The Priest Family
My paternal grandmother's name was Saryelen Priest. She
hated the name Sary or Sarah, so she
went by Ellen. She grew
up in Green Forest, Arkansas in the Ozarks, very close to the Missouri boarder.
At eighteen she asked her father if she could go to Washington and work in the
logging camps. Apparently he
had been to Spokane (probably through working for the railroad) and agreed to
let her go. In addition
she had Priest cousins (Abner and Charles) working in the logging camps in Lebam, Washington
and her other cousins Keenis and Sherman (sons of William M. Priest who is
related but I'm not quite sure how) also lived close by in Morton and Chehalis
Washington. So she had family out here to watch over her. About 1910
she got on the train by herself and came west. When I asked her about working in
the logging camps she
said it really wasn't a big deal and "they were all nice boys." Somehow I
don't think so. She was a gutsy lady, I'm sure somewhat like her great
grandmother Pernina.
In Lebam she worked for the Quinault Logging Company. After living in Lebam for
about a year, the Painter Family (her cousin Abner Priest wife's family) in
Auburn (an area next to Kent) needed help. She lived with them for awhile and then went to stay with
the Alban family in Kent who lived next door to the DeYoung's. She married
John DeYoung August 15, 1913. To learn more about their family please go
to the DeYoung Family page.
Sarah Ellen Priest DeYoung in 1912. She loved hats.
Of all my ancestors the Priest's have proved to the the most elusive and rewarding. If it hadn't been for my cousin Terri finding the family record that Grandmother had sent away for that included her siblings and the prior generation of Priest's, I don't know if we would have made the connection between Green Forest, Arkansas and Floyd County, Kentucky where the Priest's came from. Compounding the lack of information we had about the Priest's was the fact my Grandmother had written in her Bible that her paternal grandmother was Matilda Blair, when in fact it was Mahala James. The family record clearly states her grandparents are John and Mahala Priest, so I still have no idea who Matilda Blair was and why Grandmother wrote what she did.
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| John Priest and Mahala James Priest probably in the 1860's. | |
First the Priest family. John Priest, my second great grandfather, was born in Pike County, Kentucky in 1825. Finding out who his parent were has been quite a challenge. I have been to Kentucky twice and I still don't know for sure.
I had thought John Priest's father was William Martin Priest based on the following analysis. Now I am not so sure. Guy Priest, one of John's descendants through John's son John Monroe Elliott Priest had his DNA tested and he doesn't match any Price/Priest's that have been tested so far. In fact he doesn't match anyone in the Family Tree DNA's database for 25 and 37 markers. This only confirms my belief that John was dropped into Pike County, Kentucky from outer-space in 1825. What this may do is confirm the family verbal history that John was illegitimate. I think we will just have to wait until more people are tested and hopefully we'll have a 37 marker match. For a more thorough explanation of DNA testing you can go to www.familytreedna.com.
Without more proof to the contrary as of May 2006 I think John Priest's father was William Martin Preece or Priest
(depending on where they lived) and his mother
was Mary Elizabeth Giddens. I know from John Priest's civil war records
and from the Family Record that he was born in Pike County,
Kentucky in 1825. The similarity of him with the picture below of William
and Mary Elizabeth is uncanny.
Look
at his cheekbones and her mouth.
It is important to remember that the area of Johns Creek that the James', Priest's, and McCoy's lived is on the right on boarder between Floyd, Pike and Martin Counties and that in 1822 that area of Pike County was in Floyd County. You can link to the map of this area for a better understanding..
I know that Richard and Ruel Priest were living in Floyd County in the 1810 census (It is alphabetical so you can't tell where they lived). No Priests lived in the the County for the 1820 census. Then Alexander Boone Priest was living in Floyd County in 1830 census in the Johns Creek area next to the Strattons and the Clays, and that William Priest or Preece was living in Floyd County between Pernina James, William McCoy, and Abner James in the 1840 census. (To further complicate my search William was left out of all the official 1840 Census indexes. But if you look at the actual census document - there he is.) Then John shows up in the 1850 census in Johns Creek in the same area between William McCoy and John Roop and close to Pernina and Abner James, but no Richard, Ruel, William or Alexander Priest in the Floyd or Pike County Census. Where was the connection? The Priests all seem to be in the Johns Creek area, but the names continue to change.
Also complicating the issue is that Priest is spelled Priest or Preece or Prees depending on where you live. In Floyd County it was generally spelled Priest. In Martin County it was spelled Preece. In Texas it was spelled Preece and generally in Virginia it was spelled Priest. In Washington where I live it is pronounced Priest. You can hear the "t". In Kentucky with the lovely slight southern drawl it is pronounced Preece. No "t".
It wasn't until I got to Kentucky and could go to the Pikeville College Genealogy Department and find some correspondence between Louise Preece in Texas and Henry Scalf in Floyd County and the State Archives in Frankfort that I feel that I have sufficient documentation that I am confident that John Priest's parents are William Martin Priest and Mary Elizabeth Giddens.
William Priest and Elizabeth Giddens were married March 2, 1825 by Reuben Giddens her Father (who was also a pastor). Link to their marriage license. John was born August 20, 1825. William Prieste is listed in the 1825 tax records for Pike County in the Johns Creek area not far from where the Jameses live. Since he does not own a home there is not very much information about him. However, he is living in the Pike County area of upper John's Creek at the time John was born in 1825. He shows up in the tax records or census in the Johns Creek area until 1841.
The next piece of evidence is a letter from Louise Preece. Louise was a descendant of William Martin Preece and I suspect the expert on the Preece family. From a letter she sent to her cousins "The first two children of the older couple were Reuben B. (shown as P., as I recall, in one record) who went to the Mexican War with the Red River Volunteers from Clarksville. He was dead within a few months. John C. must have been John Cyrus, who went with Reuben about the same time, and I understand he died in the War. I also find a John C. who was born and died in 1851-52; so there is much checking to be done."
I don't believe that John C. died in the war. I believe that he was my John Priest who was born Aug. 1825 in Pike County, Kentucky and that he stayed in Pike/Floyd County, Kentucky when his parents moved to Texas in 1841-42. He would have been 16 at the time they moved and maybe he was already in love with Mahala James - she was his neighbor - and wanted to stay and marry her. They got married six years later. For whatever reason he did not move to Texas. He stayed in Floyd County. He had lots of family members around to live with, or maybe since he was 16 he could have lived on his own - although he doesn't show up in any tax records. Now, all the family stories that I have heard from all the cousins I have connected with make sense.
The Priest Family
Now that I know William Martin Priest and Mary Elizabeth Giddens are John's parents I need to jump back to Rees Prees the original Priest that came to the United States sometime before 1688. Note: all of the genealogy information about the Priest family before Richard Lincoln Priest (John Priest's grandfather) I have gotten from other sources which I have not verified.
To put this in some historical context the pilgrims landed in the Mayflower in 1620-21. So the first Priest (in my family) came to the United States from Wales just some sixty years later. It still must have been a pretty rugged country.
Rees Prees was the first of my extended family that I know of to come to the United States. He went to the Philadelphia area where he married Elizabeth Williams December 20, 1688 in Radnor, Pennsylvania. The had six children of which one was David Priest (Preece) born in 1698 in Conestoga, Pennsylvania.
According to Gary Glen Price in 1718 David was an older-than-21, unmarried freeman and the land on which he settled was approximately 9 miles south-southwest of the present-day courthouse in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. David appeared on the first Conestoga Township tax list in 1718; but, by some reports, he had arrived in 1716. David's father, Rees, and brother, Thomas, followed him to the Conestoga Valley in 1721, jointly settling 1,000 acres located 1.2 miles northwest of David's land. Something occasioned both brothers to sever their ties to the Conestoga valley in the same year - 1737; perhaps it was the death of Rees Preecs. David moved in 1737 to land in Pennsborough Township, near the point where Yellow Breeches Creek flows into the Susquehanna River (south of present-day Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and on the west back of the Susquehanna River). He married Susannah and they had at least four children of which one was William Priest (Preece) who was born about 1723 in York County, Pennsylvania.
William married Mary Griffith, who had immigrated from Scotland, on June 3, 1747 in Lebanon County Pennsylvania. He and Mary had six children: William, David, Samuel, Lydia, Elisabeth, and Richard who was the youngest and was born about 1766.
William Priest (Preece) and his family moved to Virginia during this period.
"Virginia had an urgent need of merchants, skilled artisans, woodsmen, and a
large labor force to cultivate the tobacco crops. Luring laborers to
insect-ridden and swampy regions was a challenge. The English law of
primogeniture preserved the estates of the landed gentry by transmitting the
titles and property intact from eldest son to eldest son. Many younger sons saw
Virginia as a prime opportunity. The London Company lured these people to
Virginia with land. The Company agreed to give anyone who paid his way to
Virginia fifty acres for his own personal adventure. Another fifty acres was
offered for each person the adventurer transported at his own cost. When
Virginia became a royal colony, the headright system continued. Over the next
century, thousands of settlers came because of Virginia's headright system." See
Nell Marion Nugent, Cavaliers and Pioneers, Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents
and Grants, 3 vols. (1934; reprint, Baltimore, Md.: Genealogical Publishing
County, 1983).
Sometime before 1776 William Priest built a Fort. Priest's Fort is another fort found only in the memoirs of John Redd, and of it he says: "That it was located some 5 or 6 miles above Martin's Station and was on no water course. It was built about the same time as Mump's Fort, and William Priest, its builder, was perhaps a Henry County, Virginia, man in the valley through Martin's influence. Five or six miles from Martin's Station would locate this fort between the towns of Rose Hill and Jonesville, in Lee County. This fort was evacuated at the same time as Mump's and Martin's, and the men from both fled to Fort Blackmore, in June, 1776, when alarmed by the outbreak of the Cherokee War." All evidence points to the fact that it was, as Redd says, never reoccupied after the initial evacuation, as no other mention of it has been gleaned from any source.
From a letter from Louise Preece to Henry Scalf 7.2.1968
Harold told me (when I saw him last week for the first time in 23 years) that
years ago Emma Preece wrote him that William Preece opened a trading post on the
Cumberland Trail in North Carolina (remember the land grant information I sent
on a William Preece in that state?) and that he wrote a "hot letter" to his
neighbors and left. He also said that we had an ancestor, Lady Lovelace of
Scotland, who left the country for political reasons, and he thinks these were
on she Wilburn side. Lady Lovelace married a Cherokee chief by the name of
Wilburn, who married who married a Stratton at Richmond, and that our Cherokee
blood comes through the Stratton's.
This letter explains several family stories. Family stories are always interesting. There is some truth and some fiction. There is a co-mingling of stories. Actions get attributed to the wrong persons. The fun and challenge of family stories is looking at the bits and pieces of the stories and the overall thread of many stories. It is finding that grain of truth in each story. Making them fit. Figuring out the fact and the fiction. It is great fun.
First that John Priest was part Cherokee. It is quite obvious from looking at his picture that he has some Indian blood, although he had blue eyes. John's heritage was never openly talked about in the family. Instead there just was a "rumor." But it was a consistent rumor in every branch of the family. Although my grandmother vehemently denied that her family had Indian blood and had marked on the back of his picture that he was a Civil War Veteran and of German descent, there were stories. Where she got the German descent I don't know other than the Priest's lived close to the area called German town in Floyd County. Many people who have looked at the pictures of my Grandmother and her sister Della when they were young remark on how they have Indian characteristics (although they didn't have the high cheekbones characteristic of the Cherokee tribe). Della's son Carroll "Gene" told his daughter Carol Hanson that the Priest line had Indian blood. Lucy Priest Carter also tells of how her aunt June Priest had high cheekbones and her husband always called her "my little Indian." Garnet Crider remembers that supposedly the Priest's came from Virginia and that either John Priest's Mother or Grandmother was a Cherokee and that's why the Priest's moved from Virginia to the hills outside Pikesville.
I had always questioned John having Indian blood. First the blue eyes, but more importantly if it wasn't socially acceptable in Appalachia back in the 1800's or even in the first half of the 19th century to be of mixed blood. Why then would the Jameses, who were a fairly prominent family, let they daughter marry someone who was part Indian? Socially that would be very unacceptable. They did not leave Floyd County. They stayed and lived in the community. They may have been somewhat below the radar screen, but they were part of the community. It is clear through Mahala's Widows Pension Application that she went to the old Floyd County families for affidavits. She and John were accepted. That question is answered in Louise Preece's letter. John's maternal grandmother (who the Indian blood came through) was Nancy Stratton Giddens and the Strattons were one of the founding families of Floyd County, were large landowner, and were probably more prominent than the Jameses. It all makes sense.
