First, we’d like to welcome you to our blog! It is our hope that this blog will serve as a means for providing you with information and stories that we’ve gathered over the years through our combined research. If there is anything you would like us to write about, feel free to send us an email and we will try to include it in a future blog post.
About Our Tree
The House of Bishop working tree is just that, a working tree. It is ever changing and never ending. When we are long gone, it will hopefully be carried on by our descendants. Most of the credit goes to House of Bishop Guardian Michael Dean Bishop K.T.
We make no claims about our tree except that we are 99.99% sure of the origins of Captain John Bishop who immigrated to Virginia in 1643.
We made our tree public by design and welcome any new information. We have had to make our tree private again, due to challenges on Ancestry.com that we can explain via email or telephone. We happily grant access to our tree to members of the House of Bishop or fellow researchers. We are not professional genealogists, but have been researching this line for over two decades.
Under the names of many people in the tree, you may see blue bubbles/boxes with white writing. These notes will let you know if we are working on an individual or family line and that it is not currently proven. We are always open to suggestions or new information.
Facts & Gallery
In the Facts and Gallery areas of individuals and family groups (some we will discuss on upcoming blogs), we have made every effort to download available original documents and upload original typed or handwritten documents that have been translated from many different languages. These include, but are not limited to Latin, Norman French and hopefully soon middle Scots (when we can find a translator).
In the Gallery areas we have included pictures that we think will be helpful to the reader, by giving him or her a visual of that individual or what we are writing about in our blogs.
Example: In our 2nd blog post, we will discuss and try to dispel some of the confusion regarding Captain John Bishop being from Scotland versus England. In our efforts to explain this, you can go to the facts and gallery area of Captain John Bishop to see things we will speak of such as “hogsheads”, which are large barrels that tobacco is shipped in. When turned on their sides to be loaded or unloaded by rolling them (the larger barrels are in excess of 1,000 lbs. when full), they flat ends literally look like the head of a hog. On the lighter side, we have received phone calls and emails informing us that Captain John Bishop was a pig farmer (due to the term hogshead) or a sea captain (due to his title as Captain in his county militia). He was neither.
We intend no disrespect in mentioning these examples and hope the visuals will help everyone. We know they have helped us many times. Mostly, we hope our family understands this has been a labor of love. Something meaningful to leave to our children and say, “Here is where you come from!”