We are the descendants of immigrants who dared to cross the Atlantic and begin new lives in the wilderness of Colonial America. Most came from England and Wales, Anglicans and Quakers who left their homes because of religious or political disputes. They lived along the James River in the earliest years of the Virginia Colony. A few of our kin in Tidewater were French Huguenots. One German from the Palatinate was an early settler in the Shenandoah Valley. Presbyterians from Scotland and Northern Ireland made their homes in North Carolina.

       Although many of our ancestors were from the cities of Europe, they learned to live in the isolated, often dangerous, wilderness they transformed into plowed acres and homesteads. Those who had formal educations were not always able to pass these skills on to their children. Travels more than a few miles away from home were rare. They sometimes married cousins and when these marriages ended at the grave, the survivor remarried, and often married for a third time. Families had many children and, in the quest for new farmland, our ancestors were pioneers on the frontier that became Tennessee.

       In the new nation, several took to the pulpits in their small Methodist and Baptist communities. Proud of their families' heritage in these three states, they fought with the Confederacy when their property was invaded by Union soldiers. In defeat, many lost everything but pride in their families. Then they began again, creating new traditions for their children. In the twentieth century, many left the farms, entered business and professions, moved away. Old houses were abandoned, cemeteries neglected, names forgotten.

       Some names have been found with dates of marriages and lists of children written carefully in the pages of the family Bible, or on deeds and wills in the county courthouses. Now our lives have been recorded in more ways than we can ever know. We will not be forgotten, as many of them have been.

       Today we live in communities all across the continent. But to learn about our past, we need only return to a small section of our nation. My father was born in the same Virginia county where his family had lived since before the Revolution. My mother, Tom's parents and our siblings were all born in Tennessee. In our generation, Tom and I, natives of Alabama and Missouri, became the only members of our family since the Revolution to be born beyond these borders. However, our son and daughter were both born in North Carolina, not many miles from the homelands of their earliest American ancestors.

          No matter where any of us live today, we are proud of the heritage left us by the almost six hundred American ancestors of TN and Martha Green remembered in this collection.

       Virginia Pearson Green