 John's father, Captain Harry of Hanover Court House, Va., served in the Continental army, worked the land as a planter and bought enslaved persons of African descent.He eventually moved with his family from Virginia into North-Carolina, and after a short stint in Lower Sauratown, an abandoned Indian village on the Dan River in northeastern Rockingham County, he moved to Pendleton District (now Pickens and Anderson Counties), South Carolina, where he settled and farmed a plot of ground along the Big Eastatoe Creek.Being a veteran of the Revolutionary War, he was entitled to land grants, but it wasn't until after Harry's death in 1798 that some of his children applied for a land bounty for his service in the Revolutionary Army.