Land, conscience and a family name.

Long before Evelyn Kennedy grew up on a dairy farm, branches of her mother's family lived in the Quaker communities of Burlington County. One old surname survives in several spellings—Antram, Antrum and Antrim—and in an unusually personal family history printed in 1899.

Two brothers among the Friends

Harriet Stockton Antrim opened her Records of the Antrim Family of America with John and James Antram, brothers she remembered as members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers. In her telling, the family valued freedom of worship, and succeeding generations continued to marry within the Quaker tradition.

Her introduction also tells something about how the past was preserved. She had gathered deeds and family papers, identified signatures and seals, and tried to distinguish branches of a family whose surname was not always spelled alike. She knew her work might contain omissions and asked descendants to help preserve better records.

A share in West Jersey

One document transcribed in her book records a transaction dated May 3, 1680, involving John Antrum and Jonathan Aldridge of Burlington concerning a portion of proprietary rights to land. This was not simply a farmer purchasing a fenced field. The early proprietary system divided claims in West Jersey into shares and fractions, which could themselves be bought and transferred.

Precisely identifying this John Antrum with every similarly named man in later online pedigrees requires additional evidence. The document is an authentic lead in the family's early story as presented by the 1899 author; it should not be used on its own to prove a continuous father-to-son line back to England.

The little house kept inside the larger one

Antrim wrote that an early log dwelling on the family homestead still stood in her day, sheltered by later construction. She described it as about seventeen feet by twenty-eight feet, with two rooms and a loft. Her book recalls the family retaining homesteads across several generations—houses serving as physical anchors for names that might otherwise survive only on paper.

That small set of rooms is a helpful counterweight to the abstract deed language. Whatever proprietary shares were worth on paper, family life happened in shelters people repaired, enlarged and passed down.

The road to Evelyn

In the family GEDCOM, Evelyn's Wainwright ancestry runs through Charity Antrim (born 1776), her son Thomas Wainwright, later Wainwright generations and Hannah Wainwright Kennedy. Charity's line extends through earlier Antrim families in Burlington County. The Quaker history belongs to the heritage of Evelyn's maternal family, though not every much-earlier connection in the pedigree is independently proved by these three reproduced pages.

For Evelyn, the Antrims are not a replacement for her more personal story: the family dairy farm, her children and the generations she gathered around her. They are one more thread showing how far back her roots in New Jersey can reach.