Dear Brenda and Lara, Thank you for the Quaker information. William Par(r)ish who married Martha (Patty or Patsy) Goode in Bedford County, Virginia on December 7, 1778 is my 4th great grandfather. When I saw the marriage in Hinshaw's Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy, I was under the impression that Hinshaw had bound into the work all the early Bedford County marriages as a chapter --- without regard to whether or not they were Quaker. For that reason, I had not made a great deal of William's being Quaker. William and Patsy moved on to Madison County, Kentucky about 1793-1795 after he served two years in the Revolutionary War. In 1818, he applied for and received a Revolutionary War pension in Madison County. Last week, I reviewed William's 1787 patent for 396 acres of land on Beaverdam Creek in Bedford County at the Library of Virginia. The survey of this land and the index to that survey clearly use the two "r" spelling of William's name. It is unclear as to when William learned to read and write. It is apparent from the marriage bond and the land records that he could not write until at least 1793. Because clerks recorded his name oftentimes differently within the same document (and the same for his children in Madison County), it is difficult to tell if he was a one "r" Parish or a two "r" Parrish. There is no indication of his being or his children being Quakers in Madison County. The tendency seems to have been to the Christian Church. His namesake child was a magistrate and tavernkeeper in Madison County in the 1840's. If William comes from the Maryland Parrishes, it would solve a mystery that has eluded family researchers for more than a hundred years, for the research stops cold in Bedford County as to his siblings and parents. There was an account that appeared in the 1909 History of Shelby County, Indiana of my William Parrish of Bedford County, Virginia that William was Scottish of Irish extraction who came to Bedford "in the early days." Was he an Ulster Scot who, like so many thousands in the 1700's emigrated from their adopted Ireland into Philadelphia and then down through the Valley of Virginia even into North Carolina and Georgia? Certainly, it is well known that Ulster Scots were among the greatest Revolutionary War American supporters, and George Washington once said he would favor them to comprise his army. Does the research stop cold because William Parrish was the emigrant? Whether or not this William Parrish was an Ulster Scot, this may be the answer to some of the Virginia Par(r)ishes who do not seem to be "tieable" to other lines in Maryland and New England. And not very good records were kept of the sames of these emigrants. "One authority, a New England historian, counts that between 1730 and 1770 at least half a million souls were transferred from Ulster to the colonies, more than half the Presbyterian population of Ulster, and that at the time of the Revolution they made one-sixth of the total population of the colonies. Another and very careful authority fixes the inhabitants of Scottish ancestry in the nine colonies south of New England as about 385,000. He considers that less than half of the entire population of the colonies was of English origin, and that nearly or quite one-third of it had a Scottish ancestry." Source: The Scot in America And The Ulster Scot, Whitelaw Reid, MacMillan, 1912 At any rate, the chart that today is headed by William Parrish and Martha (Patsy) Goode Parrish is an enormous one spreading today throughout the United States. Edgar Edgar L. Parrish e4502w@aol.com