For centuries, the English ruled with their class distinctions. Although the Barons and Earls became proprietors of land in the New World, they did not make America their home.
Essentially, there were two classes of people in America—the planters and the gentry. The habits of the higher planting class were the habits of the English rural gentry, and the whole tone of the social life there was practically the same as that prevailing in every English county. Like the father belonging to the circle of country gentlemen, he saw that, in addition to the independence, heartiness, and refinement of its social life, the Colony possessed in tobacco culture a means by which a son starting there with a fair estate might steadily improve his fortunes. By the time of the great migration, many English merchants (the gentry class) had amassed a fortune from business enterprises. However, wealth gained by labor did not promote one to a higher-class gentleman.
The Jamestown colonists were listed on the Supply Ships “as gentlemen.”
In a petition to the Privy Council that the London Company presented some time previous to the revocation of its charter in 1624, they declared that many of the sub-patentees of the very extensive public land grants, some of whom had gone out to Virginia, were “men of noble and worthy families, and possessors of such large fortunes that they were able to expend great sums in settling and improving their plantations.” The patents to private land grants recorded in the Colony in the short interval between 1622 and 1624 were, in many instances, obtained by persons who could justly lay claim to the exact distinguished social origin, and a considerable number of these single patentees entered in their patents as “gentlemen.”
The first adventurers of Jamestown brought no women. They expected to make their fortune in the new Colony, and the great plantations in Tidewater, Virginia, emerged some years after Powhatan killed off half the colonists.
Tobacco became a means to wealth in the colonies. If the adventurer could acquire fertile lands to plant and ship tobacco abroad, he was known as a “planter.” The farmer must have at least twenty enslaved people to claim this class. The thousands of acres acquired through initial land grants put this train on the track. Yet, the most average planter possessed adequate acreage to leave as an inheritance to his sons. One can ascertain from his estate that he acquired other parcels of land in addition to the original land grant. One might ask what happened to the plantation inherited by a widow or how she managed it. In those days, the legal position of the husband was such that all properties were “in his name.” The answer to the question of management issues is that widows of large plantations did not remain widows for long. While tracing my Smith ancestry in Georgia, I discovered that Davis Smith became the owner of two additional farms or plantations through later marriages.
The rights of the primogeniture or succession belonged to the eldest son. By reading the old wills, the genealogist can presume the identity of the eldest son to the youngest.
The genealogist can certainly trace his early Virginia ancestors back to English nobility! The key is to search land patents, deeds, tax records, estates, wills, marriages, and genealogical data.
Sources: Social Life of Virginia. In the Seventeenth Century. An Inquiry into the Origin of the Higher Planting Class, Together with an Account of the Habits, Customs, and Diversions of the People by Philip Alexander Bruce, Late Corresponding Secretary of the Virginia Historical Society and author of the “Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century; Rise of the New South; Short History of the United States.