Our Family's Colonial Era - Part IX

by Glenn N. Holliman

More on Thomas Holeman, 1635 Land Owner at Martin's Hundred in Virginia

Martin's Hundred, a real estate development if you will, was named after the Society for Martin's Hundred of London, a land holding group in 1618. This huge settlement was located east of Jamestown and west of Skiffe's (Keith's Creek). It contained 20,000 acres and was a principle settlement site at that time. The website Jamestowne Rediscovery has an excellent summary.

Records indicated 140 or so English lived in the development when in 1622 on Good Friday, a surprise American Indian uprising took the lives of at least 78 of the settlers in Martin's Hundred. The remaining were captured or fled to Jamestown. According to historian Bob Dean in his book The River Where America Began, 347 settlers, more than 1/4th of all the colonists died in that one day massacre.

The Virginia colony was in great jeopardy, but struck back violently the next year against the Native Americans. The Crown took control of the dispirited colony from the Virginia Joint Stock Company that had founded Jamestown and had hoped to make a financial fortune.

Slowly the colony recovered, and immigrants arrived again. One being Thomas Holeman who purchased land in Martin's Hundred in 1635. Fifteen years later, Judith and Christopher Holyman, perhaps his siblings, arrived. Judith probably married quickly, and her name is lost to history.

In that same year of 1650, one John Holyman of Southampton, Virginia died leaving a will listing worldly goods but no land. He named a friend as an executor. When did he arrive and were Thomas, Judith and Christopher his siblings, all from Bedford, England?

We know Christopher survived and thrived, dieing in 1691 with an Isle of Wight County farm of 1,020 acres and numerous children. Most of us reading this today are his descendants.

In 1627, approximately 1,500 English persons lived in Virginia, mainly along the James. From 1606 until 1624, the Virginia Company had sent out over 7,000 settlers of whom over 6,000 died! By 1650, the year Christopher Holliman arrived, some 15,000, ten times as many white settlers were present, or about seven times as many Anglos over Native Americans by this time in Virginia. Many of the Indians had been destroyed by European diseases and malnutrition, as well as warfare. The English were living longer thanks to better diet and shelter.

What happened to Thomas? At this writing I know of no research that has surfaced a will or marriage record. He purchased land, and may have died early as did many. Unfortunately James City County records were destroyed when Richmond was burned during the Civil War, and only some land patent records survive to my knowledge. Martin's Hundred ceased to exist as an entity in the early 1700s.

Did Thomas survive long enough to welcome to Virginia other members of his family - assuming John, Judith and Christopher Holyman were his siblings (families often immigrated together or after one had settled and encouraged others to immigrate)? Can we ever know the whole story?

In the 1970s with a grant from the National Geographical Society, archaeologist Ivor Hume, excavated part of Martin's Hundred, now included in the Carter Grove Plantation and incorporated in the Williamsburg Foundation. Much of Hume's 1988 book (pictured above) focuses on the 1622 Good Friday Massacre and the physical remains of that day. The cover of the book shows an English soldier of the time, garbed in armor. It is compelling reading.

More in the next posting on our Colonial past....

Our Family's Colonial Era - Part VIII

by Glenn N. Holliman

In 1635, persons whose last names are similar to Holliman, were living in Virginia. Are they our ancestors? Who were Thomas Holeman (Holman) and Robert Hollman?

Cousins Jeanette Stewart, Joe Parker and Maxine Wright have drawn my attention to the name and landownership of Thomas Holeman who purchased property in 1635 in Martin's Hundred, approximately ten miles south of Jamestown, Virginia. On p. 30 of Nugent's Cavaliers and Pioneers, Patent Book No. 1, Part I is a listing of a purchase of fifty acres of land in James County, adjacent to John Dennett and Capt. John West. The land had belonged to one Thomas Harvey who had died (the death rate was very high in early Virginia).

Is this the Thomas Holyman (Holiman, Holman, etc.) who was baptized September 13, 1612 at St. Mary's, Bedford, Bedfordshire, England? As noted in early posts, Thomas and Ellenora Holliman of Bedford were the parents of a Thomas and three other children with the names of John, Judith and Christopher Holyman, the same names as other persons who lived in Virginia in 1650.

In some recent research at the Library of Virginia in Richmond, I consulted numerous works, seeking to know more of this Thomas. Martha W. McCartney in Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers 1607 - 1635, also writes of Thomas patenting land on August 24, 1635. Ms. McCartney spells his name 'Holman', not 'Holeman'. Likewise, Gary Parks' index of Virginia Land Records records Thomas as a 'Holman'.

Gravestones were not common in Colonial Virginia until the 1700s when the colony began to 'mature' and relatives had the resources to purchase and craftsmen to carve rock. Below is the memorial marker for Alice Holleman of the 19th Century, who lived and is buried on the original plantation of Christopher Holyman Sr. Unfortunately, of course, there are no markers for ancestors who lived in the 1600s and precious few for the 1700s. Weather and time have eroded even stone.

And Who was Robert Holliman?

Then there is twice mention of one Robert Hollman (not Holman or Hollyman) in Virginia Land Records, pages 666 and 674, on the dates of June 1 and March 6, 1635 in Henrico County, Virginia. Henricio is north of Jamestown and now encompasses the city of Richmond. This Robert Hollman owned land adjacent to the 'main' river, that is the James.

Granted spelling was atrocious in Colonial Virginia. The records are hard to read, and last names were spelled in different ways and often inaccurately.

So are Thomas and Robert our Holliman ancestors or some one else's?

If so, at least 15 years before Christopher Holyman Sr., our known ancestor, arrived, were his relatives, perhaps a brother and/or a cousin, already in the Chesapeake region? Did they prepare the way for more Hollimans who arrived in 1650 and later?

More in our next posting....as ever your knowledge and research, most welcome.

A Veterans' Day Salute

by Glenn N. Holliman

U.S. Army, Vietnam 1969

A Thank You to our Veterans

I suspect our family members have been represented in our country's battles from Colonial Chesapeake to the 21st Century Middle Eastern Wars. As it is impossible to list all of them in any kind of complete listing, I will let my nephew, Capt. Jonathan Murphy, USA, take the salute for all who been on active duty, the Reserves or National Guard. Jonathan is on duty somewhere in Afghanistan, his second tour in four years. His family waits for him in the States.

For a time he was Captain of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington, DC. Below are two photographs - one of Jonathan leading his platoon up the steps of the Memorial and the second of him walking the Guard. For those of us who have stood on guard in other fields and seas, including my father, uncles, nephews and cousins, we express our appreciation to him and all relatives who have gone before him.

Among his ancestors are family members who served in the French and Indian War, Revolution, War of 1812, Civil War, World War II, Viet Nam, the Cold War and recent Middle East conflicts. One great grandfather, Luke Stansbery (1750 - 1848), was held as a prisoner of war of the British in Charleston, SC 1780 during the American Revolution.

Back to Colonial America with the next post....

Our Family's Colonial Era - Part VII

Conflict with Native Americans – A Clash of Cultures
by Glenn N. Holliman

Between April and June, 2010, I published six articles on the Holliman family in 17th Century Colonial America (they can be found in the archive section of this blog). After having published 23 articles on our English past, I now return to the history of the Virginia English colony and the travails our family experienced.

This was truly a new frontier with both opportunity and premature death. Only the brave or foolish ventured from England to Virginia from the early to mid -1600s. Perhaps our pioneering family of Christopher Holliman, Sr. was a mixture of both.


Michael Mallary in his 2004 work, Our Improbable Universe, makes the point that everywhere farmers went taking their technology and culture, the hunter-gatherers melted away before them. “The high population density that could be supported by agriculture depleted game well below the density that hunters (such as American Indians) required” observed this historian.

This then was the societal reality when Christopher C. Holliman, Sr. with his probable sister, Judith, arrived in Virginia in 1650. The frontier required bravery, a tenacious attitude to attack the virgin forests and a strong constitution not to succumb on the voyage or to disease and malnutrition upon arriving. Fortunately this Holliman family had such attributes, although Anne, Christopher's first wife, died in the 1660s. Mary Grey, perhaps the daughter of a member of the House of Burgesses in Jamestown, became Sr’s second wife.

In only a generation or so, soil exhaustion from tobacco cultivation forced families or young farmers to move to virgin land, to push the American frontier ever westward. The quest for land to grow tobacco and later cotton meant more and more Native Americans were displaced. The result was violence as American Indians naturally resisted encroachment on their hunting grounds and villages. The Indian did not go quietly to his cultural demise in Virginia and greater America.

The founding of Jamestown in 1607 meant the English had come to stay. Unlike the earlier 1580s failed Roanoke experience, this time our Anglo fore bearers mustered the necessary resources to establish a permanent colony. The English Diaspora employed superior technology, organization and the financial resources to grasp and hold an expanding piece of the New World.

Perhaps 15,000 to 25,000 Native Americans lived in Southern Virginia in the early 1600s. Benjamin Woolley’s Savage Kingdom records Captain Christopher Newport’s 1607 initial visit up the newly named James River to the site of present day, Richmond. He sighted numerous Indian villages. John Smith’s adventurous tales record numerous Indian settlements and evidence of many warriors. What English people knew as Virginia, Native Americans called Tsenacomoco.

Although there were numerous skirmishes and at least one large assault on early Jamestown as the two cultures brushed and bruised each other, the English were fortunate the central Indian chief was Powhatan. By and large he was an accommodating weroance (chief) who failed to anticipate the ultimate threat of the English invasion.

At his passing, his brother, Opechancanough, already an old man, recognized the Anglo incursion for what it was – a death threat to Indian culture and territory. On the Christian Good Friday in March, 1622, this war chief unleashed a Pearl Harbor on the small colony. By stealth, Indians conducted well-coordinated attacks on plantations and settlements all up and down the James River on both south and north banks. Over 1/3rd of the English colonists were killed in one day – 347 men, women and children. It was a close run thing if the colony could repel the attacks.

While a tactical victory for Native Americans, the attacks were not enough to drive the English into the ocean. Within a year, the colonists struck back and killed over 200 Indians, although Opechancanough escaped. For two decades the frontier was mostly quiet, but in 1644, now almost 100 years old, ever determined Opechancanough struck one last time. Five hundred settlers died, particularly along the York and Pamunkey rivers. (Records indicate several settlers named Holyman already were living in the colony in the 1630s and 40s. We will explore this in later postings.)

This time under a controversial but stubborn royal governor, Sir William Berkeley, the Virginia militia now much stronger and more numerous than warriors the Indians mustered, captured Opechancanough and destroyed most of his forces. The old chief died in captivity in Jamestown, slain by a vengeful guard. Surviving Native Americans were relegated to a piece a land near the fall line, at present day Richmond.

Of course, beyond the settled frontier, other Indians remained as yet only modestly undisturbed by the ever westward moving Europeans. As yet undisturbed….

Next posting more on our Holliman family and their challenges in a new world.