18 Susie M. Ames, ed., County Court Records of Accomack-Northampton, Virginia, 1640-1645 (Charlottesville, 1973), 290-91.

1 One of the historian’s Royalist ancestors emigrated to Virginia in 1659. He was John Gibbon, an eccentric English gentleman whose passion was heraldry. He observed that the Indians painted their shields in armorial designs, and wrote a curious book which argued that “heraldry was ingrafted naturally into the sense of the human race.” It is interesting that the Puritans regarded the Indians as a lost tribe of Israel, the Quakers saw them as Children of Light, the borderers regarded them as rival warriors, and royalist gentlemen such as John Gibbon saw them as natural aristocrats with an inborn taste for heraldry.
   The Gibbon heraldry, by the way, had a bizarre history. An ancestor named Edmund Gibbon quarreled incessantly with three female relatives, and was given permission to change family’s coat of arms from three scallop shells to “three ogresses or female cannibals.” After his death, the scallop shells returned. Edward Gibbon, Autobiography, e d. M. M. Reese (London, 1970), 7, 17.