Two Joseph Pardue Signatures In The George Washington Papers In The Library of Congress *
Until the advent of dictionaries creating more uniform rules for spelling, those who could write often wrote a word as they heard it sounded, and it was especially true with proper names, and such was the case with the Pardue surname as well.
Over the years researchers have found a number of variations on the Pardue surname from a variety of genealogical sources and their research has shown that those different variations have long been in use in Britain, in France, in Italy, Spain, and elsewhere. Until the advent of the DNA testing for use in genealogy and the Perdue/Pardue DNA Project was created, it was never completely certain if they did not all fit together somehow, given that the name historically was not a particularly common one. The Perdue/Pardue DNA Project conclusively demonstrates that they don't all fit together somehow.
The Perdue/Pardue DNA Project consists of two major groups of participants, one group whose predominate origins in America is from Maryland's Eastern Shore whose descendants mostly spell their name "Perdue", and the other, a group whose descendants mostly spell their names "Perdue" and "Pardue" whose earliest known origin was in the watersheds of the Appomattox and James Rivers of Virginia. The Project demonstrates that those two major groups of participants share no recent common ancestor and neither group shares a recent common ancestor with the several other participants in the Project with none of those several participants sharing a recent common ancestor with each other.
The Colonial Virginia families living in the watersheds of the lower Appomattox River with the surnames Perdue and Pardue, and sometimes Purdue, and other spellings documented to be associated with this family are the the focus of this narrative.
As shown from the DNA testing there were at least two variants - Perdue and Pardue - in the Lower Appomattox River watersheds who shared a common ancestor within the previous 15 generations, but at this present time in 2017 no records have been found confirming their relationships to one another and the degree of kinship they shared, or whether they were brothers or cousins, or even if one may have been the father, or grandfather, or uncle, or a more distant relation of the others. The currently known documents are simply too few to correctly sort out their kinship.
These families appear to have arrived in the watersheds of the Appomattox River at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Early Virginia records bearing any variant of the Pardue and Perdue surnames are limited, as has been shown in a previous post, and none of those few earliest documents, singlely or collectively, can be shown to conclusively refer to the predecessor of these families. Variations in the records of the name include Pardoe, Pardue, Perdue, Purdue, and Pardieu. Research is compounded with so many variations of the spelling of the name, though the "Perdue" variation was the predominate spelling in the records until the middle of the eighteenth century in the colonial period.
Known descendants of a William and possibly a Richard Perdue who lived and continued to live in what became Chesterfield County in 1749 appear to have mostly continued the Perdue spelling down to the present day. Just across the Appomattox River in Amelia County beginning in 1743 with records of a John Pardue who moved to Granville County, North Carolina in 1761 and died in 1769 in Bute County formed from Granville in 1764, his name and the names of his sons had mostly come to be spelled Pardue in the public records and most of his descendants appear to have generally continued the "Pardue" spelling down to the present. His son, Joseph, in 1757 as shown in the pictures clearly writes his name as Pardue.
While descendants of William Perdue of Chesterfield County, VA appear in the DNA project, no participant purported to descend from Richard has yet joined the DNA project so it remains unknown his relationship, if any, to the William who lived in close proximity to him in Chesterfield County or to the John who lived across the Appomattox River in Amelia County. As previously noted in the DNA post, without documents that confirm descent, DNA confirms only if they were, or were not kin, and not the degree of kinship.
*In the first image, Joseph signed that he received his pay for his service, and in image two, he was a witness to a note and his signature appears in the lower right hand edge of the page.
The papers also include the Muster Roll for Seventh Regiment of the Virginia Company (not shown) in the French and Indian War which spells Joseph's name Purdue.
Genealogy is never done, it is always a Work in Progress!
