Kings in America

The only one of my husband’s two sets of grandparents I’ve not touched on has the last name of  ‘King.”  This lady was my husband's paternal grandmother, Jeanette King. Jeanette was born just after the end of the civil war in which her father, Samuel Sanders King, served as a confederate sergeant. Jeanette and Evan’s grandfather, Evan Eli Shelby, or Bud, as he was known, had five daughters and four sons. Arthur, my husband’s father, was one of the younger children, and he was only eleven when his mother died.  Needless to say, Evan, never knew his grandmother, and her own son didn’t have a lot of time to get to know her either. Jeanette’s father, Sanders King, outlived his wife by five years.

From what my husband had to say about the King family, I got the feeling he wasn’t thrilled with his relatives. He indicated they were a family, it was best to stay clear of. I should have asked more questions, but since he didn’t seem to know them that well, I let it go. They were from a part of Mississippi with a reputation for feuding, but I’ve never heard this involved the King family. I did see a picture of Jeanette and Bud with their nine children, and she was one grim looking lady. Photographers of that day made no attempt to look for a softer side, so maybe it wasn’t her fault.

I will say her parents did her a big favor when they named her Jeanette. She has a sister named Caledonia and brothers named Ippingtas and Eppenedus. They went by Ipp and Epp. Who names kids that?

The direct line of the King family with whom my husband’s shared DNA goes back to when they entered the states. The line traces from Boston to Virginia, to Bertie, North Carolina, and then, to Taylorsville, Mississippi. Like many of our roots, the origin of the King family is buried deep in the soil of England.

William Henry King was born in Huddersfield, Hampshire, England in 1600. One of his relatives wrote about him at the time, and mentioned “he served his time with John Wright,” which leads me to believe he was possibly an indentured servant. At any rate, by 1686, he had a nice brick home and a large plantation in Nansemond, Virginia. His relative mentioned he had slaves and a large copper still.

My first thought was this must be a way of processing copper, but with further research, I learned that copper is the preferred metal for the distilling equipment in the production of liquor. Maybe in addition to his plantation, he sold liquor on the side.

One record indicates Captain William King commanded the ship “Diamond” and was lost in a storm near the British coast in 1609. His son, John, was captain of the ship, “Falcon” which had trade routes to Barbados. This ship was said to be the first to reach the shores of what became Virginia. This would have preceded the Jamestown settlement.

Michael King born in 1628 in Norwich, England was the son of John, and he also settled in Nansemond, Virginia. English records claim William Henry King was the son of Sir Thomas King of Dorset England born in 1540. Even though the records I’ve seen confirm he had a child named William Henry, I needed more proof. There is a 60-year gap between the ages of these two, so it seems there would have been another generation or so between them.

One of the earliest mentions of a version of “King” in use as a family name pre-dates the 1086 British Doomsday Book. In 1050, prior to the Norman Conquest in 1066, the name Aelwine se Cyng or “Aelwine the King” is mentioned in a byname register in Devonshire, England.

King is identified by the U.S. Census Bureau as a surname which has more than 100 occurrences in the United States in the Decennial Census survey. In the most recent statistics, the King surname is from the 2010 census data. 

I decided I should mention a few well known people who have the name King. There are more famous people among the black race such as Martin Luther King, Jr., but the ones who didn’t deliberately change their name to King, have families that trace their roots to slavery, so their original name would not have been King. 

Among the white race, I thought of Larry King, Steven King, Alan King, Carole King, and Billy Jean King. Without exception all of these peoples names have been changed to King from an entirely different original name. This leads me to believe people might desire this name, because it sounds like royalty. It is possible there aren’t many people who have the true King family DNA.

It was then I remembered two of my daughters had attended Grace King High School when we lived in Metairie, Louisiana. Grace King must be someone special to have a school named after her. Maybe I’d finally found someone who truly was a member of the King family. I looked her up on the computer and learned Grace Elizabeth King born in 1852 in New Orleans to William Woodson King from Georgia, had a family with an aristocratic background. The family traces its roots back to Virginia where my husband’s original Kings were from. Many of the given names used by her family are the same as those used by Evan’s family leading me to believe there is a likely link. 

Grace’s father was a prominent lawyer, slave owner, and part owner of a sugar plantation, in south central Louisiana. Grace became a well-known writer at that time. Over the years she became acquainted with Julia Ward Howe and became good friends with Mark Twain. She published novels, short stories for Harper magazine and later histories.