Blow

More than 20 years ago, when doing research for my book on the Bynum family, I collected what I think is a nearly complete set of records for the Blows of early Surry County, Virginia.  At the time, it seemed possible that the immigrant John Bynum’s wife Rosamond may have been a daughter of George Blow.  Indeed this relationship has been taken for granted by virtually all of his descendants.

In an effort to identify the evidence for this claim, I collected a great many records.  After examining the records it is very clear that not only is there not a shred of evidence that John Bynum married a Blow, but that the records show that it is very unlikely.   The result is that I found that I not related to this family.  Having collected the records, though, it makes sense to make them available to others who are descended from these people.  See also the Bynum pages for additional details of that family.

  • Blow Family of Surry County, Virginia is a series of biographical sketches for the first three generations.  This document also corrects a  number of errors and omissions in the “Blow of Surry County” article in John Bennett Bodie’s Historical Southern Families, Volume VI, pp183-187.
  • Blow Records in Surry County, Virginia — 30 pages of transcripts and abstracted records from which the above summary was  taken.  It contains a set of chronologically-arranged records from Surry County, with comments added.  This file contains essentially all records of the name from 1661 through 1720 in Surry County.
  • The Real Bynum-Blow Connection – My original reason for collecting the data was to determine whether John Bynum’s wife could have been Rosamond Blow.  In the process I discovered that the connection was a generation later when Richard Blow (son of George) married Elizabeth Bynum (daughter of John).