My parents taught hard work and honesty
and though Mom attended church,
none of us five girls were made to go
But I always held if I knew God existed
I wouldn’t be content at keeping my distance.
I wanted to be intimate with Him,
and when I was fourteen I learned
that was possible in Jesus.
So I dedicated my life to Him
in complete devotion.
Getting to know Him was new to me
and a great adventure. Imagine my surprise
when my genealogist sister discovered
we came from a long line of
pastors,
including Samuel Maycock who was appointed
to be the pastor of the first church at Jamestown.
The Maycocks, when living on an acreage outside the fort,
hid their infant daughter Sarah
during the Jamestown massacre of 1622.
Samuel and his wife were murdered,
but Sarah went on to marry George Pace
whose father Richard had warned Jamestown
and saved those living within the fort.
Another ancestor, Captain Drury Pace
was a chaplain in the revolutionary war.
Some of my ancestors, Scotch Irish,
came over to the U.S.A in the
1600s
and settled the area in Pennsylvania
where I grew up. My sister has an original deed,
dated 1796. That land is now part of the
State Game Lands.
My great grandfather married
and was widowed on their ninth child.
On a trip, he met and married another,failing to tell her he already had nine kids.
It’s reported that he simply said, “Here’s your family,”
as he introduced them upon arriving home,
my Grandfather Bill being one of them.
So my grandfather Shannon was born in the area
but my grandmother was from Kentucky.
She shared a grandmother with Billy Ray Cyrus
about seven generations back.
The Scotch Irish was a wild bunch
taking the new land by storm,
with “the Bible, a gun and a bottle of whiskey.”
I dropped the gun and whiskey,
but cling to the Bible.
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