My name is Robert Glen Swearingen and I am originally from Birmingham, Alabama. My father was Robert LaRhoy Swearingen and my grandfather was your great uncle, Rev. Thomas Eli Swearingen (1891-1974). Rev. Swearingen lived in various places in southern Alabama, where he pastored several small Southern Baptist churches, sometimes two or three part-time churches at a time. My parents met when Rev. Swearingen was a pastor in State Line, Mississippi, where my mother grew up. Rev. Swearingen did not move to Birmingham until he retired in 1958. In addition to Matthew and Olive, he had two other brothers, Frank and Henry.
Your great grandfather's full name was Eli LaRhoy Swearingen (1855-1924), his father was Eli Swearingen (1790-1863), who moved to Pine Hill, Alabama from South Carolina in 1821, and whose father was Van Swearingen (1755-1810), a captain in the South Carolina militia in the Revolutionary War. Van's father was Samuel Swearingen Jr. (1736-1800) of North Carolina. His father, Samuel Sr. (1695-1775), had moved there from Maryland in 1735. The father of Samuel Sr. was Thomas Swearingen (1665-1710), our first native ancestor, and his father was Gerret van Sweringen (1636-1698). Gerret was a ship captain for the Dutch West India Company who, after his ship foundered and was destroyed off the shore of Long Island in 1657, decided to resign and stay in New Amsterdam. When the British defeated the Dutch colony, Gerret became a British subject and purchased land in Maryland. It was Thomas who anglicized the name and dropped the "van".
Some of this information is from "Family Register of Gerret vanSweringen and Descendents, Compiled by A Member of the Family", Washington, 1894.