My bloodlines are Colonial American: my people had all settled the area by the time Independence was declared in 1776. My ethnicity is largely English, partly Scottish and Scots- Irish, 1/8 French and 1/16 German and a little Swiss mixed in. My ancestors settled Virginia ( some went to Kentucky), Maryland, North Carolina ( and later Tennessee) and Louisiana.
My father's side of the family was largely Methodist ( with one Lutheran going back to the early 19th Century, my 3X great grandmother, Frances Montgomery Stoneburner, daughter of Gottlieb Steinbrenner and Margarethe Bars, attended the new Jerusalem Lutheran Church in Lovettsville, VA). The Gooding side of the family was from Fairfax County and the name had gone through so many mutations ( Gooding/ Goodwin/ Goodin) that tracking the family is truly very difficult. The Dove and Dennis families that married into the Gooding family were old style Virginians. My dad's mother, Elna Thorne, was a Marylander ( Methodist religion) from Oxon Hill. The Thornes were in Maryland from the early days.
My mother's side of the family's more complicated. The McDonalds were a Scottish family from the Cape Fear Highland settlement in what is now Cumberland County, North Carolina. The English Coxes and Cecils, the Scots- Irish Lawsons and the Scottish Bairds married into the McDonalds, while the German Peavyhouses married into the Cecils, the New England Smiths married into the Bairds. That was my maternal grandfather's side. My maternal grandmother's side was Louisiana French, through the Pecots, Armelins, Perrets and Bossiers, while German Coast German Rommels and von Arensbergs married into these Louisiana French families.
That was her mother's side. Her father's side of the family, the Cornetts, were from Kentucky, but they settled Virginia first, as Anglicans. Her father's mother, Nancy Maggard, descended from Swiss Anabaptists ( Hans Maegert migrated to Pennsylvania in the early 1700s and the name morphed into Magard as they went down to Virginia. His great grandson, Samuel Maggard, married a Scots- Irish woman named Rebecca Robertson before they moved down into Kentucky). So, the Maggards and Cornetts were Baptists by the time my great grandfather, Henderson Cornett, was born in Hindman, Kentucky. He met my great- grandmother when he went down to New Orleans, looking for work. My great grandmother came from a devoutly Catholic family and when she married a Protestant, her family disowned her until Henderson agreed to take instruction in the Catholic faith. My grandfather McDonald was raised as a Presbyterian, but later became a Baptist, as did my previously Catholic grandmother. They met in Washington, DC, in the early to mid twentieth century.
I was born in 1973, in Fairfax. Virginia, the younger child and only son of my parents. I was raised as a Baptist, became Catholic when I was 21 and later on became Lutheran, when I was living in Florida in 2013. So, there's my bloodline.
