This pertains to a query submitted by Barbara Samuels dated 10/16/2004. She seems to have about 8 families of Quaker ancestors who came to America in the mid 1600s. Were they probably Quakers before coming to America? Some of the names were THOMAS, RICHARDSON, BIGGS, and HUTCHINS. They came into Maryland and Virginia. The Quaker movement originated in the English Midlands and in the Lake Country of northwest England. The movement did not gain any significant momentum until 1652. By 1656 it had spread over most of the British Isles, although it was not widely accepted in Scotland or among the native Celtic population of Ireland. The first Quaker missionaries reached the American Colonies about 1656, and English settlers were convinced in New England, in the Chesapeake Bay area of Maryland, and in the Tidewater area of lower Virginia. Progress in lower Virginia was slow because of severe persecution and probably because of poor leadership, but several Meetings had been organized in the years following 1675.----- Under the leadership of William Penn and others, there was a large influx of Quaker settlers from the British Isles into southern New Jersey and southeastern Pennsylvania in the years from 1675 until 1720, and the children of the earlier settlers began moving farther inland. Beginning about 1725, Quakers from the Pennsylvania area began pushing down through western Maryland into northern Virginia. By 1750 these Quaker colonist from the north were making contact with the Quakers from long-established Meetings in lower Virginia, and the tide of Quaker migration pressed southward into the Carolinas and Georgia. I am a descendant of the Hutchins family of lower Virginia. This family has been carefully outlined in the work: _ Hutchins-Hutchens: Descendants of Strangeman Hutchins_, by Rita H. Townsend. Volume I was published in 1979, followed by a two volume Supplement in 1992. This work traces the family from Nicholas Hutchins who, as a young man, was living as a member of Henrico Monthly Meeting of Friends in Henrico County, Virginia in 1699. His first wife having apparently died after a brief marriage, Nicholas Hutchins married Mary Watkins by Friends ceremony on 8 mo. 9, 1701 (O.S,) in a Friends ceremony. Mary Watkins appears to have been a daughter of Henry Watkins, who had probably been associated with Friends since ca. 1675. --- Other ancestors of the Hutchins family appear to have been living in Virginia as non-Quakers, from as early as 1610 ---- later being drawn into the Quaker orbit I understand that members of the Richardson family had been living as Quakers on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland from a very early date. Third Haven (Tred Haven) Meeting is still in operation there, near Easton. The meeting-house built ca. 1684 is still standing. Perhaps this Meeting was first setttled ca. 1659. I may have noted members of the Biggs family living in northern Virginia in the mid 1700's. Thomas is a very common Quaker name. Some Thomas ancestors may have settled in Pennsylvania before moving South with the Quaker migration. ---- Herbert Standing, Earlham, Iowa.