The short version.

We Hamiltons have always found a way through.

The story I tell starts with an oak and a river. Gilbert de Hamilton stood in the court of Edward II and spoke well of Robert the Bruce. John de Spencer took it as treason and struck him. Gilbert answered. The fight was refused. Spencer was dead. Gilbert and his servant ran for Scotland with the de Spencers behind them. They came to a river with no crossing and the riders closing fast. There was an oak on the bank. They set a frame-saw into it, cut until the tree fell clean across the water, and as it dropped Gilbert shouted the only word that mattered—“Through!”—and they walked over on the trunk while the pursuers were still coming. The river was the problem. The tree was the solution. The family kept the word, the oak, and the saw.

The documents are plainer. Walter fitz Gilbert held Bothwell Castle for the English king until Bannockburn. After the battle he went over to Robert the Bruce and was given Cadzow, the land that became the town of Hamilton. He fought for the Scots again in 1333. The records say he probably came from Hameldone in Northumberland. That is as far as the paper reaches. The motto stuck either way.

Three centuries later another Hamilton crossed a wider water. John Hamilton and his wife Elizabeth Burdit reached Charles County, Maryland. Most accounts put the year at 1674; one reading of the land record says 1652. He was Catholic. No one ever found the port he sailed from. The family stayed Catholic. In 1791 Leonard Hamilton gathered a colony of Maryland Catholic families and led them west into what is now Marion County, Kentucky. The 1884 history says the Maryland farms were worn out and they wanted to settle together so they could have a priest. They came for land and for Mass.

In the spring of 1797 Thomas Hamilton settled on Cartwright’s Creek, about six miles north of Springfield on the road to Bardstown. His son Alexander told the story later. By November of the next year Thomas had signed the paper so his daughter Polly could marry. He is buried in the Thomas Hamilton Cemetery on US-150 outside Springfield, on private ground, with a DAR marker. Whether he died in 1807 or 1819 the stone ought to settle. Leonard is called his brother in one history and his cousin in another. Those points stay open.

From Thomas the line runs Alexander, then Dick, then Stith Thomas, then Richard Sutherland, then my dad Bobby, then me. Seventh generation on the creek. Counting from John, roughly the tenth in America. A male-line DNA kit from a descendant of this Thomas sits in haplogroup I1, Northern European, the kind common in Viking-age populations. It falls in the same group as the Dukes of Hamilton and the Abercorn line. The closest match is a Hamilton from Dunnalong in Tyrone, Ulster. Scotland or Ulster both fit. Neither is proven.

My grandfather Richard Sutherland Hamilton did the genealogy that led to the dedication of Thomas’s gravesite. The DAR came. The Marion County Veterans Honor Guard came. My dad Bobby was there. So were my brothers Joe and Rob, and nearly every Hamilton I know. Granddad also put the Mt. Zion Covered Bridge back in order. I grew up in Fredericktown—The Burg—in Washington County, inside Bardstown’s Catholic school world. Bethlehem High School, class of ’99. Western Kentucky University, 2004.

Hamilton Technologies was my first company. I was wet behind the ears and still punching above my weight—taking on work a kid straight out of the Burg had no business touching, and finding a way through it anyway. Then Trim Masters, then Toyota Boshoku in the Kentucky region—about nine years. I carried the TB Way with me. In 2011 I was president of the Bardstown–Nelson County Jaycees and sat on the board.

From 2014 to 2020 I was at Magna’s Louisville Seating Systems. I ran the IT for two Ford launches back to back while the new ERP went live, all while managing three plants under one roof and two more down the road. The place was doing about a billion dollars a year. You keep the lines moving, the systems talking, and the people covered, or the whole thing backs up. We found a way through it. Around 2018 OpenSecrets started with one Ruby job and turned into a retainer. In 2019–20 I mentored new developers at Trilogy Education. In 2020 I founded Hamilton Development Company. In 2023 I founded BerryBloom. In October 2024 I became Executive Partner at Anderson Family Farm & Distillery in Grovertown, Indiana. In 2025 I co-founded Novem Astra. Now it’s Timey Wimey with Roy.

Off the clock I am a Catholic, a husband, and a father of three—Haley, Benjamin, and Sammy. Nature lover and beachgoer. Bourbon man and country boy. Occasional actor, teacher, thinker, and friend of waterways. The line I keep is the old one: satisfaction comes from serving others.

The paper is clear on the Bruce, on Maryland, on Cartwright’s Creek in the spring of 1797, and on the work my grandfather did. The people who stood at that gravesite—my dad Bobby, my brothers Joe and Rob, and the Hamiltons still on the creek—and the three kids at home are the part of the story that does not need a footnote. We keep finding a way through.