Sorry about the repetition, folks; it needed some correcting! My father and mother both believed, having depression, and families that ran from that heritage and were also depressed, that their ancestors were dirt farmers. Imagine my father's surprise on learning that his ancestors included community leaders, Germantown founders, religious leaders - and farmers of HUGE, prosperous, Pennsylvania-Dutch farms, with mills, forges, you name it! But my father actually had one dirt poor ancestor with a little farm. Shortly before 1790, John and Isabella Smith came from Ireland - with the clothes on their backs. They were hired off the docks, perhaps as indentured servants, by a local large dairy farmer who also owned slaves, and was a particularly evangelical sort of Baptist. Must have been a nice guy. No records of that exist - except that in 1790, two free servants, a man and a woman, are found on John Whitten's property. Along with the slaves. I didn't until that minute know this guy who was actually the father of teh "kindly farmer and justice of the peace" who according to the family story took the Smith couple in, owned slaves. One of two or three people in that part of Chester County who did. We know that from the census, too. Though he was also a justice of the peace, and some records of his court that I've seen reveal him to have been a quite scrupulous man. This is the first record of the Smiths in this country. Could have been a different couple - except that in 1798 the Smiths, who arrived in this country with the clothes on their backs, purchased a 29 1/2 acre farm, which was tiny for that part of Chester County where a small farm had a hundred acres and quite a number had a thousand - and they paid cash for this farm. The deed tells us this. How the Smiths must have worked and scraped for that money. It's doubtful they advanced their condition sufficiently to be able to do do it if they weren't the male and female servants who lived on John Whitten's farm in 1790. They are supposed to have been born in 1769, though, and buried an infant son in the sea on the voyage over - and so couldn't have gotten to Pennsylvania much sooner than 1789. Now, the little article their grandson contributed to a biographical encyclopedia, his father having been a Delaware state legislator as well as owning nearly 1000 acres himself, described John and Isabella as "dividing their labor between the loom and the plough", as well as being Presbyterian. To my family, this meant they were farmers from Ireland. I realized this meant they were Scotch-Irish and probably if it was described that way labor slanted toward the loom, particularly since the Smiths travelled 12 miles every Sunday to the Presbyterian church when other churches were closer. Well, now the tax records enter the picture. John Smith was a weaver by trade; he paid as much in taxes for his loom as for his land, his one cow and one horse, and it was worth atleast as much as his land. Can you imagine that one horse hauling the two parents and seven children in the wagon 12 miles to church every Sunday? It had better have been a Clysdale! He had one of those huge manual looms that one finds in histories of weaving. The house where they lived, which John Smith himself built, there having been no home on the land when they bought it as a piece cut off from another, larger parcel of land, has been built around and on top of and still stands. The current owner told me that they needed to do some work on it and they excavated it. Under the original portion of the house was a kind of half cellar - with the remains of a fireplace and chimney in one corner. John and Isabella Smith bought that farm in October of 1798. They had a one-year old son and a new-born baby. They spent their first winter building that little log cabin - and while they were building it, they lived in that half cellar with the temporary fireplace in the corner. About five years after he bought the farm, John Smith apparently took out a mortgage against his farm for $200 - and he may never have paid on the interest either. In 1831, someone who probably was the son of the man who made him the loan foreclosed on the farm; he took out a judgement against the farm for the $200 and the interest. Another successful son of John Smith's bought the farm; and the following year he sold it out of the family for the judgement and whatever. Well, the descendants of John Smith so far as I know have been honest and decent people and well educated when they could manage to be, how did this story happen? Well, because so many of my father's ancestors were weavers, which is something we know time and time again from those privacy-invading tax records, sometimes quite successful weavers on top of being large scale farmers, millers and raisers of sheep, I have a small interest in weaving, so I did a little reading about it. Even tried my hand at spinning. It seems the first industrial textile operations in southeastern Pennsylvania got going right about 1830, and the price of woven textiles abruptly plunged, and village weavers like John Smith were quite suddenly unable to make a living, and were ruined. Those factories were built in New Garden, only a few miles from where John Smith lived. So an entire touching family story emerges from a few records and artifacts. John Smith takes on human dimensions. My mother's New England family actually kept very good records of a names and dates and peoples' occupations and where they lived and what land they owned sort - and as far as I've been able to learn they completely lacked the human dimensions that have emerged on my father's people. Yours, Dora Smith __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com