James McCallisterPioneer in the Valley of Virginia

This site is becoming a book.

If you've visited here before, things look different today. Here's why.

For several years this site shared what we had pieced together about James McCallister, an Irish-born pioneer who settled along Kerrs Creek in the Valley of Virginia around 1754 and later near the Jackson River, where he died in 1801. Some of the research here has been overtaken by newer findings, and updating it page by page wasn't practical. A book lets me get it right and tell the whole story the way it deserves. While I finish writing it, I've set the old pages aside.

This is a pause, not an ending. Someday the site may return in a new form, alongside the book.

Book cover: From Kerry to Kerrs Creek — In Search of James McCallister, by Bill McAllister. A painted frontier scene of a log cabin beside a creek beneath autumn mountains. Work in progress

A work in progress

From Kerry to Kerrs Creek

In Search of James McCallister

by Bill McAllister

Still being written — not yet published.

A fuller telling

The book will cover the same ground as the old site, but will go much deeper — and it will be built in two parts. The first will be a narrative: the story of James, his family, and a search that took more than thirty years. The second will be a technical genealogy — the documents, sources, and evidence laid out for fellow researchers who want to follow the trail for themselves.

One discovery worth sharing

because it changes the whole story

For generations, everyone assumed James was Scots-Irish — a Presbyterian from Ulster, like most of his neighbors on the Virginia frontier. I believed it too, for twenty-five years.

It wasn't true. It was Y-DNA testing that tipped us off — but it was old-fashioned genealogy, following the documented trees of our DNA matches, that made the connection: James's family almost certainly came from County Kerry, in the southwest of Ireland, where they had lived for hundreds of years. I went looking for one kind of ancestor and found something older, and far more surprising.

Stay in touch

If you're a descendant, a cousin, a fellow researcher — or you simply wandered in — I'd love to hear from you. Send a note if you'd like to know when the book is published. And if you'd like to read drafts of the chapters as they're finished and share your thoughts, you'd be very welcome — just say the word.