“If your two parents hadn’t bonded just when they did—possibly to the second, possibly to the nanosecond—you wouldn’t be here. And, if their parents hadn’t bonded in a precisely timely manner, you wouldn’t be here either. And if their parents hadn’t done likewise, and their parents before them, and so on, obviously and indefinitely, you wouldn’t be here.

Push backwards through time and these ancestral debts begin to add up. Go back just eight generations to about the time that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born, and already there are over 250 people on whose timely couplings your existence depends. Continue further, to the time of Shakespeare and the Mayflower Pilgrims, and you have no fewer than 16,384 ancestors earnestly exchanging genetic material in a way that would, eventually and miraculously, result in you.”

-Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

This history of the Hamby family of Buncombe and Yancey Counties is the culmination of over 30 years of research.

The name Hamby isn’t nearly as common on the west coast as it is in the south and virtually nonexistent in western Washington, where I grew up. As far as I knew we were the only Hamby family in the world. For years I wondered where the name came from.

I happened to be living in Los Angeles when Roots, the miniseries, aired on television. Like a million others, I was bitten with the genealogy bug. I began my journey in the Los Angeles Mormon Temple genealogy archives. It was there that I discovered Wallace Hamby and his work on Hamby genealogy. It was a thrill to find my name had a long, fascinating history and a coat of arms!

Most people tracing their Hamby genealogy have found it difficult. One reason is Hamby men rarely wrote wills. Maybe they were suspicious of leaving behind a written record of their lives. Much of the information about Hamby men has been found in wills from other families who were associated with them.

My family line has been frustrating in other ways. The Buncombe County branch virtually disappeared for several decades because the census taker consistently misspelled the name. The census taker may have finally retired because the name mysteriously reappeared, spelled correctly, in subsequent censuses. The gravestone of my last confirmed Buncombe County Hamby ancestor, Thomas Hamby, toppled over and disappeared sometime in the 90’s. Whatever was carved on it has been lost forever.

The internet brought in a flood of new information. I noticed the other Hamby lines were different. Theirs were filled with professors and preachers while my line were farmers and moonshiners. Then I found William Hamby and a new twist to this Hamby story.

And, thanks to the miracle of DNA testing, I have a bigger family than I ever imagined.

I am very grateful to the following people for their help in my search:

Marcia Becker, Antigo, Wisconsin
Chuck Hamby, for donating his invaluable spit
Connie Hamby Morgan
Grant Hamby, Hamby genealogy guru
Patricia June Price
Barb & Dick Reed, Black Mountain, NC
Wanda & Pearson Riddle, Pensacola, NC
Karin Hoch Stedman
Dorothy Burgin Stevens
Shawn Yokoi, for being curious about his ancestry
Tim Berners-Lee, for inventing the world wide web

Photo by Pearson Riddle, Jr.

This website was last updated May 2024.