As I consider the maternal lines in my father’s ancestry, I am fascinated by the fact that nearly all of them, as well as my Hodgsons, live at some point within a fairly small window of North America: four counties in Pennsylvania, along the Maryland border. That is, Chester, Lancaster, York, and Adams counties in the decades before the Revolutionary War.
Not that they were all there simultaneously, nor were they of the same culture. Even though some headed as far south as North Carolina and others headed more directly west, somehow they reunite for me in Montgomery County, Ohio, more than a century-and-a-half later.
Apart from a Lutheran and Roman Catholic strand, which in turn has some significant Mennonite roots, this ancestry turns out to arise largely in two of the three historic peace churches, the Church of the Brethren (Dunker or German Baptist Brethren) and the Society of Friends (Quaker).
Moreover, each generation has its own unique story. This is how they did it.
Orphan George 