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Rev. Thor -
I don't mean to cast aspersions on the good Rev Aaron, but I think that he might have found his calling later in life rather than earlier. We tend to forget that these were real people - warts and all. They had their ups and downs and their attitudes changed over their lifetimes.
Somerset Co, MD court records show that Aaron was one of the prisoners hanging out in the county jail because of debts that he owed.
"Proceedings and Acts of the General Assembly, 1766-1768
Archives of Maryland, Volume 61, Page 247
At this short, May 1766, session, eight acts were passed, of which five were general laws, one a local law, and two private laws…. The act for the relief of various languishing prisoners in the several county jails released thirty-two insolvent debtors, two of them women, and was identical in phraseology with similar acts passed at preceding sessions (pp. 68-73).
An Act for the Relief of Certain Languishing Prisoners in the several Goals therein mentioned…...
William Gullett, Edward Fitzgerald, Eleanor Barklett, Andrew Hemphill, William Miles and Aaron Speer of Somerset County"
A little later, an accounting of the estate of Robert Handy shows that Aaron, a number of his brothers (my ancestor Jacob owed 9 pounds) and 2 nephews had run up debts at "John Nelms Store."
"An inventory was filed in Worcester Co. of the debts due to the estate of Robert HANDY: SPEAR, Aaron (9 Mar 1765 - 1769) Owed 1/16/9 in Ledger C. Unpaid in D." Aaron's debt is marked "desperate."
In 1766 he would have been married to Sarah Kennerly and had 4 or 5 children at home. I am certain that the avidly Quaker Kennerly family was not very pleased about this and I bet that they had an influence on Aaron’s conversion to the Quaker faith! It has occurred to me that the pressing of the estate to collect the Speer debt might have encouraged them to relocate to NC! My Jacob was in Surry Co, NC for the 1774 tax list.
RE: Henry and his father Andrew being a "Protestant Episcopalian" or Anglican - they very well may have been. They most certainly had children christened in the Stepney Parish as early as Henry’s birth, 3/10/1689-90. One problem with this assumption is that it was at various times illegal to belong to any church other than the “Church of England.”
When the Lords Baltimore were in charge, colonists were allowed to worship any way that they saw fit… as long as they were Christians. When the crown stripped the Calvert family of their rights, the Church of England was the only accepted church. There was even a short "Protestant Revolution" in 1689 where the Catholics were vilified with a huge rumor campaign.
I happen to believe that the Speers were Anglican and had been for some time. With all due respect to Virgil Long’s huge body of work*, I've seen nothing that shows that Andrew was a Scotsman or Scots-Irish. The Scottish migration from the lowlands to Ulster, in Northern Ireland was just happening at the time the Speers were already in Maryland. The Scots’ Irish land leases wouldn't be up for another 30 or 40 years, when the then "Scots-Irish" moved on to the Colonies in droves.
I don't think that an Andrew Speer came to Maryland with the first Lord Baltimore, a Catholic looking to establish a Catholic colony. This alone disputes the Scots-Irish theory, a people who were fiercely anti-Roman Catholic. Besides, there were no Scots-Irish in 1632, the time of the original charter. I think that the Speer family got here for more worldly reasons.
I suspect that Andrew was the son of Thomas Speare / Speere a merchant of Bere Regis, Dorset, England who is found in the Somerset, Maryland court records in the 1670's. Thomas himself may never have set foot in Maryland, but he conducted business there. I am hoping that Dorsetshire parish records will either prove or disprove my little theory.
*When Virgil started his research, and when I started my own on other family lines, we didn’t have easy access to obscure records, census data (sorted by age, location, phonetic name spellings, etc at the stroke of a couple of keys in the comfort of our home offices), or to other people chasing the same ancestors. I remember waiting weeks to get a bad copy of a will, only to have my hopes dashed. Today, chances are, that I can “Google” the deceased and voila, someone has already transcribed the will. Just this week one of my distant cousins asked if someone in TX would check some cemetery records. 2 days later not only were the records checked, but pictures of the tombstones were posted. We all owe a huge debt to those who have taken the time to record what they know of our families’ histories. Just because I want to rethink Virgil’s data on the original Speer immigrant, does not mean that I don’t respect the body of his work!
Marcia McClure
Descendant of John Speer (Jacob, Henry, Andrew, …maybe Thomas)
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