THE JOSHUA FRY and PETER JEFFERSON MAP OF 1751 COLONIAL VIRGINIA
The following several references are the major records found of the variants of the P*rdue name in the last half of the seventeenth century in Colonial Virginia. For many years Pardue researchers sought to find a record that would link the variant of the surname found in the Appomattox and James Rivers area to the Philip Pardoe variant in Isle of Wight County, Virginia.
A pedigree submitted to LDS Family History Library Archives maintains he was the father of John Pardue of Amelia County who died in 1769 in Bute County, North Carolina. The information submitted was in error as explained in the following paragraphs.
Phillip Pardoe was indentured by the agent, or factor, John Scott, for a period of four years on October 9, 1665, probably in Bristol England, his destination Virginia. Where in Virginia and to whom he was to serve out the indenture was not shown and nothing further is known of him until 1673 when he bought land in Isle of Wight County, Virginia. http://tinyurl.com/3cubbn He married, probably about the same time he bought the land in Isle of Wight County, a widow, Rebecca Lewis, nee George, the daughter of John George, a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses and before Philip's death in Isle of Wight County, their union produced two children named in the will of Rebecca's father, John George, written on 2 August 1678, when he left them as "the children of Philip Pardoe.....one heifer of two years old to run in a joint stock betwixt them and the survivors of them to be paid to my said grandchildren's account.." Isle of Wight County, Virginia Deeds and Will Book 2, page 170.
Rebecca Pardoe was surely "ye poor widow Perdue" named in the will of Sir John Lear in Nansemond County in 1695. Henrico County Miscellaneous Records 1650-1807, page 96. John Lear had earlier married Rebecca Pardoe's step-mother, Ann ( ) George, the widow of Rebecca's father, John George.
When Phillip Pardue, the grandson mentioned in John George's will, the only son of the immigrant, Phillip Pardoe, died in 1720/21, the bloodline possessing Phillip Pardoe's surname died, also. The son, like his father, died intestate and the land that had descended to him from his father, by the intestate law of primogeniture, would have descended by the same law to his son, also named Phillip, who had died as a child, ending Philip's surname bloodline. Thus, the land descended to the next heir of closest degree of blood kinship, a William Homes or Holmes, who, upon receipt of the land, sold it in 1722 to Mathew Wills.
William Homes (Holmes) may have been a grandson of Phillip Pardoe, the immigrant, which, if William Homes (Holmes) sold it outright with no guardian or trustee involved, he would have then had to have been at least 21 years old in 1722 suggesting by the generational math that he was probably either the son of a possible unknown daughter of the second Phillip who had died, or he was the son of his sister, Elizabeth, who had also died.
If Phillip had no daughter and if his sister had no children, then the heir and next of kin would have been a kinsman of a lesser degree. The intestate law of primogeniture dictated that land was inherited linearly by a descendant of the closest degree of kinship from the original owner. Isle of Wight County Wills and Administrations (1628-1800) Note p. 156-157. Inv. rec. 9 Apr. 1678 p. 162. Inv. & Appr. rec. 9 Aug. 1678. Record of Wills, Deeds, Etc., Vol. 2, 1661-1719 (Reel 23) and Isle of Wight County Wills and Administrations (1628-1800) Note p. 71. 2nd pagination Inv. 4 Appr. rec. 27 Mar. 1721. Deeds, Wills, Great Book, Vol. 2, 1715-1726 (Reel 3) http://tinyurl.com/2hma52I
It is probable that the immigrant, Philip Pardoe, was from the family of that name found in Worcester County, England in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries http://tinyurl.com/4004 and he may have been the Phillip Pardoe born in 1643 in the parish of Holt in Worcester County, which seems to be the best fit of the names located in the available English parish registers. The earliest parish records of Worcester County begin in the early 1570s. The spellings of the name Pardoe and Pardo in the early English parish registers, with several exceptions, and with the given name of Philip, or Phillip, only appear in the West Midlands, and with several exceptions, mostly in the county of Worcester, and within that county predominately in the town of Omsberley. In 1987 I visited this very charming and picturesque town with sheep grazing in the parish church yard to see what, if anything, I might find to possibly establish a connection to our Pardue forebears who came to Colonial Virginia. In the end, the best information was already posted in the family history archives of the LDS Church in Salt Lake City, now available online at http://www.familysearch.org/. as posted above.
Testing of DNA of male descendants of this early Pardoe family in England compared with the DNA of participants in the Perdue/Pardue DNA Surname Project would determine if this variant of the surname shares the same DNA with any participants in the Perdue/Pardue DNA Surname Project. Perhaps in the future some descendant of those West Midlands families might join the project to see if there might be a shared kinship with the Perdue/Pardue surname dna project. The phone directories in the West Midlands area in the counties of Worcester and Shropshire and Hereford area also showed the Pardue spelling, as well.
In 1681 in York County, Virginia another document records a suit involving a debt owed to a Mr. John Cotton by a Mr. James Pardoe in which a deposition of a Mr. John Heyward states the following verbatim account as published in Tyler's Quarterly Vol. XIV, page 61.
"John Heyward, aged thirty-five years or thereabouts, sayeth That yr Depont, in November last was two years, at the house of James Pardoe, and there did meet with Mr John Cotton who did come to demand tobacco and yr said Depont & Mr Cotton did fall to drinking very hard by ye request of the sd James Pardoe & did continue drinking all day till at night we went to cards, and at cards yr Depont & Mr Cotton had some words & soe broke off from play and did goe each of them to there rest, but yr depont was ordered for to sleep along with the said Pardoe & his wife in the same roome where all the Drink was, soe yt yr Depont & ye said Pardoe did fall to drinking again, and after some discourse the said Pardoe did tell yr Depont yt Mr Cotton was come for to demand Tobo of him upon the accts of Thos. Bevins but the said Pardoe did desire yr depont for to look over Tho. Bevins' papers & to see if his bill was not there among ye papers & the said Pardoe did depart for some time out of the roome & did bring some papers in his hand for your Deponent to looke over. Yr Depont in looking over ye papers did find ye said Bevins' his bill uncanselled and did give it to the said Pardoe and yr depont will swear & further saith not."
John Heyward. Sworn before me the 21 June, 1681--Wm Booth 28th of July 1681 And is recorded -- Pr. E. Jennings, Cl. Cur. Ebor. (Clerk of York County)."
E. Jennings was Edmund Jennings, newly arrived as a young man from England, the son of Sir Edmund Jennings of Ripon, Yorkshire, England, member of Parliament. The young immigrant, Edmund Jennings, almost immediately became a customs agent in York County with increasing rises in position in the Colonial Virginia government over his lifetime: from Deputy Secretary of State in 1696 to Secretary of State for the Colony in 1702 and by 1708 was President of the Council. http://tinyurl.com/2hwnwy
In 1689 using the headrights of 131 immigrants, which included the name of a John Pardoe, Edmund Jennings obtained a grant of 6513 acres of land in Henrico County at Westham in present day Richmond, of which "sd Jennings hath the Governor's grant"... "beg. at Tuckahoe Cr, where it forks into the (James) river...". Virginia Land Patents No. 8, 1689-1695, p.2 (Reel 8). http://tinyurl.com/346yok
Headrights gave 50 acres of land to each person who paid his own way "for his own personale adventure", or 50 acres to the person who paid the fare of the person transported. This headright system was the means by which the London Company and later, the English Crown, in 1624, when Virginia became a Crown Colony, proposed to populate and permanently settle the colony.
Sir William Berkeley, the Colonial governor from his arrival in Virginia in 1641, used his family's influence and connections in England to attract younger sons of England's gentry to lands and wealth in the Virginia Colony, who were previously unable to inherit landed estates, as determined by England's inheritence laws of entail leaving the landed estates to the first born son. Most of the wealthy first families of Colonial Virginia were those younger sons. Before the English colonization, their options were the clergy, the law or the military, becoming sons of leisure, and increasingly, merchants, when under Henry the VIII the building of the modern English Navy began and merchant shipping increased.
Advertisements were published, not only to attract the younger sons, but, often published to attract others who had no land or hopes for land, who would indenture themselves for a requisite number of years for eventual access to land. Even so, it was not always easy to induce enough people with the desire to "adventure" to Virginia.
The headright system was subject to many instances of misuse and corruption and the instances increased continually through the years. By 1680 there was large scale misuse with duplicate claims, importation of the same person more than once, ship's captains claiming the crews amounting to temporary importations (remember the idea was permanent settlement), using fictitious names and reuse of names sold by clerks, and ultimately, land speculation. Periodic hearings and depositions took place seeking to correct the issues arising out of misuse of the system and in 1699 Sir Francis Nicholson, Lt. Governor of the colony, told, in a deposition to the Board of Trade, that the selling of headrights by his clerks was a common practice.
Headrights, upon the presentation of a receipt of transportation, or upon an oath, were changed into certificates for the warrants necessary to have a survey made of the land for which a patent could be issued. And the certificates could be legally bought and sold and had no time limits. In 1699 the means to acquire a patent of the King's land changed, and while the headrights were still used up to the American Revolution, a patent could be obtained for payment of 5 shillings for each 50 acres of land by any English male citizen willing and able to pay the costs of acquiring and improving the land and paying the quit rents (tax) to the King. It then seems almost without any doubt that Edmund Jennings, as a customs official, would have known from whom and how to obtain certificates necessary to obtain a patent for land, and it is improbable that he imported all of the 131 headrights, if any of them, to obtain the certificates for the 6513 acres of land he received upriver on the James at Tuckahoe Creek.
As a Colonial official almost from the beginning of his arrival in Virginia he lived in the vicinity of Jamestown, as required by the leaders of the colony, so it is almost certain that he never lived on the Henrico land. Six years after receiving the patent, in 1695, he sold half of it to William Randolph indicating the likelihood he was speculating in land. If he bought the certificates used for the patent, or even any of them, then the only thing certain about the John Pardoe, who appeared as a headright in the 1689 patent record, is that a headright bearing his name was issued for a certificate to obtain the 50 acres accounted to his name.
Who imported John Pardoe, when he was imported, or even if he ever arrived in Virginia - headrights were often claimed for persons who died enroute, especially by ship's captains who commanded the ships on which the person was transported - cannot be known from the limited facts presently available. No record links him presently in 2024 to any record that can be construed as being progenitor of the Pardue family a generation later who appear in the watersheds of the Appomattox River. If he indeed arrived in Virginia, it is probable that he was from the same West Midlands, England Pardo/Pardoe families as was the Phillip Pardoe who came to Isle of Wight County.
In the late spring of 1700 a ship, Mary and Ann, commissioned by the leaders of a group of French refugees sailed to Jamestown, Virginia from the English port of Gravesend on England's southern coast. On the ship's manifest, early transcribed and first published probably about 1905 from which the published transcription has been replicated innumerable times, was a passenger transcribed as Jean Tardieu.
Land had been given by England's King William III to the French refugees, not only to provide them a home and to seat a colony in Norfolk County in Virginia, but to relieve England of the influx of those French refugees fleeing persecution in France when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes. The edict issued almost a hundred years before had provided for the French refugees limited rights to practice their Calvinist religious beliefs. Altogether there were five ships of French refugees that sailed to Virginia.
The record of the passenger list of the Mary and Ann appears to be the only complete passenger manifest of the five ships of French refugees that sailed to Virginia in that period. A partial list exists of the ship, Peter and Anthony; and some of the names of the third ship, Nassau, are extant. Unfortunately, the passenger records for the other two ships have been lost and it was only recently has it been learned that there was the fifth ship.
The French refugees were called Huguenots in France and a tradition of French Huguenot ancestry has been handed down, as this author has noted previously, through a number of lines of descent of the Appomattox River Pardue/Perdue families. To determine if the first letter of the surname of Jean Tardieu was possibly incorrectly transcribed as "T" when it was really a "P" in the original manifest, this compiler obtained a microfilmed copy of the original handwritten manifest in the attempt to see if might have been incorrectly transcribed, the capitalization of both of those letters being written similarly in the handwriting of the time. But the microfilm copy of the original manifest was completely faded where the name appeared in the original list and I was unable to read it, so that matter is still unresolved.
Whether the man whose named has been transcribed as Jean Tardieu was the ancestor of the Pardue families who first appeared in the watersheds of the Appomattox and James Rivers of Virginia cannot be determined from the information available heretofore, but neither can the possibility be discounted, even should the original manuscript show the capital of the surname rendered unmistakenly as a "T".
Whether the man whose named has been transcribed as Jean Tardieu was the ancestor of the Pardue families who first appeared in the watersheds of the Appomattox and James Rivers of Virginia cannot be determined from the information available heretofore, but neither can the possibility be discounted, even should the original manuscript show the capital of the surname rendered unmistakenly as a "T".
It is the opinion of this compiler from the number of the various accounts of Huguenot ancestry, that the paternal ancestor of the Pardue families in Henrico, Amelia, and Chesterfield counties of Virginia was among those French Refugees, but, at present, it cannot be determined from the information presently found. More on the probable French refugees connection will be presented in the post, Huguenot Or Not.
Genealogy is never done; it is always a work in progress!
