The Fairgrieves: Three Centuries of Coal

Over the past two hundred years, the Fairgrieve family has carried it’s coal mining heritage far and wide: from their ancestral home in Scotland, to the coal fields of western Allegany County, Maryland, to the mountains of Montana. Fairgrieve became one of the most common surnames in the Georges Creek Region of Western Maryland. William

John Thomas Ayers

The Ayers family watched America grow. Obadiah Ayers, born in Suffolk, England in 1635, was the first of his family to set foot in the New World. He lived in Woodbridge, New Jersey, when New Jersey was still a Dutch colony. The colony became an English colony in 1664. Obadiah’s son, John Ayers, was born