John Musgrave, founder of our branch in Pennsylvania, came alone from Belfast in 1682, a thirteen-year-old lad working his passage as an indentured servant to a Quaker family named Hollingsworth. John is the first Quaker Musgrave of whom we have record. His descendants could qualify for the Society of Colonial Wars and the Colonial Dames. Several of his children moved to North Carolina and we've always supposed our own Carolina Musgraves were of that stock. We can trace back to James Musgrave, in North Carolina, and John had a son, James. Descendants lived in North Carolina, Indiana, and Illinois. Perhaps John Musgrave, aged 37 years was the first of the Musgraves to reach America. On August 21, 1635, he planned to board the ship, George (John Serverne, Master), bound for the Virginia shore. By the time the Quaker branch landed, Musgraves pretty well dotted the woods.

A Marine's searing and intimate story—"A passionate, fascinating, and deeply humane memoir of both war and of the hard work of citizenship and healing in war’s aftermath. A superb addition to our understanding of the Vietnam War, and of its lessons” (Phil Klay, author of Redeployment). John Musgrave had a small-town midwestern childhood that embodied the idealized postwar America. Service, patriotism, faith, and civic pride were the values that guided his family and community, and like nearly all the boys he knew, Musgrave grew up looking forward to the day when he could enlist to serve his country as his father had done. There was no question in Musgrave’s mind: He was going to join the legendary Marine Corps as soon as he was eligible. In February of 1966, at age seventeen, during his senior year in high school, and with the Vietnam War already raging, he walked down to the local recruiting station, signed up, and set off for three years that would permanently reshape his life. In this electrifying memoir, he renders his wartime experience with a powerful intimacy and immediacy: from the rude awakening of boot camp, to daily life in the Vietnam jungle, to a chest injury that very nearly killed him. Musgrave also vividly describes the difficulty of returning home to a society rife with antiwar sentiment, his own survivor's guilt, and the slow realization that he and his fellow veterans had been betrayed by the government they served. And he recounts how, ultimately, he found peace among his fellow veterans working to end the war. Musgrave writes honestly about his struggle to balance his deep love for the Marine Corps against his responsibility as a citizen to protect the very troops asked to protect America at all costs. Fiercely perceptive and candid, The Education of Corporal John Musgrave is one of the most powerful memoirs to emerge from the war.

Soft-spoken, cheerful, handsome, and well dressed, George West Musgrave “looked more like a senator than a cattle rustler.” Yet he was a cattle rustler as well as a bandit, robber, and killer, “guilty of more crimes than Billy the Kid was ever accused of.” In Last of the Old-Time Outlaws, Karen Holliday Tanner and John D. Tanner, Jr., recount the colorful life of Musgrave (1877-1947), enduring badman of the American Southwest. Musgrave was a charter member of the High Five/Black Jack gang, which was responsible for Arizona’s first bank hold-up, numerous post office and stagecoach robberies, and the largest Santa Fe Railroad heist in history. Following a decade-long hunt, he was captured and acquitted of killing a former Texas Ranger. After this near brush with prison or execution, he headed for South America, where he gained fame as the leading Gringo rustler. It wasn’t until the 1940s that Musgrave’s age and poor health brought an end to a criminal career that had spanned two continents and two centuries. Incorporating previously unknown facts about the career of this frontier outlaw, the Tanners thoroughly document Musgrave’s half-century of crime, from his childhood in the Texas brush country to his final days in Paraguay.