Author Faith McClung Kline O'Brien's paternal grandparents, Albert McClung and Mattie Fitzgerald, met at a small, country church in Oklahoma in 1907, the year that territory became a state. Albert's ancestors included Revolutionary patriots "Saucy Jack" McClung, of Scotch-Irish descent, and Abraham Kuykendall, of Dutch lineage, who, around 1740, relocated from New York to North Carolina, where he settled and accumulated a fortune in gold coins. Mattie descended from two former sea captains who became merchants in Brooklyn, New York-Edward Card from Maine and Nathaniel Grafton from Newport, Rhode Island, whose seafaring ancestors had sailed the Atlantic Ocean since the mid-1600s.