The Glorious Generation

The Glorious Generation was born just after the worst convulsions of the English Civil War. Its members grew up under renewed concern for order, schooling, and discipline, then came of age amid colonial war, imperial consolidation, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, when James II was displaced by William and Mary. It afforded my family my earliest patrilineal ancestors in the New World with the landing of Amor Via (born c. 1660) in Virginia in 1677.

AMOR VIA. c. 1660–c. 1717.     My paternal great⁹-grandfather. Good information on Amor Via, the first of the family to arrive in the New World, is precious and scarce. (I have compiled every source I am aware of onto this page, and, if I am missing any, would sincerely appreciate amendments.) Online genealogists list him under diverse names. The only one that appears in historically grounded documents, however, is Amor (or Amer), though names like William and Pierre have hitched a ride onto his record over time. Because verified records for this particular Via are lacking, document search algorithms on Ancestry and similar sites have, for decades, routinely pulled up irrelevant files containing those names. Well-meaning researchers have then conflated those records with Amor. Specifically, William seems to stem from a “William Vier” who arrived in Virginia in 1675, found in Cavaliers and Pioneers: Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents and Grants, 1666–1695, Vol. II (pages 165–166). Pierre comes from The Compendium of American Genealogy (p. 322), which notes that a “Pierre Viet” settled at Manakin Town in 1698.

The oldest Via in America to which I can incontrovertibly connect myself is Micajah Via Sr. (c. 1740–1818), my great⁶-grandfather. Because he dwelt in Hanover and Albemarle Counties, he has been linked to a William Via that died there in 1782 and bequeathed his plantation to a grandson “Micajah Viar” in his will of April 1782. This William, who would hence been my great⁸-grandfather, has himself been presumed on the basis of place, date and the resemblance in name-forms to the son of Amor Via, the obscure but widely discussed patriarch of the Vias. To my knowledge, he is the only candidate for the Via immigrant ancestor, being the only one to bear the right name-form at the right place at the right time. This Amor is hence the first American ancestor of my line, and I have attempted to piece together his life using the scant relevant resources. As follows are the only concrete facts of his life as I understand it.

The historical facts of Amor Via

In Patent Book No. 6, listed in Cavaliers and Pioneers: Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents and Grants, 1666–1695, Vol. II (pages 178–179), the following entry appears listing Amor among several transports to the Americas for the purpose of farming in Virginia. It is interesting to note “James the Frenchman”; if Amor was indeed French, as is so widely claimed, then why does only James earn the epithet? Is it because Amor’s name is so obviously foreign that it would be superfluous to note?

The following entries, recording daughters Naomi, Judith, Margaret, and Mary, appear in The Vestry Book and Register of St. Peter’s Parish 1684–1786 (pages 400, 445):

In the New Kent County Rent Roll in the Parish of St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s, 1704, in Early Virginia Families Along the James River: Their Deep Roots and Tangled Branches Vol. I (page 138), “Amer Via” is listed on 50 acres. If he arrived as an indentured servant, he has fulfilled his contract and is now a freeholder. This seems to me to be very certainly the same man as in the 1677 land patent, as that patent had 14 servants on 700 acres, which would come out to 50 each.

In the 1708/9 processioning of St. Paul’s Parish lands (the parish carved out of St. Peter’s), listed in The Vestry Book of St. Paul’s Parish, Hanover County, Virginia, 1706–1786 (page 217), “Amor Viah” is named a precinct overseer with George Turner. (Processioning was the periodic Anglican-mandated practice of walking property lines to confirm boundaries and prevent encroachment.)

The lands of James Blackwell Sen,^r Geo: Turner, Benj:^a Buckley the Widdow Thompson, Gabriel Heath, John Barnet, and Amor Viah being made one precinct, of which the said Geo: Turner, and Amor Viah, were Appointed Overseers, who made this return on the Back of the Order (viz,) in Pursuance of an Order of Vestry held for S,^t Pauls Parish for proceſsioning of Lands We Amor Viah & Geo: Turner in Company with Rob,^t Thompson Edw,^d Burnet, John Howard and George Jones, have proceſion’d our lands into one precinct, except the failures hereafter mentiond and also the dividing Lines betwixt each other without any Exceptions: Also James Blackwell Sen,^r being in Company with us where his land Joind upon part of the Afores,^d land proceſsion’d into one precinct. These following are the failures, viz. Geo: Turners Land begins upon the main run of Mattadecun creek, thirty Chains below the mouth of a bottom, called the Spring Bottom and James Turners late of this county Deceas’d by a late Survey made a Small incroachm,^t there Also Luke Howard Bought of James Turner late of this county, a parcel of Land for forty Acres, more or Leſs, bounding upon Geo: Jones’s Line and upon Rich,^d Butlers line, & upon M,^r Rob,^t Booths line, y^e Said forty acres more or leſs, as Afores,^d hath three Sides, two thereof we find but the Line dividing it from the said Booth’s Land we cannot Find. but thus far we find, viz. two corner Trees pointing out the line according to Our Judgments.

Subscrib’d , Amor Viah, & Geo: Turner

A 1711 processioning (page 226) appears to list a Margaret Via in his place, taken by many to mean that he had died by then and that the land was in his widow’s care. This is, as far as I can tell, the only strong source for his wife’s name:

In the same book (pages 250–251), Amor’s name appears again on the 3^rd of April, 1716, in another processioning, as follows. This is often taken to be posthumous. Margaret has become Mary (which could be a misreading of Marg).

Summary and other leads

And that is all. Those are all of the strong facts of Amor as they appear in his lifetime. He was not known, in the historical record, as a Huguenot (or even as a Frenchman!), as a privateer, as a blacksmith, or as any of the other fantastical things ascribed to him. The historical record merely knows him as a young man of uncertain background who arrived as an indentured servant, worked as a tenant farmer, and eventually, in his old age, was a small freeholder in rural Virginia. There are several interesting leads, however, which follow:

Dr. Socrates Maupin (1808–1871), in The Story of Gabriel and Marie Maupin, refers to the Via immigrant, Amor, as William—but only once, with a question mark appended. Had he not known of Amor, as he seems not to have, William is a reasonable guess at the name of the Via ancestor, as William was the family’s most popular given name in its first centuries in America. My own great-grandfather was William James Via.

In his Ancestral Lines from Maine to Virginia (2002, pages 190–191), genealogist Carl Boyer III (1937–2019) allows for Amor’s four mentioned daughters as well as two sons: Robert, presumed from C. G. Chamberlayne’s transcriptions of the parish books, and William, citing a 2002 account by Mrs. Elaine Marie Via Bouscher—this would be the same William to which belonged the aforementioned 1782 will. In a 1732 processioning in the St. Paul’s book (pages 278–279), a William does seem to have inherited Amor’s land:

Judy Maupin Pons has put forth the interesting notion that there was actually a third William, an early son of Amor’s born shortly after his arrival in America, to account for the long gaps between the births of the known individuals at play. There are not, to my knowledge, any sources to support this, but it is an intriguing idea.

Notes on the name

The name forms appear in the primary sources as follow. Multiple mentions in one source or entry are not counted.

The divergent name forms show that it was clearly a foreign one to English speakers. Amaury was a contemporary French name. A more interesting, and perhaps stronger, possibility is Amour or Amor, a rare name attested in medieval France and including the eighth-century St. Amor, founder of Amorbach Abbey. Interestingly, there was also an ancient Saint Amor the Martyr venerated at Saint-Amour, Jura, alongside a companion named Viator. The Amours and Amors seem invariably from Latin amor, “love”.

I have hence referred to this first Via as Amor, as that is the form predominantly used in the final attestations of him, and which more resembles the candidate names (Amaury being cognate to Amory).

The surname’s pronunciation, indicated by the spellings Via and Viah, appears to have been something like VY-ə, which, in a non-rhotic accent, could be heard and interpreted as Viar (one of the spellings that appears in the 1800s). This appears to have worn down to VY in most families and hypercorrected in modern times to VEE-ə, though I do remember a classmate in my school who pronounced my name VY-ə.

Rumor and mythmaking

The American Huguenot Society lists a “Pierre Amer Via” as an established Huguenot ancestor. As I said, I believe the name Pierre is erroneous here; maybe it is a conflation of Amor Via with Pierre Viet, a 1698 settler of Manakin Town, or it comes from Ancestry’s algorithm’s propensity to suggest the Pierre Vio of the the 1653–1668 Guer baptismal records, who, so far as I can tell, has nothing to do with our Amor.

Most Via family lore to do with Amor is preposterous mythological accretion meant to tell a more heroic ancestral narrative than a transported servant. One publication, cited by Erica Lewis, called “The Totem Pole” by Harold Houston Via (Issue #6), gives the following:

The lack of citations here disinclines me to believe any of it, but family lore, untrue as it may be, is always useful in telling us about what a family aspired to be and what they wished to see in its history. However, Amor Via, as far as we can tell at present, was an indentured servant—probably of foreign, maybe French, extraction—who eventually became a freeholder in Virginia and seems to have initiated the Vias of the American South.