Coming to My Fathers’ land
Way back in July 2019, my father and I made a trip from Ohio to West Virginia to look for the graves of my immigrant ancestors, Jacob and Mary (Connoly) Feather. Jacob came to America in 1775 with his parents and sister when he was 16 years old. He served in the Revolutionary War, married, had 11 children, and somehow ended up in the mountains of what became Preston County, W.Va.
We found the graves of Jacob and Mary that day in the Lenox Memorial Cemetery. I’d never been to Lenox before; all my travels in Preston County had been around Bruceton Mills and Union District, to the south. Traveling the Brandonville Pike to Terra Alta for the first time was quite the experience with the steep ridges and sharp curves, about 19 miles of them in all. What stood out for me that day, however, was all the Feathers in that cemetery. It was like a 1950s kindergarten Thanksgiving Day pageant.
Seriously, many of Jacob’s children and grandchildren were laid to rest in this cemetery over the years. That day, I didn’t realize that my second and third great-grandfathers, Adam H. and Christian, also were buried near Jacob and Mary. More than graves, however, I wanted to know where their farms were in this community, and who lives there now? Are they descendants? Is the old house or log cabin, the vintage barn, still standing? What kind of farming did they do? What were these people like? Were they people of faith, like my great-grandfather and grandfather, whose farms were at the other end of the county, in Eglon and Aurora? Did they have the big “Feather nose,” as my mother called my snout.
Being a retired journalist, I still find myself asking questions and wondering what compelled people to behave in the manner they did? Why did Jacob and Mary come all this way to farm? And why did four generations stay in Preston County and continue to work the land?
That trip launched what became more than four years of researching and writing my family’s story. While much has been written about Scotch-Irish settlement of the Alleghenies, I found little literature on the Germans and Swiss who came from the Rhineland, or Palatinate. Many of those who came in the early 1700s were Anabaptists and settled in the rich agricultural areas of southeast Pennsylvania; they became known as Pennsylvania Dutch. But, by the time of the American Revolutionary War, the best land in those regions had become too expensive for a “poor Palatine” like my ancestor to purchase. Indeed, many of them came as indentured servants or signed up for service in the Pennsylvania Line to get a shot at free land after the conflict had been settled in the Patriots’ favor.
As I began to dig into my background, I saw a pattern emerge: Most of the fathers were from the Palatinate or Alsace. And once they had migrated into the mountains, many of them married a woman of Scotch or English descent, whose family had been in the colonies for a century or more. Further, both the Palatinates and Scotch-Irish were in the process of pushing westward, into the trans-Allegheny region of Pennsylvania and Virginia, later to become West Virginia.
The result of this research, interviewing, digging through courthouse records, and writing is My Fathers’ Land: Palatinate immigration to North-Central West Virginia.
The book is a both a family history and general history of German-Swiss immigration to the region. I use my ancestors as examples of the big picture, the thousands of these Palatinate farmers that made their way from Philadelphia to Somerset and Bedford counties after the war.
It also is a memoir of what I had no idea would happen to me when my father and I made our pilgrimage in 2019. It turned out God had a migration plan for my wife and me, as well, to My Fathers’ Land.
The book is available on amazon.com. Both softcover and hardcover are offered.
Because amazon’s print quality has slipped quite a bit in the past year, and photo quality in particular has been dismal, I invested in a small run of these books printed on higher quality paper, with much improved photo reproduction, and a sturdier cover. These can be purchased directly from me. At this time, I am not using an ecommerce option because Woo Commerce crashed my site several years ago. Send me an email if you are interested in purchasing a numbered, limited edition of the book. The pricing is roughly the same as amazon’s.
In future blog posts, I’ll be discussing the Feather (Vatter) family in America, as well as the other Palatinate ancestors. If you have an interest in genealogy or Appalachian history, I hope you’ll follow these posts.
