Crista Cowan: 0:01

Stories that Live In Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present and future. I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist. I've spent my whole life discovering the power of family history and I know that sharing the stories that live in you can change everything. When you are raised in a household of faith and then make choices that take you away from the path your parents envisioned for you since before your birth, it can cause them a lot of pain. Some parents work through their own pain and allow their love for you and the grace of their God to override their own disappointment and fears. Other parents react badly. Peggy Lawrence's parents reacted badly. It wasn't even that she left religion, she just left their religion. Unfortunately, she lived in a community that was predominantly of that faith, and so she was forced to leave Leave her home, leave her family, leave her town. Well, I don't know if she was actually forced to leave, meaning kicked out of the house and run out of town, or if the shame heaped upon her was just too much to bear. Either way, she left. Being on your own is hard enough at 28 or 38. Being being on your own at 18 as a woman in 1727 is almost impossible to fathom.

Crista Cowan: 1:30

The last time we were together I shared a story about my father's family history and how a lot of that was how I got into being a genealogist. But my mother also had a very strong involvement and an interest in her family history. Her granny Kerr, which was her married name, was born a Lawrence and she used to tell stories about her family in Arkansas and a little bit of their history from Tennessee and North Carolina and Virginia in the centuries before that. Good Southern families pass stories down. That's what they do, and sometimes those tales get a little tall, which is also kind of fun. But there's also something about age appropriateness of how stories are told to children. Sometimes little ears hear big stories and certainly that was the case with my mother growing up. But sometimes the way those stories are intentionally shared are also really important to share in an appropriate way. So the story of Peggy Lawrence was one that was passed down generation after generation in my family. Here's what we knew and here's how it was shared with me as a child.

Crista Cowan: 2:51

Peggy Lawrence was from England. She as a teenager was shipped off to America for an offense that was for some time was unknown. But at one point somebody decided she had stolen bread from a cart in London in order to survive and been caught for it, and she'd been shipped off to America to serve out at a seven-year indentureship because of that offense. Her indentureship had been bought by a Virginia planter and during her short time in America she had birthed two sons and then she died and that's it, like that's the sum total of her life, and that's the story that I heard growing up about her.

Crista Cowan: 3:40

Now, when you hear stories of any kind, your brain does this thing where it automatically fills in the blanks, and it sometimes fills in the blanks with other stories you've heard, movies you've seen, books you've read, and so I had this very romanticized version of Margaret. Why is Peggy a nickname for Margaret? I had this very romanticized version of her story in my head, something along the lines of, you know, orphaned Oliver Twist and the dark streets of London and being taken advantage of by the people around her because of her vulnerable situation, and then a little bit of a romanticized version about what indentureship meant. Right, it meant she got to come to America, and as a child that seemed exciting and like an adventure, not like a punishment. And so as I grew up with this story, fascinated by this woman, that was kind of all I thought about. It was this romanticized version of how our family came to America on that particular branch of our family tree. But as I got older I had more questions about her story.

Crista Cowan: 4:56

Now my mom, in all of her involvement in family history, spent quite a lot of time on the Lawrence branch of her family tree. My mom had a second or third cousin who in the 1980s they worked together to write a book about the Lawrence descendants in America and, from what we could tell, all of the information that they collected was about the descendants of these two sons that Peggy had given birth to in Virginia in the 1700s. There was a lot of them. I've since found a lot more but we can get into that later. Now the stories that were told about them were that one of the sons pretty much went missing shortly after he came of age. He left Virginia, left the circumstances that he was raised in, and there was a little bit of mystery around that the son that I descend from stayed in Virginia, married a local girl, inherited some land, had a lot of children. Those children spread out across the South and in one instance the ancestor that I'm the most familiar with, his great grandson, ended up in Arkansas, and that's where the family has stayed since the 1830s, and so we know a whole lot about that particular branch of the family tree.

Crista Cowan: 6:23

But again, the stories of Margaret were kind of shrouded in a little bit of mystery and a little bit of lore, and we had to figure out what was true and what wasn't true. Now, when I was a teenager, I remember having a conversation with my mom, because one of the things that finally dawned on me was that Margaret was a Lawrence, she'd come from England as a Lawrence and both of her sons bore the name of Lawrence, which meant there was never a father discussed and they didn't bear the surname of a father, and so I wanted to know a little bit more about that, at which point my mom informed me age appropriately, that it was very likely that the father of Margaret's two sons was the man who had purchased her indentureship. That opened my eyes to a whole new realm of non-romanticized family history in a way that I hadn't expected. I often say families are messy, and all families are are messy, and families have always been messy, and one of the reasons for that is because history is also messy. There are dark things, there are hard things that people go through and history. It started to dawn on me through that conversation that maybe Margaret's life wasn't a romanticized tale of rescue from the slums of London and shipping off to an adventure in America, that maybe when she got here her life was just as difficult, and so that started a decades-long fascination with Margaret Lawrence and her life. I contacted cousins, I read the book that my mom's cousin wrote. I started doing research on my own when and where I could. I dug into my mom's Uncle Karl's audio tapes. Let's talk about that.

Crista Cowan: 8:21

In the 1970s, 1980s my mom's uncle Karl, who was in the military and then retired and traveled, would go from archive to archive here in the US and abroad and he would look for family history records. He was the first real genealogist that I ever knew in my life and a huge inspiration for why I'm a genealogist today. He would chase down stories, he would hire researchers when he needed to. He would put the puzzle pieces together and every few months in the mail at our house would arrive a cassette tape. Do you remember those? A cassette tape that he had walked around recording as he was doing his research and in his sweet little Arkansas southern lilt of an accent that I can still hear in my head today, he would share with my mom the information and the stories and the discoveries that he was making as he explored our family history. A few years ago I inherited those audio tapes and I still remember now, decades after his death, the moment when I put that into a tape recorder because I still had one of those around and I pushed play and I heard his voice come out of that speaker. I was just taken back to my childhood and and the interest that I had in every time one of those cassette tapes would arrive at our house.

Crista Cowan: 9:57

Well, I've scoured those tapes and his paperwork, looking for information about Margaret and about the story that had always been fascinating to me, and there wasn't a lot. There was some information that he had tried to find out exactly what she had been convicted of in England. There was some information that he had tried to find out exactly where in England she was from, and he left clues, as all good genealogists do. He left a trail of breadcrumbs for me to follow and I finally, over the last four years, decided to start following that trail. Here's what I found.

Crista Cowan: 10:38

Margaret was born in about 1709 in a little village called Wim in Shropshire, england. That's fun to say. It was a little market town. For all accounts it was very idyllic and has been, and still is to this day, kind of a very rural, agrarian kind of an area, and the Church of England, as it is even today in much of England, was very strong. Back then there was a village church and in those parish records I found a recording of her christening into that church that gave me the names of her parents. I studied a little bit about the village, I learned about the environment she came from and ultimately came across a story about her choosing to leave the Church of England when she turned 18. And it did not go over well with her parents. She left the Church of England and her parents appear to have kicked her out. Now, that's part of the story that I filled in the blanks with, because here she is at 18. Then there's some kind of censorship in church records and then she shows up in London just a few months later. I did also manage to track down the court records and some of those I found as a story in an old newspaper.

Crista Cowan: 12:09

Newspapers are such a treasure trove of information. Oftentimes the records the parish records or the court records or the transport records all of which I found for her will give you the bare bones or the facts, but somebody has to write it up when they publish it in a newspaper. Now, to be fair, they probably put their own spin on it one way or another, but you can sometimes read between the lines to get a sense of the true story. Now, remember, the story I'd been told growing up was always that she had stolen bread to survive and that's what had gotten her thrown into jail. Turns out that wasn't exactly the case. Now I don't know if that's just the story my mother told me. I suspect my mother didn't actually know the true story. As a matter of fact, I may be the first one in the family to uncover it. Maybe not.

Crista Cowan: 13:12

Here's what happened when she got to London she found work, and she was working as a ladies' maid for a wealthy family in London. I don't know enough about her character to know who the ringleader was in this situation, but at one point she and one of the other maids made a decision to steal from the family that they were working for, and they made off with clothing and some jewelry, and Margaret got caught when she tried to sell some of the clothing to make money. Now I imagine you have to be in pretty desperate circumstances to risk a job that's paying you, that's allowing you to live, in order to get some money for whatever else she might have needed that for, and selling fancy clothing to do that probably isn't the best scheme in the world. But she was, by this point, only 19 years old, and so I don't know if it was something she was roped into. I don't know if it was something that she was talked into or if it was something she dreamed up on her own. I know enough teenagers to know they don't always make the best choices. So she was caught and she was taken to Newgate Prison.

Crista Cowan: 14:20

The prison records then have a series of court appearances over the course of six months. Again, think about this it's 1728 and 1729 in London in a prison. That is not a good condition that she's in, and so I imagine when she finally got the sentence that told her that she was being transported to America, maybe there was a bit of relief knowing she was going to get out of that circumstance. I don't know. I do know that I went to London this last summer and I looked up some of the information about the prison. Okay, and the rations that they were fed were miserable. The conditions were damp, the conditions were crowded often it was very unclean and there wasn't an opportunity for any kind of self-care or cleanliness in that manner. It was pretty horrifying when you start thinking about it and envisioning the circumstances that she found herself in.

Crista Cowan: 15:30

After the sentencing, there is this whole thing called the parade of prisoners, so when somebody's sentenced to transport in America, it usually happens twice a year, which is why she had to wait so long, not just for the sentencing but then from the sentencing to the actual transport. Typically, prisoners were transported in April and October and it would take six to eight weeks to cross the ocean and so they would arrive in May or November, but the actual process of exiting the prison. Let me just read this to you, because this is kind of like again. You start to put yourself in their position and imagine what they dealt with. This was the circumstances according to some of the research that I've done.

Crista Cowan: 16:17

Upon the release from the prison, convicts were marched through the street from the prison to the transport ship, chained together two by two. This parade of convicts, which occurred three or four times a year, would generate considerable attention. People in London would follow the chained group as they emerged from Newgate and made their way through the streets down to Black Friars at the edge of the River Thames to board the convict ships. Lists of the criminals who were being transported were sometimes available for purchase by the curious among the crowd. The departure of convicts for the colonies generated so much interest that newspapers continued to report on its current occurrence up until the practice of transporting convicts to America ended. It was a form of almost like entertainment in the city at the time, and the humiliation that must have been felt by those people as they were paraded through town to the convict ships.

Crista Cowan: 17:16

Again, to put myself in that position and to imagine her and the fear she must have felt. It changes my perception of the story that I heard as a child. She landed in Annapolis, maryland that's where her particular convict ship came to, and this planter from Virginia had come up and purchased her indentureship Seven years that she was required to work for him. Now, planter from Virginia is probably rings some bells for some of you. He was also an enslaver, so she was indentured to him as a white woman from England, as a young woman, and he also enslaved several black slaves on his plantations Plantations. He had property in Richmond, he had property outside of the city and then he had property several miles away and to this day I haven't been able to pinpoint exactly where he had her live.

Crista Cowan: 18:18

Now this man had a wife and children and again the story that was told was that he was probably the father of her two sons. So about a year and a half or two years ago I pulled out my mom's DNA results and dove in headfirst looking to prove or disprove that fact, and evidence very quickly, very assuredly, surfaced that Tobias Phillips is in fact the father of the two children of Margaret Lawrence. I put that all on a timeline and started realizing that she got pregnant almost immediately after he purchased her indentureship and had a child, and then had another child within two years and then, within a couple of years after that, she died, and there is no record other than a notation of her death. There's no record of her cause of death, there's no record of her being ill, and so I suspect, based on the timing and when you timeline things out, all of a sudden stories start to take form that she was probably pregnant a third time and most likely died in childbirth, and there's no evidence that the child survived.

Crista Cowan: 19:38

Her two sons then were raised on that plantation. I don't know the conditions under which they were raised. I do, however, know that in Tobias's will he names those sons, does not call them his sons. He lists them with Margaret's last name of Lawrence, and he says that when they come of age they have to serve out the rest of their mother's indentureship contract and they also then have to serve out enough time to pay for the money that was going to be expended in raising them until they were of age. So this man who fathered these children almost certainly in a non-consensual situation because he owned this woman for all intents and purposes he then shows a little bit of his character in the way that he treats them. Little glimmer that there might have been some kind of conscience for this man is that he does state that once they have finished serving out their indentureship that they're to receive land, and he gives them some property. The older son, of course, as I mentioned, takes off, doesn't want anything to do with it. As soon as he is able, the younger son takes the gift and his property adjoins that of one of his older half brothers and he doesn't stay there long, but long enough to get married, long enough to earn some money and long enough to leave with what he needs to set himself up somewhere else for his life.

Crista Cowan: 21:32

I've always thought about this story from the perspective of Margaret. Lately I've been thinking about this story from the perspective of her sons. She died when they were little and yet somehow someone still knew enough that they were able to tell them those stories. Because, remember, those stories got passed down for generation about who Margaret was and how she came to America and the circumstances, or at least a rough outline of them. And yet her sons were children when she died. So somehow Margaret told her story enough that someone there on that property told them the story enough that they then passed it on to their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and those great-grandchildren started to write those stories down and then those stories continued to be perpetuated right up until my mom told it to me when I was a child, and I'm fascinated by this concept of how story gets transmitted over time and how it either remains the same or doesn't, what pieces we choose to share, what pieces we automatically, almost subconsciously, fill in the blanks with and then transmit those as if they're part of the story.

Crista Cowan: 22:50

And now that I've dug into this story for myself and have more details to flesh it out, I'm curious how I would transmit that story. I don't have children. I have nieces and nephews, I have siblings. My mom is going to hear this story now, with all of its fleshed out detail. How, then, do we continue to tell that story? That's something that's really interesting to me to think about, because the stories that come through us, the stories that have been told to us, the stories that we retell, they mean something.

Crista Cowan: 23:28

There's a reason we retell those stories, and I don't think it's just because we're related to these people. I think it's because there's something in the story that speaks to us, there's something in the story that we learn from. In the story of Margaret Lawrence there was something about a rebellious teenager who wanted to go her own way and make her own decisions and choose her own path and found herself making some poor choices and then ending up in really dire circumstances. And yet I continue to trace the descendants of Margaret Lawrence and from the two sons that she gave birth to there are now more than 50,000 descendants, and that's probably a pretty generous guesstimate of thousands of them. And there's more in my mom's DNA matches that we just haven't quite worked out yet but that I know are connected to this family.

Crista Cowan: 24:33

And when you think about all of the lives that sprung from the life and choices of one person and that if her choices had been different, that possibly where we end up might also be different, I'm just really intrigued by that concept. And so is there something about that in the stories that we transmit. Maybe the way that my mom told me the story was a way for a mother to teach a child, a cautionary tale, and I think a lot of the stories we share in families are that. That's not how I took it, maybe because I'm also headstrong and thought I knew everything at 18 and made some dumb choices at 19. But I had always the support and love of my family. I had to make choices about my own faith and had the support of my faith community, and so when I think about Margaret and the choices that she made, she didn't have that support. So the opportunity to explore my own life and my own choices and make my own path and to still have that love and support from my family is something that, knowing the story of Margaret Lawrence, actually just increases my gratitude for the way that my parents have shown up in my life and the way that my extended family has shown up in my life and the way that I've been able to make mistakes and not find myself in such dire circumstances. Now, part of that may be just a function of the fact that I grew up and came of age in the 1990s, not 1720s, but part of that may be a function of the fact that hopefully, we're evolving a little bit as a society and how we let people make choices for themselves and don't restrict them. Her choices were very limited and her outcome is a reflection of those limited choices. So what do I hope for the future? Because future, because of this story.

Crista Cowan: 26:50

Again, it's not a happy story, but there's hope in this story.

Crista Cowan: 26:53

I think there's hope that those mysterious figures in the past, those stories that we've heard growing up whether it's of a grandparent or, in my case, a five times, six times great grandparent um, I think that there's always more information to find.

Crista Cowan: 27:10

I think we can always piece together more parts of the story and that there's more inspiration to be found in those stories than sometimes we gave them credit for. I also think there's something about recognizing and honoring that people went through hard things and people survived hard things. Margaret didn't. She died, but her sons survived much theirs and recognize the conditions under which they were born and the conditions under which they were raised and the way in which they were likely treated as they were growing up, the fact that at least my ancestor became a man of honor and a man who took care of his family and a man who, from what I can tell, made good choices. There's something inspiring about that that I think I can learn from. So I'd love to hear from you a little bit about your inspiring stories. Your ancestor shrouded in mystery. I think that's a good conversation and probably one worth having.