The Tribe, The Clan, and The Family

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At the end of the last Ice Age the British Isles were still connected by a land bridge with the Continent of Europe.  The area between Dover and Calais was easily crossed by people and animals migrating between feeding and hunting grounds. Some of our most distant ancestors entered the British Isles across this isthmus around 10,000 years ago.  They were primarily hunters and gatherers.  The wild North Sea beat upon the chalk cliffs of the land bridge and finally tore through it gradually shaping today's English Channel.

Some of our tribal ancestors lived in Southwest England and in Wales. We may speculate that they participated in building some of the ancient stone-ring structures found all over the British Isles and in other locations throughout Europe. Among the most famous of these are Stonehenge and Avebury in the Salisbury Plain of Southwest England.  Several waves of immigrants entered the British Isles by small boats from the continent.  The first Celts came from the continent around 400 B.C. Like many immigrants to the British Isles they landed in the Southeast and spread slowly over the land.  Our family's Celtic tribe in Pre-Roman Briton was that of the Silures in the area of today's Wales and Gloucestershire.

When the Romans invaded Briton in 43 A.D. led by the Emperor Claudius our Celtic ancestors in Wales and Southwest Briton resisted valiantly but were eventually conquered by the Roman General Agricola.  Our people learned to speak Latin, some lived first as Roman subjects, and later as Roman citizens.  Some could say as the Apostle Paul once said, "Civis Romanus Sum, I am a Roman Citizen." Some of the Silure Tribe served in the XX Legion known as Valeria Victrix and we can assume that our Roman military kinsman were used throughout the Mediterranean world to fight Rome's battles.  Our kinsmen may also have served in the forts along Hadrian's Wall which protected Roman Briton from our own wild Pictish and Scots relatives.

We believe that Christianity was brought to Briton as early as the first century A.D.  Roman soldiers and merchants became Christians in the East and traveled freely throughout the Empire.  Christianity was planted very early among the Celts of Briton and Wales.   Several Roman Villas in our Silure tribal region have yielded Christian artifacts which are now on display at the British Museum in London.

Roman rule ended in Briton in 410 A.D., and the country lay open to invasion by Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians, and other Germanic tribes.  Briton underwent a period of tribal warfare and struggle against these new invaders.  In the years between 410 A.D. and about 900 A.D. foreigners and locals struggled to establish small kingdoms.  This is the time period which gave rise to the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.  Our ancestors took part in these struggles.

One of our direct ancestors in the line of Anna Emma Duncan was an Irish Christian missionary named Colum or Columcille (521-597).  He became the apostle of Caledonia (Scotland). Columcille was born in County Donegal in the far northwest corner of Ireland.  His father was a kinsman of princes then reigning in Ireland and western Scotland, his mother was also of royal blood.  Columcille founded Derry, now the city of Londonderry.

Setting out in 563 A.D., at the age of 42, and accompanied by 12 disciples, Columcille established a community on the island of Iona on the west coast of Scotland.  He then attempted to convert to Christianity the Pictish tribes that inhabited the area.  Columcille's missionary activities were highly successful. He and his disciples seem to have traveled the mainland of Scotland, the Hebrides, and the Orkneys for over 30 years.

Columcille was the founder of the Clan Duncan.  The Clan has split many times and produced the Clans Roberts, Robertson, McRoby, and Stuart.  We can be reasonably confident that we are descended from Columcille because of his direct link to the Duncans of Scotland.  At the Duncan Clan Museum near Blair Atholl in the highlands of Scotland, I learned that all Duncans trace their direct lineage to Columcille.

Our Welsh ancestors worked in rock quarries, and underground mines.  They also farmed and fished the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Irish Sea.  Our Scot and Welsh Celtic ancestors took part in Britain's wars both domestic and foreign.  They fought in France in the Hundred-Year's War.  They fought in the English Revolution in the 1640's.  They fought in Ireland under Cromwell.  One of our Scottish relatives was Admiral Adam Duncan of the Royal Navy who defeated the Dutch Navy in the Battle of Camperdown.  He was remembered as the tallest man in the British Royal Navy.   Admiral Duncan's statue stands today in St. Paul's Cathedral in London.  He is in the August company of the Duke of Wellington and Admiral Lord Nelson whose crypts are nearby.  I think I know where some of our family got their height.

The Family in America

Our family has an oral historical tradition which tells us that the ancestors of Dreury Brent Williams came from Monmouthshire in Wales in the British Isles.  Two Williams brothers landed in either Virginia or the Carolinas before the American Revolution, probably around 1742.  The Williams family lived in Raleigh, North Carolina for several generations.  There were many good carpenters and craftsmen in the family, as well as farmers.

Dreury Williams left North Carolina in the company of the Isaac Taylor family and migrated into Tennessee, probably in the mid to late 1840's.  He was in love with his future wife Martha Taylor whom he had met when the Taylor family camped with their wagons and livestock on the Williams' farm.  Mr. Isaac P. Taylor insisted that his daughter was too young for marriage, and offered Dreury Williams a job and suggested that the young couple wait a while before marrying.  Dreury worked for Mr. Taylor until he gave his consent to the marriage.  When Dreury left North Carolina with the Taylors, he had with him one extra shirt with a corn pone (corn bread) wrapped inside.  He walked alongside Mr. Taylor's wagons into Tennessee.  In time he married Martha Taylor and they became the parents of John Pascal Williams.

Dreury B. Williams was 31 years old when the Civil War began. His son John Pascal was 6.  Dreury did not serve in the army on either side.  He likely would have served in a Tennessee company if he had been fit for military service.  He weighed over three-hundred pounds and was never called up in the Confederate draft.  The area of Tennessee in which Dreury and his relatives lived was occupied by Union Army troops after the war until about 1876.  Many of the troops were foreigners who had enlisted after the war ended.  The census records show many were from England and Germany.  The same 1870 census records show our family living in Tennessee.

The Duncans descended from a young Scot who participated in the "Rising of the '45" as British History refers to the attempt by the Highland Clans to restore the Stuart Monarchy under "Bonnie" Prince Charlie the grandson of James II.  In 1745 the Clans marched down into England and attempted to overthrow King George II who was a Hanoverian.  The uprising failed and the Clans retreated northward.  All who had participated were subject to hanging or imprisonment if captured.  Our Duncan ancestor turned westward to Liverpool from the English Midlands and booked passage on a sailing ship to Charleston, South Carolina.

This first Duncan in America witnessed the troubled times between the colonies and the mother country.  The second generation Duncan would have been the right age to serve in the American Revolution.  The third generation Duncan would have been the right age to reach adulthood just as the U.S. consummated the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.  Since Elijah Duncan was born in 1825, we may assume that he was the fourth generation in America.  Elijah Duncan told his granddaughter Anna Emma Duncan about her ancestor fighting for Bonnie Prince Charlie.  My grandmother Anna Emma (Duncan) Williams shared her grandfather's stories with me in the summer of 1946 under the big oak trees at the old home place in Casa, Arkansas.

Elijah Duncan married Amanda Church in South Carolina.  The Church family is found in profusion in the early census records for Charleston, South Carolina and there were several Duncans in that city.  Elijah and Amanda eventually moved to Georgia.  Their son Henry W. Duncan was born in Cherokee County Georgia in 1852.  Since his birth, Cherokee County has been divided into five additional counties.  The Duncans left Georgia and moved for a while to Mississippi and then on to Arkansas.  Henry Duncan was 9 years old when the Civil War began. Elijah was 36.  I do not know if Elijah served in the Confederate Army.  I have never heard anyone say that he did.  He may have been considered too old.  The family experienced the Civil War during their time in Mississippi.  

The Duncans probably moved to Arkansas in 1863.  I have heard that the Duncans moved on to Texas for a year or two, suffered from drought trying to farm near the Trinity River, and then returned to Arkansas.  I am not sure of the accuracy of this report.   Census records clearly show that the family of Elijah and Amanda Duncan were living in Mississippi when General Grant took Vicksburg in 1863.  It is appears that they fled westward into Louisiana and then into Arkansas before the end of the Civil War.  They settled in Dutch Creek Township in Yell County Arkansas where they farmed and ginned cotton.  

Amanda Church Duncan died of a terrible injury.  She was a midwife who helped deliver babies in the Dutch Creek community.  One day she was on her way to assist in a birth when her horse was spooked by the skin of a dead rattle snake someone had draped over a fence post.  The horse reared up high in the air and Amanda was thrown backward onto the ground.  Her neck was broken in the fall and she died a few hours later at her home.

Amanda Church Duncan and her husband Elijah Duncan are buried in the Macedonia Cemetery near Danville, Arkansas along with their children and many of their descendents.  Their graves are marked by red sandstone markers with their initials and nothing else carved into the stone.  When I found the graves in 1977 there was a single red rose bush covering the face of Amanda's stone.  I found the graves of Henry W. and Henrietta (Hutchinson) Duncan nearby. 

Family Index                  Published 1994, Revised 2004