“At a Court held for
So began the county court record in his majesty’s royal colony of Virginia, and there I found the court orders which gave guardianship of the young orphan Daniel, one of my ancestors, to his Uncle Samuel.
Reading several-hundred-year- old handwritten documents is an interesting challenge. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization often reflect the imagination and ingenuity of the writer, and this doesn’t take into consideration penmanship and terminology.
But it was actually none of those things that caught my eye
in this particular legal document; rather, it was the reminder that at this
early date
It occurred to me as I read the court orders, that my
ancestor Daniel spent almost half of his life as a British colonial citizen.
For the last half of his life, he was a citizen of the
As I read the microfilm containing these old records and thought about the changes in political citizenship that took place in Daniel’s life, I thought of these Bible words: “For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13-14).
Daniel had to join a revolution and fight a war to make his change of citizenship a reality. But God and his Son have fought our battle, won the victory, and brought us into their own kingdom completely as a result of Heaven’s mercy and grace.
“Our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians