After the 1700s, there were few newcomers to the shores of the Potomac, so those that stayed inevitably married among themselves. The limits of travel by horse and boat in a rural region meant that social and business contacts were local and few. In fact, social circles were much narrower, almost always separated by race, usually by religion, and often by wealth and social status. Not surprisingly, families spent most of their social life with their relatives, close neighbors and fellow churchgoers.
By the mid-1800s, many of the Catholics around the Jesuit missions in Southern Maryland were cousins of their neighbors or even their spouses.
One of the advantages of an internet genealogy is that these family histories can be easily linked together just as the families themselves were intertwined. One of our hopes is that you will come to know not just one ancestral line, but the whole extended family networks of the past.
Currently we have material on these families