By now, you’ve learned a bit about Nicholas—and I still have much more to share with you about him. But you may be wondering: Who came before him? When did our Carter family arrive in America, and from where?
These are all great questions—ones I’m still working to answer myself.
However, I can offer an educated guess. As I mentioned in the first post, I believe Nicholas was born on April 2, 1755, in Morristown, New Jersey. That’s actually why I launched KYCarters.com on April 2: it was Nicholas’s 265th birthday. I meant to mention that in my first post, but it slipped my mind.
I call it an “educated guess” because I haven’t yet connected Nicholas directly to a specific Carter family living in Morristown in the 17th and 18th centuries. Still, I have two pieces of circumstantial evidence to support this theory.
First: his birthdate.
I found it in a transcript online—believe it or not, on Google. Nicholas’s daughter Jane married Seth Duncan and lived nearby in Boston, Kentucky. Their family owned a Bible that included the birthdates of Nicholas, his wife Catherinah, Seth and Jane, James, and Nicholas Jr. The transcript, likely typed up a century ago, was full of typos, but it listed Nicholas’s birthdate as April 2, 1755. Right or wrong, that’s the date I’ve chosen to celebrate.
Second: the Morristown connection.
We know that Nicholas and his brother Barnabas served together in the Revolutionary War. Interestingly, in the mid-1600s, a man named Nicholas Carter immigrated from England to America. He’s too early to be our Nicholas, but he had a son named Barnabas. Again, not our Barnabas, but the repetition of names is notable. My theory is that our Nicholas and Barnabas descend from this earlier Carter family. I suspect I’m missing just one generation to make the connection—and that’s one reason I started this blog: to help uncover that missing link.
Now, the strongest evidence: DNA.
Did you know that a man passes his Y chromosome virtually unchanged to his sons?
Remember high school biology? Males have one Y and one X chromosome; females have two Xs. Since women don’t have Y chromosomes, a son gets his Y chromosome only from his father. That same Y chromosome is passed down from generation to generation—nearly intact—which means it’s a reliable tool for tracing male ancestry.
So, I had my Y-DNA tested and entered into a global database. And guess what? My DNA matches several other Carters. All of them trace their lines back to Carter families—and all paths lead to Morristown, New Jersey.
While I haven’t yet found direct documentation connecting our Nicholas to Morristown, I feel fairly confident that’s where he came from.