Hawkins in the Northern Neck

I am cleaning out my bottomless pit of an inbox this morning.  I have grandkids who are sleeping in and I am just doing mindless "housework" on my computer while I wait for them to get up.  I hesitate to spend many hours on Hawkins from the Northern Neck until I do the research that I still need to do to break down the brick wall in Louisa, Orange and Culpeper Counties for parents and grandparents of Thomas R. Hawkins and his uncle Benjamin Hawkins.  These men are my "for sure" relatives/ancestors.  I am quite sure that Thomas R. Hawkins (my 3-gr-grandfather) will indeed connect to the Northern Neck as will many of us who connect through DNA results in Hawkins DNA group #1, but I have not yet done the research to make that connection.

If you were sitting beside me chatting with me as I make these notes, I would begin by telling you that I have spent many hours looking at the man that I call Thomas Hawkins of Old Rappahannock County.  I have no research to connect this Thomas to any of our Hawkins DNA lines yet.

I have also spent many hours looking at John Hawkins who died and left a will  before 1716 in Richmond County, Virginia (also a part of the Northern Neck).  This man names children and friends and relatives and has wife Elizabeth (perhaps Elizabeth Butler).  This John Hawkins has been proven by DNA to relate to my own Hawkins line.

This John and Elizabeth line has been proven to be ancestors to the line of Janet Shamiri.  Janet's DNA participant is a match for my father:  James Marshall Hawkins who is now deceased.  Janet has a lot of good information on this line on her own blog:

http://jaceychasinghistory.blogspot.com

I have some maps and information on my blog already that I would want to review next before adding anything below.  It has some maps as well.  It carries the same title that this blog post has:

http://marshamoses.blogspot.com/2012/05/hawkins-in-northern-neck.html

However, as I file some "stuff"  I want to make reminders of where I put ideas.

I just filed several e-mails from Fred Duncan in the mail folder labelled Northern Neck.  These include the wonderful maps that Fred sends me from time to time.  His Peter Duncan seems to have been a neighbor and a buddy of Thomas Hawkins of Old Rappahannock County and Thomas's father-in-law, Thomas/Jacob? Lucas.  John Catlett seems to also live in the neighborhood and is also a son-in-law to Thomas Lucas.

There is an excellent map in my Northern Neck mail folder from Fred Duncan that has date January 2013.

I want to add one more idea that is nagging in the back of my mind.  It is a post that I made to

http://marshamoses.blogspot.com/2013/01/hawkinsrowzeecatlett-connections.html

There is no doubt that I should never start looking at the Hawkins surname in the Northern Neck without reviewing the information that I posted on this blog in January 2013 that I can access with above link.

Nantucket Families

I descend from Nantucket families who are found on the island from 1659 until just before the Revolutionary War.

The below is taken from Wikipedia:

Nantucket's settlement by the English did not begin in earnest until 1659, when Thomas Mayhew sold his interest to a group of investors, led by Tristram Coffin, "for the sum of thirty Pounds...and also two beaver hats, one for myself, and one for my wife". The "nine original porchasers" were Tristram Coffin, Peter Coffin, Thomas Macy, Christopher Hussey, Richard Swain, Thomas Barnard, Stephen Greenleafe, John Swain and William Pike. Seamen and tradesmen began to populate Nantucket, such as Richard Gardner (arrived 1667) and Capt. John Gardner (arrived 1672), sons of Thomas Gardner (planter).^[9]

In his 1835 history of Nantucket Island, Obed Macy wrote that in the early pre-1672 colony, a whale of the kind called "scragg" entered the harbor and was pursued and killed by the settlers.^[10] This event started the Nantucket whaling industry. A. B. Van Deinse points out that the "scrag whale", described by P. Dudley in 1725 as one of the species hunted by early New England whalers, was almost certainly the gray whale, which has flourished on the west coast of North America in modern times with protection from whaling.^[11][12]

Herman Melville commented on Nantucket's whaling dominance in Moby-Dick, Chapter 14: "Two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires." TheMoby-Dick characters Ahab and Starbuck are both from Nantucket.

Whale weathervane atop the Nantucket Historical Association Whaling Museum

By 1850, whaling was in decline, as Nantucket's whaling industry had been surpassed by that of New Bedford. The island suffered great economic hardships, worsened by the July 13, 1846 "Great Fire" that, fueled by whale oil and lumber, devastated the main town, burning some 40 acres.^[13] The fire left hundreds homeless and poverty-stricken, and many people left the island. Another contributor to the decline was the silting up of the harbor, which prevented large whaling ships from entering and leaving the port. In addition, the development of railroads made mainland whaling ports, such as New Bedford, more attractive because of the ease of transshipment of whale oil onto trains, an advantage unavailable to an island.

If one is is descended from one Nantucket family, one is likely descended from most of the Nantucket families.  And that is part of the reason that my 5-gr-grandfather must have moved his family to Guilford County, NC just before the Revoution.  It is said that the families who moved made their move because they were worried about the vulerability of the island if a war would begin.  But also because it was getting hard to find perspective spouses for their children who were not cousins because the families were so intermarried.  Quakers did not believe in marrying cousins.

The below information is taken from The History of Guilford County, North Carolina (1902)  by Sallie W. Stockard

This source can be read on-line at:  https://archive.org/details/historyofguilford00stoc  What I have copied below is on pages 16-17 in this source:

 In 
1780 two-thirds of the inhabitants of Nantucket were Quakers. Among 
their leaders were the Coffins, Starbucks, Folgers. Barnards, Husseys. 

■'During a period of five years there were no less than forty-one cer- 
tificates recorded at New Garden Monthly Meeting from Nantucket out 
of a total of fifty certificates received. 

'In this number there were eleven families, including many that have 
since been prominent in Guilford County. Among them were : Libni 
Coffin, William Coffin, Jr., William, Barnabas, Seth (and wife), Samuel 
(and family), Peter and Joseph Coffin; Jethro Macy, David. Enoch, Na- 



iVO/v'77/ CAROLINA. 17 

thaniel. Paul (and family). Matthew (and five children) and Joseph Macy ; 
William. Gayer. Paul (and family), and William Starbuck; Richard, Wil- 
Ii:im, Stephen and Stephen Gardner; Tristrim. Francis and Timothy Bar- 
nard; Daniel. Francis and Jonah Worth; John VVickersham. William 
Recce. Jonathan Gifford. Reuhen Bunker. Nathaniel Swain, Thomas 
Dixon " 

The Pennsylvania and Xantucket Quakers did not mingle and 
inter-irarry with the Scotch-Irish, whose whole modus vivendi 
was the opposite of their own. 

Ahnost all the members of the denomination at the present 
day who are "birth rij^ht," can trace their descent from one or 
both of these sources, and those who cong^ratulate themselves upon 
their Xantucket origin may be interested in the followinjr doggerel 
which was supposed tersely to describe those same ancestors. 

The Rays and Russells coopers are, 

The knowing Folgers lazy. 

A lying Coleman very rare. 

And scarce a learned Hussey. 

The Coffins noisy, fractious. loud, 

The silent Gardners plodding. 

The Mitchells good, 

The Bakers proud, 

The Macys cat the pudding. 

The Lovetts stalwart, brave and stern. 

The Starbucks wild and vain. 

The Quakers steady, mild and calm. 

The bwains sea-faring men, 

And the jolly Worths go sailing down the wind. 

The reason that I chose to add this blog post this morning is that I wanted to put a link to the Nantucket Historical Society as a reminder for future study:

http://www.nha.org/library/librarydatabases.html

I was lucky enough to visit the library several years ago....I would also like to add photos and information about that trip to this post.

Foster in Amelia County, Virginia

WOW!  This is such a random post that I have to laugh at myself! Ira Harris posted the below on the HH mail list this morning:

Source: CAVALIERS AND PIONEERS
Abstracts of Virginia Land Patents and Grants
Volume IV, 1732 - 1741
Abstracted by Nell Marion Nugent
Edited by Dennis Ray Hudgins
Virginia State Library

Patent Book 17, page138

THOMAS FOSTER, 350 acs. Amelia Co., upper side of Stock's Cr., near sd Foster's House, in the Fork of JOHN HARRIS's Br.,
adj. John Dawson, Thomas Pruit & JOHN HARRIS; 10 June 1737, p. 355. 1 pound 15 shillings.


Ties in with previous one sent.
Any comments, please pass along through HH so that others may be helped.


Ira L. Harris III
Group 6, Harris Y-DNA Family Study.
Line of Robert Harris of Ware Creek, New Kent County, Virginia.


Don't know why .....but I decided to google to see if there was information on this Thomas Foster and found a website that I liked a lot:  

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~fosterameliacova/

The lady's name is Laurie and she has a very nice map on the site showing where the various Foster men lived in Amelia County.,,,,I just wanted to save this thought and here it is.

Hensley in Cabell County, West Virginia

I am cleaning out the file labelled Hensley on my old computer this morning.  I have a few notes that I don't want to loose:

My notes tell me that there were no Hensleys in the Cabell County Tax list in 1810.  The census for Cabell County is lost for 1810.  So the Hensley family had not yet moved here from Virginia.....Bird Hensley who is the oldest son of Solomon Hensley says that he was born in Pittsylvania County, Virginia when he tries to enlist in service as a man in his teens.  I do not think that this is random....I believe that it was true.  Bird's estimated birth date is 1810 or 1811 (Bird is said to be 39 in the 1850 census)  I also have information somewhere when he tried to enlist but is proved to be too young and is denied.  This happened just before he moved to Illinois.  I can not find it quickly this morning, but will add the information in the future.  The other fact that leads me to accept Bird's Pittsylvania information as true is that many of the names that are listed in dealings with the Hensley family are Pittsylvania area names.  They may have moved as a group from the Pittsylvania area to what is now Cabell County, WV.  For a possible location for where they may have been in Pittsylvania before the move look at my blog entry:

http://marshamoses.blogspot.com/2012/10/hensleyfoster-connections.html

When I look at the land records my gut feeling is that the older generation moves into Cabell County sometime between 1814 and 1816.    These men are Solomon, Stephen and William Hensley.

The next generation in Cabell County is Samuel who buys land in 1830 and John who buys land from Soloman in 1833.

We find Stephen Hensley buying land from Henry Farley in 1814.  It is near the Big Sandy River.  At this time Cabell Count was very large and took in a big part of the southwestern part of the state.

We find Solomon buying land from Daniel Witcher, Jr. in 1815 near Beech Fork.  We find Wm buying land from Wm Dingess in 1816 also mear the Sandy River.  An Stephen buying from Wm Holderby et all in 1815 near the Big Sandy River.  Again in 1820 Solomon buys more land from James T. Watson (who lived in NY....his attorney handled the sale) on Beech Fork of 12 Pole Creeek.  By 1823 Stephen is dead as land is being bought by his heirs.  This is land on the Beech Fork and the Tug Fork of the Sandy River.

Wooten in Surry County, NC and elsewhere in NC and Virginia

The Wooten family that is found in Surry County, NC may not have any relationship to my mother's Wooten ancestors who are found in Eastern KY and Southwestern WV in the 1800s and on into today.  But a message came across the Surry County, NC mail list today that made me do a bit of poking around on the internet.  A man mentioned that a couple who have ties to Surry County had married in Grayson County, Virginia.  And that started my thinking about the Quakers who lived in Surry who I think I remember correctly were a part of the Westfield Meeting that reported to New Garden in Guilford County.  And that the Quaker families who lived in what is now Grayson also reported to New Garden.

The facts that I know are that I have no clue about the parentage of my 4-gr-grandfather, Silas Wooten who served in the Revolutionary war and was married to Phebe Worth.  He is documented as having enlisted to fight in the Revolution in Halifax County, Virginia.  He is documented as having had dealings in Guilford County, NC just after the war (1786-1787).

Silas and Phebe were married c. 1784 based on age of oldest child.  Both of the oldest two children say that they were born in NC in Census information.

1786  Thomas Hooten and Thomas Hooten Jr. as well as a George Hooten are found in Surrey County in 1786:

http://www.fmoran.com/1786a.html

this is in Capt.  Adkins District which is said to have been in the southern region of present day Surrey County along the Yadkin River.

http://southernkin.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/surry-county-nc-map.jpg

Thomas Wooten Sr died c. 1793 and left a will in which he names his children .  Silas is not named as a son.

http://books.google.com/books?id=UxAmLimPdVsC&pg=PA101&lpg=PA101&dq=Will+of+Thomas+Wooten+in+Surry+County,+NC&source=bl&ots=vwcw_Brono&sig=11aJVlRGCiALae2xG4K5orA1t2c&hl=en&sa=X&ei=t89WUp32FY_G4APimoGwCA&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Will%20of%20Thomas%20Wooten%20in%20Surry%20County%2C%20NC&f=false

1790 United States Federal Census of 1790 on Ancestry.com has 45 Wooten (or sound alike) Head of Households in NC in Caswell, Craven, Dobbs, Edgecombe, Gates, Sampson, Surry, Wayne, Wilkes, Halifax, Hyde, Iredell, Jones, Lincoln, Martin, New Hanover, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Pitt, Rowan, Sampson, Surry, Wayne, and Wilkes Counties.  None of them are named Silas.

I find Thomas Wooten in Surry:

http://www.newrivernotes.com/surry_enumerations_1790_tax_list.htm

There is also a J. Wooten who has the 200 acres.....and a Richard Wooten who has 150 acres.  Both men are in Atkin district.  John Stotts is also listed in this tax enumeration but in Edwards district.

1792  1792 Next information take from:  http://home.att.net/~hbridges/williamsonfam.htm

John Hunt may have been a brother of Nancy Hunt. He along with Isaac Williamson and Silas Wooten 

witnessed the inventory of the estate of River Jordon, Jr. on 11th Oct. 1792.

There is a John Hunt living very close to Francis Worth on the Guilford County Map.  Is it possible that this John Hunt travelled down to Richmond County to Witness this estate?  Do i know that River Jordan, Jr's estate was in Richmond County?

1795  Martha Sisler gave me information that shows a Silas Wooten as 1 poll with no acres in Wilkes County, NC.  My Silas seemed to have rarely been a farmer....more often he is listed as a teacher later in Kentucky.  This could be my Silas Wooten.

Wilkes is next door to Surry County

1800 Silas appoears in tax list of John Hoge’s district in Montgomery County. Va

Was the family beginning their trek to Kentucky?  

1804 his son, George, was apprenticed to David Summers in Montgomery County, Va…George says later in life in the census information that he was born in Virginia….the older two children say they were born in NC, and the child just younger than George--Silas G. says he was born in OHio

1803 Silas G. Wooten born in Ohio.  Silas G. gives his age as 46 in the 1850 census Lawrence County, Ky and as in range 30-40 in the 1840 census of Lawrence County, Ky

1804 Silas received a land grant of 400 acres at Georges Creek on Levisa Fork of

Big Sandy River Certificate #115-- date of the Survey was Nov 6, 1804. 

(Kentucky) {another source says: April, 1, 1781 in Tazewell Co. Va.  Pension #S.40730}

1804 Rebecca said to have been born in KY.  Rebecca married first NAthan Blevins and second Berry Pack.  She gave her age as 46 in the 1850 census in Johnson County, Ky.  

I don't want to lose the thought that I found Hooten in Surry?  Wilkes?  I need to figure out where I was looking

Why do I look at the Surry County Wooten family?  Because there is a family in Eastern Kentucky who have a child named Silas Ooten/Wooten who is not connected to my Silas Wooten.  Anne Stotts is married to John Stotts.  We do not know what Anne's maiden name was.  She was married to a male Wooten/Ooten/Hooten who died.  She and this man had children.  After his death, she married John Stotts in Surry County, NC.  She and John moved to Eastern KY.  It is perhaps just a coincidence that she had a child named Silas....or perhaps there is a connection....just don't know yet.  My information says that Anne:


Afterwards, Anne and her children including Levi, Nancy & Jordan were living in Indiana by 1840. Her son Silas  was already deceased by then and his widow remarried and his children remained behind in the Tug River Valley.

WOW!  She had a child named Jordan.  I just looked....Jordan married a Williamson....does this marriage connect to the Isaac Williamson who was present when the estate of River Jordan was witnessed in 1792.  Don't know yet.