There is a bit more to be added to Harold Forsythe's pertinent
abovservation that
> Edmund Morgan makes the point in American Slavery, American Freedom, that
> the reason it is hard to trace the succession of fortunes from the tobacco
> boom of 1618-1630 to the latter 17th century is that scholars have failed
> to trace inheritance through the women's line.

Its not just the fact that marriages sometimes buried early family names,
etc. The interests of subsequent generations of historians, family
historians, and geneaologists also contributed to the 'disappearance' of
these Virginians and their surnames from the second quarter of the 17th
cnetury ... and it fed into an impression first voiced for scholars by W.
J. Cash in his widely read Mind of the South.

At risk of boring everyone to tears, I treated this in a review of Jim
Perry's book in Reviews in American History in 1992.  The relevant
paragraphs (and notes) are below for convenience.

Jon Kukla

 . . . . With these limits of gender, race, and status fairly in mind,
[James Russell Perry's] Formation of a Society on Virginia's Eastern
Shore nevertheless has historiographical importance because Wilbur J.
Cash's The Mind of the South (1941) "continues to provide a controversial
and inescapable paradigm for Southern history fifty years after its
publication."*2*
  Like the child who asked why the emperor was not wearing any clothes,
Perry had the courage to ask candid questions about social development
in the first half of the seventeenth century and to demolish a
sociological myth, derived from Cash's early pages, that has left
contemporary scholarship with its fleshy fundamentals and fallacies
exposed. The Formation of a Society on Virginia's Eastern Shore forces
historians to confront the origins of Chesapeake social development in
the first half of the seventeenth century, where the inquiry properly
commences. For several decades, metachronism, false periodization, and
the fallacy of presumptive change have been parading naked before our
unseeing eyes.*3*
  Want to see the naked emperor? Check out the symposium in the April 1991
William and Mary Quarterly and remember that Perry's account of American
social development on the Eastern Shore ends in 1655, when "the
confluence of kin and affectional ties, neighborhood contacts, economic
links, and an effective exercise of authority had created a society that
could survive political conflict" (p. 225). Look at the chronology that
David Hackett Fischer abstracted in his defense of Albion's Seed: Four
British Folkways in America (1989):
<>. The Great Migration to Massachusetts Bay, 1629-1640
<> Tidewater Virginia, settled . . . between 1640 and 1675
<> The Delaware Valley, colonized in the period 1675-1725
<> The southern backcountry, settled circa 1717-1775 *4*
None of this is unique to Fischer--it has been around since The Mind of
the South--but whatever happened to 1607 ?
  How is it that early American historians accepted this chronological
sleight- of-hand? In four pages Cash sketched it as mere prologue-what
"any bright Southern schoolboy can tell you offhand"-to a 440-page book
challenging the Cavalier myth and the "legends. . . of the Old and the
New Souths." He noted the presence of early Virginia's "minor squires,
younger sons of minor squires, or adventurers who had got themselves a
crest, a fine coat, and title to huge slices of the country," but he
ascribed more importance to frontier farmers and laborers. Leadership in
seventeenth-century Virginia, Cash wrote, "passed inevitably to rough
and ready hands. While milord tarried at dice or languidly directed his
even more languid workmen, his horny-palmed neighbors increasingly wrung
profits from the earth, got themselves into position to extend their
holdings, . . . rose steadily toward equality with him, attained it,
[and] passed him." "Aristocracy in any real sense," Cash concluded, "did
not develop. . . until after 1700. From the foundations built up
by his father and grandfather, a Carter, a Page, a Shirley [sic] began to
tower decisively above the ruck of farmers, pyramided his holdings in land
and slaves, squeezed out his smaller neighbors, . . . [and] sent his sons
to William and Mary and afterward to the English universities or the law
schools in London."*5*
  Sound familiar? Surely Cash's Mind of the South prepared the soil for
the almost universal acceptance of Bernard Bailyn's "Politics and Social
Structure in Virginia"-arguably the most influential article in early
American history since World War II-which noted that "most of Virginia's
great eighteenth- century names, such as Bland, Burwell, Byrd, Carter,
Digges, Ludwell, and Mason, appear in the colony for the first time
within ten years either side of 1655" (emphasis added).*6* Scholars
interested in the timing of social change in the Chesapeake colonies,
however, risk two gender-related traps (one per- haps unique to
Virginia) if they draw inferences from surnames.
  Women in colonial Virginia, as elsewhere, typically adopted their
husbands' surnames upon marriage and thereby often obscured themselves
and their roles in the transmission of property and culture. As Edmund
Morgan assessed the myth that had descended from W. J. Cash, it seemed
"that the men who made their way to the top in the 1620s and 1630s in
Virginia were unable to perpetuate their family lines; the famous first
families of Virginia came to the colony later." Morgan objected that
while "in a patrilineal sense this was the case," seventeenth-century
Virginia was "becoming an economic matriarchy, or rather a
widowarchy."*7* Perry reports that in virtually all in- stances for the
early Eastern Shore "a relict's control over the settlement of the
estate of her deceased spouse was uncontested" (p. 80).
   Virginia's finest published genealogies present a second subtle trap
for unwary historians tracing patterns of social development by the
frail light of males' surnames. Genealogical research is affected by
the fecundity of a colonist's descendants (if there are descendants)
and their genealogical curiosity (or lack of it), and there are
misleading patterns in the "standard genealogical materials indexed in
Swem, Virginia Historical Index"--as David Hackett Fischer described
sources for part of Albion's Seed (p. 214n). Descendants of Virginia's
famous tidewater plantation families commissioned or inspired
genealogical research about Cash's Carters and Pages, Bailyn's
"Virginia's great eighteenth-century names," and Morgan's "famous first
families of Virginia [who] came to the colony later.*8* Late in the
nineteenth century, scions of Virginia's oldest families succumbed to a
pride of prior descent and in 1912 founded the Order of First Families
of Virginia, open only to those who could trace ancestry to a member of
the Virginia Company or a settler in Virginia prior to 1625. Heirs of
immigrants after 1625 need not apply, and latecomers such as Richard
and Anne Constable Lee or John Carter and his five wives make only
incidental appearances in this scholarship.*9* The curious result of
these hidden biases is an impressive genealogical literature that
overemphasizes the first, third, and fourth quarters of the seventeenth
century and leads scholars further into the vortex of Cash's myth while
other early Virginians remain obscure for want of curious modern
descendants.*10* The Formation of a Society on Virginia's Eastern
Shore, 1615-1655 escaped Cash's myth because it is rooted directly in
primary sources rather than Virginia's convenient published
biographical literature--and because Jim Perry had the courage to
report what he found there.

NOTES
. . . .

2. Thomas A. Underwood, "The Mind (and Physiology?) of the South," The
Southern Literary Journal 24 (1991): 110; James C. Cobb, "Does Mind no
Longer Matter? The South, the Nation, and The Mind of the South,
1941-1991," Journal of Southern History 57 (1991): 681- 718.
3. David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of
Historical Thought (1970), pp. 132-55.
4. David Hackett Fischer, "Albion and The Critics: Further Evidence and
Reflection," Wil- liam and Mary Quarterly 48 (1991): 260-61. The forum
critics were Jack P. Greene, Virginia Dejohn Anderson, James Horn, Barry
Levy, and Ned C. Landsman.
5. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (1941), pp. 14, viii, 6, 5-8. Shirley
is the name not of a prominent Virginia family but of the Charles City
County plantation owned by the Hill Carter family.
6. Bernard Bailyn, "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia," in James
Morton Smith, ed.,
Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (1959), p. 98; Jon
Kukla, "Order and Chaos in Early America: Political and Social Stability
in Pre-Restoration Virginia," American Historical Review 90 (1985):
297-98. The governor of Virginia compiled quite a different list of the
colony's prominent families at the time: "the Percys, the Barkleys, the
Wests, the Gages, the Throgmortons, Wyats, Degges, Chickeleys,
Moldsworths, Morrisons, Kemps, and hundred others, which I forbear to
name, lest I should misherald them in the Catalogue"; Sir William
Berkeley, A Discourse and View of Virginia (London, 1663), p.3.
7. Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery-American Freedom: The Ordeal of
Colonial Virginia (1975), p.166.
8. Cash, Mind of the South, p. 8; Bailyn, "Politics and Social Structure
in Virginia, " p. 98; Morgan, American Slavery-American Freedom, p. 166.
9. The Order of First Families of Virginia sponsored three editions of
Adventures of Purse and Person (1956, 1964, 1987). The Virginia State
Library and Archives is preparing a much-needed Dictionary of Virginia
Biography with subjects selected for historical (rather than genealogical)
reasons.
10. E.g., Martin H. Quitt, "Immigrant Origins of the Virginia Gentry: A
Study of Cultural Transmission and Innovation," William and Mary Quarterly
46 (1988): 629, 640-42; Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the
Colonial South, 1585-1763 (1978), pp. 1507-1629.

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