George Washington UncertainGregory

The following genealogies have been used (September 2017) to provide clues and a general Gregory lineage structure for the early generations that can be explored and verified by documented research.

Gregory researcher Nathan Gregory comments on the name George Gregory in early censuses.

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"1790 Census Appearance - We find several George Gregorys in the 1790 Census, mostly in Pennsylvania, with nothing to link any of them to our family."

"1830 Census Appearance - We find about 16 George Gregorys in the 1830 Census, and nothing that links any of them to our family."
-- Nathan Gregory, Gregory Family Genealogy, https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/7554069/person/6025965670/story
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George Washington Gregory
BIRTH 14 Dec 1790 England
DEATH Unknown
Spouse Mary Hawkins
BIRTH England, DEATH Unknown
Richard Gregory BIRTH 20 Aug 1795, DEATH Unknown
Few Hall Gregory
Susannah H Gregory
George Gregory
-- Carolyn Cooper, Ancestry, https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/82712569/person/48465534249/facts

Carolyn reports above that George Washington Gregory was born in England. Another genealogy gives the exact date and place. But note that in the following tree the son was born in England, while the father was born in Virginia.

This was in the colonial era, so it is possible Benjamin's wife was sent back to England to give birth, but this is a factor that needs further support to be accepted as definite. It is also quite likely that several different Gregory lines have been mixed in some of these minimal reconstructions, with limited or no documentation. At any rate, I think we can discount the birth in England anyway. It clashes with the overall patterns in this family.

George W Gregory
Birth 1760 Brailes, Warwickshire, England
Death JUL 24 1828
Parents:
Benjamin Gregory Birth 1723 Pennsylvania, Death SEP 1798 Prince William County, Virginia
Mother Unknown
Wife Mary Hawkins, no details known
Wife Susannah Few, Birth BEF 1760, Death ABT 1808
Children Reported:
Susannah Lucretia Gregory, Birth 1775 Virginia, Death 1840 Bradley County, Tennessee
Married Joseph McAndrew, Birth 11 FEB 1777 Fauquier County, Virginia, Death 20 FEB 1855 Bradley County, Tennessee
Few Hall Gregory
George Gregory
Richard Gregory
-- Wilson, Greer, etal, https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/105649421/person/410062351687/facts?ftm=1

"Searching for George: In our search for George Gregory, we have flagged every occurrence of a George Gregory between about 1790 and 1820, hoping that some datum will emerge that will identify him. So far, no luck."
-- Nathan Gregory, comment on the profile of George Gregory on the Gregory genealogy, Ancestry, accessed 10 December 2018

Though the above genealogy puts all the children under Mary Hawkins, the dates and Susannah Few's maiden name indicate she was the mother of the known children, and Mary Hawkins was the second wife, married after Susannah died in 1808. The location of marriage for Susannah Lucretia Gregory to Joseph McAndrew in Fauquier County, Virginia, matches other family information.

No record has been found to document Susannah Few's life or marriage to George Washington Gregory. Various records for several individuals named George Washington Gregory, however, are found in various areas in later generations. One location is Berkeley County West Virginia, originally formed out of old Frederick County, Virginia. This is west of Culpeper County and Fauquier County, Virginia.

A marriage record is found for George Washington Gregory in 1847 in Berkeley County, Virginia, reporting marriage to a Susan Carper.

There is, however, a definite connection with George Washington. But it goes back to earlier generations. George Washington, later Colonel and then General in the Revolutionary American forces, was a surveyor as a young man, and was engaged by Lord Fairfax to survey the Northern Neck lands, where the Gregorys were prominent early pioneers. He was appointed by William and Mary University as the official surveyor for Culpeper County, neighboring both Frederick and Fauquier County.

Likewise there was a Mildred Washington, reported to be George Washington's aunt, who married a Roger Gregory in King William County, in the northeast, neighboring Prince William County, known to be the home of Benjamin Gregory in this Pennsylvania-Virginia line. The Gregorys in the Northern Neck and derived counties may well have known George Washington personally. The newborn in 1760, then, may very well have been named George Washington Gregory, as proposed. It would be nice, however, to find some documentation of that.

George W Gregory, on the positive side, is a recurring name in this Gregory line. In most cases, no indication has been found on what the W stood for. Two actual cases of later George Washington Gregorys have been documented. Another George Washington Gregory was born 1851, the documented son of Few Hall Gregory, in our primary ancestral line of Gregorys here, born in Culpeper County in 1781. Thus we have circumstantial evidence and historical context for the occurrence of Washington as a name among this Gregory lineage.

There is, additionally, an even stronger tie, which also explains the connection to the home estate of George Washington, general and then President of the United States. The plantation of Mount Vernon was originally a Gregory property. An old publication on the old families and homes of King William County, Virginia, provides important perspective on the relationship between all the old colonial aristocratic families there.

"Mr. Lawrence Washington [Mildred Washington's father] had a silver waiter with the Butler-Beckwith arms engraved thereon. Beckwith Butler was guardian of the children of Margaret, the widow of William Robinson. Lawrence Butler, William Aylett, and John Washington were witnesses to the deed from Roger Gregory conveying the Mount Vernon estate to Augustine Washington [Mildred's brother and George Washington's father] in 1726. Lawrence Washington left his Godson, Lawrence Butler, a tract of land adjoining Meredith Edwards in 1697." [emphasis ours]
-- Peyton Neale Clarke, Old King William homes and families; an account of some of the old homesteads and families of King William County, Virginia, from its earliest settlement (Louisville: John P Morton And Company, 1897), p 32, https://archive.org/stream/oldkingwilliamho00clar/oldkingwilliamho00clar_djvu.txt

Mildred Warner Washington Gregory was not only the aunt, but also the godmother of George Washington who later became President.

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"Roger Gregory. Son of Richard Gregory (i). Born about 1690; died prior to 1732. Married Mildred, daughter of Lawrence Washington. On the 17th of May, 1736, Roger Gregory and Mildred, his wife, deeded the Mt. Vernon estate to Augustine Washington. They were then residents of Stratton Major Parish, King and Queen County. The witnesses were William Aylett, John Washington, and Lawrence Butler.

Issue: Frances, who married, September 3, 1736, Francis Thornton (see Thornton Excursus); Mildred, who married, October 28, 1740, John Thornton, and Elizabeth, who married four times:

first, April 29, 1743, Henry Willis, son of Colonel Henry Willis (who had married her mother);

second, Reuben Thornton;

third, Doctor Thomas Walker, the Explorer, and

fourth, Colonel Alcock, of the British Army.

Mildred Gregory, the elder, was the godmother of General George Washington."
-- Peyton Neale Clarke, Old King William homes and families; an account of some of the old homesteads and families of King William County, Virginia, from its earliest settlement (Louisville: John P Morton And Company, 1897), p 58, https://archive.org/stream/oldkingwilliamho00clar/oldkingwilliamho00c
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Index of Military Pensioners, 1820
Published by the Department of War, United States of America, p 564 (55)

Gregory Listings:
Gregory, Walter private Virginia
Gregory, George private Virginia

The Cooper genealogy above cites only one other genealogy as its source, which likewise has no sourcing but another genealogy. But that genealogy, whose profile for George W Gregory follows, does have citations from numerous historical records and some photos. And George W or George Washington Gregory is a recurring name in this lineage.

Benjamin Gregory
BIRTH 1723 Pennsylvania
DEATH SEP 1798 Prince William County, Virginia
Wife Charlotte died 1785

First child reported Jemima Gregory, BIRTH APR 27 1740 New Canaan, Fairfield County, Connecticut, USA, DEATH Unknown

Wife Mary Jameson
BIRTH 1761 Prince William, Virginia, USA
DEATH ABT 1828 Bath, Kentucky

First child reported Jesse Tyler Gregory, BIRTH SEP 1791 Virginia, DEATH FEB 1863 Bath County, Kentucky
-- Gregory Family Tree, https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/7554069/person/5059140563/facts

Quick comparisons in September 2017 with other trees and records covering that era indicate we may be on the right track. This is being explored further. Records for Gregory families found so far match generational patterns and common migration routes westward and southward. The connection to Connecticut is questionable here.

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Gregorys and Fews in Migration Patterns from the 1700s
By Orville Boyd Jenkins
Posted on Ancestry.com 16 October 2017

One factor in reconstructing a family lineage are patterns of movement and migration. These migration paths are helpful in finding and evaluating records in our Gregory and related Few line. We see Gregory records in a generational pattern along the migration streams along the tidewater area or valleys southwards and westward.

Westward

Records are being discovered in the westward line from Philadelphia through Frederick and Hagerstown, Maryland, through what is now West Virginia, still part of Virginia in the era we are looking at, and on to Ohio and Indiana. Brothers John, Richard and Benjamin Gregory, thought to be sons of Isaac Gregory of Pennsylvania, are mentioned several times in lists of residents of old Frederick County, Virginia, a large area at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley, also on a common east-west migration route.

Records for a younger Richard Gregory are found in Culpeper County and Fauquier County, Virginia, on this westward path south of the Pennsylvania border. These two counties were established in 1749, cut out of Orange County, the original huge area from which Frederick County was originally established in 1743. These counties bordered Frederick County on the east.

Dates and locations of various records match a line of movement from the residence of Richard's likely grandfather Benjamin Gregory of Pennsylvania, into Frederick County, and later back to eastern Virginia in Prince William County, across the Potomac from Washington, DC. This westward line of migration connects with the great Shenandoah Valley running southwestward along the eastern edge of the Appalachian Mountains in what is now West Virginia.

Records for a Lewis Gregory, who appears to be a son of Benjamin, son of Isaac, are found along this Shenandoah Valley route then across into the part of Virginia that later became Kentucky, one of the areas where Fews and Gregorys come into contact. This matches the pattern of residence and Gregory-Few marriages in some of these areas along this southward line of migration. Details are found in individual notes for the Fews and Gregorys. Gregorys from this lineage moved westward a bit to the part of Virginia that is now northern Kentucky.

Southward

Gregorys are found along the Shenandoah Valley which runs southwestward from Hagerstown to Bristol, Virginia/Tennessee, on the border, on through Jefferson and Cocke County, which were all one area of North Carolina, then East Tennessee (current I-81 to I-40 to Knoxville) in the 1700s and early 1800s and on toward Cherokee and contiguous counties in Alabama.

We find Gregorys that appear to be from two different lineages who followed the Shenandoah or similar route from Philadelphia-Baltimore through Virginia into Tennessee, our line through the easterly route of the named east Tennessee counties, the other a bit more westerly, with members of both lines in Kentucky.

These two lines seem to be connected to the same line from Pennsylvania and northern Virginia. But there are indication of one or two separate migration streams in the same areas. Early sources are not clear on these lines, and similar names in what may be different lineages seem to have been confused in some genealogies.

I have been through all these areas and explored these lines of migration so have these in mind as I read through records and watch for connections and clues.

Westward Ho

Gregorys in the line of James Henry Gregory and Rachel Lewis are found in those counties of Tennessee from Jefferson-Cocke on to Knox, McMinn (where we find both these Gregorys, with apparently no crossover), Franklin, etc, in the westward migration route. Gregorys of our lineage also seem to have moved northwestward through the mountain passes toward Louisville.

Fews and Gregorys are connected in the states of Virginia, Kentucky (which was originally part of Virginia colony), North Carolina and Tennessee (which was originally part of North Carolina Colony) in several generations. The Fews in North Carolina apparently followed the westerly route over the Smokies into Tennessee into Jefferson County, Tennessee, and surrounding counties where they connected again with the Gregory lineage. We find them in the family of Francis Marion Few from North Carolina Jefferson County, Tennessee, where his daughter Letha married Andrew Jackson Gregory, my great great grandfather's brother.

Crossflow

Traffic went both ways along those Midwestern routes over a period of two centuries. Fews moved into the Louisville, Kentucky, area from Indiana (across the Ohio River. Gregorys and Fews also moved from eastern Tennessee into Kentucky.

Great migrations northward occurred in the 1920s and later because of extensive floods along the Mississippi, destroying much of the Delta South. The depression added to this exodus northward. Midwestern droughts accelerated movement to California. Further industrialization in the next two decades and after WWII accelerated this migration northward and westward.

The geographical indicators are not only contiguous counties, but similarly in the counties along these common natural migration routes, which also reveal patterns of the same family decade to decade and generation to generation. These patterns match the same kinds of patterns we find in ethnic investigations all over the world.
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