OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK:

AN AMAZING AND COMPLICATED INTERNATIONAL WATTS FAMILY EUROPEAN-AFRICAN-NATIVE AMERICAN STORY:

A TALE OF “THE BUILDING OF NATIONS, FORGING OF FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES, AND THE COMPLEXITIES OF MERGING DIFFERENT VALUES AND DIVERSE CULTURES” WHILE CONQUERING NEW WORLD CONFLICTS, SLAVERY, POVERTY, WARS, AND RACISM.”

By: Reverend Dr. Martel A. Perry

The Watts Family, Native American, and Tidewater, Virginia Historical  Research, Preservation, and Service Foundation, Inc. has been working on a book about the “Amazing and Complicated International Watts Family European-African-Native American Story” for more than six years which has presented the author,  Reverend Dr. Martel A. Perry with so many twists and turns that it is only now that he has been able to organize the information in such a way that readers will be able to follow this complicated story, and family members and communities can learn how they fit in the story.

Rev. Dr. Perry took on this project because he was by default made the family historian in his family line having more than 250 years of documented and pictorial history which includes the Tidewater, Virginia, European, and African American Watts Families; the European and African American Perry Families of Virginia and North Carolina; the European and African-American Edmondson Families of Virginia; and the European and African-American Thompson/Wilson/Morrow Families of Orange/Alamance Counties of North Carolina.

What has been more surprising is that this family story is enriched by having very deep Native American family connections with (Bass, Lovina, Tucker, Wiggins, Nickens, Hall, and Weaver families) which includes traces to the Meherrin, Pamunkey, Nansemond, Virginia Cherokee, and other Tribes along with relatives who settled in Australia.

Moreover, the Watts’ family connections can be traced back to the early colonial times of American history in the 1600s, Australia mid-1800s, the formation of America in 1776, and Australia in 1901.

This book will take the reader from the Slave Sea Port  of Bristol, England and its surrounding counties of Somerset and Devonshire, England, to West Coast of Africa, to the Shores of Colonial Virginia, and finally to New South Wales, Australia.

Along the way this book will show the connections of primarily the Watts Families of Great Britain to the African, Native American, and European families of America and Australia.

This book will also demonstrate the complexities of conquering new world conflicts, slavery, poverty, wars, and racism all of which played into the formation of complicated communities, nations, and family stories.

This Watts Family Story begins with the migration of serval branches of the same Watts family from the southern part of England in the 1600s to the Colony of Virginia. These families first settled in the Tidewater Area of Virginia from James City, Isle of Wight, Norfolk, Elizabeth City, Charles City, and York Counties. They moved out to Lancaster, Westmoreland, Lunenburg, Spotsylvania, King George,  and other mid to Western Virginia counties and Northeastern North Carolina Counties between 1630 and 1750.

The European Watts Family in the American Colonies engaged in interracial relationships as early as the 1640s which is documented in colonial court cases. Furthermore, we know that land grants were issued to the European Watts Family members in those early colonial counties. We know also that they were plantation and slave owners along with being importers of slaves.

It seems that the Colonial European Watts Family members sought to have relationships with Native American and slave women that produced multi-lines of mixed-race Americans. We cannot be sure of  the reason for these relationships, but some articles and research indicate that these relationships were sought in the early to mid-1600s in the Virginia Colony because of the high mortality rate among Europeans and the imbalance of males to females. It is clear also that there was a need to improve or control possible negative interactions between Europeans and Native Americans and also to increase the slave stock of one’s plantation.

The first documented European Watts family member in the Virginia Colony was Christopher Watts, Jr. who arrived at the colonies in 1636. This information is documented on the Watts Family Foundation Website Early Virginia Immigrants, from 1623-1666  

(https://wfnaatvhrpasfi.wildapricot.org/page-18340)

The first documentation of an interracial relationship between a European Watts member and a slave was in 1649. This document is presented in the book.

Captain Cornelius Watts who gave an account of the relationship between European Settlers and Native Americans in Jamestown, Virginia in the 1600s is related by DNA to the African and Native American Watts Families of Tidewater, Virginia.

The book will provide information on THE EARLIEST MELUNGEON CLANS IN SOUTHERN TIDEWATER COLONIES. Some of the first Black, white, Indian, and mixed families who began intermarrying in the 1600s in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the Carolinas to produce the people who became known as "Melungeon’s." The African American Watts family is included in this group of Melungeon’s, and you will find on the Watts Family Foundation Website a listing of some of these families.

https://wfnaatvhrpasfi.wildapricot.org/page-18303

Furthermore, you will find in the book a breakdown on the European Watts Family connection to the Tidewater, Virginia African and Native American Families through ancestry lines and DNA results. Please note that on the familytreena.com Website you will find the “Melungeon Families of Interest Y DNA Results Chart.” The African and Native American family original Melungeon relationship came through Cornelius Watts who is identified in that Chart.

In the book you will also find a discussion about the African and Native American Watts and their Allied Families of Tidewater, Virginia and Hertford County, North Carolina.

On the Watts Family Foundation Website, you will find a listing of Free African and Native American People in the document “Norfolk County Register of Free Negroes and Mulattoes 1809-1852.”

https://wfnaatvhrpasfi.wildapricot.org/Norfolk-Free-Black

In that document you will find members of the African and Native American Watts Family who were born free or became free during that time period between the late 1700s and 1852. Also, you will find in that document members of the Watts family who moved to Philadelphia between 1830 and 1852. (Daniel-Benjamin-Ephraim-John) Later some of the African American Watts family members moved back from Philadelphia to Tidewater, Virginia.

The book will fully outline the contradictions of the European Watts Family from the 1600s to 1800s as it relates to slavery and family. On one hand the European Watts Family gained wealth and status  from slavery and on the other hand different family members fought to abolish slavery, wrote religious music which the early African American Church adopted as a basis of their worship, and they actively sought to build interracial families.

Finally, the book will discuss the contribution of the European-African-Native American Watts and Extended Families to the “Building of Nations, Communities, and Families.”(America and Australia) It will also include historical documents, references, and pictorial history.