Craig, I never said the term was pejorative.  I was merely quoting from an article (and I provided the website in my post).   You will have to take up your disagreement with the author of the article. David ________________________________ From: Craig Kilby <persisto1@gmail.com> To: DAVID BROWN <dbrown544@prodigy.net>; va-northern-neck@rootsweb.com Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2012 9:24 PM Subject: Re: [VA-NORTHERN-NECK] Marshall David, This makes a nice story except it doesn't hold much water. Two things stand out (1) land "in the forest" was inland and not nearly as swampy as land along the river. Depends of course on WHERE inland it was. Nomini Forest could be both inland and on swampy water. (2) Over in Lancaster, Joseph-2 Ball was seated in "the Forest" (now called Epping Forest) and he was certainly not someone who would have been called such a thing in preparative manner.  Craig On Nov 24, 2012, at 2:48 PM, DAVID BROWN wrote: John Marshall's parents were typical of many young couples in colonial America. His paternal ancestors were Welsh artisans who came to Virginia sometime in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. His father was the son of another John Marshall, a small planter who struggled to make a living on two hundred acres of low, marshy land cut from the wilderness along a minor tributary of the Potomac. That John Marshall was known to his prosperous neighbors as "John of the forest," a pejorative term used by tidewater aristocracy to describe someone less affluent who lived in the woods