89/100 Poetic Bloomings Prompt Ancestry

Stories Before Me

My parents taught hard work and honesty

and though Mom attended church,

none of us five girls were made to go

But I always held if I knew God existed

I wouldn’t be content at keeping my distance.

I wanted to be intimate with Him,

and when I was fourteen I learned

that was possible in Jesus.

So I dedicated my life to Him

in complete devotion.

Getting to know Him was new to me

and a great adventure. Imagine my surprise

when my genealogist sister discovered

we came from a long line of pastors,

including Samuel Maycock who was appointed

to be the pastor of the first church at Jamestown.

The Maycocks, when living on an acreage outside the fort,

hid their infant daughter Sarah

during the Jamestown massacre of 1622.

Samuel and his wife were murdered,

but Sarah went on to marry George Pace

whose father Richard had warned Jamestown

and saved those living within the fort.

Another ancestor, Captain Drury Pace

was a chaplain in the revolutionary war.

Some of my ancestors, Scotch Irish,

came over to the U.S.A in the 1600s

and settled the area in Pennsylvania

where I grew up. My sister has an original deed,

dated 1796. That land is now part of the

State Game Lands.

My great grandfather married

and was widowed on their ninth child.

On a trip, he met and married another,
failing to tell her he already had nine kids.
It’s reported that he simply said, “Here’s your family,”
as he introduced them upon arriving home,
my Grandfather Bill being one of them.

So my grandfather Shannon was born in the area

but my grandmother was from Kentucky.

She shared a grandmother with Billy Ray Cyrus

about seven generations back.

The Scotch Irish was a wild bunch

taking the new land by storm,

with “the Bible, a gun and a bottle of whiskey.”

I dropped the gun and whiskey,

but cling to the Bible.