Joseph Shearin (~1687-1752) was the ancestor of a large family of that name (sometimes then spelled "Shearen" or "Shearing" or "Sherron") in the U.S. Authorities differ on whether he was born in England or in Virginia (or even Pennsylvania): He was the son of one of two brothers (Moses and Aaron Shearin) who lived in Stepney, London, England, but were convicted by Judge George Jeffreys, in the Bloody Assizes in 1685, of having supported the rebellion of the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, against his uncle the Catholic James II of England, and the Shearin brothers were transported to Virginia as convicted felons.
Joseph's mother followed her husband to the New World, hence the uncertainty now about whether Joseph was born before or after she did so (and where his 1704 marriage to Amelia Peebles (or Peeples or Peoples) took place, although the authorities agree he died in Granville County, North Carolina). After the brothers served out their terms of penal servitude, the growing Shearin family moved a little to the south of Virginia, into what is now North Carolina, as documented in the records from when the boundary line between the two states was surveyed -- it went across their lands -- and from the American Revolutionary War pensions (now the 1790 U.S. Census records). Two Shearins (Aaron and John) signed the 1779 petition to create Warren County, North Carolina, east of Granville County on the Virginia border. The early Shearins had also acquired some slaves, who took the family name, so today there are African-American as well as Anglo-American branches of the Shearin family. By the 1800s, some members of the family had moved to Tennessee, although the majority of Shearins today are in or from the part of North Carolina north and east of Raleigh.
A great number of the men in the family have been named "John" -- many of those being "John Wesley Shearin" -- which makes sorting out the genealogy extremely difficult, because there were a lot of children in each generation. (Joseph's son John (~1710-1795), for example, had 15 children: List.) Among the descendants of Joseph Shearin are K. Kay Shearin and the American actor John Shearin (Webpage) who appeared in several American television series in the 1980s, including Flamingo Road (1979-1980), Bret Maverick (1980-1981), and Hunter (1985-1988) (IMDb page).
