DEPRIEST
My ancestors from the Depriest line are immigrants from France. They were French Huguenots--Protestant Christians who mostly fled France because they were not accepted there by the French Catholics. This line has been difficult to trace and I've been working on this family line since the early 1990s when I first made a trip to Virginia with my father to peruse records at the Augusta County, VA courthouse. Back in the early 90s, there was no widely available information on the internet because it was in its infancy. The only real way to do research then was to travel to state archives, individual county courthouses, cemeteries, and libraries in each individual county. So that's what my father and I did. My Great-Great-Grandmother Julia Depriest Reese is my closest connection in this line. She was born and raised in Augusta County, Virginia.
Julia Anne Depriest Reese-My Great-Great Grandmother
wife of Samuel Joseph Reese
Julia Depriest was born in Augusta County, Virginia abt 1828 and died circa 1900 in Franklin, North Carolina & was a descendent of French Huguenots who immigrated to Virginia in the late 1600s from France. Her parents were Robert Hundley Depriest and Jemima Ramsay Depriest. Her parents Robert and Jemima are buried near Waynesboro Virginia at the site of what used to be the Pleasant Grove Church(it burned down in the early 1960s) Back in the 1990s there were only a few stones left in that cemetery. Julia married Samuel Joseph Reese on January 26, 1852 in Staunton, Virginia. Their kids were William, Robert Walter, Charles Edward, Jemima Anne, and Bettie Alice. They had an additional son Jeremiah, who died as a small child before they moved to SC and NC from Virginia. And they had another child, a daughter Lucy, that died between the move from South Carolina to North Carolina in the 1870s. Julia named her son Robert Walter Reese after her father and named her daughter Jemima Anne Reese after herself and her mother.