Watkins family history society

Watkins family history society During maximum of my lifestyles my understanding of the Society of Friends or Quakers, as they have been called, become distorted. I formerly related 3 matters to the term “Quakers:”  the colony of Quakers headed through William Penn who settled in Pennsylvania,

Roger Williams being expelled from Massachusetts to resettle in Rhode Island, and  the enduring image of the Quaker revealed on programs of “Quaker Oats.” Never did it arise to me to assume that Quakers may have lived in locations aside from Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and I by no means could have dreamt that any of my forebearers have been themselves Quakers.

However, when I have become concerned in my own circle of relatives genealogy, I discovered that, indeed, lots of my ancestors on my father`s aspect have been individuals of the Society of Friends. Later, once I labored on a mission to finish my necessities for a Masters diploma in American and New England Studies,

I discovered extra approximately the records of Quakers in New England which include the function Quakers performed withinside the agreement of Nantucket and of Western Maine. The narrative that follows tells a piece approximately the records of the Society of Friends and a touch approximately how being a Quaker affected the lives of my ancestors.

The Religious Society of Friends, because the Quakers have been extra usually recognized,

advanced withinside the 1640`s and 50`s out of a European motion recognized in England as Seekers, disaffected Protestants who had stopped attending traditional non secular offerings amid the excesses of the English Civil War and Oliver Cromwell`s

Puritan regime that observed it. The early Seekers in England got here in large part from the Midlands and the north, wherein elegance shape had historically been much less of a pressure than in different elements of the nation, and its doctrines confused egalitarian

concepts and person religion. George Fox, a strongly authentic thinker, had turn out to be the stated chief of the brand new group, espousing such radical doctrines because the religious equality of fellows and women. In Fox`s view,

each sexes may want to pass from being Seekers to being Finders who could “Quake earlier than the Power of the Lord.” The term “Quaker” in the beginning used as an insult, become ultimately taken up through Fox and his followers.

Fox and his fellow Seekers targeted their religion now no longer

A head-on collision among mainstream Protestants and Quakers become inevitable. When Quakers regarded in Boston in 1656, Governor Endicott ordered them looked for symptoms and symptoms of witchcraft and deported. Immediately, new legal guidelines have been handed imparting for the “whipping-out” of first time Quaker visitors; the ones creating a 2d incursion have been to be hanged. Colonists displaying any kindness to the heretics have been threatened with stiff fines. (Ref.1)

However, it ought to now no longer be concluded that the persecution of Quakers become remoted to the Massachusetts Bay Colony whendidrelease or maybe to New England itself. Apparently a comparable mind-set existed withinside the colony of Virginia. Watkins family history society