These West Virginia Surnames Were Here Before the State Line Existed — Is Yours on the List?

West Virginia became a state on June 20th, 1863, carved out of Virginia by the mountain counties that refused to follow Richmond into secession. Before that date there was no West Virginia. There were only the western counties of Virginia, mountain communities that had been settled for a century before anyone drew a new border through the ridges and hollows they had been living in. The families who were already in those mountains when the new state was created had been there for generations. They had come through the Great Wagon Road and through the Cumberland Gap in the decades before the Revolution. They had farmed the narrow bottomlands along the Kanawha River and the Tug Fork and the Guyandotte River. They had buried their dead in family cemeteries on hillsides above hollows that still carry their names. And when the state line was drawn around them in 1863, they became West Virginians without moving an inch. This video names fifteen of those surnames, ordered from the most common to the rarest. Workman, 300,000 Americans, in the Kanawha Valley before the salt industry made it famous. Hatfield, in the western Virginia mountains before West Virginia existed and in Jamestown, Virginia before that. Chafin, Logan County, producing the sheriff who commanded the defense at the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. Dingess, fewer than 5,000 Americans, so concentrated in Mingo County that the community carries the name. And eleven more, each with the specific West Virginia county, the specific pre-statehood record, and the specific archive in Charleston where the family is documented. If your family has ever said West Virginia without knowing how far back the name in your tree goes in those mountains, the West Virginia State Archives at wvculture.org and Family Search at familysearch.org have the county records that answer the question. #westvirginia #WestVirginiaHistory #WestVirginiaSurnames #AppalachianAncestry #appalachianhistory #Hatfield #Chafin #workman #Adkins #Maynard #varney #Dingess #Hamrick #Skidmore #Ferrell #MingоCounty #LoganCounty #KanawhaValley #TugForkValley #newrivergorge #PendletonCounty #appalachianmountains #SouthernWestVirginia