In the eleventh grade, I wrote a family history project. Twenty-two pages. Nine generations. Roughly two thousand ancestors traced backward through time. I did not fully understand what I was holding.
I do now.
My family has lived in the same region of South Carolina — a strip of land between the Broad and Saluda Rivers called the Dutch Fork — for over 260 years. Not the same house. Not the same farm. But the same soil, the same watershed, the same stretch of Piedmont clay and hardwood that the first Derricks and Cooglers walked onto in the mid-1700s.
The property I live on now, Heritage Oaks Farm, sits in that same region. Some of the oak trees on this land have been documented to the 1700s. They were here when my ancestors arrived. They are still here. So am I.
This entry is a record. Not a textbook. Not a genealogy chart. A living document drawn from the original research my father, Charles Alan Derrick, compiled in 1991, and from the school project I built on top of it in 1998. The facts are theirs. The reflection is mine.
The Derrick Line — July 1738
The ship was called the Two Brothers, captained by William Thomson. It departed Europe in July 1738, bound for the colony of Georgia. On October 7, 1738, it arrived at Frederica on St. Simons Island with 133 passengers aboard.
Among them: a 26-year-old widow listed as the Widow Derick, traveling with four children. Elizabeth, age 8. Melchoir, age 7. Jacob, age 5. Margaretta, age 1.
Her husband is believed to have died during the crossing.
Think about that for a second. A young woman — twenty-six — arriving in an unfamiliar colony with four children under the age of nine and no husband. No support network. No common language with most of the people around her. Just the Atlantic behind her and the frontier ahead.
Her son, John Melchoir Derrick, grew up and moved to Lexington County, South Carolina in 1764. He and his wife Barbary settled between the Broad and Saluda Rivers, in the area that German settlers had already started calling the Dutch Fork — "Dutch" being the English corruption of "Deutsch." They were German and Lutheran. They stayed.
The Derrick family has occupied the Dutch Fork continuously since 1764.
The Coogler Line — October 1752
Fourteen years after the Two Brothers made landfall, another ship arrived. On October 2, 1752, the Snow Rowand docked in Charleston, South Carolina. Aboard was Matthew Coogler with two children — Eva (8) and Mathias (4).
His wife's fate is not recorded.
Matthew settled in the Dutch Fork. Same region. Same soil. Same community of German-speaking Lutheran families carving out a life in the Carolina Piedmont.
Two ships. Two families. Two arrivals separated by fourteen years and hundreds of miles of coastline. Both ending up in the same corridor of South Carolina. Both putting down roots that would hold for centuries.
The Convergence
For over two hundred years, these two lines lived in the same region, attended the same Lutheran churches, worked the same land. Then on May 7, 1976, at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Irmo, South Carolina, Charles Alan Derrick married Dorothy Louise Coogler.
My parents.
The two lines finally merged. I was born on November 9, 1980, at Baptist Hospital in Columbia. Every limb on the tree — Derrick, Coogler, Drafts, Ballentine — fed by the same water table, rooted in the same red clay.
"Each limb on the family tree pertains to one person and through their veins runs the history of thousands of years. Basically, your family tree is a 'tree of life.'"
— From my 11th-grade family history project, 1998
The Ground Beneath
Nearly all of these people were of German blood and Lutheran denomination. They built churches, farmed the same bottomland, buried their dead in the same churchyards. The original 1998 project traced nine generations and roughly 2,040 ancestors. Almost every single one lived and died within a few dozen miles of where I sit right now.
My grandfather Howard — we called him Grandaddy — worked for the city water department and is buried at Bethlehem Lutheran in Irmo. My Nanny, Margaret, outlived him by a decade before she passed on March 14, 2019. My Grandmama held on until June 25, 2024. The generation above mine is thinning out. That is the part of the family tree nobody warns you about — watching the upper branches go quiet, one by one.
But the roots hold.
The heritage oaks on this property — some documented to the 1700s — were saplings when the Widow Derick stepped off the Two Brothers. They were mature trees when Melchoir built his first house in the Dutch Fork. They are ancient now. And they are still standing on the same ground where I am raising my own family (even if my kids have fur and feathers).
That continuity means something to me. Not in a sentimental, sepia-toned way. In a structural way. It means the system works. The root network held. The line did not break. A 26-year-old widow with four children and nothing but nerve crossed an ocean, and 260 years later, her descendants are still on the same soil.
That is not nostalgia. That is engineering.
Sources & Provenance
This entry draws from two primary sources:
1. The Derrick Family — researched and published by Charles Alan Derrick, 1991. The foundational genealogical record for the Derrick line.
2. Family History Project — 11th-grade assignment by John Charles Derrick, 1998. Originally published on DerrickFamily.net. This entry preserves and extends that original research as a living archive.
The Record: Two ships. Two families. Two hundred and sixty years on the same ground. The names change, the generations turn over, but the coordinates stay fixed.
