Where We Came From

Like most European-descended Southerners of my time, my heritage is rather homogeneous. It appears that I am almost totally a descendant of immigrants who came to America from England, Scotland, and Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries. The major known exceptions to my British ancestry are an emigrant fifth great-grandfather who was a German Palatine and a seventh great-grandmother born in the Germanic-speaking Rhineland. Thus, my heritage is about one percent German. My colonial forebearers, who came from Ireland, were Scotch-Irish.

Where Neville Came From

The ancestry of my wife, Neville Frierson Bryan (b. 1936), is remarkably similar to my own. We are both descended from British immigrants who came to the American colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales

Both Neville’s and my immigrant forefathers were Anglicans (Church of England), Presbyterians (Church of Scotland), and Nonconformists (other Christian Protestants such as Quakers). Most of these ancestors became Baptists and Methodists in the nineteenth century in America.