There are many theories regarding the origins of our Gregory ancestors. If
you search the internet you will undoubtedly find someone claiming that
our earliest known ancestor Edward Gregory married a young lady from
Massechusettes by the name of Miss Experience Robbins.
[Fact: Miss Robbins was married to a William Gregory.]
Another source will tell you that Edward Gregory was a convict and/or
an apprentice brought over from England to work in America.
[Fact: I did find an Edward Gregory listed in two seperate
publications as an indentured servant from England who arrived in
Maryland in 1775 onboard the ship Hope. I haven't been able
to determine if this is our Edward Gregory. BUT if it is, he would have
had to work off his indenture in Maryland very quickly in order to be
living in Virginia where his sons were born during the same time period.]
I have even found an elaborate story that tells the tale of how Edward
Gregory was shanghaied from Scotland as a young boy, forced to work
aboard ship and eventually deposited in America.
[Fact: I'm not even going to touch this one!]
All are great stories, but none have been proven and in some cases they don’t
even fit the time frame of Edward Gregory’s life span. The fact is that so
many records and documents from early Virginia have been damaged or
destroyed that it has made the task of tracing our Gregory roots very
difficult. As much as we would like to be able to trace our ancestor’s
journey from across the ocean, if the stories and tales we read about can
not be documented in some manner, then we need to be cautious and not
accept everything we read on the internet as fact.
So what do we actually know about our Gregory ancestors? We know
“they came from Virginia” I will even go out on a limb and say that
had Edward Gregory been a man of great wealth or a man who owned vast
amounts of land in Virginia, he would not have given it all up for the wilderness
of Kentucky. Meaning, Edward probably had nothing to lose when he made
the decision to leave Virginia. Most likely, his migrating to Kentucky
was an opportunity for Edward and his sons to finally become landowners.
Let us review here what we do know of the Edward Gregory family in hopes
of learning more about our ancestors from Wayne County, Kentucky.
More to come......
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by Marilyn Gregory Fisher
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