I'm looking for Pendleton District residents, especially in the early 1800s, who were from families documented to be religious dissenters in Virginia and Maryland. Prior to the American Revoution, it was illegal in VA to belong to any except the Anglican church. Some folks petitioned the legislature to practice as Baptists or Methodists or Presbyterians. Others simply left the colony to live in the more liberal colonies of North and South Carolina. Please drop me a line if you have any family history of religious dissent. I am writing a history of antebellum Anderson District. [email protected]

See Francis Asbury Journal #! for a lot of Methodist information on South Carolina residents in the 1770s forward. God Bless. HerbHendricks [email protected]

At 12:29 PM 8/4/2003 -0400, kim wrote: >I'm looking for Pendleton District residents, especially in the early 1800s, >who were from families documented to be religious dissenters in Virginia and >Maryland. > >Prior to the American Revoution, it was illegal in VA to belong to any >except the Anglican church. Some folks petitioned the legislature to >practice as Baptists or Methodists or Presbyterians. Others simply left the >colony to live in the more liberal colonies of North and South Carolina. > >Please drop me a line if you have any family history of religious dissent. I >am writing a history of antebellum Anderson District. > >[email protected] Prior to the American Revolution, the only officially recognized church was the Anglican church. Periodically, an Anglican priest would travel into the very extensive "back country" of South Carolina to marry couples and baptize their children. One account of this is in a book by a Rev. Woodmason (title has something about "Carolina Back Country"), who was an Anglican priest who was hired to do just that at least once in the early 1770s. He has a lot to say about a lot of things and people. One of the main reasons he did this was because he didn't have any luck getting his own church, and, after reading several pages of his writing, you can get a good idea as to why. *Very* opinionated! If you're Presbyterian or Baptist, don't take him personally! He doesn't seem to have come in contact with the Methodists, but it has been a while since I've read the book. (I do not own a copy.) If I remember correctly, the Lutherans were able to have their own clergy baptize and marry, but there wouldn't have been that many of them, except in the Dutch Fork area (parts of present-day Newberry and Lexington counties). My Whitakers and Perrys didn't arrive in the state until just before 1800. They were Methodist. I had some Low Country ancestors who were probably in the state from a very early date, but I'm having trouble establishing documentation on them -- too many folks in burned counties and almost no material on their maternal lines. There were small Jewish and Catholic communities in Charleston from early on. The first Catholic parish in the Upstate (St. Mary's, Greenville) traces its origins to 1852. Pre-Revolutionary white settlement in South Carolina was very sparse more than about 90 miles from the ocean. The oldest pre-Revolutionary non-Indian-founded town in South Carolina more than 90 miles from the ocean is Camden (originally Pine Tree). Elizabeth Whitaker