In 1636, Roger Williams, recently banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony because of his religious beliefs, established a settlement at the head of Narragansett Bay that he named “Providence.” This small colony soon became a sanctuary for those seeking to escape religious persecution. Within a few years, a royal land patent and charter resulted in the formation of the “Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,” which incorporated Williams’ original settlement and espoused his tenets of freedom of religion and separation of church and state. During the ensuing decades, thousands of Baptists, Quakers, Jews, and Huguenots relocated to Rhode Island from other New England colonies, the British Islands, and Europe in search of religious freedom. One such individual, John Thomas, an immigrant from Wales, made significant contributions to early settlements at Jamestown on Conanicut Island and at Wickford on the nearby mainland of Rhode Island. He was the first town constable of Jamestown in 1679, and later owned hundreds of acres of land in the towns of North and South Kingstown. This fully indexed work traces and sketches the lives of his descendants, many of whom were at the forefront of the great American westward migration, and represents the most comprehensive compilation of them to date. It is the result of twenty years of extensive research and includes detailed information from military pension archives, will and estate records, agricultural data, county histories, and migration patterns that far exceeds the standard for genealogical works of this scope and magnitude. It is important for us to remember those who helped shape our nation. This work provides valuable information for those who are interested in this family and its evolution in America.
The 580 documents in this volume cover a wide range of fascinating topics. Jefferson receives impressions of a mammoth's tooth, altitude and meteorological observations, a call for a national pharmacopoeia, a discussion of primeval geology, and a letter that elicits Jefferson’s opinion that cognition exists "in animal bodies certainly, in Vegetables probably, in Minerals not impossibly." Jefferson leases his Tufton and Lego plantations to his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph. The directors of the Rivanna Company rebut Jefferson’s 1817 bill of complaint and he unwittingly ensures his eventual financial ruin by endorsing notes totaling $20,000 for Wilson Cary Nicholas. Jefferson adds to the collections of the American Philosophical Society and writes an extended introduction to the "Anas," a corpus of official papers and political anecdotes documenting his service as George Washington’s secretary of state. Jefferson drafts legislation to establish a public education system in Virginia. He attends a Masonic cornerstone laying ceremony for the nascent Central College’s first pavilion early in October 1817 and is greatly pleased by the passage on 21 February 1818 of a law establishing a commission to plan a new state university, raising his hopes that Central College might soon become the University of Virginia.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1872. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.
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