The story
The Carpenters were Zimmermanns. Zimmermann is German for “carpenter,” and somewhere in the 1770s the family simply started writing the English word instead — for a while both names appear in the same records, sometimes in the same sentence. You are descended from people who translated themselves.
George Zimmerman came out of Hallau, in the Swiss canton of Schaffhausen, reached Pennsylvania around 1740 — the family Bible says so plainly — and worked his way down into the Shenandoah Valley, settling under Peaked Mountain in what became Rockingham County. He prospered as planter and surveyor, and he was a man who did not let things go: in August 1767 he sued a neighbor for gathering Carpenter cattle into his own herd on a drive to Pennsylvania. Depositions flew; one witness testified that “Crow's drove increased damnably.” When the Revolution came he enlisted as a private in the 1st Virginia Regiment, appears on the rolls through the autumn of Brandywine and Germantown — and then he is simply gone. His widow gave the estate bond in 1779.
One of his sons, Conrad, is the one you would want to have met. He was a long hunter — one of a band who went into the Kentucky wilderness in 1769 to trap and explore, and stayed out years. In 1776 he went back, and instead of hunting he stopped: found the waters of Hanging Fork, built a cabin, cleared a field, and raised a crop of corn. That is not a hunting trip; that is a claim — and it is proven, not from family legend but from the certificate the Virginia land commissioners wrote out at Harrodsburg on 28 January 1780, granting him four hundred acres “on account of raising a Crop of Corn in the Country in the year 1776.” The place his brothers patented around it became Carpenter's Station, near Hustonville, Kentucky.
Adam Carpenter — the direct ancestor — was the younger brother who followed them out. In 1784 he bought a German Bible printed in 1773 and began writing the family's births in it, his first entries in both German and English. That Bible still exists, at the Kentucky Historical Society in Frankfort, with a trunk's worth of the family's letters, deeds and receipts.
Adam's wife has the best story in the branch, and it is not a Carpenter story at all. Catherine Spears was married first to a man who died in 1782 and left her a widow at twenty-two — with a small daughter and seven months pregnant. She administered the estate herself, presenting the inventory to the court: the pots and pans, the pewter plates, his Bible and prayer book. The sale was held at Adam Carpenter's place, where Adam bought heavily — livestock mostly, but also one feather bed for six pounds, which on the frontier was the height of luxury. The family historian's dry note: “Possibly he also had an eye for the widow.” He did. They married in March 1784 and had ten children — and in the meantime Catherine had bought fifty acres on Carpenter's Creek on her own account. Widowed a second time in 1806, she carried on another forty-two years and died in 1848, aged eighty-seven. All the Carpenter children, including the daughters, could read and write English as well as German — in that time and place, for the girls, that was rare.
Then out of Kentucky: every couple in the next generation left, three of the four to Missouri. The 1850 census of Silver Creek, Randolph County catches two feeder households three dwellings apart — the Mansfields out of Virginia, the widow Cavens out of Kentucky — a decade before their children married each other. The line came down through Knob Noster, Missouri to North Texas to Humble, where Dolores Grace Carpenter — the great-grandmother — was born in the oilfield town in 1911.