Lineage

The first to arrive Thomas Arnold on the Plain Joan in 1635.

Michael Collins Dunn has some interesting information about the Plaine Joan with his genealogical research.

http://www.tamandmichael.com/COLHIST2.htm#The Two William Collinses on the Plaine Joan

But who were the passengers on the Plaine Joan? Let us take a look at them for a moment. Because the famous publication which first printed the list is usually known by the short title as Hotten's Original Lists of Persons of Quality, I am sure many descendants of those Plaine Joan passengers have assumed their ancestors were "persons of quality". But Hotten's full title for his famous book, one known to all colonial genealogists, with all its subtitles was "The Original Lists of Persons of Quality; Emigrants; Religious Exiles; Political Rebels; Serving Men Sold for a Term of Years; Apprentices; Children Stolen; Maidens Pressed; and Others Who Went from Great Britain to the American Plantations 1600-1700".⁽⁸⁾
 
Now a closer look at the passenger list of the Plaine Joan shows that there were certainly no "Maidens Pressed", because there were no women at all, and no children under 14. There were, in short, no families. All 84 passengers were males old enough to perform labor, those of 14 being considered old enough to be farmhands at the time. The oldest passenger aboard was Ralph Wray, 64; there were two men of 50, one of 40, and the other 80 men were all between 14 and 36. This is a list of able-bodied men coming to Virginia to work, without wives, without minor children, without the elderly.

This is important to keep in mind in the discussion to follow. Later Virginians created a myth that the colony was settled by "distressed cavaliers" who fled England during the English civil war, and created the planter aristocracy of the Chesapeake. Certainly there were some distressed cavaliers among the early Virginian settlers, particularly among the richest of the "first families of Virginia". But in 1635 the civil war was still in the future and the cavaliers were not yet "distressed". African slavery was slow to take root in Virginia, and a great deal of the labor in the early years (and even much later) was performed by non-landholding Englishmen, either for pay or under the system of indentured service.

To understand who the passengers on the Plaine Joan appear to have been, and what that means to our ancestry, one first has to understand the "headright" system under which the Chesapeake and southern colonies were settled. Then we will come back to look at those Plaine Joan passengers in greater detail.

http://www.tamandmichael.com/COLHIST2.htm#The Headrights System and Indentured Servents

http://www.tamandmichael.com/COLHIST2.htm#Headrights and the Plaine Joan


  1.  Thomas
  2.  Eleazer
  3.  Joseph
  4.  Stukely
  5.  Joseph
  6.  Stukely
  7.  Amos
  8.  Johnson
  9.  Ernest
 10.  Glen
 11.  Janice