Entry #48

My mother-in-law is the one with the deep Colonial American ancestry. It took me years of research (due to several errors in a family tree compiled by one of her aunts) to tap into these lines. My mother-in-law’s great-grandmother was NOT Margaret Amelia Walton, but Margaret “Maggie” Miranda Walton. Maggie Walton’s husband, Theodore Herman Brown, was NOT born in Delaware Water Gap, PA, but in Gap, Lancaster County, PA. Once I was able to clarify those two items, I was able to identify Maggie Walton as one of the Byberry Waltons. (Please click on the image to enlarge it.)

Pedigree of Margaret Miranda Walton

There is a massive volume of family history by Norman Walton Swayne on this prolific family and a second, more recent, volume II.  During my research for this blog, I came across a fun, two decade-old news article about the family as seen by their descendants. I got a kick out of the human side of the story, so I will reproduce the article here.

Walton Clan Looks Back On Byberry – The Four Brothers Are Credited With Founding Byberry In 1683.

By Lea Sitton, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Posted: August 13, 1993

The Byberry Waltons drank too much and played around. They quarreled with one another. Some killed themselves – in 1759 Joshua Walton strung himself from a tree in his front yard – but many more lived past 90 and several saw 100.

Sometimes they stayed single. Usually they got married. They started
families, farms and mills. Samuel (d. 1857) built the first bridge across the Allegheny. Boaz (d. 1853) and Jeremiah (d. 1854) made cabinets. Hannah (d. 1817) wrote poems. (She also gave birth to two daughters and never had a husband.) William (d. 1807) loved to hunt raccoons and pigeons, and may have shot the last bear killed in Byberry Township.

The Byberry Waltons were not signers of the Declaration.

They did not invent anything like the light bulb.

They were regular people.

But they worked hard, and the first ones here – four brothers – are credited with breaking ground in 1683 for a settlement along Poquessing Creek that is now the Byberry section of Northeast Philadelphia. A lot of people would say, “So what?” The brothers are history, dead and dusty, paved over and built on.

But the Waltons of today would say the past holds good stories and is reason enough for a get-together. Tomorrow and Sunday, a couple hundred descendants of Nathaniel, Thomas, Daniel and William are expected to gather at the Best Western on Roosevelt Boulevard for their 11th annual reunion. Most of them will come from the Philadelphia area, but some will travel farther, including one expected from Hawaii.
Beatrice Walton, who married into the family, is the museum curator for the Byberry Friends Meeting, which the Waltons helped found.
She is passionate about the past.

“I can’t tell you why. I don’t know why. . . . It’s just something I took to,” said Bea Walton, 75. She and students who doze through history agree on one thing: It’s not the bare facts that get their attention.

“I hate that, just seeing a name and a date,” she said. “What were they? What did they do?”

Since 1960, Bea Walton has worked on the second floor of the schoolhouse at the Byberry Friends Meeting, which is on Byberry Road at Thornton Road, its original location.

There, the library collection, started by the Friends in 1794, is surrounded by a natural history collection, initiated around 1830. Animals stuffed and mounted for posterity, dead insects in bottles, a Revolutionary War scabbard, Civil War saddlebags, a 15-pound granite ball that William P. Bonner carried back from Massachusetts in a suitcase in 1897. That and more can be found in the museum.

Maybe the reason for her passion is also there, where it is clear that dead does not mean dull. Really, what kind of a guy would accept a granite ball from an old fisher in Cape Cod, then carry it home in a suitcase? And who would pickle a large piece of asparagus and donate it for display? Somebody who attended the Byberry Meeting in the 1940s or ’50s, that’s who.

For Bea Walton, none of them is dead and dusty.

According to the family history, the four Walton brothers walked about 50 miles north along the Delaware River after arriving from England. For months, they lived in the dirt, in a 3-foot cave covered with bark, because they lacked building supplies. Besides, they had to concentrate on growing food.

Their settlement grew into Byberry Township, which became part of Philadelphia in 1853. It was named for Bibury parish near Gloucestershire, England, the brothers’ home.

Most of Byberry’s early settlers were Quakers and things were peaceful until around 1690 when preacher George Keith showed up and started arguments over religion. Soon, the Byberry Meeting split and Nathaniel stood with the Keithians – opposite his brothers. The split was bitter. Once, Nathaniel went back to the other meeting when one of his brothers was preaching. Nathaniel rose angrily and shouted, “Brother, thou lyest.”The Keithians soon moved onto other denominations. Because Nathaniel did not stay with the Quakers, who kept detailed records, his line is more faint than his brothers’.

Richard W. Walton, 77, who descends from both Daniel and Thomas, said 15,000 to 16,000 descendants have been documented, including Ginny Thornburgh, former first lady of Pennsylvania. More than 1,200 people are on the mailing list for the Byberry Walton newsletter, which Pat Worthington Stopper sends out twice a year.

Stopper, 65, is descended from William and is as enthusiastic as Bea Walton.

“I have sleepless nights, and I come out here and I take that Book 1 and I read it, word for word,” Stopper said at her home recently.

The book is weighty, a bound history of Waltons that is nearly 2 inches thick. It is full of good stories – in small type.

Reprinted from Philly.com

Finding the connection to the Waltons was how I was able to research the family roots back in multiple directions that include Quaker ancestors, who greeted William Penn when he arrived, and early Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam (a.k.a. New York City).  I am pleased to say that my mother-in-law has numerous autosomal DNA matches to others with Walton family connections. Some matches tie into William Walton, born19 August 1629 in Oxhill, Warwickshire, England, and other ties are more recent. She also has strong DNA connections to matches with Van Zandt ancestors.

Here are a few resources, if you are interested in the Byberry Waltons:

A Family’s Mystery Pondering The Unrecorded Voyage Of Byberry’s Founders

A history of the townships of Byberry and Moreland, in Philadelphia, Pa. : from their earliest settlements by the whites to the present time (1901)

An American Family History: The Walton, Hunn, Kitchen and Grafton Families

Canadian Byberry Waltons

These two volumes are searchable for snippets only on Google Books:

Byberry Waltons: an account of four English brothers, Nathaniel & Thomas & Daniel & William Walton, who settled about 1683 in Byberry Township, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania: with accounts of more than 4000 Waltons and many more by other surnames descended from these four brothers

Byberry Waltons: volume II, continuing the account of four English brothers, Nathaniel & Thomas & Daniel & William Walton, who settled about 1683 in Byberry Township, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, with new information gathered since publication of the original Byberry Waltons in 1958

The first volume is also available if you have a subscription to Ancestry.com.

Hint: This book can be a daunting to search. It may be easier to find a specific Walton in the index or, better still, a non-Walton spouse; you can browse indexed Waltons starting on page 803.