Featherquake – by way of introduction

Middletown Meeting House, Bucks County, PA

My name is Matthew Cooper. I’m an Orthodox Christian; husband; father of two; native of Madison, Wisconsin; machinist; schoolteacher; lefty blogger at The Heavy Anglo Orthodox, Front Porch Republic and Solidarity Hall; philosophy buff; and China nerd. This blog, Featherquake, will be my fourth attempt – hopefully my second successful one – at writing a separate blog based on a separate interest from my usual political-philosophical and general history fare.

I have been interested for a long time in family history and have dabbled a little bit in genealogy. I come by this honestly, on my mother’s side at least – though my interest was really spurred after my visit to Qazaqstan (where family history and jüz membership is intensely valued). The Doane family of northern Vermont does indeed have a long and beautiful tradition of closeness to their roots; it is largely due to the careful efforts of my extended family members on the Doane side of the family – which is allied to the equally tight-knit extended Camp family through the marriage of my great-grandfather Tennyson Doane to Floy Camp – that the history, and the individual stories of the people who make up the tapestries of both families, has been so well-preserved and so well-recorded, going all the way back to ‘Deacon’ John Done of Plymouth Colony (and probably originally of Alvechurch, Worcester, England).

As a complete amateur, therefore, I started to undertake research into the Cooper family tree, which is not particularly well-attested – my immediate Cooper side relatives not generally having been as interested in preserving genealogical records. The Coopers were, after all, poor landless sharecroppers in the South Carolina backcountry – specifically, Travelers Rest in Greenville County. However, through some investigations into the connexions between the Coopers and a couple of other allied families – notably the Watsons – I was able to (tentatively) track back the Cooper line. In the broad strokes: the Cowper family – headed by William Cowper – came to southeastern Pennsylvania from Low Ellington (near Masham in Yorkshire) on the passenger ship Britannia in 1699. A convert to Quakerism, he came here with his wife Thomasine (née Porter) and his eight children – all teenagers to adults – seeking a haven among the fellow Friends in the colony founded by William Penn. He had an estate in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and was – it seems – an intermittent member of Middletown Monthly Meeting near Langhorne.

Jonathan Cooper – William Cowper’s third child by Thomasine, who was twenty-three when he made the voyage over the Atlantic from Yorkshire – married Sarah Hibbs in Pennsylvania Colony and had at least seven children, the youngest of whom was William Jacob, born in 1731, who took up trade as a wheelwright. William Jacob married a woman named Elizabeth Ann Clark at the age of 21. It was apparently Elizabeth Clark’s idea to move the family to South Carolina, and this happened around 1770 in advance of the brewing war. Moving to the backcountry likely seemed a good way to stay neutral and well clear of the fighting. There was a haven established in Bush River in Newberry County – and William Cooper is mentioned among the early members of the Bush River Monthly Meeting.

However, Elizabeth’s aim to keep her family out of the Revolution did not seem to have succeeded. At least two of her children with William Jacob were disowned by the Friends for joining either side. Jacob Cooper – my direct paternal line ancestor – was disowned on 27 June 1778; family tradition has it that he was killed by a Tory, but an enemies list compiled by Colonel Brandon for the colonial Committee of Safety indicates that he joined the Tory militia in the backcountry. Two other sons of William Jacob Cooper – Samuel (disowned 1781) and Stacey – fought in the militias on the Whig side. Jacob Cooper survived the war and died in Spartanburg County, South Carolina in 1829.

In the broad strokes, that’s how the Coopers I’m related to ended up in South Carolina, and that is where they stayed. Family records kept by the Watsons suggest my descent from Jacob Cooper, and genealogical DNA tests I’ve done positively confirm that I’m related on the paternal side to a descendent of William Jacob Cooper now living in Texas. Well – that’s a bit of background on me, and perhaps enough for an introductory blog post!

By way of explanation for the name of this blog: Featherquake is a play on words. The fun visual displayed in the blog banner came rather naturally to mind after the name did! ‘Quake’ comes, of course, from the Quakers to which the Coopers belonged. ‘Feather’ is a common anglicisation of the German surname Vetter, which belonged to my Swabian great-grandmother, Clara Vetter, on my mother’s side.