A family tree from Wiltshire, Nérac, Roscommon and Saint-Domingue to Essex County, Virginia — and on to Texarkana, Little Rock, Travis County and the Texas piney woods. Temple · Crouch · Bond · Plunkett · Catchings · Johnson · West · Carpenter.
Four years ago I wrote here that I have 32 great-great-great grandparents — and then drove to Essex County, Virginia with my seven-year-old son to go stand where two of them had lived.
I kept going. I can now name 307 direct ancestors, back through fifteen generations to a couple in Ireland whose son was born in 1568. And the first thing that did was take my own name away from me.
Thirteen of those 307 are named Temple. That is about four percent.
The surname on my mailbox traces exactly one thread through all of that: father to father to father. The other 155 surnames in my direct line gave me everything else, and most of them I had never heard of two years ago. Ten generations back, a person has 1,024 ancestors. One of them hands down a name. The other 1,023 hand down the rest.
So this is not a page about the Temples. It is a page about the other 1,023.
What the tree actually holds
2,879 people. 400 sources. 7,069 citations. Of my 307 direct ancestors, 256 have a birthplace on record and 51 are blank — so every number below is a floor, not a total.
Where they were born:
| Virginia — 78 | a quarter of everyone I can name |
| England — 32 | Wiltshire, Bristol, Somerset, Devon, Durham, Suffolk |
| Kentucky — 19 · Pennsylvania — 13 | the road west |
| Ireland — 12 | County Roscommon |
| France — 11 | Nérac and Mussidan, in Gascony |
| Texas — 11 · Arkansas — 10 · Maryland — 10 · Tennessee — 9 | |
| Saint-Domingue — 8 | the French colony that became Haiti |
| South Carolina — 7 · Missouri — 5 · Massachusetts — 5 · Rhode Island — 4 · Germany — 4 | |
| Switzerland · Wales · New York · Indiana · Kansas · Georgia · the Carolinas | small threads |
Virginia is the hearth. Strip everything else away and this is first a colonial Virginia story that spent two centuries flowing south and west until it arrived in Texas.
The oldest recorded births are sixteenth century: Poncet de La Place, born about 1515 at Mussidan in the Dordogne, and John Temple of Kingston Deverill, born 1571 in Wiltshire. The first one born on this side of the Atlantic was Benjamin Arnold, 1661, New Kent County, Virginia — the son of a man who would be hanged.
Four streams and a confluence
Wiltshire and Bristol. In 1662, the year the Act of Uniformity purged England’s church, William Temple — lord of the small manor of Bishopstrow on the Wylye — was cited with his wife for refusing to attend services. A dissenting household in chalk-down country. His younger son Joseph went into trade in Bristol as a mercer, married Hannah Liston there in 1688, wrote his will in the spring of 1699 “in perfect health,” and was dead by May with Hannah pregnant. Reading that will three hundred years later, you find him providing with enormous care for “such Male Child as my said wife is now enseint or goeth with.” That unborn boy grew up fatherless in Bristol, crossed to Virginia around 1722, and married Ann Arnold at Presquile, in the bend where the Mattaponi nearly makes an island. Ann’s grandfather Anthony Arnold had been hanged in 1677 for rising with Bacon’s Rebellion — Virginia’s first revolt, a century early. Arnold’s Ferry became Temple’s Ferry. The rebel’s land came back through the posthumous son’s line.
Nérac, in Gascony. At almost the same moment, on the other side of France’s religious wars, the Latanés were driven out of Nérac — Huguenots from the old Protestant heartland. Lewis Latané, born there in 1672, arrived in Virginia as a refugee and became a parson of the Rappahannock; his line held those parishes for generations. A Temple married a Latané, and the name has been handed down ever since — to my great-great-grandfather, to my grandfather who died in San Miguel de Allende, to my son. The family kept a Bible for it: a Philadelphia printing of 1802, its register recording Latané births and deaths in the family’s own hand.
Roscommon, by way of the Caribbean — and this is the strangest one. Jean Baptiste Lefebvre des Hayes, born to a Saint-Eustache parish family in Paris in 1689, came out to Saint-Domingue as a marine officer, rose to command the quarter of Aquin, and married a buccaneer captain’s orphan heiress who bore him twenty children. Two of his daughters’ lines rejoined a generation later, when Achilles Plunkett — son of an Irish emigrant from Killummod, County Roscommon, who had also washed up in the French colony — married the old commandant’s granddaughter in the tight planter world of the Cayes plain. Their marriage act survives: 4 May 1791, at Les Cayes, with a papal vicar’s dispensation for consanguinity “du second au troisième degré.” The church did the genealogy for us, and two hundred thirty-five years later we read its arithmetic back out of the register to work out exactly which cousins they were.
Then the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue rose, and won, and the whole clan fled the only successful slave revolution in history — to Williamsburg, to Warrenton, to Memphis, and finally to Des Arc, on the Arkansas prairie. Paris to Haiti to Arkansas in four generations. Refugees twice over.
Maryland and Pennsylvania — the quiet one. Crouches were in Somerset County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore by the 1690s, sitting on grand juries and marrying Toadvines. They vanish from Somerset probate after 1767, and by 1776 there is a Crouch child born in southwestern Pennsylvania — the family crossed the top of the Chesapeake in about a decade and kept going, to Arkansas and then the East Texas piney woods. Carpenters were Zimmermanns from Hallau, above the Rhine in canton Schaffhausen, who reached the Shenandoah and translated their own name into English. Physicians named Bond out of Gettysburg and Baltimore. Joe Johnson of Lanchester, County Durham — a coal-country Catholic, which is why the Anglican registers never held him — who came by way of Liverpool and reached Austin in the early 1870s. Wests and Catchings moving through Tennessee, Kentucky and Kansas into central Texas.
And then East Texas gathered it all in. Thomas Lewis Latané Temple, born in Essex County, Virginia in 1859, carrying both the dissenter’s surname and the Huguenot’s, came to Texarkana and built a life in the piney woods timber. His line met the Plunkett–Bond line of Little Rock; the Travis County and Houston lines met them; and the whole confluence produced two Houston babies in 1949 and 1950 who became my parents.
What I know, and what I only think I know
This is the part most family trees leave out, and it is the reason I am willing to publish this one.
A tree is not a fact. It is a stack of claims of very different quality, and a good one tells you which is which. Mine has three grades.
Proven means I have read the record. Ann Waring appears in her father’s 1771 will, on the original Essex County register page. Anthony Arnold’s execution is in the Calendar of State Papers, along with the petition of his “four poor distressed orphans.” My Plunketts are in the Census of Elphin of 1749 — two households in the whole of Killummod parish, both listed as Papist, farming under the Penal Laws.
Inference means the records point one way without ever saying it. Nobody wrote down that Benjamin Arnold was the hanged man’s son; what survives is the restoration of the confiscated land to Benjamin in 1688, and a county historian who says in print that the link has never actually been stated. It is a strong inference. It is not a proof, and I will not print it as one.
Open means I do not know. The line above my earliest Latané is uncited. An entire tier of English Temples rests on a single Victorian reference book. And I am not claiming the Mayflower: George Soule is in this tree, but the joint that connects him to the rest of it is the weakest link in the whole structure, and until that is settled the honest answer is not yet.
I have also thrown things away. A descent from the Plunketts of Dunsoghly — a castle near Dublin — collapsed when a sworn jury in 1643 turned out to have found the heir to be a kinsman, not a son. What I lost was a castle. What I gained was a document, and a real family farming two townlands in Roscommon. That trade is the whole of genealogy.
And some of these stories run through slavery. My Virginia ancestors held people. My Saint-Domingue ancestors held people, lost them to a revolution, and then filed claims with the French government to be compensated for them — the paperwork survives, with amounts on it. I am not going to write around that. The wills and inventories that make this era so traceable exist precisely because human beings were inventoried as property — which means those same documents also carry the names of the people who were owned.
If you think you might be in here
You probably are, and you would be doing me a favor.
Cousins find these pages by typing a surname and a place. So: Temple in Diboll and in Essex County · Crouch in Arkadelphia and Texarkana · Bond in Baltimore and Little Rock · Plunkett in Roscommon, Saint-Domingue and Warrenton · Catchings in Franklin County, Tennessee · Morgan and Johnson at Hornsby Bend in Travis County · West in Erie County, New York · Carpenter, or Zimmermann, in Rockingham County, Virginia.
If one of those is yours, write to me. That is the shortest route, it costs nothing, and you will get an actual person rather than a search box.
The full tree is also on Ancestry — here it is — with one honest warning attached. You will hit a sign-in wall, even though the tree is set to public. I checked it logged out: you get a login form and nothing else, no preview, no names. Ancestry offers a free sign-up if you want to go that way. That is their wall, not mine.
It is also the main reason I am writing these pages at all. What I have found ought to be readable by anyone — no account, no subscription, no wall — and the parts I am unsure about ought to be visible rather than buried three clicks inside a database.
So here it is without one: the whole tree as a GEDCOM file, which is the format every genealogy program reads. It holds 2,471 people with their sources, their citations, and my working notes on the claims I am least sure about. There are no photographs in it.
Living people are not in it. Most are simply absent; a few remain as an unnamed placeholder where one is needed to keep a line joined up, carrying nothing but that link. It is a snapshot from 7 August 2026 of a file I am still correcting, so treat the dates with the same caution I do.
Two things I would genuinely like:
- Corrections. If I have your family wrong, tell me. I would rather be corrected in public than be quietly copied into a hundred other trees, which is how a small mistake becomes permanent.
- Anything with a date on it. A photograph with a name on the back, a Bible flyleaf, a letter in a box. Half of what I know about my own great-grandparents came out of a pillowcase of letters my grandfather pulled from the roof of a collapsing Virginia farmhouse in about 1965, because nobody else was going to.
That is the actual work. Not the famous ancestor — the ordinary one, whose name would be gone in another twenty years if nobody wrote it down.