52 Ancestors 2023, Week 1: I'd like to meet

 Getting an early start on next year's challenge!  We'll see how well I stick with it but even when I'm not consistent about writing, it is still fun to think about these topics.

So, who would I like to meet in the ancestral line?  I've concentrated most of my genealogical research (such as it is) on my American ancestors since both sides start during the early European colonization of North America (with a brief moment in Brazil as well).  My mother's side has a few kinda famous folk, but my dad's is full of people who you sort of wish weren't on your family tree.  And for that reason, if I could, I would like to meet the first of the paternal line on this continent, a man named Thomas Prewitt (1616-1692).

Now, oddly, my father always claimed that we were the branch of the Prewitts (Pruitts, Pruetts, Pruietts and so on because I think these people were dyslexic) who spelled the name correctly.  Imagine my surprise when I found that Thomas, who arrived in Virginia as an indentured servant in 1636, actually seems to have spelled his name P-R-E-W-I-T-T.   Score one for Dad!

Thomas Prewitt seems to have been a bit of a character.  He was a Quaker in an era when Quakers were persecuted, and that led him into some difficulties.   He finished the five (seven?) years of his servitude and received 50 acres of land in return.  He married another Quaker, Sarah Lessene, but their marriage was not recognized as valid by the established church and they were charged with fornication.  I have to say that this setback did not prevent them from having a large family which seems to have prospered into the 18th century at least.  Thomas also was ordered by the courts to pay his neighbor for the canoe that he had borrowed and then lost.  There seem to be other judgments against him but I didn't see what he had done to cause the courts to order him to repay various people with quite significant amounts of tobacco.

I will confess here that I am mostly looking at other people's research and we all know how that goes.  However, some of those researchers confess that there are mysteries about Thomas such as who his parents really were, and how he may have actually been awarded 50 acres of land when he first arrived in Virginia.  It looks like he himself had an indentured servant which seems a bit odd.  

So, if I could talk to this Thomas, I would be asking him where he was born (in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England?) and who his parents were.  Did he really receive 50 acres of land when he arrived in Virginia in 1636 and if so why?  How successfully did he hand on his Quaker faith to his children?  Would he have had any idea or opinion on the fact that some of his descendants would become slave owners?  (I'm hoping he would have been horrified but it's impossible to know.  So far, I haven't seen any claim that he himself owned slaves.)  Maybe what I really wish I could ask him is "what went wrong?"  

One last thing:  before I knew anything about Thomas Prewitt, we named our son Thomas.  We lost our Thomas in 2004.  It wasn't really a family name when we named him, as far as we knew, but here we are.