Ancestors by William Maxwell Read Free Book Online Page B

all there was to know) I entered into correspondence with the Reverend Stephen J. England, of Enid, Oklahoma, who once lived in central Illinois. His name was given to me by the minister of a church on Park Avenue, when I went there to borrow a history of the Disciples of Christ from the church library. It could hardly have been more roundabout.
    Dr. England had never heard the story of the little boy who wandered onto a sailing ship, and thought it apocryphal. But he knew something about his own ancestry, going back to a David England who lived on the James River in Virginia at the time of the American Revolution. Dr. England’s line of descent was through one of David England’s sons, and he thought it likely that mine was through another, Stephen England, who was, he said, a great preacher of the frontier and a towering figure in the early history of the Christian Church.
    The minister of the Park Avenue Christian Church had already suggested this, and I said, “No, that couldn’t possibly be.”
    Dr. England recommended that I write to a Mrs. Lloyd Robert Geist, of Maryville, Missouri, who was descended from Stephen England and had a good deal of information about that branch of the England family. It turned out that Mrs. Geist’s great-grandmother and Louisa England, my grandmother’s mother, were sisters. And the great preacher of the frontier was their grandfather. Mrs. Geist supplied me with a genealogy going back past Stephen England to his father, David England, and
his
father, William England, who had a plantation in Goochland County, thirty or forty miles up the James River from Richmond, and died in 1768.
    Among Max Fuller’s papers there was a photostat of my Aunt Maybel’s application for membership in the D.A.R. On one page she stated that the England family “couldhardly be traced as my great-great-grandfather when a boy of 4 years old went onto a ship docked in English water at or near England and the ship left shore and they were so far out before they discovered the boy and would not go back so brought him on to America and gave him the name of England, as he could not tell his name.”
    What kind of a four-year-old boy doesn’t know his own name? Was she claiming descent from a mental defective?
    On another page of the same application she said that her great-great-grandfather, Stephen England, was born in Virginia in 1774. Neither side of my family has ever had the slightest difficulty in entertaining two contradictory ideas at once.
    Max was unable to go back beyond William England. There were several Englands who received Royal Land Patents or Land Grants in the 17th century, but no one has been able to connect William England with any of them. William England left his second son, David, half the plantation and the best featherbed and furniture. David England was fourteen when he came into his inheritance. He married Lucy Hodges. Her father, John Hodges, signed his will with an
x.
Lucy Hodges, on a deed of 1779, also had recourse to an
x,
but ten years later had learned to write her own name. It was no reflection on a farmer’s wife not to be able to read and write, and the fact that she was not content to remain illiterate suggests that her husband may have been a gentleman and a farmer, or that she herself had a hitherto unencouraged inclination to use her mind for something besides carding wool and beating wet clothes with a club to get the dirt out.
    David England was a private in the Continental Army. It wasn’t a glorious experience, judging by a petition he and several other soldiers addressed to the Governor of Virginia and the Honorable Members of the Council. The Goochland Militia marched to Hillsborough in divisions and there,soon after, sustained a disgraceful rout, “being raw and ignorant of discipline and under officers generally as undisciplined as your petitioners, who being ordered not to fire until they had the word, and then to advance with charged Bayonetts, occasioned