Stephen's Smith Family - Ancestors, Descendants and Cousins

Notes

Thomas Smith Jr

  "On September 29, 1748, THOMAS SMITH was at Newbern (then the Capital of North Carolina) with men from other western communities, petitioning the North Carolina Assembly to form Anson County, as they had to travel over a hundred miles in order to reach the Bladen Court House. The next day, September 30, 1748, THOMAS SMITH was appointed Justice of the Peace for Bladen County. [William L. Saunders, editor, NC Colonial Records, Vol IV: 189, 889]" (First Families of Jersey Settlement, by Ethel Stroupe 1996)

THOMAS SMITH of Hopewell, New Jersey, came to North Carolina about 1745 and was one of the first settlers at the Jersey Settlement in the Yadkin River Valley.
  In the 1730s the New Jersey Supreme Court invalidated the deeds to thousands of acres of land in Hopewell, including land that THOMAS SMITH'S father had purchased as wilderness. THOMAS SMITH and his brother-in-law, John Parke, were vocal dissenters of the Hopewell land swindle and engaged in acts of civil disobedience. Along with other dissenters, THOMAS SMITH and John Parke fled New Jersey for the Shenandoah Valley before they could be prosecuted. Many of the franchised families of Hopewell came to Bladen County, North Carolina (later Anson County and later Rowan County) in the mid 1740s, forming a community that came to be known as the Jersey Settlement.
 "The earliest families of Jersey Settlement came from Hopewell Township, Hunterdon County, New Jersey, where some had been members of Pennington's Presbyterian Church, and others were Quakers and Baptists who baptized their children in St. Mary's Episcopal church for practical, political reasons. The earliest families identified in Jersey Settlement circa 1745 were those of Jonathan Hunt, THOMAS SMITH, Robert Heaton, and John Titus." (First Families of Jersey Settlement, by Ethel Stroupe 1996)

Edward Augustus Pulliam

Paid his own passage to America in 1636.