Often with a woman what you don’t know is the maiden name. That as the case with Nancy, wife of George Washington Ratliff, who turned out to be Nancy McGee, a well documented Scotch-Irish family. But sometimes the problem is too many people in a family are named the same! And that is the case here. If one of your progenitors was Jane Vanderbilt, would not every family want to name a daughter Jane? And what that means is just about every tree containing the Van Cleave family has made a mess of the Jane Van Cleaves. The familysearch tree has gone as far as having a Jane Van Cleeve with two husbands during the same period and a bunch of kids in both families! It turns out the family is well documented by a number of different people so if you make a rather complete tree, you can figure out which Jane is which. Also keep reading for the Jane Van Cleave who married a brother of Daniel Boone!

The Van Cleave story starts when Jan Van Cleef immigrated to New Netherland about 1653. The colony of New Netherland was established by the Dutch West India Company in 1624 and grew to encompass all of present-day New York City and parts of Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey. What is now New York City began as New Amsterdam.

You may have an American Indian ancestor if you are a descendant of my grandmother Dessie Ellen (Kimsey) Anderson. This is a very hot topic among the descendants of Nathaniel Davis (ca 1665-1740), of which there are apparently millions… Some say yes, others say nope.

The story is that Nathaniel Davis (ca. 1655-1740, my 7th great grandfather) married Elizabeth Hughes, who was half American Indian. The story goes that her mother was named Nicketti and her father was an Indian Trader some say was named Hughes.¹

I have decided that I think the story is likely true and I’m going to tell you why I think so. Versions of this story have been told by many descendant families of Nathaniel Davis, and published in their family histories. The family of a famous descendant, John Floyd, governor of Virginia, never denied their ancestry. I’m going to quote from two family histories. Some other information from the Floyd family will be noted later in this post.

Kerr’s Creek is located between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Allegheny Mountains. It is a beautiful valley, but it was not safe. Kerr’s Creek Massacre is very difficult to describe. The dates, even the years aren’t even known, the names of those settlers killed are not known for sure. What we do know is sort of why…

The Kerrs Creek raids possibly tie with all three wars in the last half of the 1700s – the French and Indian War (1756–1763), the Pontiac Conspiracy (1760–1763) and the American Revolution. Also, it is said that the location of this community was on a crossing of two Indian trails. The Indians, it is agreed, were Shawnee. It is also agreed there were at least two raids on the Kerr’s Creek community, a couple of years apart. Even maybe three: possibly 1759, 1763 and 1764.