Family Roots

My interest in our family history began before computers, online records, or genealogy websites. In 1979, just before I left for Air Force basic training, I visited our grandmother, Erma, in Normal, Illinois. On that trip, I noticed a plaque on her childhood home: “Anderson Homestead, Founded 1881.” The old Scarbeary farm, a mile to the west, had reportedly been homesteaded around the same time. It struck me that our family had deep roots in that landscape.

During the visit, Erma showed me her family Bible. Inside were handwritten records, births, deaths, names scattered across the pages, not arranged by lineage but rich with clues. I copied everything I could onto paper. Using the old manual typewriter Dad had given me for my college papers, I typed a record of what Erma had preserved. It wasn’t enough to take us very far, but it was a foundation, two or three generations mapped out from her careful notes. At the time, it felt like a treasure.

The seed of my curiosity about family history, though, began even earlier with Grandad, mom’s dad Leon Morgan Wilson. For years, Leon had been piecing together his own family tree, long before digitized census records and online archives made research easier. He told me stories of searching through county courthouses, old ledgers, and census books, painstaking work done page by page. He often talked about our “shirt-tail cousins,” distant relatives whose names he tracked with delight. Once, mom took us to a large Wilson family reunion at the farmhouse where Leon had grown up near Braymer, Missouri. Those memories stayed with me, and they planted the idea that connecting to our roots mattered.

The crux of my motivation, however, had always been our unusual name, Scarbeary. It is distinctive, uncommon, and seemingly unrelated to any other spelling. Where did this come from? In my earliest attempts at building a tree, I could go back only as far as John William Scarbeary. After Erma passed, Dad’s brother Melvin shared additional family papers, including research that Melvin had collected from John Edwin Anderson on the Anderson line. Melvin’s work added several more branches: John William’s father Isaac Scarberry son of Samuel Scarborough, and Samuel’s father Robert Scarborough. I compiled these charts in the late 1980s, but I could not go any further than Robert, who appeared in records from Franklin City, Virginia. Still, we finally knew that the Illinois Scarbearys had come from Virginia.

My research moved in fits and starts for years. New information never appeared when I went looking for it; instead, discoveries came unpredictably, often when I least expected them. In 1997, during a stretch of unemployment, I found myself with time on my hands, and access to a new tool: the online White Pages. At that point, the internet was still young. Family research primarily relied on Mormon genealogical records, and unless your family was part of those centralized efforts, you depended on family Bibles and scattered documents.

But the White Pages allowed me to search, one state at a time, for anyone with the name “Scarbeary.” I wrote letters and made calls. A few people shared details of their immediate families, and all of them descended from John William Scarbeary. Then came the turning point: Lowell Scarborough contacted me. He’d heard I was looking for our ancestors and asked if I had ever heard of the publication Some Quaker Families. He had two copies of its eight volumes and wondered if I wanted to buy one. He had already looked up my line and found that the generations Melvin identified, Samuel Scarborough and his father Robert, were fully documented there. Overnight, my ancestry leapt from 6 generations to 11, tracing back to William Scarborough, my 9th great-grandfather, born in 1560 in Woburn, England.

The meaning of this history has only deepened with time. Today, I still sleep on the cast-iron bed frame from the Scarbeary farm, something Dad saved from the old Breckenridge cabin. There is something grounding to be resting on a 150-year-old piece of family furniture, knowing others in our line slept on the same frame.

It is humbling to know that I am a tenth-generation American, with ancestors whose lives stretch back to the 16th century in England and, further still, to likely Viking heritage a thousand years ago. But what moves me most is the story of John Scarborough (1667–1727). As a teenager left behind in the New World, he forged a life few could have imagined, living with the Lenape, learning their language, returning to Quaker society, and co-founding the first Friends meeting in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Our family came to America aboard the “Welcome” with William Penn in 1682. Since then, our ancestors have farmed, homesteaded, preached, learned Native languages, built meeting houses, and fought in America’s defining struggles, from Valley Forge in the Revolution to the Civil War to Dad’s service in the Third Army under General Patton. 

I hope that this small compilation helps each of us feel rooted in our own place. We didn’t grow up with this knowledge, most families don’t, and yet here it is now, pieced together through the work of others: the careful notes in Erma’s Bible, Melvin’s determined searches, and the extraordinary research preserved in Some Quaker Families. These discoveries feel less like something we found and more like something handed down to us. Now that we know the challenges our ancestors endured and the achievements they made, we can begin to ask ourselves: what mark will we leave on our own communities? 

David Anderson Scarbeary