Buckner: Volume I

By Jimmy White

This documents twelve generations of our Buckner Family. Several of them immigrated to America landing in Virginia in the mid 1600s, and we trace our Buckner heritage in England and America. We start with the birth of our Progenitor in 1436 following descendants in several nations side by side. We could not publish our research in a single Volume, the historical record as is requires 1304 pages. Volume I documents the First Eleven Generations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257286867

Book preview

Great-Grandchildren)

Introduction

This work is a two-volume edition that covers 12 generations of the Buckner Family in England and America. There is a full index at the end of the second volume. Additional volumes documenting Buckner allied and collateral families will also be published. With recent research we have compiled adequate data to publish information on over 800 immigrant families.

Before publishing our findings a decision had to be made - where do we stop? Originally, we decided to bring the record down ten generations. After working with several people who had hit the brick wall we found that ten generations was not adequate to solve the problems many of these researchers had encountered. When we included additional generations, the book became such a tome that most people would be unable to handle it easily. So, we decided to publish in two volumes. The first two volumes enumerate twelve generations of descendents of the progenitor. Follow-on volumes will integrate selected allied and collateral family lines from the point that marriage to a Buckner spouse occurred, providing a contiguous genealogical record unlike any we have had the privilege to study.

We searched for the truth – to honor our ancestors, male and female, for their courage and sacrifices. When solid documentation could not be found, we analyzed the data in hand and surmised connections based on a preponderance of evidence, fully expecting to have to revise some family lines when additional evidence is found. Just as we know there must be errors in this work, we are as certain that there are cousins out there with private sources on their branch of the Buckner family who will correct them when developing their own family record. We welcome all corrections that further reveal the truth about our ancestors.

We are not claiming this work is the last word in Buckner research. We are claiming that, based on the analyses of the records that we have found, this is how our Buckner family came to be in England and how one branch of that family began their American adventure. There is much more work to be done.

We offer you the fruits of our labor, but understand that this is our family record, and it will forever be our family record until those of you who choose to use portions of it verify our work and incorporate the sources and documentation that prove your ancestry. Then, you will have your family record.

HOW THIS BOOK CAME TO BE

This book was born from desperation. There is information about the Buckner family of Virginia everywhere you turn: in books, on the Internet and in family files in libraries. However, so much incorrect information is out there and seems to multiply daily, primarily because few researchers are doing original research on the early immigrants. Information from early family histories have been repeated so often in so many different places by different researchers that it has become enshrined as fact, without any proofs offered. But in this modern era, there is a multitude of records available now that was not available or easily accessible to the early genealogists. Access to these records can be now be used to correct errors in the earlier research. This work is an attempt to set the record straight for the earliest Buckners in Virginia using these newly accessible records.

The details

My great-great-grandmother was Elizabeth Buckner. Members of my family had traced her ancestry back to Edward Buckner, who wrote his will 17 February 1767 in Sussex County, Virginia. We believed John Buckner, who married Deborah Ferrers on 10 July 1661, was the proven immigrant to Virginia as implied in the book, Buckners of Virginia and Allied Families of Strother and Ashby, edited by William Armstrong Crozier and published 1907 by the Genealogical Association, New York. Although there was a family tradition that the progenitor of our branch of the Buckner family was this couple’s son, Richard, we could not connect Edward to Richard using prior research and publications on the family. We were not alone; during our research we came into contact with other Buckner family researchers who had a similar problem. In fact, we had not met anyone who had developed a solid connection back to a Buckner family immigrant. Even had John and Deborah (Ferrers) Buckner been the émigrés, there were no verifiable connections we could prove; moreover, the only dates we had to work with were the marriage record in London and an inventory of John Buckner’s estate in Essex County, Virginia.

In 1964 my aunt and uncle began research into our family history. They had no children, so during the years I was often asked to join their research efforts, but I was too busy earning a living. In 1991 a major university compiled my personal genealogy as a living anthropology lesson. In that record was one clue that my aunt and uncle had never discovered. I told them about the information and forgot about it.

In 1996 my uncle died after thirty-two years of chasing deceased family members on all branches of our family tree. Despite a valiant effort, he and my aunt could only trace our Buckner family to the Edward Buckner whose will was proved 19 November 1767 in Sussex County, Virginia. Using conventional research methods of the ‘60s – ‘90s, i.e., going to local libraries and record offices thence digging for any and all available information, it seemed our Edward must have dropped out of the sky or popped from under a rock. We had hit the proverbial brick wall.

After my uncle’s death, I became involved in the family research in support of my aunt. We nearly beat ourselves silly analyzing published information, mostly from the so-called bible of Buckner family research, The Buckners of Virginia. It became apparent to us that Edward Buckner of Sussex County, Virginia, did not connect to any of the Buckner families as presented therein. We decided we would never be able to finish our family’s genealogy if we spun our wheels on this one branch forever, so we set aside the Buckners to work other family lines. In less than six months we had finished the research on seven of our eight main-line families, each supported by documentation my aunt and uncle had amassed in their many years of research traveling throughout this country and corresponding with family members

– including extensive documentation about the immigrants from their countries of origin. When the work was finished on seven of the eight major family lines, we had a compiled a genealogical record of our combined families, yet we were missing our Buckner family lineage.

In mid 2005 retirement hit me square in the face … nothing to do; so I called my aunt and told her, I guess we tackle the Buckners now. Her reply was, Good luck, along with a few other choice words that will not be shared here.

Once more we started with the premise that our Edward had to connect to one of the men named in the Buckners of Virginia, or the other two books that were considered the baseline for Buckner genealogy - History of Ellis, Buckner and Allied Families in America by Janis H. Miller, and Simon Bolivar Buckner, Borderland Knight, by Arndt M. Stickles (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1940). Again, we realized that something was wrong, but we couldn’t put a finger on what or where the problem was. We continued to collect records of any and all Buckners; we researched immigrant lists to Virginia, the Carolinas, Maryland, Boston, Georgia, and New Orleans - but we did not find a single Buckner that we could even remotely connect to our Edward.

Then, a grand discovery! The estate of a Gerard Buckner was probated in Accomack County, Virginia, in 1663. (Hmmmm, the year 1663 was four years earlier than any other record tied to the Virginia Buckner family.) The only information in the archives on Gerard was an extensive record of Accounts Receivable set up for collection for his heirs with no mention whatsoever as to the identity of those heirs! Another brick wall – but it opened the mind to the fact that there may have been a Buckner family here much earlier than anyone heretofore had considered.

In October 2005 I experimented. Beginning with John Buckner of Gloucester, and his son Richard, from whom my family supposedly descended, I attempted to compile a genealogical record using dates in the Buckners of Virginia. The result was disheartening; I could not prove a single-family line from Richard Buckner and Elizabeth Cooke to the 1850 Census, which has full name records to work with. Also, for our Edward Buckner to connect to Richard Buckner, who died 1734, his birth would have to have taken place beyond the childbearing age of Elizabeth Cooke, Richard’s traditionally assigned wife. Finally, we realized that we had hard evidence there was a missing generation in the genealogy record established in the Buckners of Virginia and in records compiled by other researchers. We were learning, as previously stated, we were not the only researchers of the Buckner family with this problem.

Late in December 2005, I located records in London proving that John Buckner, Citizen and Salter of London, who was said in guild records of London to have married Debora Ferrers in 1661, had died in London shortly after October 31, 1670. Wow! It seems that the immigrant family identified by The Buckners of Virginia had never set foot on Virginia soil. So, who was the John Buckner found in Gloucester County, Virginia, in 1667? We began searching for the Buckner family that did immigrate and discovered not one, but at least four, who had landed in Virginia between 1667 and 1669. Of these, we found no connection to the Gerard Buckner who had died in Accomack County in 1663 and could not prove details necessary to incorporate him into our research. Then we found another record that placed Gerard Buckner in Virginia as early as 1645.

As a last resort, I posted to Rootsweb. My aunt and I had compiled a genealogy record that included over 400 Buckner families with a modicum of surety of the accuracy; nearly all the down lines beginning after the turn of the 18th century in Virginia were compiled from work done by my aunt and uncle years ago. So, we were fairly certain we could eventually establish a viable record of the Virginia Buckners if we could just work out the early family. We needed help at the local level from others willing to reject the old data and start with only data we could verify.

This single post to Rootsweb put me in touch with three people – two of them had never accepted John Buckner and Debora Ferrers as the progenitors of the Virginia Buckner family. I called my aunt to discuss sharing our data with these three Buckner researchers. She agreed, despite some misgivings. Unfortunately, a few years ago my aunt had given some data to other researchers trying to prove their Buckner family connections. That data ended up on the Internet claimed by the posters as their original research. There was not one line of acknowledgement or credit given to my aunt and uncle, who had done all of the onsite research to dig out the primary documents that proved our Buckner line to Edward. Even worse, my aunt and uncle’s original work had been corrupted. Several key Buckner family members had been assigned a second given name, although they had been known during their lifetime only by the one given name by which my aunt had identified them in her research. For instance, the John Buckner (born 1768 in Surry County, Virginia; died June 8, 1854 in Buncombe County, North Carolina) had mysteriously become, John Riley Buckner. A John Riley Buckner never existed during that period of time. This man’s name was simply John Buckner – and we owned several deeds and land transfers that proved that was his name. This John Buckner was the firstborn son of Henry Buckner and Mary Foster in our direct line of Buckner ancestors – and we have more than four, four-drawer filing cabinets filled with hard copies of original documentation to support our conclusions on this line.

My post to Rootsweb resulted in contact with Shirley Murray, Lynda Chenault, and Betty Elkins … three of the nicest ladies a person could ever meet. Moreover, Shirley and Lynda had never bought into the presentation of our Buckner family in the Buckners of Virginia. Betty Elkins had a massive amount of primary research on the Carolina and Georgia Buckners up to present day. I quickly learned these ladies were dyed-in-the-wool researchers and each demanded equal or perhaps even more stringent data validation than my aunt and I had previously decided would be adequate for our purposes.

During my first contact with Lynda I learned that a John Buckner witnessed a deed in Lancaster County, Virginia, in 1655 – more than ten full years before most other published researchers acknowledged any official records of Buckners in Virginia. Then, Lynda dropped another bombshell – there was also a record of a William Buckner, who had married a widow Hunt, circa 1657, in or about Yorktown, Virginia. With those two tidbits of information added to my bits on Gerard Buckner, we knew we had to start afresh using only our own research to document the Virginia Buckner immigrants. We started with the four immigrant Buckners we had identified and, using land and court records, began to sort our ‘validated’ Buckners into family groups.

Easter weekend 2006 was a memorable one for me. Lynda visited me here in Missouri to conduct some mutual Buckner family research. After several hours of discussion, study of several key bits and pieces of Buckner data Lynda had accumulated during visits to England and from research on her own family lines, we put together a plan to establish valid proofs for Buckner immigrant families. When Lynda left for home, we had established a hypothetical descendant lineage to work with – which, by the way, has morphed several times over the past twenty months as new bits and pieces of data came to light.

For research in England, I am fortunate to have a lifelong friend there, who on a moment’s notice has searched onsite for elusive proofs we needed to connect our Buckner immigrants to their homeland. With assistance from my friend in England we have included over eight hundred allied and collateral immigrant families based on our own research independent of other sources.

And the results

By September 2006 we had established the basic Buckner family line with substantial proofs that our Virginia Buckner immigrants descend from a single Buckner family in England. However, instead of one Buckner immigrant to Virginia, we found there were several, beginning with Gerard Buckner sometime before 1635 and ending with Richard Buckner in 1681. We quickly discovered that the brick walls in the Buckner research were due not only to a missing generation of early Buckners but also to the conflation of three cousins with the same given name into one person, and the assignment of one of the primary immigrant men … as a son of his brother.

The majority of people we have helped as we developed this record were not lost in their endeavor where expected, but in the 1830 to 1860 time frame. We wondered why this was happening. After sorting some of the lines, we found that many of the published records had wrongly assigned some of the members of Buckner families; e.g., children belonging to a particular family were incorporated into families other than their own. We found numerous marriages where a son or daughter married a spouse of acceptable age, but the two were living a considerable distance apart. One incident to demonstrate this occurred in Kentucky circa 1800. A family claimed the groom named John in the marriage record of a young couple belonged to their family; however, that family lived more than 200 miles distant in northeast Kentucky in Bracken County while the bride lived in Christian County, Kentucky, in the southwest part of the state. The proof was in the marriage record itself, which apparently the researcher(s) had not obtained to validate the marriage. The hard marriage record proved the identity of husband and wife in no uncertain terms – the young newly weds and their families lived next door to one another prior to marriage in Christian County, Kentucky

We did our best to place the Buckners living in Virginia in the late 17th century and early 18th century into their appropriate family groups, based on the evidence in hand, primarily land and estate records. Then, we built a database of more than 300,000 people who carried the surname Buckner, beginning with the first census of the United States of America in 1790 and ending with the last available public census record of 1930. (This record is applicable to the United States, and does not include Canada or the United Kingdom.) After compiling the database, we believe we can identify the majority of the Buckner families descended from the immigrants who landed in Virginia before 1650.

Richard Buckner and Elizabeth…?

The descendants of the Richard Buckner who supposedly married Elizabeth Cooke have given us more problems than all other Buckner immigrant family lines combined. Richard Buckner never married Elizabeth Cooke – Richard Buckner, of Soulbury, Buckinghamshire, immigrant to Virginia, married Elizabeth Sampson, whose father immigrated to Maryland 1651, then with his family removed to James City County, Virginia, in 1666. Regardless of whom this Richard Buckner married, in nearly every instance we have tried to prove a conventionally accepted down line family of this couple, we encountered serious problems that cannot be explained using our research, research by other members of the Buckner family or DNA testing. Proving any family connection to Richard Buckner is difficult, and has consistently been a tedious task. Part of the problem stems from the Buckner’s of Virginia by Crozier that listed Richard’s children as Richard, Philip, John, William, and one daughter, Elizabeth. In trying to eliminate errors in that record, we found instances of Elizabeth being called Frances, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth Frances in by other researchers trying to reconcile the marriage of one woman to two different men simultaneously. Our research revealed that Richard and his wife had two daughters; one named Frances the other named Elizabeth. Richard and his wife had three sons not four. The names of these sons were Stephen, John, and Thomas. We cannot prove sons named Richard and Philip.

To touch all bases in disproving the Richard Buckner – Elizabeth Cooke marriage, we approached it from the other side by proving the children of Mordecai Cooke I. He and his wife Susanna Saunders Peasley had four children. We then proved that Mordecai Cooke II and his wife Frances Ironmonger had six children and accounted for all of them. Neither Mordecai Cooke I, nor Mordecai Cooke II had a daughter named Elizabeth.

Muddying the waters more…

Between 1749 and 1820 there were no less than 384 different people surnamed Buckner that immigrated to this country, mostly from Germany, but also from other European nations, including Portugal and Spain. So researching Buckners in the mid-18th century to mid-19th century is not a snap. If one is not careful, children of these late immigrant families can mistakenly be assigned to descendants of the early Virginia Buckners who moved westward. This is especially true across the northern United States, e.g., New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and somewhat so in North Carolina and Georgia. We are privy to information about two Buckner families that do not descend from the Virginia immigrants; the ancestries of both have now been proved via conventional genealogical records followed up with DNA testing.

ALLLIED AND COLLATERAL FAMILES

For the purposes of this book, we define an allied family as that of a person, male or female, who married a person with the surname Buckner. When we use collateral family, we are referring to that of a person, male or female, who married into an Allied family before that person married a Buckner. The latter is not the conventional use of the word collateral, but it serves us here.

A quick analysis of the families that married into our Buckner line revealed that modern researchers of many of these families were having difficulties similar to those we encountered with our early Buckners. So, we began proving allied and collateral immigrant families when it was necessary to validate the research of our Buckner family and incorporating the research into our database. In our attempt to prove our Buckner family, we completed independent research of more than 800 immigrant persons to the Americas; thus, our plan for publishing the additional volumes.

We found the genealogical records of the following two families to be extremely accurate.

One of the Thornton families in America descended from William Thornton, an immigrant to Virginia in 1641. However, William was not the first Thornton to immigrate to Virginia; that honor belongs to James Thornton, who arrived in Virginia in 1635. Thornton family researchers have managed very well to sort the multiple Thornton families that immigrated to Virginia into their respective lines. The descendants of William Thornton have kept excellent family records. As a result, the dating of Thornton family events may be the most accurate of any colonial American family because of their collection of original family records, many in the form of Bible entries written at the time of the event. Through the generosity of a Thornton family researcher, we were able to ground our research into early Buckners to specific times and places through events connected to the Thornton family. These dates provided by the Thornton’s were very useful in identifying dating errors in previous Buckner research, which often led to too many or too few generations in the Buckner family genealogy – a very difficult problem to overcome.

The family history of the Thomas Lee family of Brechin, Angus, Scotland, is solid. One of the descendents of this family owns original documents that prove their family line to before 1500 in Scotland. It is from the Lee family’s documents, currently unpublished, dating from early colonial times that this researcher was provided significant information on early Buckner families, allowing us to sort our immigrants’ first descendant generations and prove our early family lines as now compiled. This family owns documents not in the public domain, which are their personal property, which they are under no obligation to share. After the current owners graciously searched their records in response to my inquiries, they requested that specific information about who they were and the type of records they own not be made public; they do not want to be inundated by requests for information about the early immigrant families to Virginia for fear that constant searching of old fragile documents would cause irreparable damage. Discussion has been initiated with the family about donating their documents to a facility that could preserve and transcribe them, which would be a great benefit to historical and genealogical research of Colonial Virginia.

At the other pole, the accepted genealogical record of one allied family not named here is in serious trouble when it comes to proofs. The immigrant claimed as progenitor of the family was actually the third of that surname to land in Virginia, arriving after an uncle and the uncle’s son. The evidence supporting this is nearly astounding in the sheer volume of extant records. These records prove that twenty-two years before the so-called original immigrant of the family received his first Royal Land Lease grant in Virginia his cousins were already there and married with families. The problem arises, however, from the fact that the latecomer and his cousin with the same name have been conflated and some children are assigned to the wrong father.

DATING CONVENTIONS AND SOURCES

Dates

You will find no dates in these volumes cited as 10 March 1621/22, where the first year given refers to the Julian calendar (often referred to as Old Style) and the second year refers to the Gregorian calendar (New Style). All dates herein are reported in New Style. We welcome corrections to any dating errors found within the body of this research.

When you see the term hard date, it usually refers to a day-month-year that is documented. During our research we found many lines with hard dates assigned to events with no source cited. When we found evidence to support these dates, we used the hard dates. When we could not verify the hard date, the event is dated by year only.

Sadly to say, some researchers avidly collected data to fill in the blanks without using the logic of life to validate their proofs. We have seen far too many family histories in which children were born before their parents were at least age twelve, when the mother was deceased, and when the father was dead more than nine months before birth of a child. For example, we reviewed the record of one particular Buckner family that listed hard dates of birth for every member of that family, hard dates for every marriage, and hard dates of death, with specific geographical locations assigned to each of these events. When we attempted to validate the information, we found that three of nine children were born before their parents married, one child was born when the mother was age eight and the last child was born more than two years after the stated death of the mother. The source for much of this information was a family ‘Bible record.’ However, the 1850 census record proved the mother of all nine children lived for more than 20 years after the date of her death as was recorded in the family Bible record. No doubt the Bible entries were not contemporary with events recorded, but had been written years after the events occurred.

Timelines and generation gaps

When you are working your way through the English Buckner family, you will notice that the Buckners who remained in England seemed to live longer and marry later than those who immigrated. Consequently, Buckners in America born in the early 1700s will prove one or perhaps even two generations later than their English cousins from their common progenitor. You will even find this true also among those who immigrated at a later date to the New World.

This is one reason it is necessary to establish a reasonable timeline that, when firmly established, allows the researcher to avoid the problem of too many or too few generations in a family line. When you have no verifiable date to work from, there are some general guidelines that are usually sufficient to prevent the placing people in the wrong generation.

One generation = 26 to 28 years

Men normally married and had their first child by age 26 years

Women normally married and had their first child by age 21 years

During the late 17th century in the Virginia Colony, families of more than five children were uncommon, very few women had children after age forty years, and men averaged 1.7 wives per lifetime through 1830. On average fewer than 50% of children born lived to be adults until 1740. From 1740 through 1780 the statistics were not much better, at 55%, increasing to 60% between 1780 through 1820, then to 70% through 1880 only reaching 75% in the era between 1880 and 1900. These are guidelines only; there are exceptions – but not as many as one might expect.

Another interesting fact: we found that men who were born and remained in some geographic areas were apt to die earlier than expected. In the case of the Buckner family, a couple of those areas were Jefferson County and Green County, Kentucky where the men usually died before age fifty. This fact has been recognized and commented on by many researchers who are proving relatives living in those two locations.

Sources

Many people will not be satisfied with the sourcing technique we used. We did not use footnotes or provide a bibliography, for that would have resulted in more pages of source information than we could provide and keep the size of the book manageable. In most instances, the source data is provided within the event record itself, and when it isn’t, there is usually enough information about the event that a researcher will know where to find the source. There are exceptions.

As previously stated, some of our sources of information are not in the public domain and, although it was willingly shared with us on a one-to-one basis, it was under the condition, expressed or implied, that the owners’ personal identities would not be published. (Many people do not have the inclination, time, or wherewithal to respond to general inquiries connected to genealogy research.) When the source of the information is from an unpublished private collection, it is included only if it does not compromise the identities of the owners of the documents.

This is as good a place as any to express my view on ownership of genealogical collections. It seems that many people, in the pursuit of their family tree, believe that any document that applies to their family should be theirs for the asking, regardless of ownership. This position is extremely difficult to justify. Collecting genealogical proofs often consumes great amounts of time at considerable expense. No person should be expected to give copies of any of the documents they have amassed to anyone.

For instance, the letters, copies of documents, maps, and all other items that my aunt and uncle accumulated in their years of research became their personal collection; it now belongs to my aunt. Some of the items are very fragile and a large percentage of them cannot be replaced. And, except for the personal correspondence, the majority of the records collected over the years by my aunt and uncle are still out there for researchers to collect on their own from county and state archives. The point is this: my aunt’s genealogical collection is not yours or mine. The person who collected these items owns them and is under no obligation to share copies of them for the asking. This collection will be eventually placed in a repository for access by future generations of researchers.

Many people possess relevant data concerning their family, which is also applicable to allied and collateral families. The owner of this information has the right to share or to refuse to share. It does no harm to ask, but to insist is beyond reason. No person owes another the fruits of their labor (i.e. documentary evidence) to substantiate other people’s personal family lineages.

Colonial and early U.S. sources

In every instance when we tried to prove an original record, we can say this: only extant land records located in Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and parts of South Carolina are original documents if, and only when, they were recorded in a book of land grants authorized by the Crown and, in the case of some individual states, by the Lords’ Proprietors, or the state where granted. You will not find an original will, an original estate settlement or an original order of any kind, whatsoever. What you will find is transcriptions of original records as recorded by the clerks of the various offices involved and the accuracy of the content is dependent on a multitude of factors. Therefore, we are restricted to the use of transcriptions of original documents (except for land records), which are subject to errors due to the legibility of documents presented and how careful the recording clerk was on that day in that moment. Regardless of how accurately the information in the transcription is documented in the family history, it is still a transcription.

In Virginia, records of land grants by the Crown, through Lords Proprietors and later on by each individual state authority, are mostly complete. Under early Virginia colony law, a land grant of 1,000 acres required head rights for twenty individual persons. Therein is a wealth of valuable information, not only concerning the family that received a land grant, but also for the several individuals claimed as head rights, many of whom never owned land. To us the names of the eighteen or nineteen people who did not receive any land are as important, if not more so, than those receiving the land grant, for this may be the only evidence of an ancestor that would have otherwise slipped away from us.

Lack of early immigration records

In colonial times, there was no consistent method for recording the coming and going of ships and the people aboard. A point seldom acknowledged by researchers is that many affluent immigrant families owned their own ships and carried goods and people to and from England and elsewhere regularly. Some Virginia plantation owners who owned ships were heavily involved in the slave trade, another fact quite often ignored by family historians.

Daughters and wives

Sometimes the only way to prove a family is through identifying daughters and their marriages, which lead to records concerning allied families.

A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY

On our genealogical journey through time we traveled through the personal histories of many of our ancestors, learned who they were, and in a few cases, what drove them to endure the hardships that led us to our place in the world and defined who we are. We want our children to know and understand that many generations of the family, regardless of their stations in life, endured tribulations and scored triumphs; they lived life the best they could, remained true to their beliefs and accomplished those many tasks set before them regardless of personal sacrifice. Our ancestors persevered!

You will not find false pretenses in this record of the Buckner family nor will you find any whitewashing; facts are presented as discovered and validated, the good and the not so good. Here is just a bit of what our journey through history taught us.

We learned about the Staple of Calais, sheep and wool industry in England in the late Middle Ages 1500 - 1600. We learned about Guilds in Oxford and in London, about the Livery Companies and what is meant to be a freeman of a city.

We learned about the fast sailing ships required to transport men and animals across the Atlantic regularly in record time. Few people realize or even think about that to bring livestock such as cattle, horses, sheep, goats and swine was no small task. As an example a medium framed cow in the lactation stage requires more than 15 gallons of water daily when the average temperature is 60o degrees. Plus the confines of ocean going ships were not a healthy environment for livestock. Stalls had to be cleaned daily (often twice daily) and fresh bedding spread about to prevent multitudes of diseases from killing the animals while in transport. In addition to carrying adequate fresh water, and necessary foodstuffs young animals could not be held more than 8 to 10 days in such damp confinement without losing them. That means they were usually offloaded and allowed to rest for a few days on various islands located along the chosen ocean route. We have proved three Atlantic Crossings from Ireland in less than 14 days travel time, and many crossings from England and Ireland in less than 18 days travel time.

We would be remiss here if we did not shed some light on learning how to prove and use Ship Manifests to identify and learn how your immigrant family arrived in America. It is not a simple task to learn, and often very difficult to locate accurate ship manifests. We learned the hard way that many immigrants landed in Virginia, Maryland, and in both Carolinas aboard ships transporting livestock. In many cases the immigrants took care of the livestock for his and her passage. They did so because very few sailors knew enough about livestock to care for and handle them properly, and many mariners simply refused to transport or care for livestock as the animals usually left a considerable mess requiring extensive cleanup of those ships used to move them.

We learned about early agriculture in Virginia, and the difficulty in draining the damp and brackish water swamplands adequately to allow production growing of wheat, barley, oats, beans, peas, and or other crops needed for survival. How many people ever learn that flax was a necessary and most important crop in early Virginia? Although it was the tobacco industry that drove the early North American economy, it was the other crops grown by the early settlers that ensured the survival of the colonies.

We learned about the early fur trade, who controlled it, and who wanted to control it. We learned the nature of interaction among Spanish, French, English and Native American contingents all seemingly bound to maintain strict control in some manner, which usually ended in warfare among the various factions. Strong alliances were continually built and broken by everyone involved making it difficult to extract valid data proofs, which are no easy task to find let alone validate as being much more than hypothetical. It was through the fur trade that our youngest primary Buckner male immigrant, Richard Buckner who married Elizabeth Sampson, was adopted in England by a couple with no children. Proofs were subsequently located that told the story about how he was orphaned, taken to England, adopted, reared, awarded Denizen Status and then returned to North America as a male Buckner Immigrant. It is without doubt we can make these statements for the Male Y Chromosome DNA Tests proved conclusively Richard’s DNA is significantly different than that of the other three primary Buckner Male immigrants.

We learned about Buckners who came to Virginia but did not stay or who died without children.

We learned that for each landed plantation owner in the new Colony of Virginia there were at least twenty other non-landed immigrants necessary to support the expanding economy, not including the merchants. Many of these people never owned land, but most of them can be found and their roles in the development of the New World Colony acknowledged.

We learned about one of Virginia’s greatest love stories ever recorded.

We learned it was not uncommon for a man to die of natural causes in his twenties and that often fewer than fifty percent of the children born to a couple would live to maturity.

We learned that very few plantation owners lived on their plantations until after the mid-1700s and few plantations were fully inhabited until after the French and Indian Wars, which began in 1758 and did not end until 1764.

"Load the wagon with the kids’ ma, we is movin’ to Kaintuck. Sorry folks, it was not that simple. We followed families escaping from Pennsylvania during the French and Indian Wars, when there were no roads upon which an articulated tongued wagon could traverse. We learned the early migrants from Virginia traveled west by two-wheeled ox drawn carts; that the wheels were made of tree trunks cut horizontally with a hole in the center, which was then often generously lubricated with bear grease to keep the wheels rolling freely as possible. We learned that some of those wheels were more than fifteen inches wide so the cart could be pulled more easily through the wet and swampy land conditions migrants faced. Those people fortunate enough to be located near a large river could boat" to a new location, which was the favored method of getting to Kentucky from Virginia before Daniel and his buddies opened the Wilderness Road in 1775. From Virginia via river to and through Pennsylvania, and then dropping south via the Ohio River … much quicker and safer than trying to go overland using the ancient warpath trails of Shawnee and Cherokee, upon which only feet wearing moccasins navigated without difficulty.

We learned one of every twenty log cabins built burned with the family who built it trapped inside, especially those cabins built with smoke holes in the roof, or fireplace chimneys built of wood.

We learned how cruel the Civil War was. Far too many people ignore their family’s participation, regardless of which side the family supported, and the impact on the lives of fathers, mothers, and their children who suffered and sometimes died. We do not wholly understand the mentality of two men primarily involved, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, who did not, for whatever reasons, sit at a table to settle their differences in the manner of civilized men rather than engaging in a prolonged and miserable war. (Please refer to the short treatise concerning the Civil War that follows this Bulleted Section).

We learned about a young Buckner man who chose to fight for the Union during the Civil War against his family’s wishes and they disowned him. He died on his birthday from a self-inflicted single bullet to the head; for it was the only thing he had to give his still living father.

We learned about the mulatto children fathered by one of our Buckner ancestors and the efforts he made to ensure that after his death they were well cared for and educated.

We learned about a Buckner man whose most memorable life’s moment was when Aristides won the first Kentucky Derby and he held a winning ticket.

CIVIL WAR

We would be remiss in this effort if we did not address a few incidents during the Civil War that greatly affected our families, especially in Missouri. The Civil War did not end in Missouri on April 18, 1865, when Jefferson Davis surrendered. In the area of Missouri where I live the horrible violence of war continued through 1870.

Missouri was a border state and families were heavily involved in the war on both sides when the Civil War began on April 12, 1861 with the shots fired on Fort Sumner, South Carolina. The first major battle in Missouri was the Battle of Wilson Creek on August 10, 1861.

My great grandfather traveled from Johnson County to Polk County, Missouri, where he enlisted in Company E of the 6th Missouri Cavalry June 5, 1861 - the unit commanded by Captain Clark Wright. Simultaneously Captain T. A. Switzler formed Company D of the 6th Missouri Cavalry comprised mostly of men from Cedar County. In Dade County Captain E. A. Carr of Lockwood Missouri formed Company I, 4th Missouri Cavalry.

Polk County is immediately east of Cedar County, and Dade lies south of both - the three counties adjoin. The line betwixt North and South ran through Dade County Missouri from east to west, and passed directly through the County Courthouse then, as it does today.

On June 10, 1861, the combined companies D & E of the Union Army Cavalry of Polk and Cedar Counties attacked an entrenched force of more than 600 Confederate Soldiers at Greenfield in Dade County, which formed the very core of local Confederate Forces. Captain T. A. Switzler then moved Company I of the 4th Missouri from Dade County to Springfield to assist with the fortifications, and today we fully understand his reasoning. If Captain Switzler had joined forces with the 6th Missouri, the families of his men from Dade County then would have been in a terrible predicament, and subject to immediate attack by their own neighbors.

The ensuing battle and running skirmishes involved Missouri fathers, sons and brothers trying to kill their own fathers, sons and brothers. The battle went mobile as the Union Force chased the Confederate Force from Dade County to Neosho County, a distance of fifty odd miles as the crow flies. Of the 600 Confederate Soldiers, more than 250 were dead, and 141 wounded or badly maimed in less than 24 hours – many of them Dade County citizens. The repercussions from just this one battle in the war caused very bitter emotions among family members on both sides, and those emotions still prevail among many families living in this area 142 years later.

In Missouri after the war, soldiers from both sides made uneasy attempts to live side by side. To make matters worse, the rage-driven remnant of William Clarke Quantrill’s troops visited their peculiar kind hatred on a small populace of Missourians ill equipped to deal with them. Although Union Forces had killed William Clarke Quantrill in 1865 in Kentucky, his followers, known as the Jayhawkers, continued his brand of war in this area into the 1870s. Burning out families and murder was commonplace – seldom was justice meted out to the culprits. The deadly mark of a family to be burned out could be found on their outbuildings, and most every family so identified, was annihilated.

Entire families were burned to death in their homes, women were raped and their children disemboweled. Many men disappeared to be found later hanged from a tree. These ex-soldiers burned with so much hatred they would not quit - and would rather die with their neck in a hangman’s noose.

Several of our Buckner families lost relatives after the Civil War supposedly ended … and in Missouri to this day many of our Buckner family members will not converse with their cousins unless their families fought on the same side during this war. I identify the Civil War as The Great American Tragedy. The Civil War was a tragedy because of the huge price it cost our nation: 970,000 casualties … 3% of the population, which includes 620,000 Soldiers ... of the military casualties, approximately 400,000 died of disease. Add to this the collateral damage: 350,000 innocent citizens also dead. The Civil War was certainly, not civil.

OUR FAMILY ROOTS

We heartily disagree with the extensive summations of the origin of the Buckner family name provided in the genealogy report of Gustav Anjou, and Crozier’s Buckners of Virginia. Therefore, we simply state; we have no doubt that the origin of our Buckner name was Büchner, after the small community of Bocholt, Frankish Empire, thence transformed from Büchner to Buckner during the first generation of our family in England.

Three linguistics scholars agree on the pronunciation of our progenitor’s surname, Büchner. It is a conventional B sound followed by the sound of two oo’s pronounced just short of a long u, the guttural ch, and lastly the ner. B ōō ch’ ner. Later generations provide evidence to support this: the surname of Thomas Buckner of the Harriott expedition to Virginia is written into that record as Thomas Bookener, and one of the Buckners of Cumnor, Berkshire (now Oxfordshire), signed his name, "Bukener."

We do not know when the ancestors of our progenitor, Richard Büchner, migrated from the Frankish Empire to the area of the Swiss Federation. Richard was born circa 1433 near an ancient village located in the province of South Tyrol, a part of the autonomous region Trentino-South Tyrol in northern Italy. His family lived in or near the village of Neustift, which lay in the shadows of the famed Abbey of Neustift. At the time Richard was born, Switzerland did not exist as a sovereign country; it was identified as a confederation. Switzerland became an independent nation in 1648, more than 200 years after Richard’s birth. Hence, in our records we identify Richard Büchner’s place of birth as – Neustift, Province of Uri, Confederation of Switzerland.

It is possible that Richard Büchner was educated by monks of the Abbey of Neustift, and his education included learning to read, write, and speak Latin, and most likely Italian, and French. He may have chosen to leave Switzerland because of a business opportunity or prospects of an advantageous marriage, for he called Garswood, Lancashire, home in his marriage document. At the time of his migration there was also unrest in the areas surrounding his home caused by political dissention between the adherents of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1450-64), appointed by Pope Nicholas V, Bishop of Brixen, and Archduke Sigmund. Cardinal Cusa was captured and held prisoner. The Pope placed the diocese under an interdict, but Archduke Sigmund won the ensuing power struggle and walked away victorious.

The border between Italy & Switzerland was not clearly defined in the 1400s; searching for records in that timeframe is difficult; therefore, we relied on the historical archives of an allied family, the Fabians, for proofs.

Thomas Fabian was an associate partner-merchant member of the Staple of Calais. The Fabian family of England is directly descended from the ancient Fabius family of Rome. The origin of the name is rooted in the soils of ancient Europe, for it is the single Latin word that identifies the broad bean, one of the first staple foodstuffs of man known to be cultivated and harvested long before Rome existed.

The Fabian family owned leaseholds in several counties in England circa 1450; the family seat of this branch of the family had been located at Compton, Berkshire, England, since shortly after 1359. Compton is but a few miles from Cumnor, Berkshire (Compton and Cumnor are now located in Oxfordshire), where our Buckner family flourished during the 16th century.

The Fabian family knew sheep were a dual-purpose animal, for the fleece and the meat were both in high demand in England. It was thought that by importing superior breeds of sheep, local production could be increased significantly beyond that of the smaller breeds of sheep then grown in England. While on a trip to the Tyrol valley circa 1465 in the Province of Uri, Thomas Fabian was searching for an animal superior to those grazing in his pastures. He met a young Richard Büchner, who most likely was a breeder of Red Engadine sheep. It was not long thereafter that Richard and a flock of Red Engadine sheep were loaded aboard a Fabian family-owned ship bound for the seaport on the Mersey River, which separates the England counties of Lancashire, and Cheshire. From the port on the Mersey River it is thirty-six miles to what is today Ashton-under-Lyne, and Garswood lies about 24 miles west. The target area is well within the distance a shepherd could move a large flock of sheep in four to five days.

The first leg of the trip was overland approximately two hundred miles as the crow flies from Brixen to Genoa, Italy, and would take several weeks to move a herd of sheep. At Genoa, the next leg would have been a voyage along the northeastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, around Spain, then northeast to the channel between Ireland and England, rounding Wales, and navigating up the Mersey River. A voyage of this sort would take several weeks, as the sheep would need to be unloaded every two to three days to forage and rest. Adequate water could be transported along with the sheep to last up to five or six days without difficulty.

From the sparse details we have found, the location of choice for Richard and his herd of sheep was the area between Ashton-under-Lyne and nearby Garswood. North Yorkshire, County Durham, and Lancashire have long been two of the finest grazing counties in England. We learned the land where Richard and his flock settled belonged to the Gerard Family; and there is some evidence the Trafford family was also involved in this venture. In a few years’ time the grazing land controlled by the Gerard and Trafford families were well stocked from the herd of Red Engadine sheep imported by Thomas Fabian.

What was the attraction of the Red Engadine sheep breed to Thomas Fabian? The Red Engadine sheep breed was first found in the Lower Engadin and bordering Tyrolian and Bavarian valleys of Switzerland. This breed was developed from the Bergmask Sheep of nearby Italy and the local Stone Sheep native to the previously mentioned areas. Red Engadine sheep are medium to large framed and are distinguished by a ram nose and their long, hanging ears. They have a dark-brown body and red-brown medium-to-coarse wool, which, with increasing age, becomes lighter. This sheep breed is an easy-care animal adaptable to and suitable for intensive managed production and growing circumstances. In the early 1980’s, the breed was nearly extinct in Switzerland but conservation efforts reversed the trend. Today the breed is classified as rare, but is distributed broadly throughout Europe. The wool from this sheep requires little or no dye when woven into cloth of its natural color. Historically, fleece from these sheep was of more value to weavers than most other breeds.

The Buckner family retained its connections in the Garswood area up to and through the 1630s, but apparently migrated south toward the vicinity of the Thomas Fabian family seat of Compton.

Records show that William Buckner paid taxes at Cumnor during the Great Subsidy Collection of 1524. Cumnor Parish, located in Berkshire, appears to have supported several Buckner families simultaneously during the 1500s. There are several locations in the area surrounding Cumnor that are also connected to Buckner family groups. We have diligently accumulated, categorized, catalogued and analyzed all of the pertinent documents available from Cumnor and the surrounding area including parish, land, and estate records. From those records we located and proved three connecting wills that allowed us to establish a contiguous genealogical record with adequate proofs and substantial facts that others can use to expand their individual family trees. The wills begin with Rychard Buckner who died 1548 at Cumnor, his son William who died 1558 at Cumnor, and his son William who died 1617 at Chawley Farm Berkshire. The last will of William Buckner (died 1617) named two sons, Thomas and Anthony. We proved Anthony very quickly, but Thomas seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth. It was during our search for the elusive Thomas named in the will of his father that we discovered evidence proving he never claimed any part of his father’s estate, and learned he was associated with Thomas Harriott, who is incorporated in the genealogical record of the Buckner Family via a strong Collateral Family line. There is a fourth will which provides a significant amount of data which validates these family connections directly to Thomas Buckner, friend and associate of Thomas Harriott. That will is of William Buckner, Gentleman, who died 1655 in London, and identified his brother, John Buckner, thence proved him sole executor of his estate. John and William were brothers, sons of Thomas Buckner, Threadneedle Street, in London.

Of particular interest is the proven fact that Thomas Buckner, contemporary and great friend of Thomas Harriott, became a Freeman at Oxford, while living at the Boldshipton Inn located in the City of Oxford, Oxfordshire. Thomas became a Mercer of Oxford prior to his move to London shortly before 1596. A Mercer is a member of the Mercers Guild, with affiliated guilds of like name located in every major city in England. In London, Guilds were called Livery Companies, each specifically associated with a type of business. Mercers were not only involved with the fabric trade, including linen, silk, wool, and even fabrics used to make sails for England’s burgeoning fleet of worldwide ocean going vessels – The Mercer’s Livery Company was the first Livery of London to deal with all sorts of mercantile goods. This was the trade of Thomas Buckner during his tenure as a merchant in the City of London on Threadneedle Street, where he owned his own home and where his friend, Thomas Harriott, died in 1621. We contacted the Mercer Livery Company of London inquiring about information they might have concerning Thomas Buckner, and his son John, who was also a Mercer of the City of London. The Livery Company archive specialist advised us they had no records prior to 1941 … their first hall was completely destroyed by the Great Fire of London 1666, and their second hall was destroyed during a raid by the German Blitzkrieg of December 1941. This aside, we were able to discover that Thomas Buckner, Mercer of London, owned property in Garswood, Lancashire, and returned as an old man to die there. This was after at least one of his children had followed in his footstep – gone adventuring across the ocean to what was then called, The Virginia Colony.

GEOGRAPHY

The distances involved in our Buckner family migration routes in Europe are surprising when calculated in a direct line, as the crow flies, from point to point. Thanks to modern-day GPS (Geographical Positioning System) technology, the calculations of distance are simple and they prove our family moved inside of a circle with diameter of less than 650 miles after they first moved away from the ancient city of Bocholt, until several members of one branch of the family decided to try their luck in America.

Whilst in England, our Buckner family settled within a radius of five to ten miles from the following locations: Garswood in Lancashire, Cumnor in Berkshire, Oxford in Oxfordshire, and the City of London, and then spread into the area now identified as Greater London, which today includes adjoining counties of Buckinghamshire, Middlesex, Sussex, and Essex.

Bocholt, Frankish Empire

The first mention we found of Bocholt is 779 when Charlemagne won a battle against the Saxons nearby. It is precisely located 4 kilometers south of the Netherlands border. Today, Bocholt is a city in the northwest part of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, and part of the Borken District. This area is noted for its Beechwood Forests and Bocholt, translated into English, simply means Beechwood. The city of Bocholt is probably not much older than when Charlemagne won his battle nearby, and not much else happened there of historical significance until Bishop Dietrich III von Isenburg from Münster gave Bocholt city rights in 1222. The registered coat of arms for the city reveals a beech tree, which has been the symbol for the city since the 13th century.

We learned that Bocholt flourished as a city during the 15th Century. The famed engraver Israel van Meckenem lived and worked in the city. Bocholt is more or less cloned with the Rossendale District of Lancashire, Aurillac District of France, and the Bocholt District of Belgium. In each of those places you will find substantial numbers of the famed Beechwood tree. The Beechwood tree is noted for one quality of its wood that no other tree can surpass. When dried Beechwood is soaked in ammonia, thence dried, it shrinks approximately 50% in size from the original piece of wood. If the process is repeated, the wood continues to shrink to approximately 22-25% of its original size. It is ideal for the carving utensils and bowls and other useful household items in addition to the knick-knacks we are accustomed to seeing today.

Switzerland

The three states of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden - the so-called Ur-Kantone - united against surrounding aggressors in 1291. A citizen of each state swears August 1st 1291 on the small alp mountain named Rütli: We will be a one and only nation of brothers.… This leads to the term confederation (Eidgenossenschaft). In 1332, Luzerne joins the Swiss Confederation, followed by Zürich in 1351 and Glaus and Juz in 1352. In 1460, Bern joins the Swiss Confederation - 8 states form the acht alten Orte (eight old states). Switzerland became an independent country in 1648. Source: Will Durant, History of Civilization, 1932, Simon & Shuster

By the way, Switzerland is one nation that certifies its Beechwood forests today.

Calais

In 1469 Calais, France, was controlled by England. The Governor of Calais was William Claxton, who also served as the Mayor of the City of Calais, and as the Mayor of the Staple of Calais. The following is a brief synopsis of the Staple of Calais from the Farlex