BRINKLEY FAMILY HISTORY: USA Here follows an email sent from Kent Brinkley to Ben Williams. Both are American Brinkleys who attended the Brinkley reunion in July 2000. Kent resides in Virginia; Ben lives in London. In it, Kent gives the clearest exposition yet of the story of the early Brinkley settlers and outlines just where the family research has got to in trying to pinpoint the exact  location in   England that Brinkleys originate from: I have reprinted it as follows: Dear Ben, Thanks for your response to Lallie's note and for your willingness to do a little genealogical 'digging' there while you're still in London. You might try searching through early surviving emigration records for those Brinkleys who left England during the period 1630-35 and 1665-80 from the ports of London and the east coast, as well as from Bristol, Plymouth and Portsmouth. Although I recall that David told me that he has done some checking on these while on prior visits to London, even so, it's a good little ways from Plymouth to London, and I would suspect that he doesn't get there often for that very good reason. The more eyes we have looking for possible English-U.S. Brinkley links the better, don't you agree? I visited the Society of Genealogist's office (then located in Harrington Gardens, about two blocks south of Cromwell Road, and right around the corner from the closest Tube Station) briefly on my first visit to London in 1979. Although I didn't have but about two or three hours to devote to the task, it was very convenient for me to do it, as I was staying in a hotel just around the corner on Cromwell Road, right on the edge of Earl's Court. To recap what I told David and you that I found back then was as follows: that the Cambridgeshire records in 1248 list the earliest Brinkley names that I have personally ever seen. Their names and the spelling used (if my memory serves correctly) were "Martin de Brenkelee" and "Robert de Brinkelee" and they were listed as then living in "Brenkele" parish, near Newmarket. David told me back in July (when I was there) that he has often encountered both of these old, variant spellings of the Brinkley name in English records before (among the many others he listed on the information sheet he distributed at the Brinkley Millenium Fete). Ben, as I mentioned to you in July, I then surmised that because of these spellings it seemed to me that both were in the typical form of most Norman names of that period. Norman French was, I believe, the common language spoken at court and among all well-to-do literate people of that day, until at least about 1400 or so. It was the gradual blending of the old Anglo-Saxon language with the Norman French that eventually gave us the so-called "Middle English" language of Chaucer's day (1400s), which of course, was the forerunner of the Modern "Queen's English" of today. On that same 1979 visit I also found a reference to the supposed meaning of the name of "Brinkley," which was given as "one who lives by or on the 'lee' edge of the sea." Although the village of Brinkley is located pretty far inland from the English Channel or the sea, other adjacent areas of Suffolk are not. I would surmise that if the original derivation of the Brinkley name was based on one or more locations by the sea, it was not tied specifically to the village of Brinkley, per se but, rather, that it merely indicated that the people who eventually took that name were East Anglians (ie. living in either eastern Cambridgeshire, in Suffolk, or Norfolk, and perhaps even in northern Kent) who were, technically speaking, living by or at least in relatively close proximity to the sea. This is, however, only my personal hypothesis about the possible source of origin of the Brinkley name. As I've mentioned to several of you, the earliest Brinkley in North America that I've ever found was one "Michail Brinckley" or "Micall Brinckley," who first appears on a headright grant of 500 acres of land to one Anthony Jones of Isle of Wight County, VA (near the present-day town of Smithfield, VA), in June of 1635. Attached to this grant was a list of the ten indentured servants whose passage to Virginia Mr. Jones paid, and for which he was given 50 acres of land each. Our Michael was among those named as first noted above. As most indentured servants had to serve for a period of seven years, this Michael Brinkley must have completed the service he owed his master, Mr. Jones, and survived the 1644 Indian massacre in VA, as this same Michael Brinkley later appears (circa 1650s) as a small freeholder living along the Nansemond River in the Bennett's Creek area of old Nansemond County (today the City of Suffolk, VA). I've also done some checking on Mr. Jones and learned that he had emigrated from England (I need to check my notes to see if a specific location was mentioned, as I can't honestly remember all the details now) in the period 1619-21, and apparently was himself first an indentured servant, first living at Flowerdew Hundred, an early settlement on the James River about 15 miles upriver from Jamestown, in what is today Prince George County, VA, near the town of Hopewell. He managed to survive the "Great Massacre" of March 1622, in which fully half of the population of the colony at that time were killed. Jones was still living there at the time of the first census of the Virginia colony, called the "Generall Muster" of 1624. Jones next appears in Isle of Wight as a freeholder by 1632, and eventually became a wealthy and influential planter by the 1640s (a typical sort of 'rags-to-riches' story one often sees in the early days of the Virginia colony, provided you could manage to survive the heat, the diseases, and the two major Indian massacres of 1622 and 1644!). By the 1670s, Michael Brinkley seems to have relocated further inland (no doubt in search of better land for growing tobacco) to a what was then a very remote, desolate area located south of the Nansemond County seat, the town of Suffolk, on a sandy ridge on the western edge of the Great Dismal Swamp (confusingly, today all of this former county is called the City of Suffolk, VA along with the old Suffolk town area which was the old county seat). In early records this southern area of old Nansemond County was often referred to as "The Desert" or "The Maine Desart." In fact, one of the old roads in this area has long been called "Desart Road." Locals today pronounce it literally according to the old spelling, ie. "I live down on the 'Des-heart'(sic) Road." The area is now referred to as the Cypress district of Suffolk, as it was named for an old church (founded 1792) and crossroads community called "Cypress Chapel." The sandy soil in this Cypress Chapel area was apparently OK (but never great) for raising tobacco, but was only marginal for other crops, as it is still a low and swampy region. However, with rich timber resources (Pitch pine, cypress; etc.) the early settlers managed to augment their meagre crop earnings by harvesting the timber during the winter months for making barrel staves, tar turpentine, and shingles. Although malaria was prevalent and common for generations, and living a farm life there was always very difficult, somehow these hearty Brinkley people put down deep roots there and multiplied prolifically. That's part of the problem: they were VERY prolific! So much so, in fact, that coupled with three devastating Nansemond County courthouse fires throughout its early history, sorting out the early Virginia Brinkley family lines has been extremely difficult, if not nearly impossible. Compounding this problem has been the tendency for each of several generations to use the same given names, sometimes over three and four successive generations in a direct line, but also by nephews and nieces, as well. I've been at this task of trying to sort out some of this information for over two decades, and while I feel that some progress has been made in that time, it has been frustratingly slow and fraught with undoubted errors and mis-identifications due to the lack of verifiable, factual record data. One is forced to use whatever secondary sources can be found, but all of it provides only the sketchiest picture, at best. It is this general area (the Cypress Chapel area of old Nansemond Co., VA and the adjacent Chowan-Gates-Perquimans Counties in NC), however, from which all subsequent early Brinkley land holdings appear, and from which area (it is my theory and opinion) that most, if not all, U.S. Brinkleys family lines first originated. Later, in the 1680s, a "John Brinkly" and "Jacob Brinkley" also appear in the records within the same general neighborhood. Freddie Brinkley in Maryland has learned that this Jacob Brinkley emigrated from England in about 1680 from Woodbridge, located on the Suffolk coast. (I believe that David and Lallie both visited there together this past July on the day before the Millenium Fete. I didn't hear whether they had made any new discoveries while there, however). When the boundary line between VA-NC was first physically surveyed in 1728, William Byrd II, one of the VA commissioners appointed to oversee the work, recorded in his diary that his survey party came out of the Great Dismal Swamp after having spent several days traversing that morass, and repaired to the nearest plantation, that of Peter Brinkley, to rest and refresh themselves. From a perusal of old maps, this farm was located in old Nansemond Co., VA, but just north of the VA-NC state line. By the 1780s, many younger Brinkley sons left this "core origin area" of southeastern Virginia-northeastern North Carolina and migrated west and south just after the American War for Independence. They were obviously looking for good land to farm, as all of the best lands by that time had been taken and these typically all went to the eldest sons upon the deaths of the fathers. One or two Brinkley families moved into what is today West Virginia and, from there, later into Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana. The majority, however, moved southwest into central and western North Carolina, and another branch down into southern North Carolina. From Virginia and these locations, we see the movement continue into Georgia, and from there later into Alabama, Texas, and Oklahoma by the 1840s, 50s and 60s. So much for the general U.S. Brinkley's history lesson! Please forgive me for the length this letter has become. While I've spent my entire lunch hour today typing this up, I really hadn't originally intended to go on for so long here. I have had the great pleasure to talk individually with many of you about these and related topics, but it seemed to me as I was typing this that there are some folks copied hereon who may not have known about any of this information. Therefore, I wanted to share these general facts with all of you now. I hope that many of you will hopefully find it of enough interest to compensate, in some small measure at least, for its overly long length. Ben, returning to you personally, once again let me express my great thanks and appreciation to you for your willingness to do some additional hunting in London for the early Brinkley origins in England. Of course, Lallie, Buddy, Freddie and I (and many others, I'm sure!) also hope that perhaps between David, Mark and you, one of you might eventually be able to find the "missing link" in England to factually tie our Michael and Jacob Brinkley of early Virginia with their proper English family branch(es). We can only hope this information is only waiting to be found! If I can answer questions or be of some help to anyone copied, please let me know. I'm certainly no genealogical expert, by any means, and I can assure everyone that I have certainly made my share of interpretive mistakes along the way. We've all just got to stay determined and to have the faith that one day, those one or two important clues or links will eventually turn up! Ben, if I can be of some help to you from afar, please drop me a line via e-mail either here (at my office) or at home: mkbrinkley@aol.com. With my thanks for your interest (and patience!) to read all of the above, I remain your Virginia "cousin" and fellow genealogical hunter, Kent M. Kent Brinkley, FASLA Landscape Architect The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation telephone: (757) 220-7954 fax: (757) 565-8570 email: kbrinkley@cwf.org