Around 1720, John was elected Constable in the Kingston, New York Elections. In about 1727 he served a Ulster County, road surveyor from Hurley to the Strand. After John and Rachel moved to Virginia, they were among the 70 families that founded Hopewell Friends Meeting House in Fredrick County in 1735.

Rachel Van Benschoten was bap. Dec. 22, 1695. They reportedly left Ulster County circa 1729-1730---appear in Orange County, Virginia in 1735. Rachel was the executrix of Jan’s estate. Records are found in the Frederick County Virginia courthouse. Both John and Rachel were Quakers and as a surveyor, John measured some land for George Washington.

Hood Family Bible
Notes for RACHEL VAN BUNSCHOTEN:
Rachel is the daughter of Thenunis Eliaszen Van Bunschoten and Gerritjie Gerrit. Rachel was Baptised in New York on December 22, 1695.

Beginning in or around 1730, the children of Jasper Hoed and Trytje Luykas began to leave their Dutch communities in New York to make a new life in the South. They included sons Jan and Luykas Hoed and daughter Aefje Hoed.

Jan and his wife Rachel Van Bunschoten were the first to leave. After their marriage in 1718, they spent their first dozen years or so residing in Kingston, New York. Jan was elected a constable of the town in 1719 and later worked as a highway surveyor from 1726 to 1727. Rachel took care of their six children, three boys and three girls. But by the end of the decade, Jan and Rachel had decided to move southward. After an undetermined amount of time in Pennsylvania, they ended up on a plot of 1,175 acres along the Potomac River in what was then a part of Spotsylvania County, Virginia.

The Hoeds were one of several dozen families of Dutch and German extraction who settled the area from Pennsylvania in the early 1730s. Many of them, including Jan and Rachel, converted to the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) while in Pennsylvania. In 1734, the new Virginia residents petitioned the colonial government in Williamsburg to separate the area from Spotsylvania County and call it Orange County, perhaps reflecting the significant Dutch presence. Much later, at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, many area residents opposed secession and refused to support the Confederate war effort. Their pro-Unionist sentiments, and those of other communities in western Virginia, resulted in the creation of a new state. The area in question is now a part of Berkeley County, West Virginia.

Sometime after the Hoeds built their new home on the Potomac River, they adopted English spellings of their names. Jan Hoed became John Hood. Church records show that John and Rachel were among the 70 founders of the Hopewell Friends Meeting House in 1734. When the family of John’s brother arrived in Orange County, Virginia shortly thereafter, they also professed the Quaker faith and Anglicized their names. Luykas Hoed became Luke Hood. The children of both John and Luke Hood married spouses of English or Scotch-Irish descent, and most moved further south or west to present-day Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas. So what had been a tight-knit Dutch community from New York became a far-flung family of the American South.

John and Rachel’s oldest surviving son, Tunis, was named after Rachel’s father Teunis Eliasen van Bunschoten. But then the couple came to their senses and named their next son John Hood, thus upholding family tradition. Tunis would eventually move his family to North Carolina. Both were recruited to settle in Virginia by the Van Meter brothers, land developers in the Shenandoah Valley, to whom they were related by friendship or kinship.