A Brief History
My first American immigrant ancestor, Thomas Welch, arrived in Charleston, South Carolina in 1682. Thomas Welch’s great grandson, Richard, fought in the Revolutionary War in the Sumter District of South Carolina. After the war, Richard moved to Jones County, Mississippi to make his own way in the world as a farmer. His children, grandchildren, great grandchildren and great great grandchildren (and so on) would go on intermarry with other early immigrants that settled the Piney Woods area of Mississippi.
As descendants of Revolutionary War soldiers, many of these families were very proud Americans. This may be the primary reason they joined Captain Newton Knight in fighting for the United States of America during The Civil War and refused Confederate Army conscription. As a simple matter of practicality, slavery was not in the best interest of the yeoman farmer.
For more information about these early families and Jones County, Mississippi, Victoria Bynum’s book, The Free State of Jones, is considered one of the best books on the subject. The Free State of Jones movie borrows heavily from this text. Be sure to catch the first few minutes, Ms. Bynum plays a nurse in the beginning of the movie. She blogs about the South and the Civil War at Renegade South Histories of Unconventional Southerners.
Below is a link to a copy of our family tree. My dad, the physicist Charles Robert Welch, went to great effort to have one of the eight original copies digitized by a local photographer in Vicksburg. The tree was originally compiled by Houston Longino Welch in 1953 at the request of my great grandmother, Mahala Duckworth Welch. Houston wrote in his letter to Bessie Lou Welch, “I don’t vouch for the accuracy of any of it, except the 3 (ineligible words) descending from the 3 Rogers daughters.” I view it the same way I would a Wikipedia article-a great place to start, but not something you want to hang your hat on. In any case, it is a treasured document in my family and many other branches of the Welch family. If you claim any of the ancestors listed in this document, please use this at your discretion. There are a few social media pages for our families; I look forward to seeing you there.