The Worrilow family were among the first settlers in the English colony of Pennsylvania. The Delaware Valley was explored as early as Jamestown and Plymouth and was colonized, soon thereafter, by Swedes and Dutch who fought over rights to the territory and were eventually succeeded by the English in 1664.

The first English settlers in the Delaware Valley were Quakers who emigrated to what is now New Jersey onto land granted by James, Duke of York, to a company whose trustees included William Penn. A few years later Penn, son of a Lord of the Admiralty who had been of great service to Charles II during his exile and restoration, received a large land grant on the west side of the Delaware, and a few of the New Jersey Quakers crossed the river to the original Swedish settlement of Upland, now Chester, PA. Penn busied himself with encouraging English Quakers to buy land in his new colony, which he first visited in 1683. He landed briefly at Chester, by then re-named by one of his English land agents, before continuing upriver to found Philadelphia.

Penn’s agent Edward Markham laid out land to the northwest of the Chester settlement which an early settler named Edgmont, and it was to this area that Thomas Henry Worrilow brought his family in about 1687. The Worrilows had been yeomen or farmers in the village of Houghton, Staffordshire, England. The Quaker sect had been formed during the Interregnum (the period between the defeat of the Cromwell Puritans and the restoration of the Stuart Charles II). By the 1680s, with King Charles back on the throne, the Society of Friends was looked down upon and persecuted by all the established religions, which was Penn’s reason for starting a colony for them. Since we do not know when Thomas Worrilow joined the Quakers, we cannot tell whether he emigrated because of persecution or whether he joined the sect in order to purchase land and come to the New World. We do know, however, that he had been a land owner and a justice of the peace in Staffordshire and no doubt sought refuge from the turmoil that was the English government at that time.

Thomas and his wife Grace Perkes Worrilow brought with them five of their children, including two sons. One son, however, died young, without marrying, so all the American Worrilows are descended from their son John or one of their three surviving daughters. Although those of us who are interested in the genealogy have tried to find as many descendants as we can, there must be thousands who do not bear the name Worrilow and have no idea of who their ancestors were.

Although there are few records of the family before emigration, there are many in the early Edgmont Township history. One of the first weddings performed in the village was that of Thomas’s son John Worrilow and Anne Maris, daughter of another prominent Midlands Quaker. John and Anne also had only one son who survived them, so that there are many other descendants of their daughters who married into several of the other well-known early families in the colony.

Grace Worrilow died in 1700, and Thomas married a Philadelphia widow named Sarah Bird Brightwen. By this time he had turned over the Edgmont farm to his son John, and he and Sarah lived in a house at Third and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia until his death in 1709. Both Thomas and John were active in governmental affairs in the early colony and no doubt were well acquainted with the Proprietor William Penn and the other founding fathers of Pennsylvania.

Kay Hutchinson

This was a piece that my cousin Kay Hutchinson wrote over a year ago and I thought it would be a fitting first post for this new blog.  Kay really was the first person that sparked my interest in genealogy and the history of our family.  Her book, One Man’s Family, written in 1997, was, and still is, a valuable source of information and history of the Worrilow family.  I thank her for her work, council, and friendship.

Larry Worrilow