Culpepper Genealogy

Preface

Some years ago I began an attempt to trace my paternal ancestry and to find out from where and from whom I am descended. Being ignorant of things genealogical, but being curious and possessed of the necessary funds and time, I soon found myself swept along a trail of facts and clues that amazed and perplexed me. After traveling thousands of miles, reading old British and early American historical documents, and having spent some years searching for relevant data in archives, Library of Congress, courthouses, churches, cemeteries, libraries, and private collections, I had amassed a considerable body of information concerning my forbears, the Culpeppers, and their character, as well as the probable points of connection between them and the American Culpepper of today.

Fortuitously, at the genealogical library of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City, I happened onto several sources of edifying and enlightening information. They were: Sir Bernard Burke’s Genealogical History of Dormant and Extinct Peerages of the British Empire and his General Armory of England, a registry of armorial bearings from ancient England to the Modern time; John Burke’s Genealogical and Heraldic History of the extinct and dormant Baronetcies of England, as registered in 1841; Col. F.W.T. Attree outstanding Genealogical work The Sussex Colepepers published in the Sussex Archeological Journal, Vol. xlvii; and, a treatise, The Proprietors of the Northern Neck, by Fairfax Harrison, published in a series of articles in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, published during the year 1925. I was most pleased and surprised, and above all relieved, to find that a portion of the task I had set for myself years before had been ably accomplished decades ago by so learned and adroit gentlemen as the above listed authors. All of the gaps in the history were bridged; the missing documentation was supplied; and most importantly, the relationship of the American to the English Culpeppers was clearly established. Most of the information on the English Culpeppers must be accredited to the works of these diligent, departed historians and genealogists.

A major credit must also be given to other eighteenth and nineteenth century stalwart Englishmen who were steadfast and uncompromising partisans of English genealogy of the noble families of the British Empire. We, the American Culpeppers, are deeply indebted to them for their conspicuous works that have removed from "the urns and sepulchers of mortality" the Culpepper name and the part they played in the national annals of early England and America. The authors and their works are listed in the notes of each chapter.

It is my view that due to the sparsity of documentation, and the limitation of time, no presentation today of the Culpeppers could be more concise or complete without the works of Sir Bernard Burke, John Burke, esq., Col. F.W.T. Attree, Mr. Fairfax Harrison, and the various surveys of the Visitations of Kent and Visitations of Sussex published in The Harleain Society Journals. Thus, all of the leading data must, of necessity, be presented in a compact form sufficient to allow the Culpeppers of the present day to visualize their own history in the colorful heyday of colonial entrepreneurialism, and the rise and decline of a great family of landed aristocrats responding to and helping to create major political and economic forces.

Yet the chapters presented here are inadequate, taken alone, as an explanation of the Culpepper family fortunes. If, to quote Mr. Fairfax Harrison, the Culpeppers, "…as the hard saying goes, have gone down in the world," it is due largely to their support of the English Monarchy and their failure to read the events which led to the American War of Independence that they have done so. It was partly by this same loyalty that they were undone over a century earlier in England, only to recoup their fortunes in more favorable times. And if this loyalty to the crowns of England is to be held against them, it should also be remembered, alongside the resiliency and adaptability of the family, that an early Culpepper was among those barons who extorted the Magna Charta from King John, another baron placed King Charles II on the throne, a queen came from the Culpepper loins, and that the first major rebellion in the American Colonies was led by our own John Culpepper, "The Rebel".

Warren H. (Dick) Culpepper