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How the descendant of a colonial Delaware settler found his way home again, and how you can too By Mark E. Dixon photograph by Madeline Polss Do you know where your ancestors lived? I’m not asking whether you can name the city, state or country that they came from. I mean, do you know the address? Have you visited the house? Have you walked the fields your great grandparents plowed? Sat on a pew in the church where they worshipped? Toured the battlefield where an ancestor fought or died? Finding these places is a passion of mine. After nearly 25 years of researching my family tree, I’ve found that visits to the scenes of family events make genealogy "real" in a way that books can’t – and I’m a guy who loves books. When my wife, Cindy, two daughters (Abigail, 9, and Rachel, 2) and I take a summer trip, we pack our family tree as well as our swim suits. Once, heading home on the New York State Thruway after a week of camping in the Adirondacks, we pulled off at Coxsackie, a nothing town on the Hudson near Albany where Peter Bronck, a ninth-great grandfather, had lived in the mid-17th Century. After a quick pass through the sleepy business district, we were about to move on when I stopped at the post office and lucked into a knowledgeable clerk. With 15 minutes, we were pulling up at the Greene County Historical Society, which is headquartered in the stone house that Peter – a branch of the family for which the Bronx is named – built in 1668 and where a friendly guide greeted us with "Welcome home!" In 1977, driving from Michigan to San Francisco, I chose two-lane Route 50 across southern Kansas rather than I-70 further north. My grandfather, Willis Dixon, had been born in 1890 in a sod house not far from Dodge City and I wanted to see what remained. What I found was a field of winter wheat, plus the tombstone of my grandfather’s grandfather – also Willis Dixon – a former Upstate New Yorker who had joined the California Gold Rush. He came home poor but caught the westering bug and, when past 60, joined his sons in a new homesteading venture on the plains. This can drive Cindy crazy. She’s a Quaker whose family followed William Penn to the Delaware Valley more than 300 years ago and, mostly, hasn’t been anyplace else since. With little personal connection to anything more than 50 miles away, she tends to see any real estate between home and her vacation destination as an obstacle to cross quickly. "Why were they always moving?" Cindy once asked as we searched a burial ground in Concord, Mass. "Where was the continuity?" "They took their continuity with them," I said. I may have converted Abby who, as a four-year-old, practiced her reading skills in New England graveyards. Back then, I gave her a list of family names and let her loose among a sea of leaning slate monuments. Now, whenever we drive past an old burying place, she asks, "Do you think we have any ancestors in there?" But, although I’d lived in the area since 1987, I’d never gotten around to searching for my Delaware roots. One of my mother’s Quaker ancestors, William Gregg (1642-1687), had settled early on a 400-acre farm that he called Strand Millas. But where that was and what remained of it, I had no idea. Recently, I went looking. It turns out that some people named DuPont had gotten there first. * * * What I knew of William Gregg came from a 1944 genealogy, Quaker Greggs, whose author had traced the family to County Antrim in northeastern Ireland. The Greggs were apparently Scottish Presbyterians who, in the early 17th Century, received Irish land from England’s James I in exchange for helping control the native population. When the English civil war spread to Ireland in the 1640s, however, the Greggs fled south to County Waterford. Later, they converted to Quakerism and, when William Penn offered land for sale in America, the Greggs jumped at the opportunity. William Gregg and his wife – whose name is uncertain – arrived at Chester on the ship "Caledonia" in the fall of 1682 with four children: John (born 1668), Ann (1670), George (1674) and Richard (1676). They also carried a warrant – a receipt, if you will – from Penn’s land agents, showing that they had paid for 200 acres of land in Christiana Hundred in the Manor of Rockland. Since I live in Pennsylvania, my immediate question was, "What’s a Hundred?" And what was the Manor of Rockland? An Internet search turned up the website of the Delaware Genealogical Society which revealed that a "hundred" is an old Saxon land division originally comprised of the land holdings of 100 families. In Delaware, hundreds once served as judicial districts, though they now remain primarily as the basis for property tax assessment. A map showed Christiana Hundred running from the Pennsylvania border to the suburbs of Wilmington, and from the Brandywine to the Red Clay Creek. A large piece of real estate to search. A few days later, I visited an old bank that houses the Historical Society of Delaware library on Market Street in Wilmington. In most respects, this trip was a bust. In Chester County, local historians long ago made locating early land grants easy by transferring their dimensions to maps with contemporary reference points. Nothing similar exists in Delaware. HSD’s oldest map of Christiana Hundred was published in 1868. On the other hand, I came across Scharf’s 1880 History of Delaware, which explained that the Manor of Rockland was a tract of land given by Penn to his daughter, Letitia, who sold pieces of it to settlers. (Alas, the library had no maps to indicate its location.) That night, I went back to the Web and found a mailing list devoted solely to the genealogy of the Gregg family. "Where," I asked, "was the Manor of Rockland and Strand Millas?" Within a day, I got a reply from Billy Jack Gregg, a distant (though never-met) cousin in West Virginia. A descendant of William Gregg’s son, John – I’m descended from his daughter, Ann – Billy directed me to a phrase in Quaker Greggs that I’d missed on the first reading. William’s 200 acres were located "at the confluence of Brandywine Creek and Squirrel Run." "Today," wrote Billy, "that property is the site of the Hagley Museum." * * * In 1802 E.I. du Pont started buying pieces of Strand Millas from various descendants of William Gregg; he used Squirrel Run to power his first gunpowder mill. For this and other information, I have Pierre S. DuPont to thank. President of DuPont Chemical during World War I and later chairman, Pierre also served as company historian, keeping up a regular correspondence about the history of the company and its property. And he saved everything. After getting Billy Gregg’s message, I called the Hagley and talked with Marjorie McNinch, an archival specialist, who told me that Pierre DuPont’s papers filled several shelves. Fortunately, they were well organized and, if I was interested, she’d pull the five or six boxes – boxes! – related to the Gregg family. Naturally, I said Yes. One of the first thing I learned was that William’s son, John Gregg, had inherited his father’s 200 acres, plus another 200 purchased later. John’s brother, Richard, had died unmarried while George, the third brother, seems to have gone elsewhere. Women didn’t often inherit land so my ancestor, Ann Gregg, probably got furniture or other household items. About 1708, she married John Houghton. Their daughter, Rebeca, moved late in her life to Richmond, Ind., where – seven generations later – my mother was born. Second, William’s first home, a log cabin, had survived into the mid or, possibly, late 19th Century on the nearby property of the Carpenter family. A photograph of the structure with several people in Victorian garb was filed with a handwritten note from the 1930s which recorded that the cabin was torn down "several years ago." Apparently, it was used for storage; another photo showed the interior, filled with farming equipment In 1695, after his father’s death, John Gregg built a stone house not far from the Brandywine. It was this house into which, in 1802, E.I. DuPont moved his family while workers began construction of the company’s first gunpowder mill on Squirrel Run. Later, after the company was a success, E.I. DuPont built the first section of a mansion that, much enlarged, stands today on a bluff overlooking Brandywine Creek. Holding up an old sepia-toned photo of John Gregg’s house, I asked Marjorie McNinch, "Does this building still exist?" "Oh, yes," she said. "In fact, if you look, you might able to see it from here." I walked to the window of the historic Soda House in which the Hagley’s archives are housed. Looking off toward the south a couple of hundred feet, I saw a dark stone building with a low-pitched roof at the bottom of the hill below Hagley's main library. Built with Quakers’ characteristic lack of style, John Gregg's house looked like a utility shed. Still, in an odd way, it was also home.
Doing It You don’t have to trace your family back 300 years to make genealogy part of your next outing. When I got started, I simply queried my grandparents – four people born between 1889 and 1901 – and quickly got details about their parents and grandparents. That took me back to 1816 and to eight states, Ireland and England. For many people, that’s enough. Obviously, you have to know something about your family history to do this. Once you do, however, there are lots of tools available to identify the specific places your family originated. Here are several that I’ve found useful:
USGENWEB. This site (www.usgenweb.com) is organized by state, then county and, sometimes, township or city. It often has links to the local historical society and is another fast way to learn about the place you want to go, or reach knowledgeable people who may even live there. There are also links to similar websites serving other countries. Delaware Today / July 2000
 Mark
E. Dixon
757 Upper Gulph Road
Wayne, PA 19087-2022
USA
610-971-0649
dixon_mark@verizon.net
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Finding
Strand Millas