When Augusta County, Virginia was established in 1745, it extended from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi River and from the northern part of Tennessee to the Great Lakes. From the outset, the county served as a haven for Scotch-Irish, German, and, to a lesser extent, English immigrants who failed to find economic opportunity or religious freedom in the colonial settlements along the Middle Atlantic coastline. This little known but important work contains detailed genealogies of the twenty such families mentioned in the title of the work, who settled in that region of "old western Augusta" which today encompasses Bath and Highland counties, Virginia during the middle of the eighteenth century. In addition to the family histories, some of which trace a family's European progenitors back to the seventeenth century, the compiler has provided introductory chapters on the history of German and Scotch-Irish settlement to the region; a table of family members who fought in the Colonial, Revolutionary and Civil Wars, a bibliography of over 100 sources, and a full name index with approximately 10,000 entries.
