Jeffreys

I haven’t been on this forum for months, and had missed this post. Is the question serious?

Osborne Jeffreys had many connections, certainly places of residence and perhaps also some affinal kin, with families, some of whose members were partly native. I’ve never seen a serious suggestion that his own background was native.

I’ve previously mentioned this on a couple of Saponitown threads, a few years ago. One factoid that has come up more recently is a tax list on which I believe three members of our Hulin family are listed in close proximity with a “Thomys Notwey.” My cousin Doug and I had previously speculated that our family’s native members might more likely have been Nottoway than Saponi, just from the locations at which they had lived at the time the admixture took place. So we suspect this Thomys Notwey may be one of the inlaws. These are the same Hulins found in Osborne Jeffreys’ militia company in the 1750s, living near him then (on one of the upper headwaters of Tar River), and also at an earlier date farther north, on a Meherrin River tributary barely below the VA/NC line.

Anyway, here is one link that cites a little-known Jeffreys genealogy:

http://www.saponitown.com/forum/showthread.php?2595-Holland-Family-Migrations-VA-to-GA-to-IN&p=21691#post21691

And here is one that mentions some of the property lines, other Saponitown families, and residential proximity (to Osborne Jeffreys) issues:

http://www.saponitown.com/forum/showthread.php?1093-simon-jeffreys-and-tar-river-neighbors&p=19612#post19612

It makes me sad to reread that thread, much of which was a conversation between me and the late, lamented Sue Janz. Anyway, it might have some bearing on your question, or at least on whatever was behind your asking it.

Also, I have little doubt that both Osborne Jeffreys and William Eaton were facilitators of what little community integrity was left to the part-native residents of piedmont North Carolina during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. I don’t know what it had to do with their own lineage, or genetic background. Maybe everything; or maybe they were just nice guys.

And speaking of genetic genealogy, I’ve recently gotten into that. In the direct male line, I’m about as European as one can get, let’s see, R1b1a2a1a1b2* at the moment. (That’s a haplogroup, expressed in a code that changes with each new discovery — and is barely understandable even when it remains stable.) I almost certainly have native ancestry, from VA and probably NC; but Heinegg’s theory that our surname’s lineage must be African or Native is incorrect, in our particular case.