Be careful what your are looking for.

I want to talk about the past. Sometimes it makes you proud, sometimes it embarrasses you.

I’ve been able to spend some time developing a family tree for the Big Moses Spencer family. When we were growing up, it was said that we were granted the land by the King of England, and were related to Winston Spencer Churchill and later Princess Diana.

I became Administrator of the Spencer Farm in 1986, when my Uncle Dennis G Spencer passed away. I wanted to find out more information about our family tree. We had found a bunch of old papers in a firebox that Uncle Dennis had. The original deed, dated 1870 deeding the Big Moses Farm from Moses to Stephen (my great-grandfather), Marion, and Oliver Spencer, his three sons, was in that box. I had found through several sources that Moses father Alfred had actually bought the farm in the 1830’s. I also found in the 1790 Census at the National Archives, the first Moses Spencer, Alfred’s father. I was later able to ascertain that Thomas Bolton Spencer was Moses’ father. We haven’t been able to get any information on Thomas’ father for the last 18 years or so.

Inasmuch as I have some free time, I’ve been at it again. I’ve started a family tree, have been able to get a lot of information between 1800 and today, but nothing on Thomas’.

The thing I knew about him was that he was born in Buckingham County, Va. I decided to start looking there at the county records. I was able to find one Nicholas Spencer who was born to an Aristocratic Family in England in 1929 and came over to America to help the Culpepper family manage their estate. His predecessors included several Earls and went back to the 1400’s and was probably descended from the De Spencer’s from France even earlier than that.

Nicholas Spencer came over with 3 brothers, whose names I haven’t found. In any case, if he isn’t a direct ancestor, the chance that there were 2 unrelated Spencer Families in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s is remote. I have the names of his sons, but there are two generations missing because of the Buckingham Courthouse burning sometime in the early 1700’s and I haven’t been able to get past that. I’m still looking for the missing links.

Nicholas was a very important person back then, at first an administrator and tax collector, eventually becoming the Acting Governor of Virginia. He was related the Washington’s and jointly owned what was Mt Vernon with John Washington, George’s grandfather. They split the property, with John getting the Mt Vernon part, and Nicholas getting the lower Northern Neck portion. He also owned land on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He was in charge during some very volatile times, and was a strict capitalist. He was a pretty harsh man, with the seizing of beaver skins, and collection of taxes.

Here is his description from the Wikipedia website:

Spencer was apparently a pragmatic administrator. He was also a hard-nosed capitalist. When it came to slavery, for instance, Spencer weighed the benefits of enslaved labor in a strictly cost-benefit way. “The low price of Tobacco,” Spencer wrote, “requires it should bee made as cheap as possible, and that Blacks can make it cheaper than Whites.”[14] Spencer’s rationale for slavery was probably as succinctly heartless as any committed to paper.

So you see, both my pride and my embarrassment.