The Trewollas came from Cornwall England

Cornwall, a maritime county in the extreme south-west of England, bounded on the north-east by Devonshire, on all other sides by the sea. It is divided from Devonshire chiefly by the river Tamar, and washed along the north-west coast by the Bristol Channel, along the south-east coast by the English Channel. Its form is cornute or horn-shaped, extending south-westward from a base at the boundary with Devonshire to a point at Lands-End. Its breadth at the boundary with Devonshire is about 45 miles; its average breadth over the 17 miles next Lands-End is about 5 1/2 miles; its average breadth elsewhere is about 20 miles; its length from the middle of the boundary with Devonshire, along the centre to Lands-End is about 80 miles; its circuit, including sinuosities, is about 265 miles; and its area, which includes some near islets and the Scilly Islands, is 868,208 acres. A ridge of bare rugged hills, with one summit 1368 feet in height, and several others nearly as high, extends along all the centre; bleak moors lie among the hills and spread down from their sides; mounds of drifted sand, in some instances several hundred feet high, occupy considerable space along the north-west coast, and only very fertile valleys and bottoms, together with pieces of exceedingly romantic scenery, redeem the entire county from one general aspect of dreariness and desert. The chief rivers are the Tamar, the Lynher, the Looe, the Fowey, the Camel, and the Fal.

The soils are generally light, often largely mixed with gravel, yet show considerable variety, and range from sterility on the moors to fertility in the valleys, and they may be 'classified, into three kinds—the gritty and black, the shelvy and slaty, and the clayey and reddish. About 115,000 acres are waste, and the rest of the area is variously pasture, meadow, and arable land. Much moisture, both in frequent mists and frequent rains, characterises the climate; but this is favourable to agriculture, in consequence of the lightness of the soils, especially as few days pass without alternations of sunshine, and there is not a much greater aggregate of water throughout the year than in most other English counties. Agriculture has undergone great improvement, yet, being secondary here to mining, is not so improved as amongst most entirely agricultural populations

Page One of Grandpas book

As a boy, I was told by my father (Charles Brothers Trewolla) and grandmother Trewolla (Marry Elizabeth nee Harrison) that my grandfather (William Boase Trewolla) came to America from the town of Truro, in Cornwall County, England, at the age of 5. And that his father, John Courtenay Trewolla was a tailor. Except for this, and a few incidents that were retold many times regarding the journey in the ship, I learned very little about the family until 1932 or 33, when my father gave me the few old papers and books (including two diaries) that were in the Harrison desk in the old home in Kentucky. In 1934 my Aunt Mary (Trewolla) Holland gave me a book that had belonged to her aunt, Mrs. Betty (Trewolla) Fortson. In which, Aunt Mary had placed a copy of a letter that Betty Fortson had written in 1887. It contained the names of Trewollas and their wives for four generations. It also contains the dates of the deaths, and the ages, of Betty Fortson and her brothers and sisters.
In 1934 I discovered a book in the Carnegie Library at Pittsburgh that contained a genealogy chart of Trewolla’s who lived in Cornwall County, Eng., from about 1420 to 1620. The next year, while in Washington, D. C., I located five distant Trewolla cousins, a man and four women, who were children of Samuel P. Trewolla. One of these, Mrs. Garrett (Annie Virginia nee Trewolla), later gave me a detailed record of that branch of the family. The same year I learned, through my cousin William Trewolla of Winona, Mississippi, of Trewollas living at Greenwood and at Macel, Mississippi and by corresponding with those at Macel I procured a complete record of this Mississippi group.
From 1936 to 1957 I added a few items to this file of papers, but I was busy and seemed to find very little time to work with them. During an illness I had in January 1957, I read through the file and began some more research. In Chicago I discovered the Newberry Library, a wonderful research library that contains thousands of rare books, especially on history and genealogy, among which are many dealing with Cornwall County, Eng. Learning that a good many Trewollas had lived at a village called Gwennap, I wrote to the vicar of the Church of England there, and got a friendly reply from him, Rev. M. C. Browning. He has helped me to contact other people in Cornwall, and I am about to complete filling in the gap of missing information to make the line complete. From this long series of events, together with my reading a good bit of English History, has come the information contained in the following notes.
THE OLDEST RECORD OF THE NAME TREWOLLA AND SIMILAR CORNISH NAMES
This oldest record of our name, or of names very similar in spelling, was written in the year 1086 A. D., and it is still preserved. At that early date, the names were identified with Cornwall County, Eng. This old record is known as the DOMESDAY BOOK, one of the most important historical documents in all England. It is in two volumes, now in the British Royal Archives. It is a "geld book", geld meaning "tax". It contains a detailed assessment of all the land in England in 1086 that was valuable for farming, and of the livestock and plows, and the freemen, tenants and serfs (slaves) living on the land. The smaller volume, "Little Domesday", covers five counties of England, and "Great Domesday" the remaining 16 counties.
Domesday Book was made by order of William the Conqueror, (the Norman who had invaded and overrun England and made himself King), so that he could impose a king's tax on all property. The land was assessed in units called "hides", a hide being 120 acres (sometimes less), which was the amount of land that one man with one team (8 oxen and a plow) could cultivate. Each "manor" was listed separately, - a manor being an estate of 3 or 4 hides or larger, under the con¬trol of an earl or lord. In Cornwall County in 1086 there were many small manors, whose landlords constituted the "gentry" or middle class. There were few very large manors owned by wealthy families or by the Church (then the Catholic Church). There were not a large number of "gent", or lords of manors in Cornwall.
Domesday Book got its name from the fact that it became the "court of last appeal" in England in disputes as to ownership of lands. Decisions based on information in it were "as final as Domesday".
CORNWALL SECTION IN DOMESDAY BOOK AND THE OLD NAMES
The volume called "Great Domesday", containing 760 pages, 10 by 16 inches, is made of vellum or sheepskin, written in double columns in black ink, in the Latin language, and the names of people and places are scored by having a line drawn through the middle of them in red ink. In the 1860s the two volumes of Domesday were reproduced, in lithograph printing, in black and red exactly as in the original and the pages belonging to each county were bound separately. The full set of these rare books is in the Newberry Library in Chicago.
The thin volume on Cornwall County, 10 by 16 inches, contains eleven pages. The proper names of manors, or owners of manors, which are similar to Trewolla, are as follows: on page 4 – TREWILLE; on page 5 - TREWELLE and TREWILLEN; on page 7 – TREWALLEN; and on page 10 - TREWALE. A typical entry, translated, reads this way: "Trewelle holds 7 hides, with 9 teams plus two oxen; 5 freemen, 8 tenants, 2 villains (serfs), meadow for 4-6 sheep, woods for 80 hogs." Horses are rarely mentioned. All plowing seems to have been done with oxen, usually 8 pulling a big plow. Except for fruit and vegetable gardens, the land was planted in wheat, oats, rye and barley. From these were made bread and beer. It is recorded in the Middle Ages, probably 2/5 of all grain produced in England was made into beer or stronger alcohol drinks. Besides bread and beer, the people ate much pork and mutton, as well as poultry, fish and other seafood.

THE CELTS, THE CORNISH AND OLD CORNISH NAMES:
The very old families of Cornwall County are called "Cornishmen". The English have an old sayings "By TRE, POL and PEN you may know the Cornishmen". A very large number of old Cornish names begin with one of these syllables. Trewolla is ob¬viously an old Cornish name. Cornwall (which means "Britons of the horn", allud¬ing to the hornlike shape of this south-west corner of England) was, in very ancient times, occupied by Celts. The Celts were an Aryan race of rugged people who were spread all over Europe in the 3rd and 4th centuries B.C. In the British Isles they came to be called "Britons", whence comes the name of the isles.

Letter from my Grandpa Trewolla to his sons.

Libertyville Illinois
February, 1957
To our two wonderful boys, Lynn and Justin:
This loose-leaf book of Notes, Clippings and Family Papers is for you, and for any of your loved-ones and descendents who may find it to be of interest, to make them want to open it and read it. There have been others of our families, in recent years, which have shown an interest in these notes and the old papers, letters and diaries, and I have tried to share the access to them, and copies of these notes, as generously as I can, with those who have shown a real interest in them. But I am taking the, time and care to prepare the notes, etc., in a well bound and fairly permanent form, and am entrusting the care of this book and its contents to you boys, in the belief that you will take pride in preserving it with care and in sharing its contents with all who will be interested in seeing it through the coming years.
Most of the contents of this book concern the Harrison family, for two reasons: (1) some of our ancestors in the Harrison line, as far back as 1750, and down to the present time, took a special care in preserving family documents, receipts, letters, etc., and saw that they were carefully passed down until they came into the possession of my great-grandfather, Fayette Harrison, who owned the Trewolla farm where I was born in McCracken County, Ky. Fayette Harrison carefully preserved all these papers in an old Cherry wood desk that he owned, which my brother Richard Trewolla now owns; there, they came to my special attention about the year 1932. My father's sister, Mrs. Mary Holland nee Trewolla, preserved some additional Harrison, as well as Trewolla, records, which she turned over to me before her death in 1935. (2) Mr. J. Houston Harrison of Alexandria, Virginia, in 1935, published a large (over 700 pages) history of the Harrison family of the Shenandoah-Valley of Virginia (from which our Harrison’s came), including a great amount of general historical material regarding Augusta (later Rockingham) County, Virginia and its early settlers along the "Long Grey Trail", (the pioneer road through that valley). About 88 pages in that book contain historical material relating to our own Harrison ancestors, back to Rev. Thomas Harrison, who was at one time the Chaplain of Jamestown Colony, the first English settlement (permanent) in America. So much in the big book of Harrison history did not relate to our ancestors, that I clipped out these 80 odd pages and have fastened them into this loose-leaf book, and have indexed them, on sheets like this one, a few pages farther on. .
So far as I have found, my grandfather, William Boase Trewolla, came into possession of just two rare items of Trewolla family records, both of them being pocket-sized diaries. He married Fayette Harrison's daughter (my own grandmother Trewolla) and these diaries found their way into the old cherry desk, too. About 1880, a sister of my great-grandfather Trewolla, who came from England, wrote down what she remembered about the Tremolos in England, and this letter was later given to my Aunt Mary Holland, who copied parts of it for me in 1934. This led me to discover that there are Trewolla descendents living in Washington, D.C., Virginia and Mississippi, who are all related to us because all are common descendents of John Trewolla (Senior) and his wife Margaret who wrote one of the two diaries that I now have, writing in it daily during the trip from England to America on a ship in 1841.
During the years 1934-38 I corresponded with some of these Trewollas and was furnished much detailed info. concerning their Trewolla lines and some additional facts regarding our common ancestors. A second diary, which I also have and which was also in the cherry desk, was kept by John Henry Trewolla. Brother to my grandfather, William B. Written at the age of 19 when he made the wagon journey from North Carolina to western Kentucky. He was traveling with his sisters and brothers, his father and mother (John Courtenay and Elizabeth Boase Trewolla) and grandparents (John and Margaret H Pearce Trewolla). This was in 1846. The 2 diaries reveal that they lived for some years in North Carolina, 17 miles from the town of Oxford, at a farming community then called Young’s Cross Roads. I visited this place in 1949. Your mother, Miriam and I have also visited in the home of one of the Trewolla women in Washington DC, and have met several members of the Trewolla descendents living in Washington and in Richmond, VA.

About 1935, in the Carnegie Library, I discovered a book published by the Harleian Society of London, in the 1870s with the title, “The Visitation of Cornwall Co. Eng. In 1620 A. D.” The book contains a brief pedigree, submitted by a Thomas Trewolla who was the head of a large family in 1620, to the Kings “Visitor”, tracing his Trewolla ancestry back to a Marke Trewola, whose birth date was about 1480-1500. The book also contained transcripts from Parish Registers giving the names and dates of baptisms, marriages and burials of Trewollas who lived in the Cornwall County Towns of St Ewe, Gwinear, Fowey, Gwennap, Gorran and Bodmin from 1570 – 1677. Our own Trewolla ancestors came to America from the city of Truro, in 1835 and 1841. The info, now preserved, that was brought by them from England, goes back to a Henry Trewolla, whose wife’s name was Tamson, (who was the father of John Trewolla Sr.). This John was born in 1770, so his father Henry would have been born about 1740-50. There is, therefore, an unfilled gap between the record of Trewollas living in Cornwall in 1570-1677 and the time of Henry Trewolla, born 1740-50. I have opened a correspondence this month (2, 1957) with some clergymen of the Church of En. In Truro and others towns In Cornwall, in an effort to get some Parish Register transcripts which will help me to “fill the gap” in the records. These findings will be included in the Trewolla section, within.
My mother, Gertrude Trewolla nee Gourley, preserved an account of the Gourleys that was given her by her uncle, Dr Willie Gourley of Fulton Ky. She also made some brief notes on the family of Puckett, given to her by her mother, my grandmother Virginia Gourley nee Puckett. I plan to include a brief section on the Gourleys and Pucketts, in a 3rd loose-leaf book.
You boys have other ancestors, by other family names such as Mansfield, living in Ky, and earlier connections with the family of Bradshaw (Fayette Harrison’s wife Harriet was a Bradshaw), also the Davises of Christian Co, Ky, etc. I have not had the time or opportunity to do any work on these, except in incidental references to inter marriages. Perhaps someone else will take an interest and work on these, someday. I think the Harrison records will be especially interesting to you, because your grandmother Mansfield was a Harrison before she married, as was you great-grandmother Trewolla, both being descendants of Robert Harrison Jr. of Christian Co, Ky.
I hope you will take good care of this book, and will find as much fun in reading it as I have found in making it.
Your Dad
James A Trewolla

My start in Genealogy

My grandfather James Trewolla, is my inspiration for my family history research. He started researching back in the 1930s, yes, before computers. So he had to go to librarys and churches and collect documents. He even went to Cornwall where he found the first Trewolla Farm. I have a picture of my Dad, Lynn who went on a trip with Grandpa. It was taken at the gate entry to the Trewolla Farm. Grandpa went to the parishes in Cornwall and complied alot of information on our ancestors. He also corrosponded with other relatives and learned info and collected pictures. He has all of the info and photos in a hard back binder. I have added the letter that wrote to his sons explaining his research.

When I was a teenage my Grandma Trewolla showed me here husbands works, and I was very intrigued. I hope that some day I will inherit the binder. It wasnt until I was in my 20s and got my first computer, when I started doing research. I wish I had the luxery of being able to travel to do my research, maybe someday. My grandfather passed away when I was 1 year old, in 1971. I sure wish he were still here, because we would have alot of fun doing research together.