LesBlog

My Uncle Carl Bunge completed his research on our family geneaology, and has traced my ancestors from Boone County, Missouri to the early settlement of Jamestown, Virginia in 1610. Micajah Gipson Proctor settled on a homestead in 1817 near present-day Sapp, Missouri, prior to the founding of the State, and I’m the 7th generation of Proctors from that line.

Prior to arriving in Missouri, my ancestors lived for a generation or two in Lincoln County Kentucky, when it was still known simply as Kentucky County, and part of Virginia in the mid-1700’s. Before that, the Proctor line goes back to the ship that was essentially dispatched to rescue the surviving settlers of Jamestown colony.

As it turns out my first ancestor in North America (’John The Immigrant’) voyaged to these shores in 1609 aboard the Ship Sea Venture, which was a part of The Virginia Company. The Sea Venture was caught in a hurricane, seperated from its flotilla, and wrecked off the coast of Bermuda. My ancestor, John Proctor and 149 of his comrades built two ships (”pinnances”), ‘Patience’ and ‘Deliverance’ from the debris of the wreckage, and completed the journey, fulfilling the mission and bringing badly needed supplies to Jamestown in 1610. This was the year following the hard winter of 1609 that left only 60 of the original 214 settlers from 1607. In fact he would have been in the same group with, and contemporaries with tobacco entrepreneur John Rolfe, who married Pocahantas, the favored daughter of the Algonquian chief Powhatan.

Shakespeare is said to have written ‘The Tempest” after having been inspired by the accounts of this voyage.

Another one of my ancestors from that era, John The Immigrant’s son, George Proctor, was a small landowner in Henrico County who participated in Bacon’s Rebellion, which is viewed by scholars as the first real colonial uprising.