport (West Jersey, 1682), we now know that there were two >Davies Davenports among the Cheshire gentry contemporary to Davis Davenport >in Virginia. According to Harrison's "Surnames of the United Kingdom, A >Concise Etymological Dictionary" (London, 1912), Davies and Davis are variant >spellings of the same surname, namely "Davey." The two Davies Davenports in >Cheshire, father and son, were the result of a Davenport father and a Davies >mother among the landed gentry. If there were two Davies Davenports above >the salt, there well could have been a Davis Davenport below the salt who >sought his fortune in Virginia. > > A further note of possible value, virtually all of the Pamunkey Neck >claims located above Davis Davenport's plantation of 1696 on the Mattaponi >River ratified by the Committee of the House of Burgesses in 1799, and >converted into patents in the years following, were paid for entirely or in >part by the headrights earned by the patentees and their wives. In other >words, none of Davis Davenport's neighbors northwardly appear to have been >transportees, all had paid for their own passages, owned their own >headrights. > > Comments? > > John Scott >Davenport >