Ellison Shares Family History
Mark Ellison, a Rosebud-Lott High School graduate, enthralled members of the Rosebud Wednesday Study Club November 12 with stories of his ancestors beginning with Robert Ellison, who was 2 years old in 1744 when he arrived in the New World with his family from Northern Ireland to William Penn’s Quaker colony.
He went on to fight in the American Revolution and at a time when few in the colonies were literate, he received a “formal British education,” enabling him to become a surveyor when that profession was in high demand to map out the new land and help establish land titles.
Ellison, a “hometown boy” from Baileyville, a community east of Rosebud, remarked after being introduced that speaking at that venue (the community room of the D Brown Library) was “very special. I got my polio shot here, graduated from the Little Red School House here and got my first kiss outside by a bush.”
He said that growing up he had heard family history like most other youngsters, but it wasn’t until Covid hit that he became active in pursuing his family’s stories. “My wife was going crazy with me not having anything to do.”
He became a member of Ancestry.com and qualified to join the Sons of the American Revolution, the “little brothers” of the Daughters of the American Revolution. He said they were the little brothers because they were not as large and well-organized as the DAR and the DAR helped them out on occasion.
Ancestry.com and the SAR gave him the tools to find the “nitty-gritty” of his family’s history. He said the history he learned in elementary, high school and college was” just the cover, just the cover layer” of history. Even the info from the SAR was concerned mostly with the battles. He became interested in how people, specifically his family, lived at their time in history.
The Maxwells (his mother’s side of the family) came from Scotland and there is a Maxwell Castle in Scotland. He showed a picture of Hedrick Maxwell, Sr. and his wife, Martha Pirtle Maxwell with their children and dog standing in front of their “castle” at Cedar Springs, a community north of Rosebud. The “castle” looks to be a fourroom wooden house with a front porch.
Ellison praised William Penn and his colony that welcomed Lutherans, Presbyterians, Catholics and Native Americans. The Pirtle side and the Ellison side of the family came through Penn’s colony, then were lured south by the call of cheap land. They took the Old Wagon Road from Philadelphia to Lancaster, PA, to Winnsboro, NC, in a Conestoga wagon.
The toddler Robert Ellison grew up in North Carolina and earned his living as a surveyor. Sometimes he was paid in land. He married Elizabeth Potts, who was Welsh, around 1770 in North Carolina. He was part of the militia there which was a mounted group. When the Revolutionary War broke out, the militia joined with the Continental Army to fight the British. He left Elizabeth with three children, the youngest 3 years old, to run the farm.
Cornwallis and his troops seized the farm, burned down the house, pulled half of Elizabeth’s hair out. Elizabeth then took her family—three children and three slaves—and headed for Charleston where she had family. They walked the 90 miles. Robert meanwhile had been captured and was on a prison ship at Charleston. “He was on a cruise,” Ellison joked.
When the war was over, Elizabeth with her black and white family returned to Winnsboro to reclaim the land. There she provided land to the Continental Army to train troops. Robert returned and they had three more children. Robert went on to serve in the House and Senate of South Carolina and voted on the adoption of the state constitution.
Ellison told many other stories of incidents in the lives of his many ancestors, but concluded his talk by saying that Elizabeth was registered as a patriot in the Revolutionary War. He said history is most often written about the men, but the women and their stories are history, too. He also spoke of the courage it took on the part of the men, women and children to head South and West in wagons to build a new land. He urged his listeners to become interested in the lives that their ancestors had led and that he was ready to help with their research.
Ellison has worked for various politicians and lobbyists at the national and state levels. He is currently working with a company from Israel that builds desalinization plants and was on his way to Fort Stockton for a meeting there. “Fort Stockton sits on an underground body of salt water. We are going to try to reclaim that.”
Upon an invitation from Carol Stock, WSC president, to return to speak about water in Texas, Ellison said he would be glad to do so.
Photo by Sheryl Fuchs