According to family lore, the progenitor of the family was an unknown
German linen weaver, surnamed
Weber, that fled from the
Holy Roman Empire to the
United Provinces of the Netherlands due to religious persecution, likely because he was a member of the
Reformed church. He married a
Dutch woman and fathered 3 sons, including John, who later settled in the
British colonies. A 1914 book, History of Western North Carolina (From 1730 to 1913), described John Weaver of Reems Creek as: John Weaver the First. left the information with his children that his father was a
Holland gentleman. Other information obtainable indicates that his father came from
Holland to Pennsylvania, and in company with other brother and kinsmen of the same name settled near
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, later migrating across
Maryland into the
valley of the Shenandoah in
Virginia. The Weaver family would intermarry with the predominantly
Anglo-American, notably
Scots-Irish (descendants of
Lowland Scots and
northern English settlers in
Ireland), population of the region. A historical article on the history of Weaverville described the early inhabitants of the settlement as follows:WEAVERVILLE, BUNCOMBE COUNTY. The greater part of the early settlers of this country was made up of men and women seeking
religious liberty. This motive no less prompted the immigrants from
Northern Europe than the great body of Scotch-Irish that emigrated to this country from Scotland and Ireland (
Northern Ireland). In
Pennsylvania and down through the
valley of the Shenandoah we find the Dutch of Holland (
Pennsylvania Germans) and the Scotch-Irish, living side by side dominated by a single purpose. It is easy to believe that these Dutch people found congenial friends and neighbors in the Scotch-Irish people that were thrown together in the valley of the Shenandoah. They were all dominated by a single purpose, to hew out for themselves and their posterity a civil and ecclesiastic system, free from the domination of
king or
pope. There is no doubt but that the ancestors of these Dutch people were the loyal supporters of
William, Duke of Nassau, called "William the Silent" who broke the power of
Catholic Spain over the
Netherlands in his defeat of
Philip the Second in the latter part of the Sixteenth Century. Per the
Family Tree DNA Weaver DNA Project, the family has the
Y-DNA haplogroup J-FTC77280, originating in the
Balkans. Branches of the family exist in
Oklahoma,
Arkansas, and
Texas. == History ==