Today there are families named Northen or Northern in almost every one of the contiguous United States. One of the fascinating things about having an ancestor who came to the continent near the beginning of the English settlement of the country is that it is an occasion for being able to watch how family members spread across the country from the first small colonies up to the modern day, a family diaspora that in some ways mimics the growth of the country.
Our ancestor John Northin came to the shores of York County, Virginia in 1636, less than thirty years after this country’s first white settlers. His son, Edmund, moved up to Richmond County, Virginia where many members of the family lived for the next three and a half century. However, as this blog mentioned, John, the immigrant had another son, also named John, who was likely the first member of the family to move out beyond Virginia. John #2 also lived in York, but in 1712 moved south to Currituck County, North Carolina.
According to Dorothy P. Gross’ Families Named Northern from which most of this information comes, this second John brought land in North Carolina in 1709. Currituck County had only recently been formed and was essentially swamp land. The original settlers were almost all transplants from Virginia. When John died, his will in 1714 gave the land two his two sons, John and Phillip. No one is sure what happened to John #3, but Phillip’s descendents continued on through U. S. history. In fact, in 1992, a year before Gross published the book, one of Phillip’s descendents, Kathryn Northern, who had been born in St. Louis, Mo. had just died in Jacksonville, Florida. It is interesting to note that when John#2 moved down to North Carolina, he began spelling his name Northern, thus all of his descendents have retained that spelling.
As the country developed, John Northin’s ancestors continue to move across the country. Some of them went to new territory and then returned to Virginia. Others settled for a few years in one state and then moved on. In what follows, I am going to focus on those family members who were the first to move to another state establishing a home for a family whose descendents continued to live in that area. I’ll on those ancestors who were descendents of our ancestor Edmund Northen, the immigrant John Nothin’s son. In doing so, I am taking a patriarchal approach, following those family members, predominantly male, who retained the Northen/Northern surname. It is quite likely that many of the female members of the family, actually contributed more to spreading the family genes than the male members, marrying husbands , taking their surnames, and accompanying them to new places when they did so. However, tracing out that family history is one that would require more resources than I have.
The direct descendents of Edmund Northen are almost all descended from his youngest son William. As related earlier, by 1777 William left Virginia, probably to escape from the lawsuit by his wife, and purchased land in Edgemont County, North Carolina. Several of his children followed him including William Jr. , Kilby, Catey, Nelly and Lucy. The family established themselves in Edgemont County, but William later continued the journey south, living in several places along the way until the family ended up in Jones County, Georgia in 1811 where the family remained until his death.
It is an embarrassing part of our family history that several of Williams children living in Crawford County, Georgia were involved in the Cherokee land lottery of 1832. The Cherokee Land Lottery was a redistribution of land to white settlers that the United States government had stolen from the Cherokee people. A lottery was conducted in which male residents of Georgia could submit their names. Though no Northens or Northerns are listed in the official record of winners, according to Dorothy Gross several of our family members were among “the lucky drawers.”
In addition to Northern’s benefiting from the governmental of Cherokee land, there is a larger part of the westward movement of the family that parallels the patterns of the country as a whole. Virginia was the first slave holding state and our Northen ancestors were granted enough land to enable them to become both tobacco planters and slave holders. As the land beyond the Appalachian mountains began to open up for settlement and family members moved out of Virginia, they almost all tended to move to other slave- holding states. This was part of a general trend during a period of time when abolitionist were beginning to call for the end of slavery. As part of a culture that defended the use of slaves, it is not surprising that most family members did not head out for the north or northwest but to states such as Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and beyond to Texas.
Northen History 