The following article was written by my friend, Thomas Fiske
Very seldom do my interests in cosmology and genealogy come together, but once in a while it happens. Especially when I think of a particular family line.
No one really knows what gravity is, and I am not fool enough to try to explain it. I know it holds our solar system together. Planets swing silently around the sun, held tightly by a thin “bond” called gravity. We cannot see this bond but we can demonstrate its presence and even calculate its strength. We can also predict what it will do far into the future or what it has done deep into the past. Gravity has a firm hold not only on our solar system, but also on our galaxy and even our universe.
I also recognize that certain people and families tend to gravitate around others. They seem to do it just as the planets swing around the sun. It was not unusual for elderly parents in the 1700’s to have their children living nearby in towns or villages or on farms that were close to them.
When the parents died, some of the children seemed to have been bound to each other and are known to have moved from territory to territory together. Today that is not as common. Children move many states away from their original homes and become separated from their families and family heritages.
This kind of attractive force can be very important in tracing one’s roots. There usually is a reason people stay together. Finding that reason can be crucial as the following example demonstrates.
It really doesn’t matter what my ancestor’s name was, but I will use it for convenience: Samuel Pryor. A hell-raiser in his part of Virginia, young Sam had several scrapes with the law. Some of these involved young ladies, so I know he was interested in females at an early age.
When he was 35 (1760), Sam married Frances Morton, a widow of one of the Merriwethers, and had several children. Those children seemed to have been somehow bound to their parents and also to each other over the years. Not only those children but also a set of other Pryor young folks stayed with them or near them. We do not know the names of the parents of this other set of Pryor children. All we know is that where known Samuel Pryor children went, the other set of Pryor children followed. Or maybe it was vise-versa. But whatever, they seemed gravitationally bound to each other.
Sam’s children by Frances moved on into Kentucky and so did the other set of Pryor children. Several of us researchers observed that there may have been a special relationship between the two sets of children. Since Samuel Pryor did not marry Frances until he was 35 years old, we reasoned that it is likely he had a previous wife. Or two. And it is also likely that his first wife or wives had children with him. That is what people did in those days.
Unless a bachelor is familiar with children, my wife pointed out, he does not want them when he is 35 years old. So, perhaps Samuel was quite familiar with children. He seems to have had no objection to raising a bunch as he approached middle age. (Maybe he was crazy.) But he was not so poor that raising them was a problem.
It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to conclude that the “hangers-on Pryor youngsters” were half brothers and sisters of the set that we know about. There is no record of a former wife, no listing of births of children to Samuel during his early years. Also there is no record of parents of these “mystery” Pryor children, so they certainly could have been children of Samuel and Miz X.
After studying this rambling family, I have concluded, assisted by other Pryor researchers, that they were all Sam Pryor off-spring. One of these researchers is a descendant of one of the mystery Pryors.
In my mind’s eye, I can see our sun, surrounded by tiny planets. The planets swing around the sun in very regular orbits held tightly to it by an invisible bond of gravity. Just because I cannot see the bond, there is no reason to doubt its existence. And there in the dim swirling past, is a group of Pryor children orbiting around another group of younger Pryor children, connected by a bond I cannot see but only faintly sense. I think that bond is blood and kinship brought about by a common father.
Unseen genealogical bonds are clues and not facts. But they can point us in the right direction when we try to make sense of our past. They are worth looking for. As the years roll on, additional bits of evidence emerged that support our theory about the kinship of the two sets of Pryors. We have not proved their relationship yet, but we have never been able to find parents for them, either. The answer to our questions is probably written in the stars.
The cosmological approach has its usefulness.