A Long Time Ago/11 Yeardley

From Wally Atkins Family Wiki

Yeardley

This page is part of A Long Time Ago: A History of the Atkins-Paynter and Allied Families, the chunked book edition on the Wally Atkins Family Wiki.

  • Book section: Yeardley
  • Page range in the book: 81-101
  • Chunk order: 11 of 36

This section has been lightly cleaned and reconstructed from the working transcript and related extracted notes. It preserves the strongest readable Yeardley material now in hand, especially where the line intersects with Thorowgood, Lawson, Custis, Bucke, and the early Virginia story.

Source note

  • Book: A Long Time Ago: A History of the Atkins-Paynter and Allied Families
  • Transcript source: `010-yeardley.md`
  • Companion extracted material used: `arrivals-in-virginia-context-notes.md`
  • Editorial note: the available transcript includes surrounding-family carryover and chart-heavy passages, so this page emphasizes the clearest narrative Yeardley material that matters to the family line

Cleaned import

The Yeardley line matters in this book not only because of its own colonial prominence, but because it crosses repeatedly with the Thorowgood, Lawson, Custis, and Bucke branches in ways that shape the later family story.

Sir George Yeardley

The book's early Virginia context identifies Sir George Yeardley as leaving England on June 9, 1609 aboard the Sea Venture. The voyage was shipwrecked in Bermuda, and the survivors later reached Virginia on May 23, 1610 aboard the Deliverance.

The chapter says George Yeardley was born in 1587. After his parents died of plague in London when he was still young, he was cared for by kin and later trained for military service under Sir Thomas Gates. By 1608 he was a commissioned captain in the English army and was serving in the Netherlands.

The chapter treats him as one of the great early leaders in the colonial story and one of the major landed figures in early Virginia.

The Sea Venture world

One of the most important reasons the Yeardley chapter matters is that it sits in the same historical moment as the Bucke and Lawson lines. The same family tradition places Reverend Richard Bucke and Bridgett Langley Bucke on the same voyage-world, with their daughter Marah Bucke later marrying into the Atkins line.

That means the Yeardley chapter helps anchor a whole cluster of interwoven families in the Sea Venture, Bermuda, and Jamestown story.

Yeardley, Thorowgood, Lawson, and Custis entanglement

The chapter spends substantial effort explaining how the descendants and marriages around Sarah Offley and Captain Adam Thorowgood created a web that crosses repeatedly through the Yeardley, Lawson, Custis, Gookin, and Bray lines.

Among the most important intersections preserved in the text:

  • Frances Yeardley, daughter of Argoll Yeardley, married Colonel Adam Thorowgood.
  • Their descendants then re-entered the Lawson line through marriages involving Margaret Lawson, Thomas Lawson, and Rose Thorowgood.
  • The chapter also points back toward the Custis branch through marriages involving the descendants of Argoll Yeardley and later Margaret Michael and John Custis.

The result is a tangled but important explanation: the later Lawson branch from which Dosha Lawson and Paulina Sue Lawson descend is inseparable from the Yeardley-Thorowgood world.

Why Yeardley matters to the later Atkins line

The Yeardley line is not in this book as a decorative aristocratic flourish. It matters because it helps explain how the wider kinship web around the later Atkins line was formed. Through Yeardley connections, the family story reaches into:

  • Jamestown-era leadership
  • the Sea Venture and Bermuda shipwreck world
  • the Thorowgood-Lawson intermarriage network
  • the Custis branch that later connects to major Virginia history

In short, Yeardley is one of the structural branches that helps the later family line make historical sense.

Context notes

Related pages

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