Family Reunion: Bellamy
Going four generations back to find another line
This surname can be found among my Sixteen great-great-grandparents. We have to go that far back to find the first Bellamy - my maternal grandfather’s paternal grandmother, Sarah Jane Bellamy (17 Dec 1836 - 22 May 1920).
Sarah is named in The Bellamys of Early Virginia, by Joe David Bellamy. We know she married Joel Clark (of Family Reunion: Clark fame), but Mr. Bellamy’s book didn’t give us a lot of detail about her family. There is a skeletal genealogy for Sarah’s parents, with names and birthdates for her siblings, but not a lot of additional information.
There are a lot of names, though.1
Several generations of Bellamy men married women from the West family. Sarah’s parents were Bennett Bellamy and Jane West; Bennett’s parents were Matthew H. Bellamy and Nancy West. Sarah’s son, David Ulysses Clark, married the granddaughter of Frances (West) May, whose father was murdered by secessionists in 1862. I have no idea how or whether these West families are related to each other, yet, but I am working on finding out!
The Bellamy book covers a lot of territory. It is not a straightforward descendency report, but it does trace descendants of a John Bellamy who was “imported” to be an indentured servant of Dorothy Pleasants in Henrico County, Virginia. Based on the available records and what is generally known about the terms of indentured servitude, John most likely arrived from England around 1710 or 1711, purchased 120 acres of land in 1717, and died in 1729. By the time he died, the land he had purchased in Henrico County in 1717 was in Goochland County.
Joe David Bellamy offers a great deal of analysis, rather than simply drawing conclusions and presenting them as facts. I appreciate this approach. Being able to see the journey he took and the facts that led to his conclusions about John’s origins makes the factual claims that are here more reliable and shows me where further research needs to be done. Along the way, he includes photographs and personal stories where he finds them.
As I said, Sarah Bellamy was the paternal grandmother of my maternal grandfather, Russ Clark. I have been working my way through these branches of his tree slowly, and adding profiles to WikiTree - but I have been slowed down by the fact that several generations in a row had as many as a dozen children each. Their large families intermarried with the same handful of families, making it hard to document exactly how the cousins are interrelated.
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Postscript: Joe David Bellamy died in August 2014, not long before I discovered his book. He was an award-winning author and professor at several colleges. You can learn more about him at that link, and let me know if you read any of his work.
The Bellamy name is often seen spelled “Bellomy” but I can’t tell if that is a preference used by actual Bellamys or if it is just a transcription error; I apologize if I misspell somebody’s name, but I will usually default to using “Bellamy”.