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The accompanying genealogical chart reflects 7% years of research into the ancestry of my wife, OLLIE IRENE STRINGER, daughter of Dr. Jesse Jackson Stringer, a ?horse-and-buggy? country doctor of Lawrence County, Mississippi, where he practiced until his death in 1914. She was the sixth generation of her family in that county. Her mother was Eliza Ophelia Williams.
Her early ancestors in this country were among the pioneers who opened the frontiers of our country in what is now New York, Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Close kin pioneered in Kentucky. Later they helped open Texas and the West.
COLONIAL ERA
Among my wife?s ancestors who emigrated from England to Tidewater Viriginia in the early 1600?s were the Stringer and Brinson families.
And from the Republic of the Netherlands??brave little Holland??came Jacob Luerson van Kuykendall to New Amsterdam (now New York City) before 1646 in the service of the Dutch West India Company. The first Kuykendall born in this Dutch Colony of New Netherlands was a boy, Luer Jacobsen van Kuykendall, baptized by the Rev. Jonas Michaelus on May 29, 1650, in the Dutch Reformed Church of New Amsterdam. This is the present day Collegiate Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of the City of New York.
In Pennsylvania by the early 1700?s were the Armstrong family?Scots from County Fermanagh, Ulster (North Ireland), commonly designated as ?Scotch-Irish?; and the German, John Christian Heidelberg, from the Palatinate area of the Rhine Valley, who came to this country by way of Rotterdam.
These ancestors of my wife?English, Dutch, Scots, and German?were among the first (before 1740) to settle west of the Blue Ridge in the great Valley of Virginia, 20 miles wide and 120 miles long, later to be known as the Shenandoah Valley. And here they provided a buffer for the Atlantic Coast settlement against the enemy French and their savage Indian allies. James Armstrong, an ancestor of my wife, was a charter member of the Tinkling Spring Meeting House in Beverley Manor, Augusta County, Virginia, and his four younger children, Mary, Joseph, and twin boys, Benjamin and Matthew, were baptized in the period 1741-47 by the early Presbyterian minister, the Rev. John Craig. This is the present day Tinkling Spring Presbyterian Church of Staunton, Virginia.
And here these ancestors of my wife were associated in land trades with Lord Fairfax and his young surveyor, the 17-year-old George Washington. They were at Braddock?s defeat in 1755, and as members of the militia under the 23-year-old Colonel George Washington, they provided the sole protection against the confident Indian. Later, they were to serve in the Revolution under the Commander-in-Chief, General George Washington, and to support Washington as the first President of the United States.
My wife?s ancestors appear in wilderness North Carolina before the Revolution, being among the earliest land grantees. They included the Armstrongs, Kuykendalls, Coburns, Culpeppers, Carrolls, and others in Anson County; the Stringers in Edgecombe County; the Brinsons and Heidelbergs in Onslow County; and the McClammys in New Hanover County. Some of the land granted in Anson County, North Carolina, was shifted to York County, South Carolina, in a boundary revision of 1771. And ancestors in York County, South Carolina, were participants later in the turning point battles of the Revolution in the county, including King?s Mountain.
FRONTIERSMEN
They were the bold and the brave, these ancestors of my wife, providing restless manpower and aggressive energy in successive migrations that carried the frontiers ever onward into the primitive and forbidding wilderness; opening the way for the ax, the plow, and permanent settlements; and blazing the trail for an empire.
Learning the woodsman?s art in the harsh school of experience, they adapted to conditions of pioneer life, accepting as commonplace the trials, difficulties and dangers of the wilderness-frontier. The wild animals, the poisonous snakes, and always the menace of the tomahawk and the scalping