BAKER FAMILY HISTORY AND GENEALOGY

"Thomas Robey, who died [in Iredell County, North Carolina] three years before his wife Eleanor [widow of John Baptist Lovelace of Frederick County, Maryland] mentions some of the Lovelace children in his will. Obviously, two daughters married Lovelaces, since he refers in his will to his daughter Sarah Lovelace. His daughter Ann married Elias Lovelace on January 11, 1775, he being her step-brother. The will mentions Nathan Robey, who was to have 150 acres on both sides of Fifth Creek, and Prior Smallwood Robey, who was to have 79 acres at the north of Robey's tract and eventually the 91 acres left as a life estate to the widow Eleanor. The witnesses to Thomas Robey's will were John Rosebrough, Robert Shaw, and Isaac Lovelace. Among the descendants of Thomas Robey who kept the name alive into the next century were John Robey, whose will is at Statesville, 1804, with wife Rachel and children Berry, Elizabeth, Basil, Leonard, Milly Barker, Esther Tucker, deceased, Mary Tucker, Ede Smith, and Tobias Robey, who had seven daughters. Then we have John Boswell Robey, whose will at Statesville, 1820, mentions wife Patta (Martha) and children Betsey, who married Ebenezer Holman, Anne, Polly, Cynthia, Matilda, Patta and son Greenberry, James, Barton, Absalom and John Randolph. The name was on the map for a time as old deeds refer to Robey's Branch, which ran into Fifth Creek."
"Let us take a glance over the neighborhood say as of the day that Thomas Robey lay dead in his home on the north fork of Fifth Creek, late in 1773. Where should a man, stranger in a strange land, be interred? So far as appears, he was the first of the Marylanders to die in the neighborhood. The only burying ground was six or seven miles away, by rough road, at what came to be known as Fourth Creek Cemetery. There had been an interments [sic] there as early as 1764 when William Archibald died. It is said that Rev. John Thompson had held religious services there, or near by, and that the beginnings of a congregation were in existence. There they buried Rev. James Rosebrough, when he died in 1767. There was no Bethany until 1775, no New Hope until around 1803, and no Providence until considerably later. However, the Fourth Creek burying ground had been used, apparently, only, by the Pennsylvanians who held to Presbyterian tenets. Maryland people were of a different strain and custom. It is very likely that the Robey family was not invited to mingle its dust with the dust of the Covenanter. However that may be, there is no record of the internment of Thomas Robey, or any of his family, at Fourth Creek. It must be, then, after the Marlyand custom, they rest on lands that were once their own. May it not be on that spot of higher ground, somewhat above the creek, which had been willed to Prior Smallwood Robey, and which is known as the Lewis Graveyard?"
[Ref: Information gleaned from "Lewis Graveyard With Mention of Some Early Settlers Along Fifth Creek, Iredell County, North Carolina? written in 1944 by Mary Elinor Lazenby (born 1875) in a booklet maintained by the Michigan Microform Collection (LH110) and published in the Maryland Genealogical Society Bulletin, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Winter, 1998), pp. 91-93.]