Up a Tree

Sometimes, while I'm reading through the entries of our family's ancestors, I happen on a surprise. I have been hoping that one of those surprises might be that an actual, honest-to-goodness pirate will show up in Sharon's genealogy, as she enjoys a good pirate story and went so far as to name her sailboat after a pirate ship. So far, no luck. 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