An "Uncertaine Rumor" of Land: New Thoughts on the English Founding of Virginia's Eastern Shore

The years 1620 and 1621 saw three small camps - a former Virginia Company salter and his "Jamestown bride;" a recently arrived captain with hired tenants from the crush at Kicotan; ten tenants for the Secretary's Land - pave the way for English settlement on a remote Virginia peninsula. Separated from Virginia's mainland by twenty miles of the ocean-like Chesapeake Bay, the isolated life in these outposts was interrupted when other colonists streamed in on their flight from the mayhem of an Indian attack that killed a quarter of Virginia's mainland European population. Sir George Yeardley and Thomas Savage negotiated with "the Laughing King" for more land on this safe, bountiful peninsula. The confusion of these days would later result in an "uncertaine rumor" about who owned what on Virginia's Eastern Shore.

An "Uncertaine Rumor" of Land reveals a fresh, intriguing view on this little-known facet of colonial Virginia history.

Jenean Hall has relished stories of Virginia history since the days of 4th grade when she and all her classmates were required to make scrapbooks for history class. Reared in a railroad family in a railroad town, Jenean captured memories of that town, Victoria, in her book, Victoria Stories: Glimpses of a Virginian Railway Town (2011). During her career as a school psychologist, Jenean moved to Virginia's Eastern Shore, the setting of her maternal grandmother's beloved childhood memories.On weekends and vacations, Jenean pursued the documentation of her grandmother's genealogy and discovered that the presence of that family in Accomack and Northampton counties traces solidly into the seventeenth century, one line reaching back to the nine ships of Jamestown's Third Supply in 1609.Jenean continues to make her home on Virginia's Eastern Shore where she volunteers to research for special projects such as the Virginia Department of Historic Resource's archaeology excavation at Eyreville Plantation and Northampton Historic Preservation Society's genealogy and history lectures. Her current project is a second book of Eastern Shore history, this one titled Another Day: More Stories from the Early English Records of Virginia's Eastern Shore.