The adventurers
Most of the surprises have come from looking at America's English colonial period. I've run into a number of ancestors who came here early on in the founding of the original colonies, mostly as recruits to the New World that would allow the recruiter to receive a certain amount of property in proportion to the number of recruits he (again, they are always men at this period) brought over.
Today's surprise was that, if the genealogy is correct, Sharon's 11th great-grandfather, Capt. Thomas Graves, was among the earliest members of the famous Jamestown settlement in Virginia. He arrived in the year after the settlement was founded -- 1607, if you don't remember.
Just a year before Capt. John Smith established the settlement, King James I -- he of the King James Bible -- issued a charter to "adventurers," a term that encompassed investor and potential settlers of the New World, to the Virginia Company of London. Capt. Graves had invested in the company, which is described as a joint-stock company.
This arrangement held benefits for the king and the members of the company. The king would reap the benefits of any successful colony, which included providing new markets for England, reaping natural resources from the colony, and establishing a presence to fend off Spanish expansion without cost to him or the nation. Meantime the number of investors would provide financial protection if the colony failed, as no one person would be responsible for the total cost of the expedition.
Investors were promised grants of land parcels for which they would have to pay rent. Graves invested 25 pounds, a decent amount for the times, and received a grant for 200 acres. By the time he died, he had acquired another 400 acres.
One curious incident pops up in the records about Graves. He was a member of an exploratory expedition led by John Smith that ran into a group of Indians, who captured him. I'll have to check John Smith's account for more details, and if I find any, I'll write a later post. For now, the only other info I found is that he was taken to Opechancnough, who was Powhatan's younger brother or cousin and default leader of his people after Powhatan's death.
A fella by the name of Thomas Savage (way too many Thomases in these early accounts) was dispatched with three other members of the settlement to retrieve Graves. They accomplished the goal, but in the process the group seems to have challenged 13 of the Powhatans to a fight, which they declined. Graves had been held long enough to learn the tribe's language and served as an interpreter
You know from your schooling that the Jamestown settlement struggled in its early year, with a number of the settlers dying. Eventually the settlement stabilized after the arrival of Lord Delaware, who became governor of the Virginia colony. By 1616, Jamestown's population totaled 351.
The Virginia Company of London undertook an expansion in 1617, establishing a new settlement about 8 miles north of Jamestown called the Society of Smythe's Hundred. Smythe was the company's treasurer, but I found no good answer to the question, "Hundred what?" Graves was among those who moved to the new settlement, and after troubles arose between some of the settlers and a man named Eps, who had been appointed the leader of the settlement, Graves was asked to take over.
Smythe's Hundred encountered troubles with the native population and disbanded in 1622. He next appears in the records after receiving a commission to lead a community in what is now Northhampton County, VA.
One last note. His entry in Family Search asserts that Graves was born in Dublin, and in some of the extant records he is referred to as Thomas Graves of Dublin. If this information is correct, then he may be distantly related to the Vikings, who settled the area now known as Dublin. So Sharon may not be related to a pirate, but she may have just a hint of Viking ancestry, which is about as good.
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