Have you ever wandered what life was like in the colonial era? Or how the American Revolution affected individuals and families? In this original history you will journey with Jamaica-born Jonathan Tipton I and his descendants, Jonathan Tipton II, and his grandson, John Tipton and wife Mary Butler, middling American colonial farmers in the Shenandoah Valley. As John passes through space and time over a period of 36 years, he unpredictably rises to important positions in the established Anglican Church, the Shenandoah County Court and militia, and the initial revolutionary Virginia government. During these years, his family endured violent death at the hands of warring Native Americans and the tragic demise of Mary Butler in childbirth, the beloved mother of nine Tipton boys. The experiences of the Tiptons mirror those of thousands of colonials and early revolutionaries of the flourishing Shenandoah Valley in the last half of the eighteenth-century in Virginia. John Tipton was not held back by his successes in agriculture, the military, and politics in Virginia. After the Revolutionary War, in which he participated wholeheartedly and experienced the killing of one son and the severe wounding of another, he relocated to a less developed section of the early United States in western North Carolina where he pursued his active life in new and developing circumstances. By reading this book you will sense the struggle, the hardship, and the turmoil that forged late American colonials into citizens of a new country in uncertain times.