VA-HIST query

In his Progress to the Mines narrative, William Byrd II described am October
1732 visit to Studley plantation in Hanover County where me met the widow
Sarah Winston Syme, future wife of John Henry and future mother of Patrick
Henry. Byrd described her as “a portly, handsome dame, of the family of
Esau, and [who] seemed not to pine too much for the death of her husband,
who was of the family of the Saracens.”

Mrs. Syme was not literally Jewish (i.e., "of the family of Esau") nor was
her late husband literally Moslem ("Saracen)." Haven't turned up anything
useful in the OED.  Is anyone aware of any scholarship about whether these
descriptors were idiosyncratic on Byrd’s part? or might they have had a
contemporary context?


-- 
Jon Kukla
www.JonKukla.com

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