Roy Victor Harp is my grandfather.
I have not yet determined with certainty the original immigrant ancestor of the Harp family. Currently the line is documented back to Joshua Joseph Harp (sometimes known as “Earp” – many believe the Harps and Earps are closely intertwined). Joshua Joseph was born in 1706 in Baltimore. He married Mary Budd of Fairfax, Virginia Colony. Several online sources report Joshua’s father to be Thomas Harp (born 1656, Baroney of Fews, Northern Ireland) and mother Mary Peddicord (1656, Ireland), but I have not yet seen actually documentation of this. It is often reported that he was known as Thomas Earp and was said to be a Scots-Irishman who came to America prior to 1680. That is certainly possible but needs more research and documentation.
What is known is that Joshua Joseph and Mary Budd Harp had three or four children, one being Thomas Marion Harp (born 1732 in Maryland) and the child through whom our line descended. The family migrated west slowly, following the frontier, through North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee, and eventually to Kansas where William Henry Harp died in 1879.
Roy Victor Harp was born in 1890 in Wilmot, Crowley County, Kansas, son of Wiley and Minnie Myrtle Groom Harp. He married Cecil Munkers (born in Missouri in 1889) In Waukomis, Garfield County, Oklahoma, in 1911. They lived the remainder of their lives in the state of Oklahoma where Roy Harp served as a widely-respected and beloved pastor in the Christian Church. They both died in 1972.
The Harps had two daughters: Naomi (born in 1912) and Esther (born in 1915). Esther, my mother, married Philip Perdue in 1936. That marriage ended in divorce and she married Hartford Inlow, my father, in 1946.
Related Surnames:
GROOM
DYE
DANIEL
PARRISH
And many others