The French Protestant believers (called Huguenots by the French) left France to escape death after the revocation of the earlier Nantes Edict. The Feastday of St. Bartholomew, captured in the painting above is of a massacre in a French village, and the engraving demonstrates how protestant French citizens had to flee in small wooden boats across the English Channel from Brittany and Normandy to England. Such was probably the fate of the original John Bethea, and how he happened to be called "English John" accompanying fellow protestants settlers to a new life in America, where old Indian  lands (like the Manakin Town) were offered on the James River for homesteading  in Virginia. Some of the protestant settlers preferred locating on navigable waterfronts, instead of on the isolated and non-navigable upstream locations like Manakin Town, Va., so they went elsewhere in Virginia  and settled along Chesapeake Bay and Albemarle Sound to the South, near the old community of  Suffolk, Va.

From what is recorded in Harlee's Kinfolks History, we know that "English" John Bethea was a success in his entrepreneurial activities. By 1735, when John (1) was 51 years old, he had owned and been living on his own plantation. He made a deed from himself to Tristram, one of his two sons, transferring his 150 acre plantation situated in what later was to be known as North Carolina (Gates County) for the consideration of 100 barrels of tar and the right to have a home place on the land for as long as he lived.  So Tristram's children and the North Carolina Betheas expanded to the South in North Carolina along the Cape Fear River and raised their families. Meanwhile the other son  "Virginia John" (apparently called such because in those days, they really thought that they were all living in Virginia, in what was then a county called Nansemond to the West of what later would become Norfolk, Va. and their commercial and marketing village was a place called Suffolk, (British Colonial Plantation) well known to travelers of the late 1600s. The children of "Virginia John" (2) somehow all lived and married in the area around what is now Dillon County, South Carolina so either "Virginia John" himself settled in South Carolina, or all four of his children arrived there another way. The men were known as "Sweatswamp William" Bethea and "Buckswamp John" Bethea (3), due to their land being crossed by branch creeks called Sweatswamp and Buckswamp, the former flowing into the Little Pee Dee River, along which many Betheas resided by 1800.