Philips Family History

In which I do some research and visit the old Philips family homestead:

Through my mother's mother (that's Grandma Jo!), our family lineage can be traced back to Joseph and Mary Philips, who emigrated from Pembrokeshire, Wales, to Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1755 with their three sons, David, John, and Josiah.  Their fourth son, Joseph, was born in Pennsylvania.  (I decided to research this some more since we were going to be in Chester County for Kaitlin and Aaron's wedding; see previous post).  This information (and a bit more) is available in this history of Chester County, that was published in 1881.  That book states that the elder Joseph Philips bought some land in Uwchlan, PA, which in 1881 was the Frederick Bingaman farm.  In trying to google "research" some land records, I came across this surveyor's map of Uwchlan Township, PA, from 1883, just two years after the "history" was published.  The map is labeled with the landowners' names.  After studying the map for a few minutes, I noticed an area in the eastern part of Uwchlan labeled "Fred Bingaman", highlighted in yellow in this picture (click to enlarge):

If you go to Google Maps and search "Uwchlan Township, PA", you'll see the boundaries of the township haven't changed much.  To view the more specific area where these photos were taken, look at this map.

I was able to print the survey map out on a transparency sheet, which I then held up to my computer monitor.  I then aligned the general boundaries, along with the distinctive S-bend in Brandywine Creek (the western boundary) to find the location of Bingaman's farm today.  On the current map, the creek running through that land is labeled Pine Creek.  Here are some photos of that area today:

Now, it doesn't all look like that, but I didn't take any pictures of the business park or the newer houses that were nearby.  I also found this, as a nice reminder of who used to live here:

Caleb came along with me that morning before the wedding (which was why we didn't have a whole lot of time to look around), and we collected some rocks from Pine Creek, near where it crosses under Philips Road.

Just a few minutes up some winding Pennsylvania backroads is the Vincent Baptist Church, of which the Philips family were charter members, and where many of them are buried (someone in the family has obviously been taking care of the graves, with modern, readable markers installed in front of the old weathered tombstones).

Our ancestor, Josiah, with the DAR marker