Family:Andrew Kerr and Jane Neill (1)

E-mail from Joyce Kerr:

I am including some excerpts from an e-mail I received from Nancy Arvay. I may have sent them to you earlier, but I don't think I did. Hope this helps you in some small way. <J> .......... Andrew appears to have been born in Chester County, Pa. c. 1734 (other sources indicate he was probably born abt. 1744), which (probably) makes him a child of the first American generation of this branch of the family. He was among the first settlers of Rowan County (c. 1750), where he married the much younger Jane (Jean) Neill, daughter of Andrew Neill, on November 4, 1774. Given the fact Andrew would have been about 40 at the time of the wedding, there's a good possibility that this may have been his second marriage, but I've yet to find any record of a previous wife or family.

My understanding is that a group of Allisons, Kerrs and Buchanans from the Octararo area of Chester County settled in Augusta County in the 1740s. This may be where I encountered the name Joseph Kerr. I'll check my records and let you know if anything pops up.

Like the Kerrs, the Allisons were a large, extended family which usually thought and moved as a single unit. There are historical and cultural reasons why the Allisons did this; the same may apply to the Kerrs. In fact, there's a family story that the Kerrs and the Allisons left Scotland together for Northern Ireland, and later travelled together to Pennsylvania. I suspect that the story is simply shorthand for the fact that both families were swept up in the Scottish Covenanter movement of the 18th century, and that both suffered some depredations and dislocations as a result of their involvement

1. ↑ Yount, Ray A., 10031 Shortest Day Road, NW, La Vale, MD, 21502-6011, (e-mail: alby6@@juno.com). (Gilbreath Falls Family Records, unpublished manuscript).

   another source has this date according to Ray Yount.

2. ↑ GRS Marriage Records of Southern States, Early to 1850 (CD Version)
   Rowan County, North Carolina.