Saturday Night Challenge: Which Ancestor Do You Most Admire

This week's Saturday Night Challenge and the links to the other bloggers that participated can be found HERE.  The actual wording of the challenge is:

1)  The Family History Hound listed 20 Questions about your Ancestor, and I'm going to use some of them in the next few months.  

2)  Please answer the first question - "Which ancestor do you admire the most?"

3)  Write your own blog post, make a comment on this post, or post  your answer on Facebook or Google+.  Please leave a link to your answer in comments on this post.



My family history research includes interesting people who do not have a direct ancestral line to me.  Often I will go wondering off into a branch that has an especially interesting person that I have ran across.  Although that disqualifies my research as a strict genealogy I still work my tree in the way that I enjoy. I have found many ancestors that I admire in my tree.  Therefore picking the person in my research that I admire most was difficult.  Mary Draper Ingles is by far a very admirable person so I decided to write about her this week even though the connection is very remote.  

Mary Draper Ingles

1732-1815

Mary Draper is not a direct ancestor of mine.  She is very indirectly related to my children.  But I am proud to have her information included in my family history and I admire Mary very much even if the connection is very remote.  My children's father's paternal grandmother, Hazel Fan Coffman Lyle,  has many famous lines in her tree which have interesting historical men.  This is the line that also traces indirectly to Mary Draper Ingles.   Hazel's mother was Emma Norvell,   Emma was the daughter of Isabella Givens Duffield and she was the daughter of Mary Polly Givens.  The father of Mary was Robert Givens and he was the son of William Givens.  Captain John Givens was William's father.  John was the brother of Elizabeth Givens and she was married to Brigadier General Andrew Lewis. whose brother was Thomas Lewis.  Thomas had a daughter named Agatha and she married Colonel John Stuart.  One of their daughters was Jennie Lewis Stuart who married Major Robert Crockett.   Robert Crockett's sister was Jane Crockett and she married John Draper  whose father's name was also John Draper and he was the brother of Mary Draper Ingles.

Mary Draper was born in 1732 to Irish Immigrant parents in Pennsylvania.  In 1750 she married William Ingles and they migrated to a small Scots Irish settlement in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.  In July of 1755 while she was heavily pregnant with her third child and the men were out in the fields, the community was raided by Shawnee.   Some of the settlers were killed and some were taken captive.  Mary was one that was taken captive.  The Shawnee took their captives 500 miles away.  One day Mary grabbed her chance to escape.  Using the Ohio River as her guide she walked home.   You can learn more about Mary's ordeal HERE.  An Indiana author named James Alexander Thong wrote a book about her.  To prepare for the book he donned his back pack and walked in her foot steps.  It is a wonderful book.  It can be found HERE.   There has also been a TV movie made about Mary Draper Ingles which can be found HERE.   She deserves to be honored in this blog for her courage and her amazing survival story.  

The legend of Mary Draper Ingles can be found in detail all over the net.  Below is a map of the route she walked home.

She escaped in the fall and the weather became colder and colder as she traveled.  She had no way to hunt live game or fish.  At one point she even ate earth worms.  The woman she escaped with and was traveling with got so hungry she even tried to kill Mary for food.  By the time Mary arrived at her destination there was snow on the ground and she had no shoes.  In fact she no longer had clothes or even a blanket.  Today the descendants of Mary Draper Ingles have rebuilt the cabin that the family lived in after she got home twenty miles from the original site.  The original one that was raided was burnt and was located at what is  now Virginia Tech.  

Even though Mary is technically in the ancestry of my children's on their father's side and then it is distant,  I wanted to pick her for this weeks challenge.