The family illustrated on this web site is unique in many ways. The name was spelled Bagod and Bagot in the earliest records of the family history. Among the highest noble families in the world, many were admired as counts, countesses, baronets, barons, and dukes. Others became ambassadors, magistrates, ministers, and church pastors. These were regarded as exceptionally high positions in medieval times, but when a branch of the family who had assumed the name of Stafford (Edmund Stafford, a descendant of Hervey Bagot), married Lady Anne Plantagenet, the family became highly esteemed in English history. This line of the Stafford family obtained their status as part of the royal family in England when Hervey married Anne, who was a granddaughter of King Edward III. Their descendant, Henry Stafford (who became the second Duke of Buckingham), was a great-grandson of Edmund and Anne. Henry descended from a double bloodline from King Edward III.

Like many who were qualified at various times in history, Henry Stafford and two others of this lineage were widely considered as successors to the English throne in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although these three were certainly eligible because of the high positions they held and their royal blood line, they, too, were executed because each reigning house saw them as a potential threat to the monarchs themselves or to the succession of their heirs. However, the Stafford family survived and retained their status as barons until A.D. 1640, when the male line became extinct.

The family in England (from whom the Baggett family in the United States is descended) came from an old line of Bagods who bore noble titles in Flanders and Normandy. The family is one of the few in the entire world who can claim an authentic Domesday ancestor–a knight who fought with William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings in England in A.D. 1066. The name was spelled Bagod at that time. This family of Bagods settled in a place called Bagot's Bromley (Bramelle) in a moated manor house until the time that Ralph Bagot married Elizabeth Blithfield, and they became heirs of the Blithfield estates. Many of the descendants of this family became ministers, knights, high sheriffs, and eventually baronets and barons in Staffordshire and are, at present, very prominent in England.

In the mid-seventeenth century the family of John Baggott came to America from England and settled in what was originally Virginia (including North and South Carolina), and we believe this was the beginning of the long line of Baggetts here in the United States. Nicholas Baggett, the known ancestor, came to America in the beginning of the next century and settled close by in Bertie County in a section that became Hertford County, North Carolina. These Baggetts of America were explorers and pioneers, and they continually helped to open up ways to new frontiers.

Beginning in Old Virginia, they explored and conquered the southern part of the United States, settling from the present Virginia to Florida and to Texas during the first two centuries. Although the majority of the Baggett family now lives in what were once the Confederate States, they are found from coast to coast.