Ward Family Branch

On the Ward Branch of my family which is my Mother's Father side, you will find other surnames such as Norman, Church, Keen and Thompson just to name a few.    

Click on the Map to go to the Ward Family Lineage, this is where you will need an access code.

                     Ward Surname Ancestry

In England. Robert le Warde, was recorded in the 1273 Oxfordshire rolls, he was a guard; while Walter de la Warde, in the Suffolk rolls of the same year, lived by a fen. The early spelling of the surname was Warde, although it generally later became Ward.

Wards were substantial landowners at Givendale near Ripon in north Yorkshire in the late 13th century. Sir Simon Ward was sheriff of Yorkshire in 1315. This line died out in the early 1500's.

First records of another Ward line began in Norfolk in 1363 when John Ward obtained the manor of Kirby Bedon through marriage. This family was described as lesser Norfolk gentry.

However, they took a step upward when Edward Ward was able to take possession of Bixley Hall at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. The main branch of this Ward family continued as local gentry there until the 18th century. Sir Edward Ward who died of a fever in 1742 at the young age of 21 was much grieved for.

In the early 1600's William Ward, a sixth son of this family who saw no prospects at home, departed for London where he became apprenticed as a jeweler. In time he became a very wealthy jeweler and goldsmith to royalty:

• his son Humble Ward married into the well-born Dudley family.
• and their descendants, based at Sedgeley in Staffordshire, became the Earls of Dudley.

The first Earl of Dudley was briefly British Foreign Secretary in 1827. Many later Wards were Conservative politicians. The actress Rachel Ward came from this family.

Elsewhere, John Ward, of uncertain origins, served in the British capture of Gibraltar in 1704 and stayed on. His descendants were merchants there and later in London. George Ward became a large landowner on the Isle of Wight.

The 19th century surname distribution showed the Ward name to be found more in the north of England, with 30% in Yorkshire and Lancashire.

In Ireland, Ward appeared in Donegal and Galway as an anglicization of the Gaelic mac an Bhaird, meaning "son of the bard." This is where our descendants came from.

The Mac an Bhairds, dating from the 11th century, originally served as the bards to the O'Donnells in Donegal and the O'Kellys in Galway and were among the learned families of late medieval Ireland. Aedh Buidh Mac an Bhaird or, in his anglicized form, Hugh Ward, was born in Donegal in 1593 and is considered the father of Irish archaeology.

Other Donegal names such as MacWard and Deward became Ward as well over the course of the 19th century.

The Wards of county Down, the head of whose family was Viscount Bangor, came from England, however. The line began with Bernard Ward from Cheshire who had been appointed Surveyor General of Ireland by Queen Elizabeth. In 1570 he acquired Castle Ward in Strangford, county Down which was to be the family home. And later Bernard Ward rebuilt the castle in the 18th century.

In America. The early Wards who came to America were English and many of them settled in New England.

New England. Andrew Ward may have been the first Ward in America, arriving in 1633 and later settling in Fairfield, Connecticut where he died in 1660. He obviously was a person of some importance as there is a special monument to him in Fairfield's old burying grounds. William Ward, according to family lore, came from Yorkshire. He arrived in Sudbury in 1639 and later settled in Marlborough. His line in America was covered in Charles Martyn's 1925 book The William Ward Genealogy.

From him came Nahum Ward, a sea captain who bought land in what became the town of Shrewsbury. That was where Artemas Ward, a Major General in the Revolutionary War, was born. His home there is now the Artemas Ward House. A later Artemas Ward of the family became a successful businessman in the early 1900's:

"It was said that Artemas Ward gave over four million dollars to Harvard University on condition that they erect a statue in honor of General Ward. Harvard provided the money for a statue, but not enough to give the general a horse."

John Ward meanwhile was an officer in Cromwell's army from Gloucestershire who had come to New England after the restoration of the monarchy in England in 1660. His descendants settled in Newport, Rhode Island where they were first merchants and then town officials.

Samuel Ward was Governor of Rhode Island in 1764 and was later a delegate to the Continental Congress. His descendants were distinguished:

• his grandson Samuel established the Bank of Commerce in New York. He was also a founder of New York University and the New York Temperance Society
• while two of his children were very notable. There was Sam, a political lobbyist in Washington who married into the Astor family, and Julia, a poet and author who wrote Battle Hymn of the Republic.

More than half of the Wards that came to America sailed from Irish ports. Some early arrivals, Scots Irish, were:

• James Ward, our direct descendant, who came from Donegal to Philadelphia around 1730 and settled with his three sons in Augusta county, Virginia.
• and John Ward also from Donegal, who settled in Amberson Valley in Pennsylvania sometime in the 1760's.

Francis Ward had come to South Carolina from Antrim in Ireland around 1730. He married there the daughter of a Cherokee chief but was later banished from the tribe. Their daughter Nancy married his nephew, Bryant. However, this marriage also did not last; Nancy, known as "Beloved Woman," became a much-respected mediator between the Cherokees and white settlers and lived onto 1822.

• while Bryant died in Georgia in 1808. His descendants through his son John were part of the Cherokee forced emigration from Georgia in the 1830's.
• James Ward emigrated from Donegal in 1860 and went to work in the Pittsburgh iron and steel mills. The family story is that he had a stroke at the mill and his 14-year-old son Michael had to go to work in a glass factory to support the family.

Some Irish Wards made it to Texas at an early stage. A certain "William Ward of Ireland" was inscribed among the dead at the Alamo in 1836; while Edward Ward was a mercenary for the Mexicans a few years later.

James Ward and His Sons in Virginia. James Ward was fifty-eight and a widower when he came to Philadelphia from Donegal in Ireland with his three sons - James, William and John - in 1730. They made for the Scots Irish outpost in Augusta County, Virginia. Sadly, there is a record of a petition by James Ward there in 1758, then aged 86, almost blind and unable to provide for himself.

The eldest son James settled in Greenbriar county, West Virginia. James's grandson John was kidnapped by Shawnee Indians in 1758 at the age of three. He was raised by an Indian family and given the name of White Wolf. In 1774 he fought against his father James in a battle where his father was killed. He died later in another skirmish that involved his brother James

William Ward, our ancestor, his line had a more settled time of it in Virginia, although one of his sons was captain of the local militia at the time of the Revolutionary War. These Wards stayed in Virginia over the course of the 19th century. A branch, our family's branch did migrate to Kentucky.  Their family history with many accounts has been recounted and recorded one including in "Lilburn Everett Ward's 1978 book Ward Family History."