Immigrant Origins of the Virginia Gentry: A Study of Cultural Transmission and Innovation

Abstract

I N the middle decades of the seventeenth century, roughly i645 to I 67 5, a distinguishable group of immigrant leaders arrived in Virginia, where they founded families whose names would become identified with the pre-Revolutionary gentry. The careers of these men provide a unique perspective into the process of cultural transmission and innovation in the Anglo-American world, for their stories involve them in cultural interaction on three fronts: with their English backgrounds, with conditions they encountered in the colony, and with their legacy to subsequent generations of gentry families. Through them we can follow cultural evolution over space-from England to Virginia-and over time-from charter settlers to mid-century immigrant leaders and from the latter to their Virginia-born sons.1