Week 30: The Old Country: England? France? #52ancestors

We are still pandemicing away here in Washington state.  As of the end of this past week, restrictions on restaurants returned in a modified form (maximum of 5 people, all from the same household, at a table indoors) due to rising numbers.  This will affect our Taco Tuesdays with my sister and her husband and son but other than that, I don't expect it will be much of a bother.

And so to the Old Country.  One of the interesting things about genealogy for me personally has been that it has confirmed my impression that no one on either side of my family remembers or thinks about the Old Country.  The most recent immigrant was early in the 19th century and he in fact may have been just lying about where he came from (he claimed both Ireland and New York on the census in different years).  My husband's family is definitely German on both sides but it has proven very challenging to figure out exactly who it was who did the immigrating.  I will leave them aside for the moment.

Despite this lack of tangible ties, if I had to pick a country as a candidate for "Old Country" it would be England.  (My father was a Prewitt, my mother was a Belknap.)  Both the Prewitts and the Belknaps started out there.  The Prewitts seem to have been linked to the aristocracy, at least in the 15th century, though the evidence is that they had really come down in the world by the 17th, when Thomas Prewitt came to Virginia as an indentured servant (and a Quaker).  The earliest records I've seen referenced for the Belknaps have them in Hertfordshire in the late 16th century which is also when the name seems to have changed from Beltoft to Belknap (or Belnap or Belnapp).  The Belknap side seems to have stuck to marrying into other English families.  I've found one branch that lived in Heptonstall in Yorkshire where they seem to have been involved with the wool industry--their surname was Draper, which means someone who makes and sells woolen cloth.  This makes me wonder just how much genetics really does influence us:  I worked in a fabric store for 16 years, selling a lot of wool!

Thomas Prewitt was from Salisbury in Wiltshire, England.  I really haven't found much about him except that he came to North America in 1636, apparently finished up his indenture, married, and had a largish family.  I assume he farmed here but what he was trained for before he came to Virginia remains a mystery to me.   My Prewitt grandmother was Olive Howdeshell:  her family had come to Virginia maybe around 1750 from Alsace Lorraine, on the perpetually shifting French and German border.  As it has turned out, there are a number of Doerflingers (my husband's name) in Alsace-Lorraine too, so maybe I should include that in the Old Country definition.

Maybe a little eerily, both my sister and I have felt very at home in England.  My sister lived there for about 8 months in the late 1970s, and I visited as a child in 1962.  I was lucky enough to visit Alsace-Lorraine in 2009 and, even though I did not get the same "at home" feeling there that England had given me, I was still relatively comfortable and found that the remnants of French that I spoke worked pretty well there.  I also got to visit with a Doerflinger connection but that is a story for another day!