General Notes

[janet skelton.FTW]

Bruce" sometimes is shown as a middle name, but he lived in a time beforemiddle names were common.

William R. Polk, "Polk's Folly," New York: Doubleday, 2000, pp. xx-xxi:[Robert] was a Scot ... who had been an officer in Cromwell's army andwho lived in county Donegal in what is now Northern Ireland. In thevicissitudes of the struggles between the Parliament and the monarchy andbetween the established and the reforming sects of Christianity, hebecame a marked man. With his life in danger, he fled Ireland just asJames II and Charles II took vengeance on many of Cromwell's officers andother Republicans. His wife Magdalen's family's house, which is stillstanding, is one of the few that were not burned by the vengeful king.... Robert got a land grant [in America] about 1680. ...Robert came toAmerican in what I think of as the second wave of immigrants. Those whocame half a century earlier had already displaced the resident Indiansalong a narrow band of Atlantic coast, laid claim to the better lands andstumbled upon a crop that had enriched them. Tobacco played a formativerole in seventeenth-century America that is hard to exaggerate. But thelands Robert acquired were not suitable for tobacco--or indeed for muchof anything else. So his sons padded out their meager incomes fromfarming by becoming artisans: one was a ship carpenter and another ablacksmith.

One internet record lists birth as 1640 in Donegal, Ireland, with parentsAnnabel Stewart and Robert Bruce Pollock, with father being born in 1606and dying in 1660. No info for Annabel Stewart. Therefore, I'm not surewho his mother was.

He changed his name upon coming to America, from Pollok to Polk.

Wally Polk, MPolk24825@@aol.com, in an e-mail of 26 August 1999, writes:
Robert Bruce and Magdalen were the first known Polks to come to the USA.They landed here in the late 1600s and established a home in Maryland. Intheir family they had a son William -- William had sons -- I will mentionWilliam Jr. and Charles. These sons left home and pioneered west. WilliamJr. became the father of the Polks of North Carolina. Charles became thefather of the Polks of Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky.

"The Pollag" Newsletter of Clan Pollock, 1 July 2000, "The Arrival ofRobert and Magdalen Polke/Pollock in America," John F. Polk, Jr., ClanPollock International Historian, pp. 3-4:
When did Robert and Magdalen Polke/Pollock, the progenitors of the Polkfamily in America first come to these shores? There will probablly neverbe a definitive answer to this question, but a sidelight from the historyof Maryland and Donegal, Ireland can tell us how it came about.
In 1680 Colonel William Stevens, one of the founders and originalCommissioners of Somerset County, Maryland, sent a letter to thePresbytery of Donegal in Ulster, asking that a "godly minister" be sentto look after the needs of the people of Somerset. The actual text of theletter has not survived, but it is referred to in the minutes of thePresbytery. The motives of Stevens can be seen as both enlightened andself-serving. He had acquired very extensive land rights in the form ofwarrants and patented land, probably more than any one else in the countyat that time. He clearly needed settlers to increase the value of theseholdings and realize a profit. At the same time one has to admire theopen minded liberality of Colonel Stevens, a member of the establishedchurch and leader of the local government, in turning to a non-conformistgroup with which he had no obvious ties, to provide spiritual leadershipfor the people of his domain. The followers of the Covenant were notknown as strong supporters of establishment power, in fact theirreputation was quite the opposite. The record of the Presbytery does notindicate that he actually asked for settlers as well as ministers, butsimply that "Col. Stevens from Maryland beside Virginia his desire of agodly minister is represented to us. The meeting will consider itseriously and