The three Brothers Weasel — Isaac, William Essex and James — earned their passage to New World as a result of a service to the King of England. Specifically, poaching the King's deer. As all the deer in England belonged to the King, this was an easy mistake and almost certainly didn't involve any actual hobnobbing with royalty. They were, in short, deported to Virginia as criminals.

I don't know where that story comes from, beyond hearing it all my life. By running my fingers through Google, I have found references to the same three as "descended from the ancient and honorable family of that name in England. Four of the name emigrated from Yorkshire, England, some time previous to the year 1710. They were of the Society of Friends, and left England to enjoy freedom of religion." The fourth mentioned here, incidentally, was a cousin by the extremely satisfactory Quakery name of Pleasant Weasel.

Well. Maybe. If you were to ask me which seemed more likely, petty criminals or Quakers, I'd have to think about it very carefully while I nicked your wallet. Wikipedia says 50,000 Brits were deported to the Colonies during the 18th Century; about a quarter of the total British emigration.

The Weasels weren't indentured servants, though, I'm pretty sure. I've stood on the site of the cabin the brothers built when they first arrived, expats and presumably free mustelids, in Virginia.

That was spooky. An old and distant cousin drove my father and me to a plot of scrubby waste ground in the middle of nowhere. We pulled aside layers of briar and dead creeper to find a low, raised platform of stone that was once a foundation. I stood for a while inside the walls that had crumbled away centuries before, and I could almost hear a distant cry of, "Verily, Isaac — didst thou put in this coffee the dung of an opossum?"

Eventually, one brother moved East and founded a town — now a fairly large city — still named after him (more or less).

One went South to Alabama. There is a mansion there built by him (or perhaps a descendent) haunted by the spectre of a subsequent Weasel. She died in a fire which gutted the house but didn't entirely destroy it. She still makes occasional public appearances in the rebuilt interior, drifting ghostily down the main staircase. It would be even cooler if she did it with her head tucked under her arm, but that's pretty good nonetheless.

Isaac, though, stayed put in Virginny, leading a life of dissolution and debauchery that eventually led, tragically, to me. Okay, I don't actually know that for sure. For all I know he was a model of Quaker rectitude and piety. But he was my ancestor and I'd like to think better of him than that.