Our Hughes Lineage for Three Centuries.

The free society that we believe in and enjoy today is traceable, in a large part, to the Friends (Quakers) who settled in Pennsylvania beginning in 1682. Our Hughes ancestors, also of the Quaker faith, arrived in 1698, and owe their start in America to William Penn, who had received a grant of land in1681 from King Charles II.

Penn came to America on the good ship "Welcome" in 1682. One of his first positive moves to establish a colony was to purchase land from the Indians and negotiate a peace treaty; later said to be the only treaty made between white men and the Indians that was never sworn to and never broken.

Due to Penn's government dedicated to religious freedom, equality, and peace, Pennsylvania was for decades a model to the world for democracy, liberty and harmony. He attempted to apply the Christian principles held by Friends to the practical business of government. When the Founding Fathers met in the latter part of the 1700's to write the Constitution that would design the government of the United States, they turned to William Penn's Frame of Government for Pennsylvania.

The Puritans of New England believed in an established state church. Virginia was governed by an aristocratic class system. Penn's Charter of Liberties for his colony established in Pennsylvania many of the rights and freedoms that we take for granted as a part of our way of life in America today.

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