Parks/Million Genealogy

Come on in –

meet the families

Parks, Parke, Jones, Shearer, Johnson, Fowler, Scudder, Gentry, Denny, Massie

Million, Christopher, Newby, Heathman, Dozier, Perkins, Jennings

Scanning the 200 names on the 1788 Tax List for Madison County, Kentucky, the first one that catches my eye is James Ingo Dozier, a 5th great grandfather on my mother’s side. Next is his son Leonard. On down the list are two more sons, James and Zachariah, and a son-in-law, James Montgomery.

The Dozier clan had come to Kentucky from Virginia in 1779, as surveyors and land speculators. James Ingo had purchased 700 acres on Otter Creek just south of Boonesborough from Green Clay. Son John acquired large tracts in Nelson and Ohio Counties. Zachariah bought and sold land in adjacent counties and in Illinois, and young James eventually acquired a large estate in Lewis County. The youngest son, Thomas, acquired 300 acres in Madison County but soon moved to Missouri to practice medicine on another frontier.

The next recognizable name on the 1788 list was John Newby, a 4th great grandfather, who is most likely the John Newby who signed a petition to the Virginia legislature at Boonesborough in October 1779. He is certainly the John Newby who married Susannah Embry in Wake County, North Carolina, in 1784 and soon thereafter moved to Madison County and settled on Tates Creek along with several other relatives and neighbors, including Matthew Symes (Sims), another 5th great grandfather on the tax list.

Over the next 20 years, the families of all my ancestors arrived in Madison County as pioneers settling along Otter, Tates and Muddy Creeks. Million, Perkins, Heathman, Jennings, Christopher, Broaddus, Munday, Parke (later Parks), Quick, Fowler, Gentry, Scudder, Shearer, Jones, Massie. Nearly all came from Virginia and North Carolina. Most of them came as a family or with a group of neighbors. They intermarried with each other generation after generation, cousins not infrequently marrying cousins.

This site is a tribute to these resourceful pioneers. Here you will find links to family trees that I have generated from a large data base of my ancestors and related families. The genealogies are a merging of work by others supplemented by my own research and verification. You will also find photographs that my parents and I collected over the year along with short histories of some of the key families.

About me: I am Robert James (Jim) Parks, son of James Edwin Parks and Evelyn Million. I live in Frankfort, Ky., but I own property in Madison County near the village of Newby. Now retired, I reported for newspapers in Kentucky, North Carolina and Wisconsin during the 1960s and 1970s, then worked for Kentucky State Government (Revenue and Education) until 2005.

Back to the Top