Virginia Founders

 

My 7g-grandfather was George "the Jacobite" Marjoribanks, born about 1690 in Scotland and a participant in the Second Jacobite Rebellion of about 1735.

He was captured by the British, put in chains, his property confiscated by the government, and shipped to the colonies as a slave (indentured servant is a PC term applied much later.) In 1735 there were many white slaves. I don't know what weapons he carried in the rebellion but I know that I spent many great days as a boy lugging another grandfather's single-shot Sears Ranger ($6 new) .22 rifle around the rugged Madison county farms of the sons of Rebecca Malinda Marchbanks, all surnamed DeBruhl. My ten year old grandson now owns that rifle and shoots it in Washington State as responsibly as I did. I, who killed nothing with it on innumerable hunting trips.

Anyone who thinks I would sell my self and my grandson into the chains and slavery that my honored grandfather escaped, before his death in 1740, by giving up the firearm ownership bequeathed to me by a long line of better men than I is a fool.

This article reminds me that I am a proud native of North Carolina who was lucky enough to marry a Virginia Belle in 1957 and become an adopted Virginian. How much we owe those Virginia Founders.

Horace Smith