ANDREW HUNTER: of County Londonberry, Ireland, was born in 1640, and it was the family tradition that his birthplace was the ancestral home of the Hunters of Hunterston in Scot land. His son, Hugh, married Isabella Semple, and their son, David Hunter, lived in York County, Pennsylvania. He married Martha McIlhenny in 1745. He was a Captain of a York County Company in the French and Indian War, and a member of the expedition against Fort Duquesne. Capt. Hunter mysteriously disappeared in the summer of 1776, and his family never saw or heard from him again. His fate was not known until nearly a century afterward, when on the destruction of an old house in a valley of Virginia by Union Soldiers, a paper was discovered concerning him. It was given to his great-grandson, Captain David Hunter Strother, and was found to be a writ of habeas corpus, issued in the name of “George III Rex,” by authority of the Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, directing the sheriff of Berkeley County to bring the body of David Hunter to the capitol at Williamsburg. Captain Hunter was a patriot, and Lord Dunmore, last of the English Governors of Virginia, was notorious for his cruelties and injustice to the colonists. Captain David Hunter bore the arms of the family of Calderwood, Scotland, “Vert, three dogs of the chase courant argent collared or; on a chief of the second as many hunting horns of the first, stringed gules. Crest: A greyhound sejant argent collared or. Motto: Cursum perficio.” The descendants of this line of the family are distinguished in the annals of Virginia, and allied with the Washington, Dandbridge Spotswood, and many other historic families.
Among early immigrants to New England were four of the name, as shown by the following ship record: “These under written names are to be transported to N. England imbarqued in the Blessing from the Ministers and Justices of their conformitie in Religion and that they are no subsedymen.
Christian Hunter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Eliz. Hunter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Tho. Hunter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Wm. Hunter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11.”
