In Search of Family History

When searching for ancestors. the best is in discovery ~

The saddest is to come to the end of the line.

I have to begin this segment saying the least likely grandparent to have an interesting family history has heritage which blazes right into English Royalty.

The most likely has heritage leads us into English History as well as Fables.

All is worth sharing.

My Maternal Grandmother was a beautiful woman right up until her 86 years came to an end.

Smart, organized, independent...all good characteristics she embodied in abundance. She was my most admired person...not especially lovable, but admirable.

Orphaned early, she lived with her Uncles' family until 18 when she married. Her life was spent raising seven children in hard times.

Here is some of what has been discovered, which places new destinations on my list of things to do. My "Bucket List" so to speak.

Great (many times) grandparent was James Neals, Esqr who was granted 2000 acres in Charles County, Maryland when he immigrated circa 1636. There, he had built Wollaston Manor.

Wollaston Manor is made up of 2,000 acres patented in 1642 to Captain James Neale and was named for his Grandfather's home in Northamptonshire, England.

Neale's wife, Anne Gill, was Lady-in-waiting to the wife of Charles I, Queen Henrietta Maria. Arriving in Maryland in 1636, Neale traded with Indians, was member of the Privy Council, a Commissioner of Treasury and a Magistrate. Neale's four children were born while he was King's Emissary to Spain and Portugal, and became Maryland's first naturalized citizens after his return to province in 1660. A house built near Wollaston Manor, known as "Lone Holly," survived until 1900.

THE FOLLOWING DESCRIPTION: Transcribed material, correspondence and newspaper clippings concerning the Neale home in Maryland.

If one had the privilege of choosing the spot where he wished to be born, he could find none more attractive than Wolleston Manor. Long ago the old manor house was destroyed by fire, and not a vestige of it remains to tell its story,

Page 2 The site where once it reared its lofty walls still exists -a small plain fronting the majestic Potomac for a mile or more, and presenting a vista of such rare natural beauty and splendor as to have no compeer on either side of that noble stream. Standing on the spot where the manor was erected in the early days of the Seventeenth Century, to the left, as one looks out on the river, lies a grove of primeval oaks, beneath whose shade the heroine of this narrative played when a child. No doubt she heard from her parents and from her kindred the saga of her family, one of the proudest that ever came from England to settle this continent.

Beautiful women, the queens of Maryland issued from that race, and men of great ability, who, from the founding of the colony down to the day of her death, made and were making great history. On both sides of the Chesapeake Bay and on both banks of the turbulent Potomac lived families of the first distinction in whose veins ran the same blood that coursed through young Rose Maria's. Southern people, particularly those from Maryland and Virginia, paid more attention to their birthright than did the people of the other colonies, and that characteristic alone set them apart, as different from their neighbors to the north. It was a remarkable connection in which to be bred and educated. No aristocratic race was ever finer. And we shall see that this famous woman, descended from Irish and Spanish royalty and having the best qualities of each, was ever and always an aristocrat , deeply attached to the soil which her ancestors had cultivated, and deeply loyal to the traditions which made Maryland

one of the foremost States in the Union. Blood kin to many of the first families in Southern Maryland, she knew the history of each family and also the history of the other great families who lived on the shores of the Potomac and were neighbors to Wolleston Manor. Around one little town - a consequential town in colonial days and down to this century -Port Tobacco, there clustered the homes of some of the most distinguished men and women of their times - homes where Washington and Lafayette and other leaders in the War of Independence were often guests, wining and dining, dancing and reclining, and sitting down to a stout game of cards. At Mulberry Grove lived John Hanson, President of the First Congress organized under the Articles of Confed-eration. in 1781, and often called the First President of the United States, who extended to Washington the official thanks of his country when that great soldier came to Philadelphia to make formal announcement of the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown.

Nearby is LaGrange, named in honor of the home of Lafayette, where resided Doctor James Craik, the first Surgeon General of the United States Army, but whose chief claim to our remembrance is that he was Washington’s most intimate friend, who closed his eyes in death.

Neighbor to LaGrange is Rose Hill, where Doctor Gustavus Brown , the consulting physician in Washington' s last illness, with his incomparable wife, dispensed a hostility that is
Page 4 traditional even in our times. Just beyond Rose Hill is Habre-de-Venture, the seat of Thomas Stone, one of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, although he did not favor a war with England. His fame lingers on with the passing years. Around it clings a romantic aura, for he died of a broken heart, while still a young man, grieving over the loss of his beautiful young wife. Some miles to the southeast of this cluster of historic halls stood Wolleston Manor, a great house older than any of the others. Here Captain James Neale, on October 21, 1642, established his residence, on a grant of two thousand acres, given him by Governor Leonard Calvert. Source:

This is an excerpt from an unpublished mss of Mrs. Robert Greenhow by David Rankin Barbee.