Lee and Lea Families of Russell County, VA and Lots of Other Places


Lee and Lea Families of Russell County, Virginia

and Lots of Other Places

Middlesex, Eng > Monmouth and Morris Co., NJ > Wilkes Co., GA > Russell Co., VA > Harrison Co., KY > Jefferson Co., MO

Wilkes Co., GA > Buncombe Co., NC > Lincoln Co., TN > Jackson and Madison Co., AL, Madison Co. AR > TX




The 2000 census found over six hundred thousand people named Lee living in the United States, making it the 22nd most common surname in the country. Lees (and Leas and Leighs) have been here since the 1600s, and once they found the way to the New World, they came over from the British Isles almost as often as the Smiths, Johnsons, Williams, and Jones.

The Lee migration was “encouraged” by the fact that most lived in desperate poverty in their homelands of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Furthermore the evidence we’ve seen indicates many young Lee men, once they got here, proved quite good at reproducing and kept it up for most of their lives—sometimes with one very resilient wife, more often at the expense of several. So the combination of early and sustained migration and strenuous siring helps explain why you probably know somebody named Lee, but never heard of anyone named, say, Altemeyer.

This site presents recent record-based and DNA based research on both the LEE and LEA families in the form of reports on various individuals and genealogies built around them. The first essay deals with William LEA of Russell County, Virginia, who moved there from Caswell County, North Carolina about 1797. John "Halifax" Lea and John "Richland Creek" Lea play central roles in William's story. Abner Lea and Joseph Gold Lea also find places in the report. The next essay describes the origins of three LEE men who appeared in Russell County at the same time as William Lea: Giles Lee, James Lee, and John Lee. These men came to southwestern Virginia from Wilkes County, Georgia. Giles and James each married three times, the latter to two daughters of pioneering families in Russell County, the Hendricks and the Fraleys. John Lee married Mary "Polly" Vanhook, the daughter of Samuel "Southwestern Virginia" Vanhook. This second essay also necessarily developes the story, told in Essay 3, of 1) Eleanor "Nellie" Lee who married George Isaac Glazener, 2) Robert Lee who married Lucy Weaver, and 3) a William Lee who wed Mary _____ before moving to Jackson County, Alabama.

We think we have untangled the roots of a very small patch of Lees whose progenitor arrived in a northern colony in the early 1700s, as described in Essay 4, and whose descendants are now spread far and wide across the USA, but mainly south of the Mason-Dixon line. He was not connected with Stratford Hall, Virginia or Robert E. Lee. None of his descendants, as far as we know, wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. His gggg-grandson did not invent Spiderman.

But even if this progenitor’s descendants had invented sliced bread, set the record for the javelin throw, and developed the software that enables someone to instantly find the most common surnames in the USA, nobody would know it because no one knew their ancestry traced back to him. This tiny little part of the Lee Family Tree, like tens of thousands of other tiny little parts, was at a loss to connect itself to the rest. Most people know who their grandparents were. After that it gets fuzzy fast.

We three researchers set out to connect our lives, our existences, to the rest of humanity, to the Lee Tree in this instance. Eventually we made the progress presented on this website. Our discoveries will probably interest maybe ten other people altogether (which breaks down to about a thousand words of essay per person). So if you keep on reading this, feel yourself treasured. We were counting on you being here.

The key person in tracing things turned out to be a Giles Lee (1737-1817) (but he’s not the progenitor). That’s why this site is entitled as it is. We hope you enjoy this presentation and welcome your correspondence.


Four Essays are presented below. Family Trees are linked at the bottom of the page.



Terry D. Lee ([email protected])

Greg Lea ([email protected])

Bob Altemeyer ([email protected])


The Essays




Essay 1: "William Lea of Russell Co., Virginia and Caswell Co., North Carolina (c1750-1810)"



Russell County nestles in the extreme southwestern tip of Virginia, and launched the Wilderness Road that Daniel Boone extended through the Appalachians. It was originally part of Fincastle County, and then Washington County, from which it was carved in 1786 as its population increased. Europeans began settling there in significant numbers during the 1770s, and conflicts with the understandably annoyed original inhabitants arose fairly often, especially during the Revolutionary War. The county was divided into an ‘Upper District” and a “Lower District,” with most of the early settlement occurring in the Upper along the Clinch River and its tributaries. The county seat was established at Lebanon, which sits nearly in the middle of the county.


In the late 1790s a group of Lees appeared out of nowhere and were rewarded with spots on the personal property tax rolls. A John Lee was the first, living in 1795 in the Upper District (https://sites.rootsweb.com/~varussel/census/1796tx.html). He reappeared on the 1796 roll, along with two more John Lees in the Lower District and a Giles Lee. We find John Lee in the Upper District once again in 1797, and one John Lee in the Lower District. The latter was joined by Giles Lee, James Lee, and William Lee. But in 1798 all the John Lees were gone, leaving Giles, James, and William in the Lower District. These three men reappeared on the tax rolls into the 19th century, and all three eventually died in the county.


“Who are these guys?” And where did they come from? If you cast your net on the Internet, you will find claims for almost every set of relationships imaginable—a sure sign that nobody knows. Mostly, previous researchers thought that a John “Halifax” Lea [1] (i.e., see Endnote 1) led his four sons (William, Giles, James, and John) from Caswell County, North Carolina to Russell County, Virginia in the 1790s. This leaves a spare John Lee in 1796, but that is a minor problem with many possible explanations.


The Sound of Amateur Genealogists Hitting Brick Walls


The authors of this paper have an abiding interest in this place and time because we each ran into a brick wall here, or else a brick wall that might lead back to here. We are pretty certain that author Greg Lea descends directly from the William Lea in Russell County we were just talking about. We are pretty certain that author Bob Altemeyer’s wife descends from one of the John Lees. And we are pretty certain that author Terry Lee descends from a different William Lee who must have been very closely related to the Russell County Gang. So that’s how we met: we noticed each other staring at the same brick wall. “Come here often?” “Almost every day.”


At one point all of us claimed John “Halifax” Lea (hereafter called simply “Halifax”) as a progenitor. DNA testing has, however, challenged these claims. A known male descendant of the James Lee above has Y-chromosome DNA that belongs in Haplogroup I1a (now called just “I1”) (http://www.leedna.com/dnaresults.php?id=103). However Greg Lea’s own DNA, inherited from another proposed son of Halifax, belongs to Haplogroup R1a and has only a 30% correspondence with James’ descendant (http://www.leedna.com/dnaresults.php?id=278). And Terry Lee’s DNA, traceable to a William Lee who lived in Alabama, matches James’ descendant’s DNA almost perfectly. (It is only one marker off out of 46, which could easily have mutated in the six generations separating Terry Lee from his gggg-grandfather William.) However, we had no idea who this William was and how this DNA could have gotten to Alabama, when it reputably was moving north from North Carolina to Virginia in other people instead.


The extensive conflict between “James’s” I1a and “William’s” R1a DNA confounded us, because (as has been widely noted by others) William mentioned James in his will when he died in Russell County in 1810. Specifically, he asked his sons and wife to "comfortable maintain my brother James Lee" during the rest of his life (https://sites.rootsweb.com/~varussel/probate/williamlee.html). One immediately thinks either William or James was adopted, or else sired by someone other than Halifax. So in our own group we began to fight over who was the true son of Halifax, and whether the DNA donors truly had descended from the men claimed as ancestors. It took about six weeks of playing “Who’s your daddy?” to decide that all the begats were correct as given. [2] So we were stuck, staring not just at a brick wall, but a maze of them. And to make things worse, we would discover that a large part of the previous “factual” reporting of names and events relevant to navigating the maze were in fact wrong. One could find lots of maps claiming to know the way through the maze, but unfortunately they contained errors. We like to think that’s the big reason it took us so long to figure this thing out. (Besides ignoring clues a third-grader would have seized upon.)

William Lea (c1750-1810)


We got some traction by pursuing, in the records, the origins of the William Lea who appeared in Russell County in 1797. This was inherently difficult, because about 90% of the men in Colonial America seem to have been named William Lee. Another 90% were named James Lee, and the other 90% were named John Lee. But one of the John Lees left a clear signpost pointing to the William Lea we were looking for. He was known as John “Richland Creek” Lea to distinguish him from the many other John Leas living around him, and that is what we’re going to call him in this report. “Richland Creek” owned a lot of land in Caswell County, NC in the middle 1700s—mainly along Richland Creek and South Hico Creek. In 1778 he drew up his will, in which he divided his considerable estate mostly among his children in roughly 250 acre allotments. At the end of his will he added the following clause: “& the remainder to be conveyed to William Lea & John Lea Snr. according to Plan No. 6, on their paying for the same according to contract & not else" (Caswell County Will Book A, pp. 166-167). [3] Will page 166  and   Will page 167   Plan 6 would likely have been a surveyor’s drawing of a particular part of Richland Creek’s estate. Altogether six plans were referenced in the will, specifying what each lucky beneficiary was going to get. Note that Richland Creek referred to a contract between himself and the two men he named, and that these men would have to pay for the land he had set aside for them, not receive it free as an inheritance.


Richland Creek died about 1781, and his will was probated that September. About a year later, on 5 August, 1782, Edmund Lea (son of Richland Creek and executor of his will) conveyed “to John Lea Snr., ½ of a tract of land on Bear Br adj. William Lea, 126 A as set forth by old plan made by John Lea” (Caswell County Deed Book E, p. 34). This would seem to be John Lea Snr.’s “inheritance.” Bear Branch was a creek that ran into South Hico Creek, and the land in question may have been bordered by each stream. (Today all these waterways are submerged beneath Hyco Lake.) Notice that these 126 acres were described as half of the land Richland Creek had set aside in his plan, and John Lea Snr.’s half was adjoining or adjacent to 126 acres “belonging” to William Lea.


The 1784 Caswell County Tax List for St. Lawrence District (where Richland Creek’s properties lay) shows William Lea as owing taxes on 126 acres and next to him on the list, John Lea also owed for 126 acres. So William probably had paid for his land by 1784, although the deed had not been registered yet. (This sort of thing happened there and then, especially among relatives and close friends.)


Caswell County Deed Book C, p. 158, recorded on 30 September, 1785 that Edmund Lea sold to “William Lea, son of John (Halifax) (buyer) of Co(unty) and State aforesaid-100 pounds south side of Bear Branch, corner of James Sergent's 126 acres." This seminal record, together with the 5 August, 1782 deed, establishes that John Lea Snr. was John “Halifax” Lea, and that Halifax indeed had a son named William Lea. The two deeds make clear that Halifax owned a farm on the north side of Bear Branch, and William owned a farm of equal size on the south side of that stream—and these purchases apparently fulfilled the contract Richland Creek had made with them.


Why did Richland Creek Make a Deal with William and Halifax?


We don’t know. We haven’t been able to find the contract mentioned in Richland Creek’s will. But the arrangement seems to be an “including” one: Richland Creek offered William and Halifax a place at the table, as it were, by giving them a way to buy land among the plantations he was giving his own children as inheritances. One immediately suspects Richland Creek and Halifax were related. But they were not father and son. They both had sons who were (we know from other sources) still growing their own families, so they would have been of roughly the same generation. Yet they were almost certainly not brothers, for they had the same first name. We suspect they were cousins, and one of them had done much better in life than the other.


The reason may have been medical. “Backwardness” or inadequate development appears noticeably often in this branch of the Leas. In later generations it was labeled “idiocy” by juries and census takers. For example, Richland Creek gave a daughter Phoebe a generous legacy in his will; but Phoebe had to take care of another daughter, Millie, for the rest of her life. Halifax in turn had at least one other son besides William. This son, named “John Jun.” in the 1777 Caswell County Tax List for the St. Lawrence district, was at least 21 then because he was titheable. But he owned no land. He was still living with Halifax in 1782, because “John Lea (Halifax) and his son John” were excused from paying their poll taxes that year (Ben Rose: Lee Families in Caswell & Person Counties, North Carolina and in Virginia Before 1800, p. 86). And in the aforementioned 1784 tax list, the John Lea who owned 126 acres was charged for two polls, suggesting John Jun. was still around. Indeed, the presence of John Jun. was probably the reason Halifax was called John Snr.


Halifax himself may have been a little slow off the mark, and Richland Creek may have included William in the contract—an unusual move when you think about it—to look after Halifax’s interests. Indeed, William is named ahead of Halifax in the will.


In any event, on 11 August, 1786 John Lea sold 126 acres adj. William Lea’s to William Lea for 50 pounds (Caswell County Deed Book E, p. 74). On the same date John Lea Snr. sold his household goods and livestock to William Lea (Caswell County Will Book B, No. 156). We have not found a will for Halifax, and it is possible that he and his son John Jun. comprise two of the John Lees who appeared in Russell County, VA ten years later. [4] But it may also be that Halifax knew he was dying in 1786, and this was how he disposed of his possessions. [5]


How do we know William Lea, son of Halifax, was William Lea of Russell County, VA?


Do you recall our saying that 270% of the men in colonial America were named William, James, or John Lee? Then why should one believe that the William Lea living on Bear Branch in Caswell County, NC in 1784 ended up in Russell County, VA in 1797? Good critical thinking question. The answer is that in October, 1799 a William Lea of Russell County, VA sold 119 acres of land on the north side of Bear Branch in Person County, NC [6] to an Ambrose Lea and another 141 acres on the south side of Bear Branch to William and Ruben Lea (Person County Deed Book C, p. 204-5, 15 October, 1799.) Each piece of land, nicked and supplemented over the years from the original 126 acres (mainly in 1794), fetched 150 pounds. [7]


But how do we know this is the same William Lee who arrived in Russell County by 1797 and stayed until his death in 1810? For one thing, the tax lists reveal only one William Lea/Lee in Russell County in 1799. For another, we know from his will that the Russell County William Lea had had children by two different wives, including a son named Joseph Gold Lea by the second wife. The Caswell County William Lea had, in November, 1790, married Sarah Gold, daughter of Joseph Gold who lived very close to him (Katharine Kerr Kendall, Caswell County North Carolina Marriage Bonds, 1778-1868, p. 60). And William Lea of Russell County said in his will that his wife was named Sarah. The two men were the same.


To tie all this up with a final thread, one of us (Greg Lea) is a direct descendant of a William Lea through Joseph Gold Lea. Since we believe William was the son of Halifax, and Halifax was very closely related to Richland Creek, Greg Lea should have very similar DNA to that of Richland Creek’s male relatives. In fact, it almost perfectly matches that of a known descendant of James Lea of Caswell County, Richland Creek’s brother. It is just two markers off a perfect match with two descendants of Owen Lea, one of Richland Creek’s sons. These changes could have occurred in the generations that have passed since Richland Creek and Halifax lived. But in any event they show the two men, and their sons, were grapes in the same cluster. [8]


The “Brother James” Problem


Then how does one explain the fact that the James Lee in Russell County had very different DNA? One of us (Greg Lea again) suggested there were two James Lees in the county with William, an idea that got a rough ride amongst us because there’s only one James Lee on the tax rolls. However, if you look at the known facts, it’s very hard to see that James Lee as someone who needed support. He was a vigorous, competent, and self-supporting citizen for most of his life. He acquired large amounts of land and sired a very large family. He could read and write, and kept an extensive record of his family in his Bible. He served on juries and was given the job of overseeing various roads. He can’t be William’s brother who needed maintenance for the rest of his life. [9]


Then we discovered that on 26 March, 1799 a James Lee was bound to a protective Russell County official by the “overseers of the poor” because this James was unable to take care of himself (Russell County, VA Law Order Book 2, 1792-1799, p. 539). This could have been Halifax’s son John Lea Jun., by another name (however, see Endnote 3). Or it may be that Halifax had another son who, for whatever reason, was so debilitated he never had to pay tithes. [10] And this James Lee would not have been on the tax rolls. Whatever the case, it seems clear to us that the James Lee who prospered in Russell County was not William’s brother, and Halifax was not his father. Nor, we believe, was Halifax the father of the other new Lees who showed up in Russell County between 1795 and 1797. William Lea was not related to James, Giles, or John Lee. We should have paid more attention to the spelling of the name.


Why did William Lea Move to Russell County?


It was an unusual move. He had a plantation in Caswell County, a much younger wife, and he was raising a second family. Middle-aged men don’t usually pull up stakes and head off to the frontier. Why did he go?


We shall probably never know, but he had seemingly been there before, as a young man. A William Lea settled on 200 acres on Cedar Creek in 1774, that creek being a tributary of the Clinch River in the Glade Hollow region of what became the Upper District of Russell County (Washington County Surveyors Records, p. 69. A clan named Vanhook, who were neighbors of Richland Creek, had sent sons Lawrence, Aaron, and Samuel to Glade Hollow at about the same time (http://www.newrivernotes.com/va/washsurv.htm). The land was fertile and virtually dirt cheap, if one didn’t mind skirmishes with the people who had been living there for hundreds of years hitherto.


Let’s ask our old question. How do we know this William Lee was the William Lea who was the son of Halifax? In 1780 a William Lee and Aaron Vanhook vouched in a Washington County court that a Timothy Burgess was a “regular ordained Baptist Minister” (Annals of Southwest Virginia, p. 1078). Burgess was from Caswell County, NC and had owned 550 acres on South Hico Creek in the St. Lawrence District, where we believe William had lived before coming to Virginia. The vouching establishes that William “Lee” had himself (along with Aaron Vanhook) come from this area. Second, in August, 1782 William “Lee” sold his 200 acres in Washington County to James Sargent, whose family had lived in the St. Lawrence District in Caswell County for some time. (Yes, this was the same James Sargent whose land “cornered” on William Lea’s 126 acres in Caswell County.)


The 1782 Washington County Tax List names only one William Lee. He owned 7 cattle and a slave named Filius (http://www.newrivernotes.com/va/wash1782.htm). We have found no indication that William served in the Continental Army or the militia during the Revolutionary War.


By 1782 William would have known that Richland Creek had died, and he and Halifax now had the opportunity to buy land along Bear Branch. Halifax bought his 126 acres that year. William, who had not been on the Caswell County Tax Rolls previously, appeared on them, as we have seen, in 1784.


This sojourn offers us some hints about William’s date of birth. Since he was able to buy land in 1774, he would have been born by 1753 at the latest. [11] Furthermore he had to be old enough to sign a contract with Richland Creek before he left for Virginia, so he was almost certainly born before 1753. William might have been the unidentified “Fourth William Lea” who signed a petition in 1771 to create Caswell County (Ben Rose: Lee Families in Caswell & Person Counties, North Carolina and in Virginia Before 1800, p. 63). That would push his date of birth back to at least 1750.


We don’t know whether he was Halifax’s oldest child, but if we make the conservative estimate that Halifax was 25 when William was born, that means Halifax was born about 1725, probably sooner. [12]


Conclusions


Four men named Lee suddenly appeared on the tax rolls of Russell County, Virginia in the late 1790s. DNA evidence conclusively shows that one of them, William Lea, was UNrelated to another of them, James Lee. This paper focuses on William Lea. Various records make clear that William was the son of a John “Halifax” Lea who appears to have been related to one of the major land owners in Caswell County, North Carolina. This landowner, also named John Lea and nicknamed “Richland Creek” during his lifetime, made a contract with William and his father John "Halifax" that gave the latter two an opportunity to buy some of Richland Creek’s land after he died. William moved to southwestern Virginia for a while, along with other young men from his area, but returned after Richland Creek died. He bought the land promised him, as did his father Halifax. When his first wife died, William married a neighbor’s daughter, Sarah Gold, in 1790. They moved about 1797 to the same part of southwestern Virginia, now called Russell County, where William had settled earlier, where they took care of their family. William died in 1810.


What about the other three Lees on the scene at that time: Giles, James, and John? Were they related to one another? Yes, yes, and yes. We’ll tell you why we believe this in our next paper.


Endnotes for Essay 1


1 Most of the Leas and Lees at this time were illiterate, and signed their names on legal deeds with an “X,” so the county clerk spelled out their names as he wished. Thus the spelling of “Lee” vs. “Lea” and (“Leigh”) was often determined by local custom. For example, the many Lees/Leas/Leighs who lived in Caswell County, NC almost always had their name spelled Lea. In Russell County, VA the name was almost always spelled “Lee.” But the individual could trump the clerk. The William Lea we find in Russell County could spell his name, and he spelled it Lea. He was identified as “William Lee” by the clerk in Russell County who drew up his will, but William signed the document “Wm Lea.” While one ordinarily disregards such spelling differences, it turned out this was a clue to unraveling the very complex mystery of the Lees of Russell County. (We noticed it of course, but ignored it , and then felt silly later.)


2 At one point during this backtracking we found ourselves confused by records of Joseph Gold Lea in Greene County, MO. A researcher at the county library in Springfield, Patti Hobbs, and then the county archivist, Robert Neumann, both busted a gut digging out papers, photographing them, and sending them to us literally overnight to help us out. They were the most outstanding researchers we encountered in our quest, and counterweight the several counties and heritage societies that would never even reply to our requests.


3 We found four different summaries of John “Richland Creek” Lea’s will on the Internet, all different in one way or another. Three of the four, including that presented by Katherine Kerr Kendell in her book, Caswell County, NC Will Books, 1777-1843; 1784 Tax List; and Guardians Accounts, 1794-1819, as well as Ruth Lien Henneman’s version in Person County Heritage-North Carolina, Vol. II, said "Richland Creek’s" “Plan 6” pertained to William Lea and John Lea Jun. This creates confusion down the trail, since John Lea Snr. got the land. Ms. Karen Oestreicher of the Caswell County Historical Association was kind enough to send us a photocopy of the will itself. The designation after “John Lea” on p. 167 is not very legible, but comparison with other words on the document makes it clear that the first letter after “Lea” is an upper-case “S.” Thus we have said the designation was “John Lea Snr.” Earlier researchers may have interpreted the designation as “Jun.” because they assumed this John Lea must have been a son of John “Richland Creek” Lea.


4 A John Lea paid taxes on 100 acres in the St. Lawrence District year after year through the 1790s. If this was "Halifax’s" son, it means he could not have been in Russell County, VA as one of the “extra” John Lees in 1796.


5 One of the many things we don’t know is how John "Halifax" Lea got his nickname. It most likely came from Halifax County, VA, through which many settlers of Caswell County passed. But we can find no record of a John Lea/Lee/Leigh ever owning property or being on a voters list there at the relevant time. Of course, "Halifax" was not a rich man, and he may never have owned any property before arriving in Caswell County.


"Halifax" probably came from the same place that "Richland Creek" came from, and it seems widely agreed that was Spotsylvania County, VA. "Richland Creek" (whose real name, we should remind ourselves, was John Lea), along with brothers James and William, acquired large tracts of land in the 1750s in what became Caswell County, NC. So did their sister Sarah, who married a William Sargent. The father of these four siblings is more disputed. It might have been a William Leigh of Virginia, who married a Francis Major. Or it might have been this William’s older brother, John Leigh. However Ben Rose (Lee Families in Caswell & Person Counties, North Carolina and in Virginia Before 1800, Chapters 6 and 9) believes the Lea brothers under discussion were born in England and migrated to Virginia, and were unrelated to the Leighs of Virginia.


Among ourselves, Greg Lea has offered the hypothesis that "Halifax" was a second or third cousin of "Richland Creek" who migrated from England and married one of Richland Creek’s daughters.


6 Caswell County was split down the middle in 1791, and its eastern half, which included the St. Lawrence District, was named Person County.


7 We’re not sure of William’s relationship with Ambrose, Reuben, and the new William, but suspect they were grandchildren of "Richland Creek" or one of his brothers. Ambrose paid the taxes on his 141 acres beginning in 1796, when William apparently left for Russell County. (William’s son Abner paid the taxes on the rest of William’s property up until 1799.)


8 Greg Lea’s DNA matches the descendants of two other men perfectly. One is Ambrose Lea, who Greg suspects will turn out to be an unknown son of "Halifax", which would certainly explain a perfect match with William Lea’s descendant. An Ambrose Lee is found in the 1790 census of Chester County, SC, living near Edmund, Elliott, and Owen Lee—known sons of "Richland Creek". This Ambrose, married to Frances Wheeler in 1779, reappeared on the 1800 census and then died in Chester County in 1803. On the other hand, an Ambrose Lee was paying a poll tax in Caswell County from 1794 to 1801. He was not, apparently, a son of the Ambrose Lee who moved to South Carolina, for the latter did not mention a son named Ambrose in his will.


The other perfect match comes from a descendant of a Lemuel Lee of Muhlenberg, KY and Topisaw, MS. who is, you can imagine, the object of considerable research now.


9 This James Lee (who spelled his name “Lee” and can’t be found in North Carolina) did become senile before dying in 1851. A Russell County judge ruled against a will James had written in his last years, saying James had evidently not been in his right mind for some time at the end. But the court’s comment means he had been in his “right mind” previously.


10 William Lea also asked his beneficiaries to look after his son George, who too apparently needed ongoing support.


11 Then why wasn’t William on the Caswell County tax roll around 1774, if he was 21 and living there then? Because there was no Caswell County then. It was Orange County, and the Orange County tax rolls were apparently lost during the Revolutionary War.


12 What do we know about William Lea’s descendants? He mentions three children by his first wife in his will. One was a son named Abner, who seemingly lived with William and stayed behind in Caswell County when William moved to Virginia. William was not charged an additional tithe for a son either in Washington County, VA in 1782, or in Caswell County, NC in 1784, so Abner was probably born after 1764 but before 1772, since he was titheable in Caswell County in 1793. A daughter Elizabeth married James Hobbs about 1802 in Russell County; if she was 18 then, she was born in 1784 in Caswell County. She obviously accompanied William and his second wife Sarah to Russell County. Another daughter, Frances (called Franky in William’s will) married Joseph Whiteley in Russell County as well. William then had at least three sons with Sarah Gold: Joseph Gold, Alvey, and Ephraim. Joseph, Ephraim, and perhaps Alvey stayed in Russell County on land they inherited from William until after the 1830 census, when they moved to Jackson County, Tennessee. From there they moved to Greene County, Missouri. Sarah Gold Lee reportedly died in 1834 in Russell County. The fate of William’s invalid brother James and his invalid son George, is unknown.



Essay 2: "How Giles, James, and John Lee Came to Russell County Virginia"



In the preceding paper on the four Lee men who arrived in Russell County, VA in the late 1790s we concluded that one of them, William Lea (c1750 - 1810), was the son of John “Halifax” Lea (c1725 - c1786) who lived in Caswell County, NC. However, to our slack-jawed surprise we found that DNA evidence proved that this William was not the brother of the James Lee (1765-1851) who arrived in Russell County shortly before William did. (There was another James Lea in the county, who was William’s brother.) So where did James Lee come from? And how about Giles and John Lee? Were these men related, and if so, how?


You can find two prominent answers to these questions on the Internet. One is the “Father John of Stratford” explanation. The John Lee we are pursuing had a son named Louis Harrison Lee, who in turn had a grandson named Charles Oliver Lee. “Harrison” told Charles stories about the family, and Charles wrote them down years later.

See https://sites.rootsweb.com/~mojeffer/lee_history.html. The John Lee we are pursuing, according to this source, grew up in Stratford, Virginia where his father, also named John, lived after coming over from England. Another descendant, Samuel Thomas Lee, wrote a letter to a family member in August 1887 in which he descended from a great-grandfather named John Lee who migrated from England to Virginia at an early age, and lived in Stratford (http://van-hook.us/tng/getperson.php?personID=I1830&tree=VanHook). These independent and mutually reinforcing Stratford–centered accounts are buttressed by a claim that Eleanor “Nellie” Lee, thought to be John’s sister, was baptized in a Baptist church on September 27, 1774 in Stratford, VA.


The second answer you can easily find on the Internet comes from annotations made to the Russell County, VA 1850 census a few years ago which state that the James Lee we are pursuing was the “s(on) / John Lea of Halifax Co.” (Household No. 513).


These explanations say nothing about Giles, but various investigators have solved that problem by saying Halifax’s name was John Giles Lea, and the Giles Lee found in Russell County was actually Halifax.


These propositions run aground on several immovable facts, however. There is no Stratford, VA. There’s a famous plantation named Stratford Hall in Westmoreland County, where Robert E. Lee was born. And there’s a Stafford County, where Fredericksburg is located, which is two counties northwest of Westmoreland County. But there’s no county, city, town, or burg named Stratford in Virginia. The story implies the “Russell County” branch of the Lee family came from Stratford Hall, but the extensive research done on that aristocratic family shows no such connection. [1] (See Endnote 1.) Furthermore, September 27, 1774 was a Tuesday, a rather unlikely day of the week for a Baptist congregation to gather at the waters for a sacramental immersion. As for James, the DNA testing mentioned above has established that direct male descendants of William Lea and James Lee have very different Y chromosomes. Since we know from various records that William was the son of Halifax, James’ connection to the latter is highly doubtful. And we know of no evidence that Halifax’s name was John Giles Lea. [2]


Pursuing Giles Lee


We shall concentrate on tracing Giles Lee, rather than James or John, because if you’re a genealogical bloodhound you have a much better chance of tracking a Giles than a James or a John. You can easily go crazy trying to untangle the John, James, and William Lees/Leas/Leighs running around colonial America—especially because (1) many were illiterate so the spelling of their last name was decided by the clerks who drew up various documents, and (2) they loved to name their sons after their grandfathers, fathers, uncles, brothers, and themselves. So if a James Lee had two or three sons, and each of those had two or three sons, you could easily end up with four or five James Lees living in the same county at the same time. And at this time people had not developed the convention of using middle names, such as “James John William Lee” (vs. “James William John Lee”). Fortunately for us, as far as we know only two Giles Lees appear to have been afoot in colonial America in the late 1700s, so we have a fighting chance of discovering where the one in Russell County came from.


One of the two Giles Lees descended from Thomas Lee (1640-1704), the progenitor of the “Lyme, Connecticut Lees.” This Thomas had a son John, and he had a son John (what did we tell you!), and he had a son Giles (http://www.archive.org/stream/genealogicaltabl00hill/genealogicaltabl00hill_djvu.txt). This Giles married Delight Way of Lyme, who died in 1764. Then he married Mercy Smith in 1769, who died in 1777. And finally he married Martha Crook. At some point he moved to Sandisfield Township in Berkshire Co., MA, and he served as a private in the Berkshire militia in 1777 (http://saratoganygenweb.com/batlla.htm). He died of consumption in Sandisfield on August 17, 1790, soon after he had answered the first federal census. So far as we know, he never set foot outside Connecticut and Massachusetts. So this is not the Giles Lee we are looking for, especially since he had been dead for some time when our Giles Lee arrived in Russell County in the late 1790s.


Giles Lee in Georgia


In February, 1783 the Georgia legislature—reestablished after the British withdrew from Savannah—passed an “Act for opening the land office and for other purposes therein mentioned" (http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/s/t/a/Larry-R-Stanley/FILE/0023page.html). This act offered 200 acres of land as a “headright” to men who would settle in Georgia, plus 50 more acres apiece (for a small fee) for each member of their family or slave who accompanied them to the new state. This offer ignited a “Going to Georgia” movement in the United States as the Revolutionary War ended.


Franklin County was created in February, 1784 north of Wilkes County to absorb the flood of new settlers. Giles Lee obtained a warrant for 500 acres there, almost certainly in 1784 (Warrant). But he probably sold his warrant as soon as he obtained it, as many speculators did, and moved his family south a bit to better land in Wilkes County.


The oldest surviving tax records in Wilkes County say Giles owned 400 acres in 1785. We’ve not been able to locate a surveyor’s description of his land, but a later tax record says it was on the “Broad River.” However, two Broad Rivers flowed through Wilkes: the main channel, and the South Fork of the Broad, and both were called the “Broad River” on the tax lists. We shall eventually see that Giles lived on the south bank of the South Fork, near the spot where this tributary joins the main stream.


Giles likely chose the land himself. The way it worked, you showed up at the land office, and swore you had a family of N with you and that you’d never gotten a headship grant before. (Giles must have crossed his fingers behind his back at this point.) Then they gave you a warrant for X acres. Nobody really cared for a while, so long as settlers were settling. The Cherokee and Creek nations had recently ceded these lands to Georgia, and officials in Savannah were powerfully interested in putting a lot of people between themselves and the Indians in case some tribes did not get the memo.


The headship grant program in Georgia experienced significant start-up problems. On one May day in 1784 a mob of angry claimants stormed the land office handling Franklin County grants, sending the clerks fleeing out the back door. Piles of grant certificates were soon blowing around in the wind outside http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/s/t/a/Larry-R-Stanley/FILE/0023page.html There was also a definite lack of oversight in the process and some men—playing even faster and looser with the rules than Giles did—were able to obtain more than the official 1000 acre headship maximum.


Once you had your warrant, you went looking for the best unclaimed place you could find, while your kids moaned from the back of the wagon, “Are we there yet, Pa?” When you found a spot to your liking, you got the county surveyor to get out his 66-foot chain and mark off your land, giving consideration to what you wanted it to include—like a source of water. The surveyor took his drawing of your claim, called a “plat,” back to the county office, and you started cutting down trees and building, literally, a home. You had to live there a year and cultivate at least 3% of your land before you could ask for the title.


Huge amounts of land were just lying around, unclaimed. We were impressed with how often a plat from this era showed the claim was bordered by “Vacant” land. A William Cunningham from Virginia, who obtained 800 acres in 1784 alone, owned 200 acres across the South Fork from Giles (i.e., to the north) (Wilkes County Deed Book G, p. 121). So Giles likely got a pretty good spot. Giles’ immediate neighbor to the south became Adam Simmons from Wake County, NC, who had a headship warrant for 400 acres laid out in March, 1785. The plat for this land names Giles Lee as the landowner immediately to the north
(Simmons' plat).


We should note another nearby settler. Thomas Hendon, also from Wake County, NC, received a headship grant for 200 acres along Tillet’s Creek in 1784. Tillet’s Creek flows into the main channel of the Broad a short distance east of the spot where the South Fork does the same. So Hendon lived very close to Simmons and Giles. Simmons and Hendon probably had known each other previously, and both helped found the Cloud Creek Baptist Church a few miles to the north in 1788.


One finds all three men in the 1785 tax records reproduced in Frank Parker Hudson’s Wilkes County Georgia Tax Records, 1785-1805, pp. 42-43, living in Captain Elsberry’s district. “Jiles” Lee owned 400 acres, while Simmons owned 600 and Hendon 400. Perhaps the latter two men bought some speculator’s 400 acre grant and split it between them.


1786. Giles Lee was the only Lee listed in Captain Elsberry’s district in 1785, showing—given the way the records were kept—he did not have any males over 20 living with him. However Giles’ entry on the 1786 list (p. 115 in Hudson) was followed by a Robert Lee who owned no land but owed a head tax. An initial appearance on a tax list like this usually meant a son living at home had turned 21 during the ensuing year. This implies that Giles Lee had a son about 1765 whom he named Robert, and it establishes that Giles had reached middle age by 1786.


1787. In 1787 Giles still owned his 400 acres (p. 127), but had no sons “of age” living with him. Robert’s absence piques our curiosity. 400 acres made for plenty of work, so one hardly needed to “farm out” a son to toil for someone else.


1788-9. The 1788 and 1789 tax records for Wilkes County have been lost.


1790: An Important Year. In 1790 Giles owned only 200 acres (Hudson, p. 222), which again piques our curiosity. A John Lee, who owned no land of his own, was living with Giles (p. 222). Robert, however, was again missing.


Where did Giles’ other 200 acres go? Probably to Robert Pogue, who appeared on the Wilkes County tax rolls for the first time. Pogue was Adam Simmons’ father-in-law, and he had evidently been living elsewhere until now. Later tax rolls would indicate that Pogue lived adjacent to both Giles Lee and Adam Simmons. So Pogue evidently bought half of Giles’ farm in 1789.


Giles may have sold half his land to help two of his children obtain their own. A James Lee also now appeared on the tax roll in Wilkes County for the first time, owning 300 acres (p. 223). The James Lee who died in Russell County, VA was reportedly 83 in the 1850 census, meaning he had been born about 1767. [4] If so, he would have turned 21 in 1788 (for which, like 1789, we have no tax record). So he would have been titheable in 1790, as this James Lee was.


One finds only one James Lee on this Wilkes County tax list, and we know he purchased 100 acres on Tillet’s Creek in November, 1790 from Thomas Hendon (Wilkes County Deed Book GG, pp. 376-377). Where were James’ other 200 acres? We find out later they were just south of Giles, on the other side of Simmon's land, and probably close to Tillet's Creek.


Another man, named George Glaisnor on the deed, also bought 100 acres along Tillet’s Creek from Thomas Hendon in 1790 (Deed Book GG, pp. 364-366). George was married to Eleanor (Nellie) Lee, who we think was Giles’ oldest child. [5] The two plots lay side-by-side, west-to-east, with the creek running through each of them. [6] George “Glasner” (on the tax list) owned 275 acres altogether (but we have not found a deed for the extra 175 acres, which connected to the first 100.) [7] We do not know where the Glazeners lived in the 1780s, but most of their children said on the censuses, fairly consistently, that they had been born in North Carolina.


So two new “Lee families” now lived next to each other a short distance downriver from Giles’ farm.


Turning now to the John Lee living with Giles in 1790, is he the same John Lee we find in Russell County, VA in a few more years? That John Lee’s answers to the 1820 (Harrison County, KY) and 1830 (Jefferson County, MO) censuses indicate he had been born between 1765 and 1770. That certainly fits into Giles’ family picture. In fact, if John was Giles’ son, we can narrow the possibilities quite a bit. John couldn’t have been born in 1765 because it seems Robert was born about then. If he had been born in 1766 he would have been titheable in 1787 (and he was not listed.) If John had been born in 1770 he would not be titheable in 1790, and he was. That leaves 1767, 1768, and 1769. If James, born in 1767, was Giles’ son, then John was likely born in either 1768 or 1769.


1791. Giles and James each appear on p. 307 of Hudson’s very helpful book with the same acreage as the previous year. Robert was listed as well and lived with Giles. John was gone. The Glazeners were also missing—but almost certainly there.


1792. Giles received a land grant for 200 acres in Wilkes County on June 29 this year (Deed Book WWW, p. 269). As his land holdings on the tax list never increased, we suspect the state was simply giving him title to the half of his original 400 acres he still owned. (The description of his 200 acres in the grant (Giles' grant) is the closest thing we have to a plat of Giles’ land in Wilkes County.)


James Lee in turn received a grant for the 200 acre farm for which he had been paying taxes since 1790 (see James' grant). Both grants were issued on June 29, 1792 and called headright grants--which is hard to figure in James' case and even more problematical in Giles'. [8]


The biggest landowner in the area, named John Griffith, bought William Cunningham’s 200 acres across the South Fork of the Broad River from Giles’ farm (Oglethorpe County Deed Book A, p. 268). The transaction, presented in Michael Farmer’s Oglethorpe County, Georgia Deed Books A-E on p. 34, stated that Giles Lea lived on the south side of the South Fork of the Broad River, opposite Cunningham’s land.


The tax rolls listed, for the first time, the “waters” on which various farms lay and whose land was nearby. Giles’ land was said to be on the Broad, with John Griffith (also on the Broad) as his neighbor.


Robert and John Lee were recorded as living with Giles (p. 370). James Lee was missed this time. George “Glaizner” owned 273 acres on Tillet’s Creek.


1793. Giles continued to pay taxes on his 200 acres on the Broad River (p. 498). Griffith was again his nearest neighbor. Robert lived with Giles, but John was gone. James Lee again owed taxes for his 100 acres on Tillet’s Creek (p. 500), and separately for 200 acres south of Simmon's farm.


A new Lee, William Lee, seems to have lived with James on his Tillet’s Creek farm (p. 500). If this William is another son of Giles, he was likely born in 1772. George “Glasner” still had 273 acres on Tillet’s Creek (p. 499).


In November, 1793 James Lee and his wife Sarah sold the 200 acres he had been granted in June 1792, to a Samuel Shannon for 25 pounds (Oglethorpe County Deed Book A, p. 215). The farm may have been land-locked, which would account for the low selling price.


Sometime late in 1793 Robert Pogue died. Adam Simmons was named executor of his estate.


In December, 1793 the state created Oglethorpe County from a northwestern portion of Wilkes County, and the Lees and Glazeners found themselves living in the same place in a new place. [9]


The Great Lee Bug-Out from Georgia


1794. In February Adam Simmons held an estate sale for the property of Robert Pogue (Grace Gillam Davidson, The Early Records of Georgia. Vol. I, Wilkes County, p. 45. Giles, Robert, and James Lee were reported as attending, along with George Glazener. Simmons’ report to the probate court shows that Giles, Robert, and John Lee, and George and Eleanor Glazener all had accounts to settle with Pogue’s estate (page 1) and (page 2).


In particular, Pogue owed John Lee 10 shillings for five bushels of corn. Simmons had the probate court “assign” the money to Giles Lee on January 7, 1795. Evidently John was not anywhere nearby then. (In fact, as we’ll explain soon, we think he was in Virginia at this time.) The fact that John had corn of his own to sell in 1793 in turn supports the evidence from the tax roll that he was not living with Giles then. If he had been, Pogue would probably have owed Giles for the corn.

In June, 1794 Giles and his wife Ann sold their 200 acres to neighborly John Griffith for the goodly sum of 500 pounds (Oglethorpe County Deed Book A, p. 270).The deed, presented in Michael Farmer’s book on p. 34, says that Griffith now owned the land on the north, east, and south of Giles’ 200 acres, while Robert Pogue (deceased) held the title to the land to the west.


The earliest tax digest for Oglethorpe County is dated 1795 (http://cdm.sos.state.ga.us/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/tax&CISOPTR=484&REC=1). However the lists themselves appear to have 1794 written on them. We find James Lee in Capt. Simmons’ District on p. 22 as “Person 20,” owning his 100 acres on Tillet’s Creek and the 200 acres he was granted in 1792. Giles Lee appeared next on the list, a good trick since he had sold his land in 1794—another indication the listing was based on 1794 holdings. George Glazener appeared as Person 30 with his 273 acres next to James’ 100. And the mysterious William Lee materialized as Person 32, living perhaps with the Glazeners or perhaps with James.


1795. In September, 1795 George “Glasner” and his wife “Elener” sold their 100 acres on Tillet’s Creek (Oglethorpe County Deed Book A, p. 253). (The disposition of their other 173 acres remains as unknown as the way they got them in the first place.) Then in November a William and Mary Lee sold, somehow, James’ 100 acres on Tillet’s Creek (Oglethorpe County Deed Book C, p. 64). However this was arranged, it implies a strong connection between James and William, and that James was no longer in the area.


1796. William Lee appears on the “1797” Oglethorpe County tax list, which probably was compiled in 1796. He was Person 28 on p. 20, and he owned no land. Then he disappeared from the records there, as Giles, Nellie, Robert, James, and John already had. By 1797 all these Lees had gone.


Gone where? The Glazeners settled in Buncombe County, NC, and Robert and William joined them there. We take up their story in a third report which will follow after this one. Giles, James, and John Lee, on the other hand, moved to Russell County, VA—which is where we came in. [10]



“We’ve Got This All Figured Out” (Perhaps)


John apparently was the first to head north, and he probably went because of a man named Samuel Vanhook. Samuel had moved as a lad with his family about 1753 from western New Jersey to the area that later became Caswell County, NC. [11] In 1771, now a young man with mouths to feed, he migrated to Fincastle County, VA with some of his brothers. The clan bought land on the cheap in the Glade Hollow and Elk Garden area, mainly along Cedar Creek which empties into the Clinch River. Samuel raised his family there and accumulated more property as time passed. He became an officer in the militia and fought in the Battle of Kings Mountain. After the war he opened a tavern and continued to prosper. He seems to have been a colorful figure, judging by the court records.


Then he sold all his land, now part of Russell County, in 1791 and moved to Georgia, leaving behind his brothers and other kin. He settled with his nephew Aaron in Elbert County, the county across the Broad River from Giles Lee’s land. Somehow Giles’ son John met Samuel’s daughter Mary (Polly) Vanhook—probably at church as both families were Baptists. The two were married about 1794 in Georgia, we believe. [12] Soon Samuel was on the move again, returning by a circuitous route to Russell County by 1795 (Russell County Law Order Book 2, p. 225). Polly and John—who seems to have carved himself a niche in the Vanhook clan—got there ahead of him.


We think we know where they first alighted, although the story’s a little complicated. The state of Virginia granted a Cornelius Roberts a tract of land in Glade Hollow in 1787. In 1788 he had the misfortune of dying at the hands of some indigenous people who had not been consulted about the awarding of the grant.


1795. So far, a pretty simple tale, but here comes the complicated part. Giles Lee bought 50 acres of Cornelius’ former holdings in August 1795 “in the Glade Hollow on the waters of the Clinch River” (Russell County Deed Book 2, p. 25). A man named John Hargis also bought some of Cornelius Roberts’ tract two months later. Hargis’ deed said his 50 acres adjoined “the land John Lee now lives on” (Russell County Deed Book 2, p. 56). So we have a John Lee living on (but apparently not owning) some land in Glade Hollow. Hargis buys a small farm next to John. Giles owns a similar farm in the same locale.


We believe this John Lee was Giles’ son, since Giles moved near (or even next) to him in the summer of 1795. This also has to be the John Lee found on the 1795 Upper District Personal Property Tax Roll for Russell County (https://sites.rootsweb.com/~varussel/census/index.html), because that’s the only Lee/Lea/Leigh on that tax roll. This means a John Lee was living in Russell County by March, 1795 when the tax roll was compiled. So Giles apparently was not living anywhere in the county then, because he did not appear on the 1795 tax list.


We suspect John (and Polly) were living in 1795 on land in Glade Hollow owned by one of Polly Vanhook’s relatives, waiting to buy their own place.


1796. In June, 1796 John Lee bought 87 acres on the Clinch River (Russell County Deed Book 2, p. 313). This land had originally been part of a Virginia Treasury Grant (No. 11961) that included Glade Hollow land along Cedar Creek and, at one time or another, bordered land held by Aaron Vanhook and Samuel Vanhook. We know this John Lee was married to Polly because she signed the deed when they sold these 87 acres. So it seems Polly had come home, or pert near it.


Giles did not stay long in Glade Hollow. He soon bought a 94 acre farm along Moccasin Creek in the Lower District (Russell County Deed Book 2, p. 367) and sold his original 50 acres in Glade Hollow to William Sargent (Russell County Deed Book, p. 436).


Both John (Upper District) and Giles (Lower District) appear on the 1796 Personal Property Tax List, along with two other John Lees (Lower District) who we believe are unrelated to our present quest. (They could be Halifax Lee and his son John, Jun.—but that’s a different story.)


Meanwhile James Lee had arrived in Russell County, for he served on a jury in November, 1796 (Russell County Law Order Book 2, p. 332).


1797. In 1797 James purchased 110 acres on Sinking Creek in the Lower District (Russell County Deed Book 2, p. 346). Thus the 1797 Personal Property Tax List found “John (River) Lee” living on the Clinch River in the Upper District, and Giles and James Lee living in the Lower District. It would seem we have answered the questions about how these three men came to be in Russell County, VA at this time, where they came from, and the relationships among them.


But How Do We Know This James and This John Were Giles Lee’s Sons?


The fact that we have two unidentified John Lees floating around Russell County in 1796 should remind us that John and James were very common names, and the fellows we’ve claimed as Giles’ sons could have come from lots of other places instead. How do we know they were Giles’ offspring, and brothers to one another?


First, the dates fit. John married Polly Vanhook about 1794 and in 1795 John was living in Glade Hollow, where lots of Polly’s kin lived. [13] Giles sold his 200 acres in Georgia in 1794, and he bought land in Russell County in 1795. James’ 100 acres on Tillet’s Creek were sold in 1795 and he turned up in Russell County in 1796. One can ask why the three families didn’t move at the same time, and we don’t know. It looks to us like the decisions happened in stages. The Vanhooks probably started things rolling, deciding to return to Russell County, and John went with them. [14] Giles in turn may have gotten an offer for his farm he could not refuse (500 pounds, not a dead horse), and decided to follow John and Samuel to Virginia. [15] James in turn followed his father. (A more interesting question: Why didn’t Robert, William and Nellie go too?)


Second, the James Lee who settled in Russell County in 1796 named his first son (born in 1799) Giles R. Lee. (He also named a daughter Nellie Glazner Lee, which is rather a long shot if one thinks we’re just dealing with coincidences here). And he recorded Giles’ death in his Bible. And Giles is reputedly buried in the Lee Cemetery James established in Castlewood in Russell County. So this part is pretty much a slam dunk.


Third, the fact that Giles Lee bought land very near to where John Lee was living upon arriving in Russell County seems to link the men closely. And since Polly Vanhook had a child by a John Lee in 1795, apparently in Virginia, it’s a good bet they knew each other before then. We think we know where Polly was in 1794: in Elbert County, GA, across the river from Giles’ farm. And John and Polly Lee named a son, born in 1797, Giles S. Lee.


Fourth, it’s still possible that Polly married a different John Lee who had no connection with Giles’ family, and the points above are just remarkable coincidences. But if the John Lee we find owning 87 acres in Russell County in 1796 was James Lee’s brother, their direct male descendants should have very similar, if not identical, Y chromosomes. In 2012 we located a direct male descendant of John and Polly Lee who kindly submitted a DNA sample to Ancestry.com. We already had the DNA record of a direct male descendant of James Lee (http://www.leedna.com/dnaresults.php?id=103), so we could compare the two. They were identical. We accordingly believe Mary “Polly” Vanhook Lee’s husband John was James Lee’s brother John and, like James, Giles Lee’s son. [16]


Giles Lee’s Later Life


Giles Lee should have left Georgia a wealthy man, having sold his 200 acres along the Broad for 500 pounds. But he may have given some of his money to James and John to help them get started, and perhaps to his other children who moved to western North Carolina. In any event, he did not buy large amounts of land in Russell County, and his life there for the next 20 years seemed to slide ever downward in a slow spiral caused by the death of his wife, and a drinking problem he may have brought from Georgia. [17]


In June, 1796—not that long after he had arrived—Giles was brought before the Russell County Court of Quarterly Sessions for selling spirituous liquors (Russell County Virginia Law Order Book 2, p. 364). The following summer he was granted a license to keep an “ordinary” (a tavern) in his home for one year (Russell County Virginia Law Order Book 2, p. 382). But the license was not renewed.


Ann Lee appears to have died soon after moving to Russell County, for in September, 1797 Giles (and only Giles) sold the 50 acres in Glade Hollow (Russell County Deed Book 2, p. 436). Both the husband and wife had to sign the bill of sale when disposing of family land, so Ann’s missing signature implies she was dead. We know that by August, 1798 Giles had married a woman named Rachel, because the two of them sold 50 of the 94 acres then that Giles had bought along Moccasin Creek just the year before (Russell County Deed Book 2, p. 537).


In 1801 Giles confessed to the Stoney Creek Primitive Baptist Church that he was drinking too much (http://historical-melungeons.blogspot.ca/search/label/Stony%20Creek%20Baptish%20Church). At some point Rachel died, for the same records show that two years later Giles and a new wife, Sarah, left the congregation.


In 1804 Giles asked the county court to be excused from paying his taxes because of age and bodily infirmities (Russell County Virginia Law Order Book 3, p. 331). He was probably in his upper 60s then and the release was granted. But it was an unusual request; very few men asked to be relieved of their local taxes. It strongly suggests Giles and Sarah were quite poor.


In 1809 the couple sold another 15 acres of their farm, and they disposed of the last of their property in April, 1814 (Russell County Deed Book 5, p. 43). We don’t know where they lived thereafter. Giles bought a 5 acre plot in the Copper Ridge region of Russell County on November 3, 1817 for $3 (Russell County Deed Book 6, p. 33; Virginia State Microfilm of Deed Book 6), probably for Sarah to live on after he was gone. Ten days later James wrote in his Bible, “Giles Lee departed this life Nov. 13, 1817.” No probate record exists. Giles probably had nothing to be distributed.


James Lee’s Later Life


Unlike his father, James Lee prospered in Russell County. He did lose his first wife there in 1810, known to us only as “Sarah” from the sale of their 200 acres in Georgia. She had borne him two children. He then married Rachel Hendricks, daughter of an early settler in Russell County, in 1812. They had six children before she died in 1829. James then married Chloe Fraley in 1830, offspring of another pioneering family who was some 42 years younger than himself. The couple had five children, the last in 1842.


Beginning in 1806, James acquired farms and slaves in the county at almost the same pace he sired children. Curiously, he does not appear—so far as we know—to have helped his father avoid destitution. James did not record Giles’ second and third marriages in his Bible. [18]


James apparently became senile during his last years, and because of his wealth and complicated marital history, his final will was contested by children from his first two marriages. A judge declared that James had been out of his mind long before the final will was written, and threw it out


John Lee’s Later Life


Giles’ son John and his wife Polly stayed only a short time in Russell County, as a number of Polly’s brothers and cousins struck out for new homes in central Kentucky—just as their fathers had left North Carolina for southwestern Virginia a generation earlier. Thus John and Polly sold the 87 acres they had bought in 1796 on the Clinch River in 1797, and by 1800 they had bought land in Harrison County, KY next to Polly’s brother Benjamin Vanhook. They stayed in Kentucky as their family grew to nearly a dozen children.


John and Polly had both been raised Baptists, and John served as a deacon in his local Baptist church. But eventually he and Polly became Methodists, possibly over the issue of slavery. Some of the family moved briefly to Indiana sometime after 1820, then briefly to Illinois, and finally settled in Jefferson County, MO by the mid-1820s,where their son Giles Sydney Lee had moved earlier. Polly was still alive for the 1830 census, but was gone by the time John died, about July, 1841.


Endnotes for Essay 2


1 Many Lees have tried to show they descend from the famous “Lees of Virginia,” so this is hardly the first unsupportable claim. We don’t question Harrison or Charles or Samuel Lee’s veracity. But it does look like their common source, the John Lee we are pursuing, stole down the well-travelled highway back to Stratford Hall trying to put his family in the good light at the end of the road. We shall see that he changed his own father’s name in these tall tales, which was unnecessary and puzzling. By the time you have finished reading this paper, you may have an hypothesis about why he did this.


2 It says in the 1850 census that James Lee was born in Georgia. James came to Russell County from Georgia, but we strongly doubt he was born in Georgia. We don’t know who provided James’ (age 83) answers to the census taker in 1850. It might have been his young (third) wife Chloe who may not have known James’ origins. If James did the answering, we shall see that he was out of his mind in 1850, according to a judge who threw out his last will.


3 We shall rely heavily on tax lists and property deeds in this report, but we hardly think they are infallible. Tax lists are only as good as the system that produces them, and can fall out of date and omit people—often because the people wanted to be omitted. (Ever hear someone shouting, “Tax me! Please, please, over here, tax ME!”?) Land sales were sometimes not filed until long after the sale took place, or not filed at all. Sometimes on the frontier there never was a deed—just a handshake and a scrap of paper with scrawlings by someone who was much better at clearing land than at reading and writing. And dates of sale may have nothing to do with when a buyer actually moved onto the property. Nevertheless we think the information in tax lists and deed books (and will books and records of court proceedings) are generally superior to some of the census records we also peruse. For some reason, despite their famous American civic-mindedness, people tend to be a lot more persnickety about affairs of the wallet, and owning their home, than they do about answering the census.


4 You will sometimes find sources that say James Lee was 85, not 83, at the time of the 1850 census. The number on the census form looks much more like 83 than 85 to us, given the way the clerk wrote his “3’s” and “5’s” on other entries on the sheet.


5 Nellie and George had a son in 1781, when Robert would have been 15, so Robert was almost certainly younger than Nellie. However, Nellie could have been Giles’ younger sister instead of his daughter. That would make her Robert’s aunt, not his older sister. Robert appears to have been attached to her, and either relationship, older sister or aunt, could have produced that attachment.


6 Giles may have helped George Glazener and James buy their lands as a way of bringing and keeping his children together. Unlike Robert and John, who you will notice got nothing, both Nellie and James were married and had children. Nellie’s first child, Abraham, was born in 1781. James’ Margot was born in 1788.


Tillet’s Creek, incidentally, was named after Giles Tillet of Virginia, who in November, 1773 received 500 acres of land “at the fork of Broad River” from the Colonial government (http://www.giddeon.com/wilkes/books/early-records-of-ga-vol1/003-029.shtml). When push came to shove came to shooting in 1776, Giles Tillet came a Loyalist and served as a Captain in the British militia during the take-no-prisoners Patriot-Loyalist fights of the Revolutionary War. He was captured and executed in 1783 (http://revwarapps.org/w26160.pdf).


Loyalists’ lands were usually seized by the state after the war ended and sold. Tillet had probably cleared a lot of his land by 1783 and built a house on it, which the state would not have given away as a headright.


7 There’s no Glazener, or reasonable facsimile of, on the Wilkes County tax rolls before 1790. So apparently the family moved there then, perhaps in response to an offer from Giles to buy them a farm.


8 Land-owners often paid taxes on their farms before the grant was recorded. The tax lists were usually compiled by a citizen in the area (a militia officer such as Captain Elsberry) who rode around his district and recorded who was farming what, how many titheable males lived on the place, and any other property the owner held in Georgia. The deeds, especially if they were in the form of land grants, came from the state capital and had to percolate through several layers of bureaucracy and a committee. And that process would not begin until the tenant formally asked for the land grant. This may help explain why Giles’ grant in 1792 came some seven years after he began paying taxes on his land in 1785.


9 Elbert County had been created to the east of Wilkes in 1790. Oglethorpe, Elbert, and Madison Counties meet today very near Giles Lee’s 200 acres.


10 Nellie, James, John, and William all named sons “Giles.” But Robert did not, choosing instead “Robert” and “Daniel” (his father-in-law was Daniel Weaver). Going to one’s father-in-law ahead of one’s father when naming sons would have implied a very strong relationship with the former, or a very weak one with the latter.


When Robert went missing from the tax roles in Georgia in 1787, he might well have been with Nellie and her husband George Glazener, wherever they were. He returned about the same time they came to Wilkes County, and he went with them to Buncombe County, NC rather than go with Giles, James and John to Russell County, VA. William also appears to have had a stronger relationship with the Glazeners, and with Robert, than with the other men in the family. One will see later that John also “changed families,” and moved in and about with his in-laws. Only James remained with Giles at the end, and we shall see that relationship seems cool as well.


11 The Samuel Vanhook we are discussing is sometimes called Samuel “Southwest Virginia” Vanhook to distinguish him from his uncle, called Samuel “Kentucky” Vanhook. See http://www.van-hook.us for a clear explanation of these two men whose lives often get combined into one legend or confusingly intermixed.


12 One can find many opinions on the Internet about when John and Polly married. We have decided upon “about 1794” because the couple’s first child, Abner Lee, indicated on the 1850 census (Gentry, MO), the 1860 census (DeKalb, MO), and the 1870 census (DeKalb, MO) that he had been born in 1795 (or late 1794). (He also consistently said he had been born in Virginia.) This means John marched Polly from Georgia to Virginia when she was preggers. That seemed to go well, so he later marched her from Virginia across the mountains to Kentucky a few months before she bore Samuel Vanhook Lee in January, 1800. Polly was tough.


We would like to thank the Historical Society of Washington County, Virginia for providing copies of records that show John Lee and Polly Vanhook did not get married there on 24 April, 1787, as has been claimed. (It was a different John Lee, and he did not marry a Vanhook, but a Mary Lee who was perhaps his cousin.)


13 Could John have moved to Russell County as a single man, coincidently settled in Glade Hollow, met Polly there, who for some reason was not in Georgia with her father, and gotten married in Virginia? Possibly, but it would have been a barn-burning romance. There’s no record of John Lee in Russell County in 1793 or 1794. Say John arrived in April 1794, just missing enumeration on that year’s tax roll. He met Polly, courted her, and they got married in late 1794 or early 1795. Then they had their first child at the end of that year. It could be done. But it seems less probable than the “Met in Georgia” scenario, doesn’t it? For one thing, it doesn’t explain why John would have gone to Russell County in the first place.


14 Samuel and Aaron Vanhook may never have intended to stay in Georgia, but just went down to “flip” some land they could get for free. They would likely take their families with them, especially since that determined how much land they would be granted.


15 Giles may have known Samuel Vanhook’s extended family from his childhood, the subject of a fourth paper in this series. Giles probably never met Samuel before Georgia, but they would have had common acquaintances to talk about when they did meet.


16 John Lee, Teller of Tall Tales, Vindicated! The DNA samples from James and John’s descendants have a 74% match with that of Richard the Immigrant (the progenitor of the Westmoreland County Lees) and various other descendants of this famous household (http://www.leedna.com/dnaresults.php?id=103). So the Lee Clan we are studying is distantly related to “the Stratford Lees.” Very distantly, however. The last common ancestor was probably a Viking who pillaged some part of eastern England and then, when the smoke died down, found he rather liked the place, so he settled there.


17 Histories of the frontier often say the main diversions of the settler were not watching television and going for rides in the country to see cows, but drinking and gambling. Combining the two could cost a man his entire fortune in one night.


18 One last possibility for the road. We don’t know with 100% certainty that Giles Lee was the father of Robert, James, etcetera. He could have been an uncle who adopted a whole mess of a brother’s children after they were orphaned. There aren’t any birth certificates. But there’s also not one speck of evidence for this hypothesis, so we don’t lose a lot of sleep pondering it. (We lose sleep over fact-based things we can’t figure out, like George Glazener’s extra 173 acres. There are plenty of those!)



Essay 3: "The Other Children of Giles Lee (1737-1817)"



Terry D. Lee ([email protected])

Bob Altemeyer ([email protected])



In our second essay we traced the move of a Giles Lee and two of his sons from Wilkes County, Georgia to Russell County, Virginia between 1794 and 1796. This left another tale from the family chronicle untold, however, for Giles had three other children with him in Georgia who chose not to go to Virginia. Instead they migrated to western North Carolina, and later to Tennessee, Alabama, and Arkansas, leaving several dozen sons and daughters along the way whose many descendants today might be interested in where they came from, how, and maybe even why. We’ll tell what we’ve learned of that story here.


Eleanor Lee Glazener [1]


We know from various deeds and court documents in Georgia and North Carolina that George Glazener’s wife was named Eleanor (or Nellie), but we have seen nothing that shows her maiden name was Lee, and that she was related to Giles Lee. She could have been Eleanor Smith Glazener as far as the records go, and George may have hooked up with Giles in Georgia simply because he was friends with James Lee. But strong circumstantial evidence supports the family lore that Nellie was a Lee. Two of George and Eleanor’s Glazener-granddaughters were given a middle name of Lee:  Nellie Lee Glazener (born 1816, daughter of Isaac), which pretty much hits the nail right on the head, and Harriet Lee Glazener (born 1825, daughter of Jesse). Additionally, as we shall see, Eleanor was apparently born in New Jersey, as was Giles.


All of the “players” in the story of Giles Lee except Eleanor were men, and because of the enormous difference in the status of men and women in colonial times, we know virtually nothing about her. There’s no record of her birth, her christening, her marriage, her death, or her burial. Wherever she now rests, it is part of the huge wake of graves left from the Atlantic watershed to the Rocky Mountains holding women who went to the frontier, cared for their families, and had child after child until, so often, they died having their last one.


Eleanor Lee survived her many pregnancies, but as noted in Endnote 5 of Essay 2, we don’t know whether she was Giles’ sister or his daughter. We do have a record of her year of birth. In the 1850 census, an Ellender Glazener, living with a John Glazener (and his son Giles Glazener) in DeKalb County, Alabama, was recorded as being 95 years old (and born in New Jersey). That places her date of birth at 1755. But that census report could be more convincing. Extremely old people probably did not give answers to the census enumerators. Instead, Eleanor’s son or daughter-in-law may have estimated her age. (Do your children know your exact age?) And the “95” cautions one the way a headline such as, “300 Perish in Earthquake” does. We’d find “93” or “96” more believable.) If Nellie were born closer to 1760, she could more easily be Giles’ daughter than his sister, since his son Robert was seemingly born around 1762.


We treat her here as Giles’ daughter. Fortunately, it doesn’t make any difference either way. [2]


George Glazener


How do we know that the George Glaisnor who bought land adjoining that of James Lee in Georgia in 1790, and (with “Elener”) sold it as George Glasner in 1795, was the same George Glassnore who appears on the 1800 Buncombe County, NC census? Easy. There’s no alternative. We catch a huge break from the fact that, however you phonetically spell his name, only one George Glazener was running around America at the time involved. Try to find another in the 1800, 1810, and 1820 censuses, when "our George" was definitely alive.


George’s Father. As will be clear in two paragraphs, George Glazener was apparently the son of a German immigrant named “Johannes” who probably arrived in Philadelphia in the mid 1700s. [3] [4]  We think this man moved to central Pennsylvania near the Maryland border because a John Glassner appeared on the 1772 tax list for Brothers Valley in (then) Bedford County, PA (http://www.pa-roots.com/bedford/taxlists/tl1772brothersvalley.html). He owned 200 acres, of which eight had been cleared. He reappeared as John Glessner in 1773(http://usgwarchives.net/pa/bedford/tax.htm). But he is not on the books there for 1774 or thereafter.


On the 28th of August, 1776 a John Glassner enrolled in Captain Charles Coulson’s company of militia in the western, Skipton District of Frederick County, Maryland—which was about to become Washington County. We know from a later record that this John lived on land that eventually became Frostburg, MD, which sits about 15 miles due south of Brothers Valley, PA. [5]


On the same day a George Glassner, who does not appear in any earlier record that we have found, and was almost certainly the George Glasner whom John Glasner named as his son in his 1812 will, signed up in the same unit ("The Maryland Militia in the Revolutionary War" by S. Eugene Clements and F. Edward Wright, Heritage Books, 2006, p. 243-4). Which is why we have been telling John Glazener’s story. The Maryland militia was filled by men between the ages of 16 and 50, so John was born in 1726 at the earliest and George, in 1760 at the latest.


His Mother. Who brought George Glazener into this world? Numerous websites, including this one at its creation, have said she was Eva Martin, the daughter of a charismatic and eccentric Elder of the German Brethren Church named George Adam Martin. Except she cannot have been, if other parts of the family story are true. George Adam Martin reputedly got married about 1745 in Franklin County, PA. George Glazener was reputedly born in 1755. At the most, any daughter of George Adam Martin would have been about ten years old in 1755, and highly unlikely to be making him a grandfather. Furthermore, while no one knows how many children George Adam Martin sired and what their names were, we have not seen any listing that has an “Eva” among his progeny.


All we know about John Glazener’s wife from written records is that he called her “Eva” in his will (http://www.transylvaniagenealogy.com/GLAZENERS.pdf). Where did the story that George Glazener was the grandson of George Adam Martin come from? As far as we can tell, an early Glazener family researcher named Ruth Bump seemingly invented Eva Martin to connect the two Georges. [6] [7]


Back to George.  George’s militia unit was apparently reconstituted in late 1776, perhaps with the creation of Washington County. A Captain Charles Clinton took over command, and George Glasener became a corporal in charge of an eight-man unit called a “class.” John Glassner was placed in a different class, which meant he did not have to take orders from his son.


The militia units in Washington County apparently dissolved and reformed as needed. With few Tories on the frontier and the neighboring Indians sitting out this war, the militia would drill now and then, but otherwise was not needed. Clinton’s company apparently ceased to be in 1777.


In the fall of 1777 the newly formed Maryland state government passed a law which required every male over 17 living in the state to sign an Oath of Fidelity and Support, renouncing allegiance to the King of England and pledging loyalty to Maryland. Men had until March 1, 1778 to sign the oath. John Glasner was the fifteenth person of 108 to sign before his neighbor and local magistrate, Andrew Bruce. We don’t know the date he signed, but since he was among the first, it could have been in late 1777. (http://archive.org/stream/nationalgenealo191721nati/nationalgenealo191721nati_djvu.txt). One might suppose that George would appear with his father, but he did not sign then, or ever. Harsh penalties befell those who refused to sign, but there’s no record George was penalized in any way. He was apparently away at the time, and continued being away until March 1, 1778 at least.


The next time we find hide or hair of George Glazener in the records is in 1783, when his name appears, immediately below John Glaisner’s, in the Wills Town and Sandy Creek listing for paying a “Supply Tax” (http://www.marylandsar.org/SAR-Documents/1783%20Tax%20Lists/Washington_Co_MD1783OPT.pdf, p. 18).  The listing contains information about the number of horses, “black cattle,” and liquor stills the land owner had, as well as the value of his acreage.  It appears from the entries that John Glazener had by then given his first-born son one-quarter of his land and one-third of his livestock and stills. Whether George owned the land by deed or by understanding is unclear, but it was all doubtless quite useful because by 1783 George Glazener had apparently married Eleanor Lee and they had at least one child to feed—which likely is why he had been given part of the family farm. (His brother Jacob was 21 in 1783 but does not appear on the land-based tax list.)


It is well established in various records that George and Eleanor Glazener named their first child Abraham, after the first patriarch in the Bible.  Many decades later, in the 1870 census, Abraham Glazner of Transylvania County, NC was recorded as being 90 years old and having been born in Maryland. He died the next year, and his tombstone says he was born on July 16, 1781 (http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=pv&GRid=52457242&PIpi=37598649). So evidently George and Eleanor were married by 1780 and living in MD in 1781. [8]


How Did George and Eleanor Meet?


George and Eleanor had children with such rapidity (1781, 1783, 1784, 1786, 1787, etc.), they evidently knew how to do it and were good at it. So they probably got married in 1779 or in the first three-quarters of 1780. Where were they then?


George was presumably living in Frostburg-to-be, working on his father’s farm. But he could have been somewhere else from late 1777 to at least March 1, 1778, when he failed to sign the state loyalty oath. As for Eleanor, whether she was Giles’ unmarried sister or daughter, she was probably living with him at this time. We shall see in the next essay that Giles was in Morris County, NJ from at least 1777 (when he joined the militia there) to 1779 (when he was on the Rateables taxpayers list for Roxbury Township).

In Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet lived in the same town but only met because Romeo crashed a Capulet party. Given the hundreds of miles that separated them, and the uncertainty of airline schedules then, you would never expect George Glazener and Eleanor to meet. But it’s dead certain that they did. How?


Hypothesis I. Giles does not appear on the 1780 Rateables list for anywhere in New Jersey, so it’s possible he moved his family to western Maryland, away from the war, in late 1779. We know that a huge expanse of unclaimed, if rather hilly, land lay there at this time, because in 1787 the state surveyed over 4,000 50-acre lots west of Cumberland, MD and started giving them away to men who had served in Maryland units of the Continental Army (http://www.whilbr.org/garrettlots/index.aspx). (The people who were already living there such as the Glazeners and the Frosts were allowed to keep their places.) If that much land was sitting around in Washington County doing nothing in 1787, the area would have been even more “wide open” in 1780.


This possibility gets Juliet and Romeo in the same area code, at least, but they are not likely to meet unless they live reasonably close to one another. People on the frontier usually married someone who lived within a few miles of them. Unfortunately we have not found any land records for this time. Giles was not on the 1783 “Supply Tax” list, but we know he was in Georgia in 1784 so he might have just left.


Hypothesis I provides a plausible explanation of how Eleanor and Gorge could have met. And the amount of documentary evidence for it is contained within the quotation marks at the end of this sentence: “   ”.


Hypothesis II. If you’re the kind of stiff-necked, snarky, hypercritical, friendless person who demands more evidence than that before believing something whole hog, there’s also the possibility that George went to where Nellie was. One can imagine various scenarios. Some militia men went from Maryland to Morris County, NJ in January of 1777 to reinforce Washington’s troops encamped there during the winter (http://msamaryland400.wordpress.com/page/2/). But they were not from Washington County. The Continental Army hunkered down once again in Morris Town for the winter of 1778-9. It badly needed replacements, and George might have volunteered to serve. However, he does not appear on any roster of soldiers bivouacked in Morris County at either of those times. And camping on the outskirts of Morris Town did not exactly put one in Nellie’s back yard, since Giles lived in Roxbury Township, a good horseback ride to the northwest. So back to “  ”. [9]


There’s another somewhat plausible way George could have gone to Nellie. Remember old Johanes Glasler who got off a ship in Philadelphia and settled in Pennsylvania? So did most other German immigrants at that time. But a significant number of them disembarked in Philadelphia and hopped, skipped, and jumped over the Delaware River into western New Jersey instead, forming a large settlement in Morris County in what became known as German Valley. In 1778 German Valley was part of Roxbury Township. So George might have gone to German Valley in 1777-78, say, to help relatives, and maybe find himself a nice German girl to marry.


There are no Glazeners on the 1779 Morris County Rateables List, but we don’t know George’s mother’s maiden name. It would help a great deal if we knew exactly where Giles lived in Roxbury Township, but a thorough search of the deeds from then and there, stored at the New Jersey Archives in Trenton, has drawn a blank. (Giles might well have been renting his farm.) If George and Nellie married in New Jersey, they would probably have wed in her home or in her home “church.” We don’t know what religion the Lees belonged to in 1779, but maybe the marriage record no one can find in Maryland is presently fading away in a very old book listing Roxbury Township, Morris County, NJ weddings. So we’re still at “  ”, but this seems as viable as Hypothesis I to us. [10] Maybe more so. [11]


Another hypothesis. A third possibility exists, in logic anyway. Our couple may have met in some “neutral” place. We like Paris.


Back to 1783


However they met, we know George, Eleanor, and Abraham Glazener were living with two horses, three cows, and £28 worth of whiskey stills next to George’s father in Washington County, Maryland in 1783. In that year they had their second child, Rachel. Next came Isaac, born in 1784. He and most subsequent children maintained on the censuses, rather consistently, that they had been born in North Carolina. So evidently George moved his family to North Carolina in 1783/4, while his brothers stayed put with their father in Maryland.


Sons did not ordinarily leave their family and strike off on their own to a distant state, especially when, as in this case, the son had been given some of the family land and had a wife and kid. So the parting may have been less than friendly. When John Glazener died in 1812, he left George $10. He also stipulated that when his wife Eva died, George couldn’t get any more. Not a particularly friendly gesture, huh?


Is it a coincidence that George Glazener and Giles Lee left Maryland about the same time? One can speculate, but we have no idea where the Glazeners lived in the Tarheel State in 1784, nor do we have anything stronger than a speculation that Giles ever lived in Maryland. [This is another of the two or three (hundred) [12] things we don’t know in these essays.]


George and Eleanor in Georgia


We have been unable to find records of the Glazeners in North Carolina during the 1780s. Instead, George and Nellie appeared on a 1790 Wilkes County, Georgia tax list owning 275 acres next to land purchased by Nellie’s brother James at the same time (see our second essay). That is a lot of land for someone who probably had very little money. Nellie’s and James’ farms were close to Giles Lee’s place, and one suspects he helped his children buy their land. The Glazeners stayed until 1795, when they sold their farm. Giles had already left Georgia for Russell County, VA, and James was following him.


The Glazeners also moved north, but not as far, stopping near the place where Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina meet. [13] Another of Giles’ children, Robert, appears to have joined them there. In the 1800 census for the Morgan District of Buncombe County, NC, George “Glassnore” and his wife had three sons and seven daughters. A Robert Lee lived nearby with an adult woman and three young children. Probably none of them suspected that a first “war between the states” was soon going to dramatically change their lives.


The Walton County War (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walton_War)


The Glazeners and Robert Lee probably owned their farms through grants issued earlier by South Carolina. But South Carolina then said it did not want this neck of the woods after all, and gave it to the federal government. North Carolina began issuing land grants in the region, which it made part of Buncombe County, and settlers with South Carolina papers began to wonder if they would be able to keep their farms. So in January, 1800 a group of them sent a petition to Congress asking that the land be given back to South Carolina. “George Glazner” was the fourth to sign the petition, followed immediately by Robert Lee (http://shahall.com/walton.html). [14]


Congress accordingly gave South Carolina a chance to change its mind, but the state declined. The “Orphan Strip” was filling up with the kind of riff-raff that usually heads for places that don’t have a government. Hence all the bad guys in westerns. Congress then caught everyone off-guard by offering the Orphan Strip to Georgia in 1802. George Glazener and Robert Lee signed the “Orphan Strip Community Petition” to the Georgia legislature in 1803 asking Georgia to accept the offer. Georgia did just that in 1803, and named its new acquisition Walton County.


A series of skirmishes had already broken out between the contesting factions on the frontier, and “Robert Lea” was convicted in a Buncombe County, NC court of rioting in 1803. The folks with North Carolina land grants resisted when Georgia officials showed up demanding they pay taxes to Savannah. Matters came to a head in December, 1804 when gangs of “Georgians” roughed up two leaders of the North Carolina faction. Then on December 14 some Georgia supporters confronted a smaller North Carolinian party, and in the ensuing fight a North Carolina constable named John Havner was struck on the head with a rifle butt, from which blow he soon died. The governor of North Carolina called out the militia, and the leaders of the Georgian party were arrested and placed in jail in the Morgan District of Buncombe County—where most of them lived. Not surprisingly, they soon escaped and nobody could find them.


In March, 1805 the Morgan District Superior Court of North Carolina indicted 34 “rioters” for the December, 1804 assaults [State v. William Thomason, Samuel McAdams, James Williamson, John Ritchie, et al, Morgan District Superior Court, Criminal Action Papers, 1805-1806 (March, 1805), North Carolina State Archives, accession number DSCR.205.327.7.L805]. Thirteen “Georgia” men, including Robert Lee and Isaac Glazener, were indicted for the first two attacks. Twenty-one men (with some overlap, naturally) were charged with killing John Havner, including a William Lee and (again) Isaac Glazener. [15] None of the indicted men ever stood trial, however, because they all quickly fled the region.


Judicial systems for the two states continued to operate side-by-side. On July 1, 1806 George Glazener swore before a Walton County Justice of the Peace that two Buncombe County officials had come to his house and demanded he give it up to the state of North Carolina. When he refused they dragged him outside, threw his furniture out the door, “and by hard threats and menaces compelled Eleanor Glazener, his wife to give an obligation to pay rent for his premises.”


In 1807 the state line between North Carolina and Georgia was resurveyed, and it turned out all of the Orphan Strip lay in North Carolina. North Carolina issued an amnesty that year for all who had fought for Georgia. At least one of the indicted men, George Glazener’s son Isaac, returned to the area. But Robert and William Lee never did. Georgia kept holding courts in the area until 1811, when a more deadly series of battles led it to yield the ground to North Carolina.


George Glazener, according to family tradition, died in 1826 and is buried in the Old Mill Pond Cemetery in Henderson, North Carolina (although there is no marker there). Nellie moved about in her later years with her youngest son John and reportedly died in Alabama in 1855. Her burial site has also never been established.


Who Were Robert and William Lee?


We believe Robert and William Lee were Nellie’s brothers, i.e., sons of the Giles Lee who lived in Wilkes/Oglethorpe Counties, Georgia from about 1784 to 1794. As noted in our second essay, Robert first appeared on the county tax roll in 1786, owning no land and placed very near Giles on the list. As there were no other Lees around, and as Robert was not on the 1785 list, we interpret this to mean Robert was Giles’ son, had just turned 21, and now had to pay a poll tax. That means Robert was born about 1765, making him the oldest of Giles’ known sons. (There are other interpretations of course, and no, we don’t have a birth certificate for Robert. But we’re pretty sure he wasn’t born in Hawaii.) Robert does not show up on the tax lists after 1786 until 1791, 1792, and 1793. Then he disappears from the local records in 1794, the year Giles sold his Georgia land.


William similarly appears out of the blue on the 1793 Wilkes County tax list, owning no land and living with another of Giles’ sons, James. If he had reached the age of majority that year, he was born in 1772, which makes him (so far as we know) Giles’ youngest son. James Lee (born in 1765), as noted above, lived next to George and Nellie Lee Glazener. In 1794 William appears between James Lee and the Glazeners on the tax roll, still with no land of his own, so we can’t judge whom he was living with. In November, 1795 William and Mary Lee sold James’ land, probably because James had left for Virginia by then. William—who would seem to be very closely related to James Lee—would have been 23 in 1795, and his wife Mary probably was somewhere between 18 and 22, meaning she had been born about 1775. William appears on the tax list the following year with no land, and then he too disappears.


We don’t know where Robert and William immediately went when they left the Wilkes County area. Despite being Giles’ first-born son, Robert had never owned any land, apparently, and he was unmarried despite being 29 in 1794. He eventually wed a Lucy Weaver, who lived in the Pendleton District of Anderson County, South Carolina pretty close to Wilkes County, Georgia. (The wedding license is stored next to Nellie Lee Glazener’s in the File of Lost Documents You’d Really Like to See.) So one can hypothesize that Robert went to the Pendleton area, met and married Lucy there, and they moved to Buncombe County, NC (where his sister Nellie lived) in time to appear on the 1800 census. They reportedly had their first child, a daughter named Ellender after Eleanor Nellie Glazener, in 1801 according to Ellender’s answer to the 1850 census and the date on her tombstone. [16]


As for William, we would have no inkling he was anywhere near Buncombe County during the Walton County War if he hadn’t been indicted for murder there in 1805. His name otherwise appears on no records, not even the census. Indeed, he may have been elsewhere, and just blew into town in December, 1804 in time to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the North Carolina constable got hit in the head with a musket. Nobody knows. Furthermore, we don’t know that this Robert and William are the Robert and William in Wilkes Co., Georgia. It’s just that a lot of circumstantial evidence (living in the same place, Robert’s signing the 1800 petition immediately after George Glazener, being in the same gang of “rioters” as a Glazener son, Robert’s naming a daughter Ellender) seems to tie them to Eleanor Nellie Lee Glazener, and hence Giles Lee.


The 1800 census catches one’s eye in this regard, because Robert’s family is much too large. The household had an adult male 26-44, a female 16-25, and three children (two boys and a girl) under 10. Robert (born in 1765) could be the male, and Lucy (b. 1774) could be the female. But where did the kids come from?


If Robert and Lucy had gotten married in 1795 or 1796, they’d have had the opportunity to offspring three times by 1800. This explanation suffers from a notable liability, however: there’s no record anywhere of three Robert-Lucy kids who predated Ellender (b. 1801). Another explanation, less handicapped, posits that the kids in Robert’s 1800 house belonged to William and Mary. We know they were married by 1795, because they signed a land sale document in Oglethorpe County then as husband and wife. And we shall see later, they probably did have two sons by 1800. This doesn’t explain why William and Mary were not enumerated, but one can cook up various explanations. [16]


When Georgia established Walton County it conducted a census of the families living there in 1803. Robert Lee was recorded as having a household of seven whites. By that point in time, according to the family histories, the answer should have been three (Robert, Lucy, and Ellender). The smart money says William was probably living with Robert—just as William, the youngest brother, had lived with James in Wilkes County.


Robert and William Leave North Carolina


We had a lot of trouble tracing Robert and William after they left Buncombe County, and that brings up the First Rule of Evidence: The scarcer the evidence, the longer and more complicated the explanations. So do not attempt to read the rest of this essay if it’s late at night. (Nor should you order anything being advertised on TV.)


For reasons the reader understands, Robert and William probably wanted to go somewhere without a sheriff and "Wanted" posters. That meant the frontier, which from Buncombe County in 1805 meant across the mountains into Tennessee. At that time southern Tennessee bordered on the "Mississippi Territory," a land mass presently filled to the brim with the states of Alabama and Mississippi. But back then it was just a vast expanse of fertile land, mostly unoccupied—at least as far as Europeans were concerned—and most of it recently annexed in 1804 by the United States. So southern Tennessee offered a handy border to slip across if things ever got hot in the Volunteer State.


When we looked in the few records we could find of this time and these places, we found virtually nothing. Hello brick wall. We'd still be banging our heads against it except for one thing. There were folks on the other side of the brick wall trying to find out where their ancestors, William Lee from Alabama and Robert Lee from Tennessee, had come from. One of them, in fact, was one of the authors. [17]


Terry Lee of Madison County, Alabama had been studying his ancestry since the 1990s, and had traced his male line back to a William Lee of Jackson County, Alabama. He submitted a DNA sample for analysis, and found the closest match by far (98%) occurred with a descendant of James Lee of Russell County, VA. The slight difference in DNA could easily have occurred through a single mutation during the generations that had since passed. But there was no record of a James Lee in his family history. So Terry wondered where William Lee and James Lee had come from, both biologically and geographically. [18]


Another energetic and careful researcher in Arkansas named Joy Russell had a gggg-grandfather, Robert Lee, she could trace to Tennessee, but no further. And Robert had had a wife named Lucy Weaver, and they had migrated west from Alabama/Tennessee with some relatives about 1830. And they had a daughter Ellender! But where had Robert come from, both biologically and geographically?


So like the trains that met in Utah when the first transcontinental line was completed, the people working on both ends could hear each other's whistle, we could see we were closing the gap, but the lines of investigation were not connected yet.


The Golden Spike


Terry Lee had the link. He had discovered an 1822 land survey for Decatur County, Alabama, a county you probably never heard of because it doesn't exist. But it did from 1822 to 1825, when the newly formed state of Alabama decided there were enough people living in its northeast corner to justify having three counties, instead of the two (Madison and Jackson) you'll find in your map book. The state undertook a survey of folks who were living (i.e. squatting, usually) in what it named Decatur County. Turned out there weren't all that many, so Decatur County disappeared with the stroke of a pen before it had a chance to compile a decent tax list. But the Tennessee Valley Genealogical Society published a copy of the original 1822 survey, which had somehow survived the Civil War, and Terry went searching for Lees in it.


He found that a William Lee claimed two tracts of land in Decatur County when the surveyor came through in 1822. As well someone named Giles Lee (“Giles?” BINGO!) lived on some land nearby. And a supplemental 1829 survey found a Joshua Lee lived very close to Giles, and right next to a third tract claimed by William. Most of this land was purchased from the Bureau of Land Management in 1831 (http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/results/default.aspx?searchCriteria=type=patent|st=AL|cty=071|ln=lee|sp=true|sw=true|sadv=false), making things nice and legal.


However, any skeptic worth her salt will be saying now, "Yes, there appear to be connections to the William Lee who fled Buncombe County in 1805 and the Giles Lee who died in Virginia in 1817. But it could just be a couple of coincidences, and there's no connection to Robert Lee." Good points.


Further digging and rooting around have produced additional evidence which taken together present, we think, a fairly compelling case. But every piece of evidence can be challenged as being inconclusive in itself. (We know; we take turns challenging them ourselves.)


The Big Picture of How Little We Know


William Lee. William and most of the other persons listed in the 1822 survey were squatting on land ceded by Native Americans to the United States. The Federal government did not sell this land until 1831, as noted above. Fortunately for William and others, the Surveyor General generously gave them the first option to purchase the property rather than have the military expel them. So squatting definitely paid!


The two parcels claimed by William Lee in 1822, each 80 acres in size, lay several miles apart. One, to the north, [19] straddled Clear Creek and went up the sides of two steep, tree-covered “mountains”— good for logging but a mighty poor place to grow crops. William may have lived here first, although no ruins have been located. A cemetery of some thirty graves can be found about a hundred feet from the base of one of these hills. One of the graves has a still-legible written marker which reads, "Mary Lee born Oct 16, 1795 died Feb 21, 1842 wife of Jos Lee."


The family would have had much better luck growing crops on the other 80 acres William claimed in 1822, since it was flat bottom-land bisected by the Paint Rock River. Did he live there as well? Again, no ruins have been found. A house on this land would have been subject to regular flooding. Settlers tended to build their cabins above the flood plain for that reason. Also, if you built high enough you had a cooler place to live than the hot, humid valley floor.


The Census. Scores of William Lees can be found in the 1800, 1810, and 1820 censuses, but not this one. That’s not altogether surprising. In 1800 we think William was either unsettled or undetected in Buncombe County, NC; we think he was in Tennessee in 1810, and almost all that census was lost; and the 1820 census for Alabama also went missing. William does appear in the 1830 and 1840 Jackson County, Alabama enumerations. His age in the 1830 census (in his 50s) agrees with his having been born in 1772. His age in 1840 (still in his 50s) does not, but seems a little suspect, as most people grow ten years older in ten years. He apparently died in the 1840s, when he would likely have been in his 70s.


The 1850 census in turn found a Mary Lee living as head of a household on this property. So this William Lee was probably married to a Mary, as was the William Lee in Oglethorpe County, GA. She was recorded as being 59 years old in 1850. If you believe, as we do, that she was born about 1775, she would have been quite a bit older than 59. So we don’t altogether trust Mary’s age on the census, and other details of the 1850 enumeration of this household suggest the census taker spoke with someone with limited knowledge of the family. Alternately, one can imagine this was a second wife, coincidently named Mary, or an altogether different William and Mary Lee.


Because we lack census information for William and Mary while they were young adults, we don’t know how many children they had and when. They had a large household in 1830, however: a male in his 20s, a female in her late teens, a male 10-14, a female 5-9, and a male less than 5. The latter implies Mary had a child when she was 50-55, and that’s hard to believe. So maybe William did marry a second Mary. But the younger children could have belonged to a widowed son, such as the male in his 20s, or a deceased daughter. Many people, especially women giving birth, died at a young age on the frontier. By 1840 a new stock of young children has appeared, including a boy and girl 5-9 born since 1830. One can seriously doubt they were the children of the senior Lees. It appears more likely a case of grandparents rearing grandchildren.


Giles Lee. The Giles Lee who appeared on the 1822 Decatur Land Survey owned 320 acres of mainly tree-covered land on the side of a mountain 8-10 miles south of the cemetery (see http://www.trails.com/topo.aspx?lat=34.62786&lon=-86.27442&s=50&size=s&style=drgsr). Some of this land had apparently been part of an Indian reservation, and Giles had bought it from someone who had no right to sell it. The rest Giles claimed as a squatter, and it was purchased from the federal government in his name when it was put up for sale in 1859-1861.


You would have had a lot of trouble growing a cash crop on this hillside. Family lore says that Giles grew cotton in a rented area to the east of his land called “Cotton Cove.”


The Census. The land records prove this Giles Lee existed, but there’s neither hide nor hair of him in any of the U.S. censuses. He last appears in a record when he bought some land in 1829. One infers he died a young man, because a significantly older man would likely have left some other record somewhere. For example, if he were the son of the Giles Lee who moved from Georgia to Virginia in the 1790s, he would probably have been born after William—say 1773 or 1774. But there’s no record of such a person in either place, nor in North Carolina. Giles is an uncommon name, so it’s not like looking for a John Smith.


This Giles Lee was old enough to buy land by 1822, so we think he was born by 1801 or sooner. How much sooner, we don’t know, but his supposed father William turned 21 about 1792, and was married by 1795.


An Elizabeth Lee is found on the 1840 census living as a widow at about the same place Giles lived. She is recorded as being in her 30s, and has four children ranging in age from a boy and a girl under five to a girl 10-14. IF Giles sired these children, he died in the late 1830s.


Joshua Lee. The 1822 Decatur Land Survey did not cover all of Decatur County because part of it, called the Chickasaw Old Fields, had not been ceded by native peoples. By 1829 that little problem had been taken care of, and Jackson County surveyed the land it had just acquired. Lo and behold, there were lots of white people already living on it. In particular, a Joshua Lee occupied 40 acres of hillside that connected to the southern end of Giles’ hillside, and immediately south of Joshua, 40 more acres of hillside were claimed by William Lee. No one knows how long these men had been on this land. There’s every chance the claims were staked at the same time Giles started squatting. After all, there was no dotted line running down the side of this mountain saying the land on the other side still belonged to Indians. There were very few Native Americans around. To the settlers, it was all unoccupied and ready for the taking. [20]


Perhaps Giles and Joshua were unrelated to William, or to each other, but we think the connection of these three pieces of land pretty solidly connects the three men. One suspects the family lived at first on William and Mary’s 80 acres to the north. That was “home base,” Mom and Dad’s place, and that’s why the cemetery was there. The Lees would have grabbed the nearest piece of farmable land as soon as possible, which turned out to be a few miles to the south. The much larger, but unfarmable hillside holdings farther south were probably settled last.


Further Interconnections


1) Joshua Lee lived until about 1873, and answered the census from 1840 through 1870. He consistently said he had been born in Georgia, and his age at the various enumerations indicates he had been born in 1795 or 1796. William and Mary Lee lived in Oglethorpe County, GA in those years.


2) Recall that we know William and Mary’s apparent son Giles was born in 1800 or sooner, but we don’t know when. Since William’s father was named Giles, he would more likely have named his first son Giles than his second, according to the most common naming pattern at the time. So we suspect Giles was born about 1793 or 1794, before Joshua. This could explain why Giles owned so much more land than Joshua. He was the blessed first-born son.


3) The censuses reveal that Joshua lost his wife between 1840 and 1850. You will recall the grave marker on William’s property that reads, “Mary Lee born Oct 16, 1795 died Feb 21, 1842 wife of Jos Lee."


4) Another Giles Lee appeared in Joshua’s household in the 1860 census, born in 1818. This Giles Lee apparently served in the 12th Alabama Infantry during the Civil War, and was discharged in 1863. His discharge papers say he was born in Madison County, Alabama in 1818. In the 1870 census this Giles Lee was living with one of Joshua’s sons after both had lost their wives.


Whose son is this? A) He could have been William’s, but William had seemingly already named a son “Giles” after his father, “Giles 1,” who had lived in Georgia. B) Could William’s Giles (“Giles 2”) have begat this new Giles (“Giles 3”)? Sure. Then Joshua could have then taken Giles 3 under his wing after Giles 2 died. (Try to keep up here.) (Isn’t this fun?) Giles 3 named a daughter Elizabeth, which we think was the name of Giles 2’s wife, so that strengthens the Giles 2 begat Giles 3 possibility. C) Or Joshua (b. 1795-6) could have sired Giles 3, naming him after his grandfather (Giles 1) or his brother (Giles 2). [21]


Whatever the connection, it seems highly likely there was a connection. You can’t get a paragraph as confusing as the one above just by coincidence.


By the way, Giles 3’s discharge papers from the Civil War, if accurate, establish that William Lee and his family were in northern Alabama some years before 1822, and possibly already squatting on the land they would later claim. Madison County was established as part of the Mississippi Territory in 1808. A William Lee was listed on the 1816 Tax List of Madison County, Mississippi Territory, and this could be our William.


5) Finally, Terry Lee discovered that a Joshua Lee had been awarded two military land grants in 1852-3 for service in the War of 1812, so he obtained Joshua’s service records from the National Archives and Records Administration. They show that Joshua Lee of Lincoln County, Tennessee mustered in October, 1813 in Fayetteville, Tennessee as a substitute for a William Lee. [22] His unit marched the next day to Huntsville, Alabama and then further south to build Fort Strother. He was discharged in January, 1814 and then reenlisted the following September. His unit worked its way through Tennessee toward New Orleans, but did not participate in the battle there. In October, 1816 he still lived in Lincoln County, TN when he hired a lawyer to collect pay he was owed for his military service. [23] So William and his family probably moved from Tennessee to Alabama around 1816 or 1817.


Robert Lee


We have much less information about Robert Lee’s life after he left North Carolina than we do about his brother William’s, but we’re pretty sure Robert also settled in Tennessee. Robert’s son Daniel, born about 1810, said on the 1860 and 1870 censuses that he had been born in Tennessee. So did his sister Frances, born about 1812, on the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses. Their brother Robert (Jr.), born about 1815, also said on the 1850 to 1880 censuses that he had been born in Tennessee. These quite consistent reports indicate that Robert and Lucy Lee lived in Tennessee from at least 1810 to 1815—overlapping the time William was called into the Tennessee militia and Joshua served in his place. [24]


Tennessee’s a big place, but two bits of information reinforce the common sense notion that Robert and William both settled in Lincoln County. Robert and Lucy’s first child, the Ellender named after Eleanor Glazener, married a Simon Peter Smith sometime after 1820. Lee family lore says Smith’s farm sat astride the Tennessee-Alabama state line, the Tennessee part being in Lincoln County. Simon and Ellender would have had a much better chance of meeting if she too lived in Lincoln County, rather than somewhere else in Tennessee.


Second, you may have noticed that we did not say much about Joshua Lee’s census record. That record’s all quite understandable except for the 1830 enumeration, which found no Joshua Lee in Jackson County, Alabama, but one in Lincoln County, Tennessee instead. Apparently only one Joshua Lee was running around this part of the world in 1830, so what was William’s son Joshua doing in Tennessee when he had just been named the squatter-in-chief of 40 acres on the side of a mountain in Alabama in 1829?


The answer: A Big Move! Not to Tennessee, but to Arkansas. In 1829 Robert Lee and his family, including Simon Peter Smith’s family and some others, loaded up their wagons and began a long trek west. We don’t know why they moved. Family legend says they went because they disapproved of slavery, which was growing by leaps and bounds in the Deep South. (None of Giles 1’s children except James ever owned slaves, as far as we know.) The clan tried southern Missouri first, then found some land it liked in northwestern Arkansas, in a county later named Madison with a county seat named Huntsville. Robert died there in 1837, and his wife Lucy in 1860. They are buried beside one another on their homestead in Aurora, Arkansas.


So why was Joshua in Lincoln County in 1830? We imagine he was living on Robert’s land, maybe until it was sold. Joshua was the designated pinch hitter in the family, and it would certainly be a better place to grow something than his 40 acres in Alabama.


Summary


We have tried in this third essay to follow the three children of Giles Lee who did not go to Virginia when everyone left Georgia in the 1790s. Nellie and her husband went to western North Carolina, where Robert and William joined them in time to get caught up in the Walton County War. This armed disagreement between North Carolina and Georgia scarred all three of these Lees, most notably by forcing Robert and William to flee to Tennessee. It seems likely the brothers settled in Lincoln County, from which William moved to northern Alabama soon after the War of 1812 ended. He and his wife Mary ended their days in Jackson County, where two sons named Giles and Joshua continued on. Robert and his wife Lucy moved to northwestern Arkansas about 1830, where they died and their children continued on, or moved on.


It would be interesting to know why the Lee Clan in Georgia split in twain when it did. Nellie was married to George Glazener, and if he decided to go to the mountains of North Carolina, a wife’s role in that era would have been to start packing. But Robert and William also did not go to Russell County, Virginia, when their brothers John and James did, and that’s a little harder to figure.


We wonder if the two halves of Giles’ family kept in touch over the years that followed. Most of the principals, if not all, could apparently read and write. One wouldn’t expect to find letters from the 1830s now, but there might be some reference to the close relatives who lived up north or down south, out west or back east. We have found no such connection in the family legends. One of James Lee’s sons visited John Lee in Missouri around 1830. But both were “Virginia Lees.” In contrast, Robert Lee settled first in southern Missouri in 1829 before heading to Arkansas. But as far as we know, he did not go anywhere near his younger brother John while there.


These Lees’ various descendants today understandably don’t know about “the other half” of their family that went its separate way in the 1790s. One wonders how far back that “disconnect” goes.


One last thing. Where did Giles 1, the one who settled in Georgia about 1784, come from? We’ll tell you what we think we know in Essay 4.


Endnotes for Essay 3:


1 Eleanor’s story is the stuff of legends. Unfortunately. A shortage of records led earlier genealogical researchers to tie up loose ends by inventing people and facts. Our first treatment of “Nellie and George” on this website from 2012 to April, 2014 blithely passed on some of this lore. Eventually we realized we were spreading myths uncritically accepted from others. As you will see, we have found it necessary to go back to the beginning, hear no hear-say, cling to the records we can find, make it clear when we are speculating, and give unsupported notions all the credit they’re due. Including our own.


2 Old census records of old people’s ages can lead you on a merry chase. Some people in the 1700s and early 1800s simply did not know how old they were. Others were given to lying for various reasons. Others suffered from failing memory as they became elderly—which took less time then. And very often the information on the census came from a relative (or neighbor) who really didn’t know.


Nellie’s legend says she lived to be 100, dying in 1855. It may be true, but we know of no evidence that she lived that long, or died then.


3 Ruth Bump, who did a great deal of early research on the Glazeners, concluded that Johanes Glassner came on the ship Rawley to Philadelphia in October, 1753 http://www.transylvaniagenealogy.com/GLAZENERS.pdf . He might have, but a Johannes Glasser also arrived in Philadelphia aboard the Nancy in August, 1750. Alternately, he might have been the Johann Henreich Glasener who arrived aboard the Richmond in October, 1763. And there are probably other candidates. (If you want to develop some more, stroll and scroll through https://www.progenealogists.com/palproject/pa/).


4 We are spelling Johannes’ and George’s last name Glazener because that is the spelling eventually adopted by their descendants in western North Carolina.


The biggest reason for the various spellings of surnames was that their owners were usually illiterate and couldn’t spell their names to clerks. The court officials, tax recorders, and census takers wrote down what they heard, often though a notable accent. We know that neither George nor Eleanor could write their names; there are several instances in which they signed something with their “mark.” Ditto Giles Lee and his wife Ann. In fact, the only Lees in our story so far who we know could write were 1) Giles’ son, Robert (who signed his name to a petition in 1800), and 2) Giles’ second-born son James (who wrote entries of family events in his Bible). John Lee signed a document in Kentucky with an “X,” and William was reported on a census to be illiterate.


5 In the 1800 census John Glassner and two of his sons (Jacob and John Jr.) are listed immediately after Josiah Frost in the Wills Town district. In 1811 Frost’s son Meshach laid out plots of land for development along the National Road which was being built across the Allegheny Mountains (Interstate 64 to us). These plots became the nucleus of Frostburg, MD. So John Glazener probably lived in what today is Frostburg.


6 Some sources say Johannes Glazener married in Germany before coming to America. This may be true, but there’s no record showing he married an Eva Martin. And these same sources sometimes say Eva Martin was born in 1735 in Germany, when George Adam Martin had apparently been in America for some time.


7 The belief that Johannes Glazener had married Eva Martin’s daughter led us to spend countless hours testing hypotheses about the Glazeners’ religion, trying to forge a connection with Eleanor Lee. Circumstances made the hypotheses attractive. George Adam Martin had become an elder in the German Brethren Church in 1739 in eastern Pennsylvania, but he was excommunicated later when he joined the Sabbatarian sect of this religion that believed, among other things, that God meant Saturday to be the Sabbath.  A Sabbatarian named Abraham Cable became the first white settler in what became Brothers Valley in Bedford (now Somerset) County, PA about 1760, and George Adam Martin had bought property in the area by 1763.


The people who had thought for centuries that they had owned this land were not altogether friendly toward those who arrived in the 1760s and began taking pieces of it for themselves, so living in Brothers Valley was a sometime thing until 1770. Then a peace treaty opened the valley for settlement. In that year sixteen Sabbatarian Brethren led by George Adam Martin were living around what is now Berlin, PA., and they gave the valley its name. None of them was named Glasner, Glassnir, Glassener, etc. however (cob-net.org/text/genbrm15.htm).


Lots of people quickly moved in, and one can easily imagine that the John Glassner/Glessner who showed up in the 1772/3 tax lists was a follower (quite literally) of George Adam Martin. However there were 134 names on the 1772 tax list, and Martin’s congregation was still so tiny it could meet in a small place. So few of the newcomers could have been Sabbatarian Brethren. John Glazener might have been, but there’s no record of it that we know of.


Ruth Bump thought that the Johanes Glassler who arrived in Philadelphia on the Rawley in October, 1752 was followed by two of his brothers, Jacob Glazener and Johann Henreich Glasener aboard the Richmond eleven years later, on October 5, 1763 (http://www.transylvaniagenealogy.com/GLAZENERS.pdf). And a Jacob and Henry Gasner appeared on the 1774 Brothers Valley tax list, and remained there—their name eventually being spelled “Glessnor.” If she is right, then George Glazener’s father was probably not a German Brethren of any stripe, for Jacob Glessnor became an Elder in the German Reformed congregation. We know this because he was stabbed to death in church in 1794 by the Rev. C. Spangenburg (http://home.comcast.net/~g.glessner/gless-2.htm).


Only one of us (Bob A.) thinks that religion was often a powerful motive in frontier settlement. Terry Lee believes the real driving force was almost always land. We are both probably right.


8 On the 1850 census, when Abraham Glazner would have been 69 and more likely to have answered the census himself than in 1870, he was recorded as being born in North Carolina. So you can point out in your very friendly way that we doubted Eleanor’s 1850 census information because she was in her 90s at the time, but we are embracing her son Abraham’s census information when he was 89. Good point, well made and taken. But it’s Eleanor’s age in 1850 that we wonder about, not her place of birth. And you can see that the 1870 census got Abraham’s age wrong (90, when it should have been 88 or 89, as the census enumerator in 1870 recorded a person’s age at the last birthday). That’s what we mean about old people’s ages on census reports, especially when you find a number ending in 0 or 5.


By the way, there’s no indication of Abraham’s place of birth on the 1860 census. But he pulled off a remarkable trick between 1850 (when his reported age was 75) and 1860 (when he was still 75). Both figures are wrong, judging by his grave marker, and whoever gave them was obviously guessing. Notice the “5” in “75.”


9 A simple recording or transcription error, such as changing “Glassner” to “Classner” would make it virtually impossible to find George with an ordinary search engine. And such things happened. He was called George Tazener in the 1795 Oglethorpe County, GA tax list, p. 22. (We only found him because he was living next to James Lee.)


10 Even if George made it to Roxbury Township, how would he meet a nice, nonGerman girl like Eleanor? Well, nothing works like proximity. Or (as BA tries desperately to find some value in all the time he spent researching Sabbatarian movements) religion might be a connector. IF Ruth Bump was right and Johannes Glazener had been a devout follower of the Sabbatarian George Adam Martin, and IF George Glazener had inherited this religious passion (even if he never went with George Adam Martin on missionary journeys to North Carolina where, according to legend, he met Eleanor Lea, daughter of John Giles Lea), and IF Giles Lee had become a Sabbatarian because of exposure to a Sabbatarian sect active in Monmouth County called the Rogerenes while he was growing up (https://sites.rootsweb.com/~njmorris/history/rogerines.htm), and IF Eleanor went to religious services with her father on Saturdays, then George and Eleanor could have ended up in the same precise place in Roxbury Township, namely in the Rogerene place of worship on the western slope of Schooley’s Mountain, which formed one wall of German Valley, IF there were no German Sabbatarian services happening in the German community for George to attend instead of the Rogerene ones.


Before you bet your children’s college funds on this “Five IF Hypothesis,” bear in mind that If you think Giles moved to Morris County to be near the Rogerene enclave, about 580 heads of families were named on the 1779 Rateables List for Roxbury Township (Revolutionary Census of New Jersey by K. Stryker-Rodda, Hunterdon House, 1986, pp. 151-397). And probably 95% of them were not Rogerenes. (Still, if it turns out to be true, remember we predicted it.)


11 Hypothesis I requires some break-neck courting. Assuming Giles left Morris County in late 1779, it would take him some time to move to western Maryland and study the land laying there unclaimed. The Glazeners would only have been there for five years themselves, so it’s conceivable Giles could have squatted on a nearby patch of ground. Now Eleanor and George have to meet, get to know each other, get married, and conceive a child in about ten months. It’s by no means impossible. Some people do the meeting and conceiving in just a couple of hours. And both George and Eleanor may have reached in their mid-20s unmarried in 1780, and  been powerfully energized by the fact that most people their age had already wed and started families. But no one would call Eleanor and George’s romance under Hypothesis I a long, drawn-out affair.


Another problem for this hypothesis is, if Giles had found himself some good land in western Maryland that he could afford (free was a nice price), why would he leave for Georgia just a few years later? Recall that he was down south by 1784.


12 thousand


13 J. M. Hamlin wrote a feature article entitled “The Glazeners” for The Brevard News on April 1, 1921. The article says, “George Glazener of Oglethorpe County, Ga. by some reason became obsessed by an inclination to go to the mountains of western North Carolina, and by so doing became one of the first settlers. He brought his family and goods to “the end of the road” on the east side of the Blue Ridge…Instead of abandoning his original intention, he abandoned his wagon and packed his goods to the place he intended to go—the French Broad (River) Valley.” (We thank the skilled and careful genealogical researcher T. Dennis Glazener for bringing this article to our attention.)


14 There was only one Robert Lee in the 1800 census for Buncombe County, so there’s not much chance the signer was “another” Robert Lee who just happened to be standing in line behind George Glazener.


15 Websites commonly state that Robert and Lucy were married in 1800 in either South Carolina or North Carolina. We think this arises from the date their first child was born, 1801. We have seen no reference to a record of the marriage.


16 We hesitate to make any argument based on this particular census. Besides all the usual problems with an early census, we do not have the original record of the Buncombe County enumeration. Instead, someone went over the answers obtained in the field and copied them onto an alphabetized list. The 1800 census form looks like a spread sheet with lots of columns for checking off males and females of various ages. It would be very easy for someone writing down the answers to make a tick in the wrong column, and even easier for someone copying down the thousands of original ticks to miss some or put them in the wrong place. Nellie Lee Glazener, for example, was “ticked off” as being between 16 and 25, and she was probably about 40.


William and Mary might simply have been missed, or unmentioned. We should remember that in 1800 people like the Glazeners and Robert Lee were fighting to stay out of North Carolina, and the census was taken by Buncombe County, NC officials. So their answers might have been guarded and less than forthcoming.


One notes that William did not sign the 1800 petition to Congress to give the Orphan Strip back to South Carolina. It seems clear from 1804 events that his sentiments were anti-North Carolina, so one would expect his signature on the petition. This suggests that William was not in Buncombe County when the petition was being circulated; it was dated January 8, 1800. But he (or at least his children) could have been there when the census-taker later knocked on Robert Lee’s door. (The census enumeration date that year was August 4.)


17 Yes, this means Terry was on both sides of the brick wall simultaneously. He’s quite industrious.


18 You should be eternally grateful that our presentation is as linear as it is: X begat Y begat Z. In fact the investigations were mostly circular, as in "running around in circles." We spent most of our time chasing false leads, and trying to make excuses for facts that flatly contradicted each other. There were always two or three hypotheses about anything on the table (one per investigator), getting shot down and then miraculously being resurrected as new evidence emerged or old evidence was forgotten. And the entire enterprise was hamstrung by endless false "facts" that had us barking up one wrong tree after another...as we ran around in circles. For all of that it has been a wonderful search, if you're the sort of person who gets off on very complicated mysteries. (And you must be, because you’re still reading this complicated narrative.)


19 You can find the exact locations of these farms, as well as others mentioned later in the story, at

http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/results/default.aspx?searchCriteria=type=patent|st=AL|cty=071|ln=lee|sp=true|sw=true|sadv=false.

If you want a topographical map of this region, go to

http://www.trails.com/topo.aspx?lat=34.62786&lon=-86.27442&s=50&size=s&style=drgsr


20 Joshua bought his land from the feds in 1860, and someone bought William’s land in his name in 1861.


21 Want some more confusing information? The 1850 census found a William Lee, born in 1818, living with Joshua. This William does not appear in records afterwards, but Giles 3 does. The two men were probably the same fellow, named Giles William (or William Giles) Lee at birth, named after Giles 1 or Giles 2, and William, the grandfather of Giles 3. (Take three deep breaths, and maybe an aspirin, and go back to reading the text.)


22 William would have been 41 in 1813 and would have been called up for militia service as being a suitably-aged head of the family. It was quite common for “draftees” to arrange substitutes for themselves; they could even hire someone to take their place. The most common substitute was a son, and often fathers kept their best workers at home. Lads as young as 14 thus found themselves serving out their father’s hitch in the militia.


23 The file reveals the name of Joshua’s second wife: Martha Jane Byrd, married September 19, 1856. It also appears Joshua could sign his name.


24 Another Robert Lee served a little over one month at the end of 1813 in the Mississippi Territory militia, guarding the frontiers of Madison County. He was a private in a company of “mounted gunmen.” However this Robert signed his name with an “X,” and Robert Lee in Buncombe County signed his name to the 1800 petition. So we doubt these two shadows were cast by the same figure.



Essay 4: "The Origins of Giles Lee"



Terry D. Lee ([email protected])

Bob Altemeyer ([email protected])



On November 13, 1817, an old, old man lay in a small, probably cold and dimly lit farmhouse in Russell County, Virginia and tried to draw his next breath. He could not, and within a minute Giles Lee, “Giles 1,” had passed away. He died impoverished of finances and family. His wife Sarah likely shared his last moments. But as we have seen, nearly all of his known children spent that winter’s day far away, in North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama. Only James lived nearby, and even he may not have been at Giles’ side when the end came.


We know a lot about Giles’ last thirty-odd years, considering that he was a pretty ordinary person among the million or so Europeans living in Atlantic America at that time. But we have not said a word about his origins. You’ll find we don’t have many words to say, because we are reaching further back in history now when fewer records were kept, and the things that were written down have had more time to be lost. But we do have a couple of established anchor points, and if great gulfs of uncertainty yawn between them, we can at least suggest where someone might look to fill in the gaps. We even know who Giles’ parents were, and where his father likely came from. We might even have found his father’s father—a man named (what else?) Giles Lee.


Birth and Calamity


We believe the Giles Lee who died in Russell County, Virginia in 1817 was born about eighty years earlier in Monmouth County in the colony of New Jersey (See map). His christening was recorded on May 22, 1738 by the rector of the (Anglican) Christ Church in Shrewsbury. (John E. Stillwell, Historical and Genealogical Miscellany; Data Relating to the Settlement and Settlers of New York and New Jersey, 1903, Volume 1, p. 160). [1] You may view a scan of Giles Lee's baptismal record in the Parish Register of Christ Church, Shrewsbury, N. J. here page 160 (click on picture to enlarge) or browse the book at http://www.archive.org/stream/historicalgeneal01stil#page/160/mode/2up. Giles’ parents were listed as Robert and Rachel Lee, and the church record says they lived in Shrewsbury. The Church of England has always practiced infant baptism, and so we can make the educated guess that Giles was born in 1737 or 1738. Because a later child in the family was baptized ten months after his birth, we figure Giles was probably born in 1737.


Giles was born to even poorer circumstances than attended his death. In February, 1738 “Robert Lee, labourer,” was accused in a Shrewsbury court of stealing one and a half bushels of wheat, which he admitted. At first he was just heavily fined. The court record states on February 10, 1738 that Robert Lee "did acknowledge himself indebted unto our said Soverign Lord the King in the Sum of Ten pounds Lawful money of the Province above said to be levyed on his goods and chattels, Lands, and Tenements to the Use of our Said Lord the King his heirs and Successors." [2] February Court Record.


Robert did not have ten pounds lying around his house anywhere, so he was forced to sell almost everything he had to pay the fine. He got five pounds for all his household goods from a merchant, Thomas Holmes, in March, 1738. We have a copy of the bill of sale and of the inventory taken of Robert Lee’s “moveable estate.” [3]. The inventory reads:


“An Inventory of the Moveable Estate of Robert Lee Taken this 11th Day of March 1737/8 which are as followeth.

(See inventory).


Viz., One Feather Bed and two Pillows

Two pair of Homespun Blankets

One Coverlid two chests & one box

One Linnen wheel and a woolen wheel & reel

One Table two iron Pots four washing Tubs

Two Barrels one Bedstead

One iron Kettle and one iron Skillet

Two frying Pans & an achain Trammel

One Bible and a Pewter Basson a Pewter Quart & Porrindger

One Looking Glass and Smoothing Iron Heaters

Two Hogs Three Case knifes & three forks

One cradle and a Course Lyre

One ax two beetle Rings & two Iron Wedges

One broad hoe one tin kettle a firkin and a three

Gallon Cag & nine Small books”


Besides the fact that Robert, Rachel, and the infant Giles did not have a bed to sleep in, a pot to cook in, or any tools for working the land after this transaction, we would point out two things. First, Robert signed the bill of sale; in fact, the signature is rather stylized. Secondly, look at the last item on the inventory: “nine small books.” Nine books of any size was a library among farm laborers in this time and place. Few public schools existed in the early 1700s, and the vast majority of colonials were illiterate. Robert could not only read and write, he was a very poor man who had invested in books.


To finish the story, Robert appeared in court again on April 26. He did not have the full ten pounds, and so was sentenced to 13 lashes “laid on his bare back,” and then imprisoned until he could pay all his fine. We don’t know if he attended the christening of his son Giles on May 22, but eventually he was released from jail. April Court Record.


Christ Church records show Robert and Rachel gave Giles a sister named Elizabeth who was baptized in 1741 (Stillwell, p. 162) . Then Rachel apparently died because “Robert Lee, Schoolmaster,” remarried in Christ Church in 1748 (Stillwell, p. 170) . We have no idea how Robert pulled himself up over those ten years from the humiliation of a criminal conviction, scourging and a stay in prison, not to mention total poverty, to become a schoolmaster. (But we may exaggerate the social standing of schoolmasters in colonial America, who received very little pay and usually had to farm as well as teach to keep body and soul together) .


Robert married a widow in 1748, Mary Wright. Her first husband had been Edward Wright, a laborer who was born in Burlington County, NJ in 1712. His kin had probably been Quakers who moved to Monmouth County, probably in the vicinity of Freehold, and then Shrewsbury. At some point they (or he) joined the Church of England, for their son William was baptized in Christ Church on August 13, 1738—just a few months after Giles Lee was christened. Giles and William, being the same age, would have spent their adolescence together, and Giles may have named the William Lee who settled in Jackson County, Alabama after his step-brother.


Mary Wright had seven children altogether when she married Robert Lee, and the couple soon added an offspring of their own. John Lee was baptized in August, 1750 at the age of ten months (Stillwell, p. 173) . The later John Lee who married Polly Vanhook may have been named after this half-brother of Giles.


Robert Lee and his whole kit and caboodle disappear from the Christ Church records after 1750, and that likely means the family moved from Shrewsbury. Which leaves us with an intriguing possibility. If Eleanor “Nellie” Lee Glazener really was born in New Jersey in 1755, as is recorded in the 1850 census, then she might have been another child of Robert and Mary whom we won’t find in the wonderful church records. Mary was probably about 40 in 1755. So Nellie could have been Giles’ sister, not his daughter. Giles was but 18 in 1755. We chose to play the “daughter connection,” however, because we do not trust the 1850 census information on Nellie. But we could be wrong. (It’s happened before.) (Lots!) [4]


Where Did Robert (and Giles) Go from Shrewsbury?


We simply don’t know. You can find traces of various Robert Lees in New Jersey in the 1750s, but there’s not enough information on any of them to let one say, “Aha! There you are.” For example, a Robert Lee (yeoman) helped provide the bond for a Denis Dwier (a schoolmaster) to get married in Woodbridge, Middlesex County in March, 1758 (http://files.usgwarchives.net/nj/statewide/vitals/marriages/njmard03.txt). But there had been several Robert Lees in Middlesex in earlier years, and nothing shows this bond-provider was “our Robert.” Also, land in Woodbridge probably cost more than land in Shrewsbury. It’s hard to imagine that Robert had grown wealthy since his second marriage in 1748.


If you want to climb out on a limb, one limb catches your eye more than any other. In May, 1755 a Robert Lee of Sussex County, New Jersey signed a petition to the governor of the province asking for greater cooperation with Pennsylvania and New York in defending the frontier from Indian attacks. The French and Indian War had begun, and Sussex County (newly carved from Morris County in the northwest corner of New Jersey) was undergoing periodic attacks. Our Robert might have moved to this region in the early 1750s because it was the frontier, land was essentially free, and poor people with large families could get a fresh start there.


As noted above, Giles would have been 18 in 1755, and would almost certainly have been recruited in the New Jersey Frontier Guard which was raised to defend the northwestern part of the colony. But we have not located a roster of this militia unit.


Sometime during his early adulthood Giles married, probably a woman named Ann. They probably began having children in the 1760s, if Nellie was born then. Their last child William was born about 1772. Family lore commonly says Giles’ children were born in Virginia. So maybe Giles and Ann lived there for a while. But it appears more likely all their known children—Nellie, Robert, James, John, and William—were born in New Jersey.


The Next Sighting of Giles Lee


In April, 1777 a Giles Lee was elected First Lieutenant in a company of militia raised in the western part of Morris County, NJ. See p. 34 of "History of Morris County, New Jersey" (http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924028828386/cu31924028828386_djvu.txt) . We find a second record dated three months later in "Minutes of the Council of Safety of the State of New Jersey, Vol. 1;" printed in Jersey City by John H. Lyon; 1872; page 99 dated Thursday July 24th 1.777 "Giles Lee 1st Lieut in a Compy of Militia, belonging to the Co of Morris, voluntarily appeared & took & subscribed the Oaths of Abjuration & Allegiance as by Law appointed." Essentially this meant Giles gave up his British citizenship and swore allegiance to the Colony of New Jersey. The oath-taking was in the presence of Governor Livingston and five Board members. The event took place in Haddonfield, Camden County, NJ at the Indian King Tavern where the Safety Board met. Since apparently only two Giles Lees were strolling about in America at the time, and the other one was a private in the Massachusetts militia in 1777, it seems likely this is our Giles. [5]


When did Giles arrive in Morris County? We don’t know. A poll list was compiled there in 1776 to elect delegates to a state convention. Only land-owners could vote, and Giles was not on the list. Taxpayer records called “rateables lists” were also assembled in New Jersey. The only published rateables lists for Morris County cover 1778/1779, and 1780, Giles Lee appeared on the 1779 list, but not the one for 1780 (Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey, Vol. 46, 1971, p. 91). He owned 75 acres, 1 horse, and 3 cows, making him neither rich nor poor.


The fact that Giles was elected second-in-command of his militia company during the Revolutionary War, at the age of 40, suggests he had military experience. [6] It also indicates he had considerable standing among his peers, which would usually develop over a long term of familiarity. So he likely had lived in Morris County for some time before the war. He may have owned property before 1776 and been missed on the poll list.


Giles Disappears Again


Similarly, he may have been missed in 1780. But at some point he left New Jersey and became one of the first in the “Heading for Georgia” migration that swept the eastern seaboard in the 1780s. In this regard one notes the similarity of Giles’ and Nellie’s movements. Nellie was married and living in Frostburg, Maryland. As we saw in Essay 3, she and George Glazener apparently lived in Maryland through 1783, and then moved to North Carolina. We don’t know where Giles was between 1780 and 1785, but by the latter date he was in Georgia. You can tie these two moves south together in a lot of different ways, but they were likely connected somehow.


Finally, somewhere along the way the Lees changed religion. Robert had been Church of England; Giles and his offspring became Baptists. They were hardly alone. The first Great Awakening in American religion occurred during Giles’ early years, when a great many Anglicans left the “established church’ for the more dynamic and personally gripping evangelical faiths. Giles’ conversion may have occurred in the north, where the Great Awakening originated, or in the south, where it found its richest soil.


So Where Did Robert Lee Come From?


Robert Lee, the father of “Giles 1,” poses an enigma. He was literate and capable of teaching others reading, writing, and their sums. But he was a farm laborer who literally did not have two ha’pence to rub together when we find him in 1738. His punishment for stealing the wheat seems harsh, even for the times. You wouldn’t expect the fine and the lashing and the imprisonment for someone who was just trying to get food for his family. And no extended family, neither his nor Rachel’s, came to their rescue in 1738 so they lost nearly everything. Robert probably had low status in Shrewsbury, had stolen the wheat from a landowner, and the court may have wanted to make an example of him, even to the point of starving him and his family.


All of this suggests Robert had previously been an “indentured servant.” You could hardly throw a rock in the colonies and not hit fertile land, but labor to work it remained scarce for a long time. So land owners imported poor Europeans who had signed a contract with agents to work in the New World for four to seven years. The agents provided passage across the Atlantic, and the ships then called at major ports such as Philadelphia and Annapolis to sell their cargo. Settlers looking for workers would examine the indentured passengers who had survived the journey, and buy any contract they wanted. The price, of course, included a profit for the agent back in England and the owners of the ships. Besides getting cheap labor for the term of the contract, the buyers often received land grants of 50 acres from the colony per person imported.


The “servants,” who were usually laborers but could be craftsmen and tradesmen, were usually poor, young, single men who were not allowed to marry until they had finished their contract. (About 5% of indentured servants were women.) At the completion of the indenture, the landowner usually gave his released servant a small amount of money and a suit of clothes as the latter headed off to seek his fortune. While many abuses occurred, from cruel masters on the one hand to laborers who took off at the first opportunity, the system worked so well that historians believe most of the Europeans who came to America during colonial times came as indentured servants.


A copy of the indenture contract was supposed to be kept by the city in which the deal was done, but most of the agreements have disappeared. The ones that still exist in London have been microfilmed, and several authors have spent years compiling them. Peter Wilson Coldham has published many books listing the names of persons transported in bondage or of their own will from England to America to serve as indentured servants. In The Complete Book of Emigrants 1700-1750, Vol. 3, on page 385 one finds the following record kept by the Corporation of London Record Office: “19 July 1728: Robert Lee of Whitechapel, Middlesex, age 17, bound to John Ball to serve 7 years in Pennsylvania or New York.” (Younger men usually had to sign on for longer periods, as their “owners” would likely have to teach them a trade when they arrived.) It is the only listing of a Robert Lee in the existing files.


In A List of Emigrants from England to America, 1718-1759, Case 1690, Jack and Marion J. Kaminkow add that Robert Lee "signed" the contract, rather than using a mark. He indeed had no occupation, and John Ball was a London vintner. [7] In September, 2015 Dennis Stewart, a descendant of George Glazener and Nellie Lee, was able to obtain a copy of the contract Robert Lee signed on July 19, 1728, which is reproduced here (Indenture) Comparison with Robert Lee's signature on the bill of sale of all his earthly possessions on 11 March 1738 (Sale) shows these two signatures came from the same person.


A search of the Kaminkow records of over 3,000 contracts (available online at http://www.virtualjamestown.org/indentures/search_indentures.cgi?start_page=7&search_type=basic&db=london2_ind&servant_ln=%25 shows that only thirteen contracts, all signed between July 9 and July 24, 1728, stipulated that the servant was going to “Pennsylvania or New York.” Only eighteen contracts altogether in the London files mentioned New York as a possible point of sale. Jamaica, Maryland, and (just) Pennsylvania received far more indentured servants than any other location. The fact that Robert Lee’s ship was going to New York suggests it was mainly carrying non-indentured, paying passengers, or some other cargo.


One of the indentured servants who sailed with Robert Lee to America was named Abraham James. He also was 17, had no occupation, and had signed a seven year contract with John Ball nine days before Robert did. He was, as well, from Middlesex, but from a different parish. He signed his contract with a mark.


Do you remember John E. Stillwell’s Historical and Genealogical Miscellany…, the book that showed us Giles Lee was the son of Robert and Rachel Lee of Shrewsbury, NJ? This book also reveals that on April 8, 1735 the cleric from Christ Church, Shrewsbury married Abraham James and Susanna Newbery. The date is significant, because Abraham James should still have been an indentured servant on his wedding day—although within a few months of fulfilling his contract (which he may have “bought out”). In any event, he must have met Susanna Newbery while living in Shrewsbury. Therefore, Abraham James‘ contract had been purchased by someone in Shrewsbury, probably when the ship docked across the harbor in New York City.


How long had Robert Lee been in Shrewsbury when he got into trouble with the law in early 1738? We don’t know. His contract may have been sold to someone many miles away, and he then moved to Shrewsbury after his seven years were up because he had a friend there named Abraham James. However, the latter may have left Shrewsbury with his new wife for greener pastures once he had finished serving his servitude, for there are no christening records for his children in the Christ Church reports. So the possibility looms before us that Robert Lee was in Shrewsbury in 1738 simply because he had been there since 1728. That is, 1) he had signed up to be an indentured servant in Pennsylvania or New York and 2) his contract was sold to someone in Shrewsbury—perhaps the same person who also acquired Abraham James off the same ship. It’s a pretty straight line. Not necessarily true, but straight. [8]


Robert Lee’s British Origins (Revised January 2016)


Can we establish anything about our Robert “the Immigrant” Lee’s origins in England? Since we don’t know anybody who knew him, we have to go digging in the records and be grateful for what we find. After all, we’re reaching back over 300 years.


The best accounts from his era of who begat whom, when and where, were kept by clerics in church registers (except from 1653 to 1660 during Cromwell’s Protectorate, when the books were kept by civic officials). Tax lists and wills occasionally supplement these records.


Almost everyone in Christendom was christened, and the names given in church were faithfully written into parish books and thereafter accompanied the individual to the grave. But as we shall see, some infants were christened “privately” at home, with no record being made. The marriage and burial records are more inclusive, because most people had to be married by an Anglican priest to be legally wed. And you wanted to be buried in the Church’s consecrated ground so your body would be undisturbed by evil influences.


But not all of the birth, marriage, and burial registers have survived, and not all of the survivors have been transferred to a digital format. So we’re poking a short stick around in a dark closet through a tiny hole. Nevertheless we offer below a fact-based, if not conclusive, suggestion of where our Robert Lee came from which can be scrutinized and investigated.


Our Line of Inquiry


A web-based search for a Robert Lee christened in England within two years of (1728 – 17 =) 1711 turned up many candidates, born all over the place.9 Our Robert may have been born in Hertford, Hereford, or Hampshire and moved to London as a child. However, if you assume he was born in the London area (since he said he was “of the parish of Whitechapel”), and if you pitch out the Robert Lees who died or were still in England after 1728, only one possibility remains. A Robert Lee was christened in March, 1710 in St. Ethelburga Parish in Bishopsgate, London to parents named Henry and Mary Lee. So the quest would seem to be over before it even started. But judging by the tax rolls of 1718-1720, this Henry Lee had the good fortune to have a good fortune. Even if the family wealth went up in smoke, it seems unlikely any child of Henry’s would become an indentured servant. So searching the christening registers leaves the “Born in London” approach with no plausible cases. But this analysis is based on seriously incomplete records.


Before we go searching through the even less complete records of all the Robert Lees born outside the London area between 1709 and 1713, we should realize we have another way of finding our Robert: he named his first son Giles in 1737 (“Giles 1” in Essay 3). This implies Robert had a recent ancestor named Giles, almost certainly on his father’s side. According to the custom of the times, men named their first sons after their own father (see http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~hdecent/genebits/englishnaming.htm). Mind you, a lot of families ignored this guideline. Some sons didn’t like their fathers one bit, and you didn’t go to jail if you named the kid after your grandfather instead or after yourself. But since Giles is a rare name, we don’t have to sort through the cascade of cases that would come crashing down on us if we were considering (say) all the Thomas Lees who could have been our Robert’s ancestor—much less the John Lees.


Ta-dum! There is no Giles Lee, at least in the digitalized London area church records, who could have been Robert "the Immigrant’s" father. (Talk about having the possibilities limited!) There are two Giles Lees who could have been his grandfather. One was christened in 1633 in the London parish of St. Martin Orgar. The other was baptized in 1642 in the church called Whitechapel St. Mary. These men would be respectively 78 years and 69 years older than our Robert if he was born in 1711. You can easily fit two generations into either gap. If anything, the spans are too big, especially for the 1633 model Giles.


Searching through the burial records reveals a Giles Lee who died in 1693 in the parish of St. Botolph Aldgate, and another Giles Lee who was laid to rest in 1720 in the St. Dunstan and All Saints churchyard in Stepney. The latter is more likely to have been the Giles Lee born in 1642 than the one born in 1633, who would have been 87 in 1720—an almost unreachable age in that era.


Both the size of the generational gap and the year of death thus favor the candidacy of “Giles (1642)” as our Robert’s grandfather, after whom “Giles 1” (1737) was presumably named.


By the way, most of the parishes we have mentioned lay in what today is called East London, and are lined up one beside the other. If in 1650 you wanted to travel northeast from London along the old Roman route to Colchester, you would pass through St. Botolph Aldgate as you left the city. Once you passed through that gate in the Wall of London you’d be in Whitechapel St. Mary. A mile further down the road the locals would tell you that you were in Stepney St. Dunstan. (Remember this spot in the road; we’re coming back to it.)


William and Katherine Lee


The Whitechapel St. Mary christening register says the Giles Lee in whom we are interested received his name on October 9, 1642 from his parents, William and Katherin Lee. Further digging reveals that William Lee of Stratford-Langton 10 and a widow named Katherine Toms had married five years earlier on September 12, 1637 in St. Botolph Aldgate Church. (We can be fairly sure these are Giles’ parents because, while William Lees abounded, “Katherine” was a relatively uncommon name then. There are two other Katherine Lees in the records at this time, but none was married to a William Lee.)


Katherine had been married to John Toms and had at least three children by him—the last being An Toms who was christened in St. Botolph Aldgate on October 11, 1635. John Toms was a victualler, a person who supplied ships with food and drink for their voyages. The baptismal register says the Toms lived in St. Botolph Aldgate Without—which meant they lived in a southeast part of the parish that lay outside the Wall of London but still adjacent to part of Whitechapel St. Mary.


Then, between September 1st and October 13, 1636, Katherine lost three children (Robert, Magdelan, and An during an outbreak of the Bubonic plague that swept across London then. Although there is no record of it, John probably died then too. The disease came to England from fleas on rats aboard ships, and as a victualler, John Toms would have spent plenty of time in the holds of ships, and perhaps brought the fleas home with him.


Standard procedure then dictated boarding up a house where someone had the plague, forcing all the family to live with the infected person lest they spread the disease elsewhere. Your chances of survival in that situation depended on your immune system, and Katherine was the only person in the house with an immune system not connected to John’s. She was likely the only survivor.


Unless a new widow had inherited sufficient wealth, she faced a stark choice: Remarry, or beg until she starved. Hence when Katherine and William Lee had a daughter Margaret baptized at Whitechapel St. Mary five months after their wedding on February 11, 1638, (Tsk, tsk) the pregnancy may not have been entirely surprising to Katherine. One source says William was a servant to a brewer, and since brewers sell brew to victualers, it’s likely he and Katherine knew each other before John Toms died. William would have been below Katherine’s station in life, but she may not have had a lot of choices in plague ravaged London.


A researcher named T. C. Dale published a work entitled The Inhabitants of London in 1638 based on tax records. He reported that a William Lea lived in an unnamed alley among very low-rent tenements in St. Botolph Aldgate. William did not have an occupation.


Just under nine months after Margaret was christened, on November 4, 1638, William and Katherine Lee had a son Nicholas baptized in St. Botolph Aldgate. While that reveals a lickety-split turn-around time since Margaret’s appearance, we have to recall that these are christening dates, not birth dates. And Nicholas may have been born early. He did not survive, being buried at St. Botolph Aldgate on August 11, 1639.


On March 29, 1640, William and Katherin Lee had another son, William, christened in the Collegiate Church of St. Katherine by the Tower. (This parish, next to the Tower of London, was also adjacent to St. Botolph Aldgate Without.) Then two years later, as we have seen, Giles was given his name in Whitechapel St. Mary.


There are no more christening records for children of a William and Katherine Lee in the parishes we’ve mentioned. Instead William and Katherine reappear seventeen years later in the burial register of Stepney St. Dunstan. First, Katherine Lee, wife of William Lee, was buried in the St. Dunstan churchyard on 19 December, 1659. The vicar thoughtfully added two bits of information about William. He was said to be of “Knockfergus” and he was a “carman”—someone who drove a cart hauling things. Two years after Katherine died, a William Lee from “Knock Fergus” was buried in the same cemetery. He was a laborer, and almost certainly Katherine’s husband.


Knockfergus was a tenement slum built just east of the Tower of London around 1600 to house destitute migrant Irish families. It bordered on St. Botolph Aldgate Without and St. Katherine by the Tower to the west and on Whitechapel to the north. The Thames docks were a few blocks to the south. To the east lay a series of hamlets along the river that were, like Knockfergus, part of the Stepney St. Dustan parish. Living around Knockfergus in 1650 did not necessarily mean one was Irish. It did mean one was desperately poor. 11

'


We don’t know when William and Katherine moved to Knockfergus, but if they had more children there the Stepney St. Dunstan christening records do not show it. But that is not necessarily surprising, as most of the Stepney parishioners had their children baptized at home by someone other than the vicar to avoid paying the four penny church fee.12


Giles Lee in Stepney St. Dunstan


If the Katherine Lee who died in Stepney St. Dunstan parish in 1659 was Giles’s (1642) mother, and the William Lee who died there in 1661 was Giles’ father, we might find traces of him in that place too. And we do, for he lived and died there in a hamlet named “Mile End.”


Recall that the border between Whitechapel St. Mary and Stepney St. Dunstan was drawn one mile to the east of the Wall of London. A hamlet just to the east of that line was accordingly called Mile End—a name that persists today. This hamlet contained the St. Dunstan church and cemetery, so Giles lived by the church. When another hamlet grew up next to Mile End, the original settlement became Mile End Old Town.


The St. Dunstan records show that an unnamed infant daughter belonging to Gyles Lee, who was a weaver, was buried in the churchyard on May 24, 1668. Giles Lea and his wife Elizabeth13 then brought a daughter Anne to Stepney St. Dunstan to be christened on November 28, 1669. The cleric wrote down that Giles Lea was a silk weaver who lived in Mile End.


How did Giles Lee, a kid from the slums by the Thames docks, become a weaver? He would have had to apprentice a weaver, probably starting when he was about 12. Weaving was a common cottage industry in Mile End, and Giles probably went to live with the weaver’s family—although Mile End was only a mile or so from Knockfergus. With both of his parents dead and buried in the nearby churchyard when he finished his apprenticeship, Giles probably stayed in Mile End as one of the colony of weavers.


In 1693 a tax was imposed on London area residents to support a protracted war the king was merrily waging with France—which war also led the government to raise the christening fee 600% from four pennies to two shillings the next year. Those tax rolls have survived, and show a Giles Lee living in Mile End Old Town. His rental rate was a minimal £3—the same that William Lee had paid in that tenement in St. Botolph Aldgate in 1638.14


On August 26, 1711 Elizabeth Lee was buried at St. Dunstan. The register says her husband was Giles Lee of Mile End, a weaver.


Almost exactly a year later, Giles Lee of Mile End, a labourer, married a widow who also lived in Mile End named Alice May.


On August 9, 1720 Giles Lee of “M.O.T.” was buried at St. Dunstan. He was 78.


William (~1615)->Giles (1642)->???????->Robert (1711)->Giles (1737)->Robert, James, John, William


If the Giles Lee buried in St. Dunstan cemetery in 1661 was the grandfather of the Robert Lee who signed on as an indentured servant in 1728 and ended up in Shrewsbury, New Jersey, we need somebody in between to be Robert’s father. And this father had to move back to Whitechapel if that’s where Robert grew up. 15


As far as the records go, Giles Lee of Stepney St. Dunstan never had a son. But we know Giles’s wife Elizabeth lived well into middle age, and we know most poor people in the parish did not take their children to the church to be christened. So Giles and Elizabeth may have had several sons who could have moved back to Whitechapel.


There are lots of potential Missing Links. The problem is deciding which of the twenty Mr. Lees buried in the Whitechapel St. Mary cemetery between 1710 and 1750 was Robert’s father. Aside from the fact that they were adults (for children were noted as such in the burial register), we don’t know how old they were when they died. Nor do we know where they were born, what they did for a living, and so on. The vicar was very stingy with facts in his recording.


We might be informed by the fact that Robert "the Immigrant’s" son, Giles Lee of New Jersey-Georgia-Virginia, aka Giles 1, named his sons Robert, James, John, and William. (Remember them? We spent a lot of time linking them by their DNA in Essay 2.) But most of the Lees under consideration in the Whitechapel cemetery were named either John or William. If Giles (1642) was following the naming custom, he’d have named his first son William, after his own father William, the brewer’s servant. But we don’t know that Robert’s father was Giles’ first son. He might have been Giles’ second son, and been named after Elizabeth’s father—whose name we do not know. ARRRGGGG!


When your head is all messed up from banging it into a brick wall over and over, switch to a question to which you may know the answer. If Robert was born to poor, uneducated parents, how did he learn to read and write? A school for poor children was established in Mile End in 1714, and Robert would have probably qualified with flying colors. If instead our Robert grew up in St. Mary Whitechapel, he might have gone to the more famous school founded there for the same purpose by the Rev. Ralph Davenant.


The fact that Robert had no occupational skill when he became an indentured servant is curious. He apparently did not become a weaver. Either his own father did not become a weaver, or if he did Robert did not slide into place before the family loom.


Robert Lee's Agent, John Ball


As noted earlier, the agents who signed up indentured servants were frequently vintners and merchants, men who had contact with the captains who sailed into the East London docks with natural resources from the New World, and who needed supplies for the return trip and a cargo to make it profitable. The colonies mainly needed labor and manufactured goods, so the ship masters would notify agents of their next voyage west, specifying how many indentured servants they could take, where and when. The agents would advertise these facts and sign up those who wanted to go.


Only thirteen indentured servants sailed on the unknown ship that brought our Robert Lee to America. The fact that it was going to “Pennsylvania or New York” suggests, as noted earlier, it was mainly carrying cargo or paying passengers to New York, because the Big Apple was a very rare destination for indentured servants then. One agent, John Taylor, got the jump on others and signed up two indentures for this trip on July 9, 1728. The next day a Peter Simpson signed up four, and John Ball one. Six more signed on over the next two weeks, most through John Ball. Our Robert was the second-last to make the commitment as he signed his contract on July 19th. Maybe he had spent some time thinking over the situation; maybe he did it on impulse or from sudden necessity. The last to join the party was a William Hays from Ireland on July 23, 1728. Presumably the ship sailed off soon afterwards. It the crossing took six weeks, they arrived in early September. 16


The records show that the individuals who signed up with an agent came from all over the British Isles. That is, agents did not tend to get their indentures from some particular place. There was not, for example, an agent who got most of Stepney’s business. This suggests that those looking for an overseas passage visited several agents every day or so to see if new openings had appeared. When a voyage to their liking showed up, they jumped. The suddenness with which contracts were signed soon after a trip was announced indicates the supply of would-be servants had built up, waiting for the next ship to come in.


It stands to reason that the agents would have their places of business near the docks. In this regard, a Henry Ball lived at White’s Court on Rosemary Lane in Whitechapel during the 1690s (if not sooner). Rosemary Lane ran parallel to the Thames two or three blocks to the north of the river, and then turned into Cable St., and then Knockfergus. 17 On October 19, 1690, Henry and his wife Elizabeth christened a son John Ball at Whitechapel St. Mary. If this is the John Ball who signed up Robert Lee as an indentured servant, he was nearly 38 on July 19, 1728. 18


We don’t know that Henry Ball was a vintner, and his death in 1698 meant his eight-year old son would not immediately slide into whatever line of work Henry had. But the family lived only a block or so from Knockfergus, and Henry was roughly contemporary with Giles Lee, while John Ball was roughly contemporary with Giles’ son, who was Robert’s father. It may have been no coincidence that our Robert signed his contract with John Ball.


Rosemary Lane was no ordinary street, even for East London. While some respectable people lived on it here and there, it was reputed to be the center of thievery, prostitution, cheap booze joints, and violence in the London area. If Robert Lee grew up in Rosemary Lane, stealing a bushel of wheat when his family was hungry might have been second nature. And if you were to punish him for this theft, and you knew he came from this part of Whitechapel in the old country, you might have been quite determined to beat this “second nature” out of him. 19


Summary


We have established to our satisfaction, if not yours, that the Giles Lee who died such a sad death in 1817 in Russell County, Virginia was the son of a Robert and Rachel Lee. Robert was born about 1711 and very likely came from London in 1728 and labored for seven years as an indentured servant in Newark, New Jersey. He married Rachel about 1736 and Giles was born about 1737 in Shrewsbury, New Jersey. We know a few other things, but there are large gaps in our understanding of Robert’s and Giles’ lives. Giles may have stayed in New Jersey throughout his early years. We know he lived in Morris County in 1777 and 1779 before he showed up in Georgia in the 1780s.


As for Robert’s early life, we know the Robert Lee who became an indentured servant in Newark was from the Whitechapel district of East London. His grandfather may have been named Giles, and his grandmother Elizabeth.


Others, as always, are invited to investigate these matters, find the mistakes we made in reaching our conclusions, and clear up the few hundred questions we left unanswered along the way.



* * * * * * * * *


A Parting Word


The authors of these four papers met at a brick wall. Like most amateur genealogical researchers trying to find their origins, we each had gotten to a certain point and could get no further. But we kept trying. In our case a DNA sample, a book of tax lists from Georgia, and an old church record provided the crucial information that pointed us in the right directions. It’s a minor success story, but it shows brick walls are not forever. The right information is probably out there. You just have to keep searching, and searching is getting easier every day. We hope other stumped, frustrated, and angry but determined family detectives will draw some encouragement from this tale.


Endnotes for:


1 We are forever indebted to Mrs. Leigh Gifford of Morris, New Jersey who graciously spent a lot of time during her 90th year searching for our Giles Lee. She found the all-important record of Giles’ birth in Stillwell’s book.


2 Ms. Tara L. Christiansen, Reference Archivist of the Monmouth County Archives, located these files in one day after we asked for a search by name. She told us what they said, and scanned us copies of them as soon as we asked for them. When those copies proved inadequate for close reading, she photographed the records and sent them to us. Mrs. Christiansen gave outstanding service to our research, and we are grateful.


3 We thank Ms. Laura Poll of the Monmouth County Historical Association for providing this bill of sale from the Association’s “Holmes Collection”.


4 As mentioned in an endnote to the second essay, Giles might have known various Vanhooks as he grew up in Shrewsbury. The story begins with a Laurens Van Hook (1670-1724) (http://www.van-hook.us/getperson.php?personID=I60&tree=genuser), an early Dutch settler of New Amsterdam who moved to the village of Freehold in Monmouth County, NJ some time in the early 1700s. He had a goodly number of children, including two sons he named Aaron (b. 1698) and Henry (b. 1701). The sons grew up in Freehold, each got married, and each had a family. Each named a son Samuel.


Aaron apparently moved to Hunterdon County, New Jersey in the 1740s. His son Samuel (“Southwest Virginia”) Vanhook was probably born in Hunterdon. Aaron was apparently indicted for murder and fled to Pennsylvania, from which he took his family to Orange County, NC about 1753, including young son Samuel. Aaron had acquired 400 acres as a grant for settling in Orange County [very close to where John “Richland Creek” Lea settled], and after Aaron died in 1760, Samuel got 200 acres from his mother in 1767 (suggesting he had been born in 1746). He married and had his first child Benjamin in 1768. Polly was born about 1770, either in Orange County, or in Virginia, for Samuel moved with other Vanhooks to (what became) Russell County, VA in the early 1770s.


Henry Vanhook, on the other hand, never left Freehold, where he owned a tavern. He had six children there, including a son born in 1733 whom he named Samuel (known to us as Samuel “Kentucky” Vanhook). Giles might have known Henry’s children, as Freehold is about 12 miles by road from Shrewsbury. Henry died in 1750, and his son Samuel went with his uncle Aaron to Orange County, NC. He had many adventures in his life, including being captured by the British in Kentucky during the Revolutionary War and imprisoned in Detroit. But his story does not intersect ours.


5 This was our first evidence of Giles in New Jersey. Because of the 1850 census data on Nellie, we Googled “Giles Lee and New Jersey militia, Revolutionary War.” Up popped Giles in Morris County. That led us to local inquiries and Leigh Gifford, who found the christening record from 1738.


6 A Paul Lee served as the wagon master in Giles’ company. He was the son of Thomas Lee (1728-1805), who had moved to Morris County from Hempstead, Long Island. We spent a lot of time seeing if Giles’ father Robert could be connected to the Hempstead Lees, but it was just a coincidence. (We read somewhere that Lee is a fairly common name.)


7 We originally thought John Ball was the person in America for whom Robert Lee worked for seven years. We found a good match in a farmer named John Ball who lived in New Ark, New Jersey at the time, who later moved to Morris County. We also found a ship captain named John Ball who unloaded a cargo of indentured servants in Philadelphia in 1729. But both were the wrong John Ball, a hazard of searching for a common name.


Most of the agents who signed up indentured servants in London were merchants, wine makers, and tavern owners. Why? Our guess is it had to do with the return voyages of the ships that took indentured servants to the New World. The captains would fill their hulls in the West Indies and America with molasses (used to make rum) or sugar or other raw materials and take them to London where merchants, vintners, and innkeepers would be regular buyers. These businessmen may have discovered they could make quite a bit of money by providing the captain with indentured servants for the trip back to the New World.


8 Of course, the circumstantial line to John Ball of New Ark was also rather straight and meshed with the known facts. (But there was no link to Shrewsbury.)


If Robert Lee, an Anglican, married Rachel in Shrewsbury in 1735 or 1736, there should be a report of it in the Christ Church book. It’s not there for 1735; but not every event was entered. And no marriages were recorded in 1736. Our guess is that Rachel was a poor young woman in the Shrewsbury area who married Robert in 1736 after he finished his contract. They had Giles in 1737 or 1838 and had him christened in 1838. Their poor circumstances may have played a role in his theft of the grain.


9 Lacking any documentary evidence regarding his birth, we don’t know when our Robert was born. IF he was 17 when he signed his contract on July 19, 1728, he would have been born in either 1710 or 1711. But he may not have been 17. Ship captains often charged twice as much to transport someone 18 or older as they did for someone 17 or younger. Thus John Ball, who paid for Robert’s passage, might have been a tad motivated to misrepresent Robert’s age. Or Robert might have said he was older than he was, hoping to get one of the shorter contracts given to older men. (Although we’ll see later that John Ball may have known Robert Lee for some time before that July day.)


10 The name “Stratford Langton” derives from a medieval abbey called Stratford Langthorne that was destroyed by Henry VIII around 1538. The area, which is just east of Stepney St. Dunstan, is noteworthy today because the 2012 Olympic Stadium and other venues arose less than a mile away in Stratford proper. And the lane that led from that road to Colchester to the abbey’s old site is today called Abbey Road, and there’s a well-known photograph of four hairy young men crossing it—one of them barefooted.


As well Richard “the Other Immigrant” Lee and progenitor of the famous Lee family of Virginia, bought a large estate in Stratford-Langton about 1658, which was then sold by the terms of his will probated in 1664. But there is obviously no connection to our branch of the Lee family, as Richard, who apparently originated in Worchester, was a Johnny-Come-Lately to the area. And the DNA is all wrong too.


Lots of Lees lived in the region before Richard bought his estate. Sir Robert Lee, Knight of Stratford-Langton, wrote out his will in 1616 in which he spread his holdings among four sons named Thomas, George, Robert, and Edward. However it is highly likely that the William Lee who married Mrs. Toms in London in 1637 descended from a much poorer batch of Lees who paid Sir Robert rent to live on his land.


Our William should have been christened in the All Saints Church in West Ham, as that was the parish in which Stratford-Langton sat. However the baptismal records there only go back to 1653, so we cannot be sure. Curiously a William Lee was christened on April 6, 1615 at nearby Stepney St. Dunstan, the son of a John Lee. That William Lee would have been 22 in 1637, when the Widow Toms married her second husband, which sounds about right.


11 Knockfergus was built on a path that ran along the north side of the Thames River. It featured a lot of shops that sold rope used for the riggings of sailing ships. The first part of this path was therefore called Cable Street, and in 1695 the whole road from near the Tower of London to the eastern edge of Stepney was called Cable Street. You may have heard of it, for a battle was fought on it in 1936 between Communist and other anti-Fascists on one side, and police who were assigned to keep the peace as the British Union of Fascists attempted to march down the street.


12 http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/bk6/pp7-11 presents an interesting document prepared in 1650 outlining the monetary value of the Stepney parish. Among other things it says,


“To the Vicarage there belongeth a house and orchard, but no other messuages, lands, or tenements; the tithes belonging thereunto are but small, being raised by sixpence a cow, and by cocks and hens a penny each, and such uncertain profits, as also by christenings, most of which are privately and at home by strangers, and the benefits lost, and likewise by burials, whereof a small share accrueth to the Vicar.”


“Strangers” was apparently a code word for religious officials from other Christian faiths. These “non-conformist” clergy, Presbyterian ministers, and perhaps even Catholic priests did the baptizing in the parents’ home for less than the Church of England would charge, with perhaps an evangelical gleam in their eye. This would appeal to the poor more than anyone else, because in their houses every penny counted. So the baptismal records will seriously under-represent the many people in a parish such as St. Dunstan who were permanently poor—such as our Lees.


13 Our Robert, it will be recalled, named his first two children Giles and Elizabeth. (Of course, Elizabeth was a very popular name at the time.)


The lack of a marriage record may be due to two events which overwhelmed the London area at the time. The greatest outbreak of the Bubonic plague struck in 1665, and then the Great Fire wiped out much of London in 1666. The fire caused many homeless people to move outside the city.


Dennis Stewart pointed out that while the fire destroyed 87 parish churches, and their records, it did not reach the east end and “suburbs.” If it had, we would not know anything about our Robert’s possible connection with Giles (1642), and William and Katherine Lee.


14 A William Lee also lived in Mile End, and may have been Giles’ older brother born in 1640. He was a bricklayer and paid £5 rent. He died a few years later as a result of breaking his leg on Tower Hill while harassing his “home guard” neighbors as they went marching about on parade. He was buried in Stepney St. Dunstan churchyard on March 9, 1694.


15 Was Giles (1642) the father of Robert, not his grandfather? Giles was alive while Robert was a boy. It could have happened if Alice May was appreciably younger than was likely, and Giles was appreciably more into siring that was likely, and Robert was appreciably younger than was likely. Or Robert could be an illegitimate son of Giles. But there’s no evidence for any of these things.


16 These three agents had also been signing up a much larger group of indentured servants since July 2 to go to (just) Pennsylvania. So someone who dropped by John Ball’s shoppe in mid-July, 1728 had the choice of going to Philadelphia and getting off the boat, or to New York or Philadelphia. Robert Lee and twelve others (including three women) took the flight that landed at New York.


New York was probably the first port of call when the ship arrived in the New World. The boat was going to head south (for tobacco or sugar) after unloading the things it had brought from England, and going to New York first made more sense than going to Philadelphia and then north to New York and then south.


17 Peter Simpson, who signed up most of the dozen indentured servants who sailed to America with our Robert Lee, apparently lived on Brook Street, which is by the docks at the eastern end of the multi-named Cable Street/Rosemary Lane.


18 For whatever reason, John Ball did not stay in the business for long. He only signed up indentured servants in 1727 and 1728 (41 altogether, compared to Peter Simpson’s 248, and John Taylor’s 491).


19 In retrospect, the generalization about the customary naming sequence of the times is violated far more in the exception than in the rule.

A) William Lee (~1615-1661) named his first son Nicholas, suggesting that his own father was named Nicholas. But there is no such combo in the on-line birth records at the relevant time.

B) Giles (1642-1720) was William’s third son, and plainly was not named after his father as custom would have had it. He may instead have been named after his mother Katherine’s father. Our search for a Giles-Katherine father-daughter combination is severely handicapped because we don’t know Katherine Tom’s maiden name. But a Gilles Morgaynne, was christened in St. Botolph Aldgate on April 7, 1577—which by the way was eleven years before the Spanish Armada and Shakespeare’s first play, so we’re getting way back when. Gilles in turn had a daughter christened Katherin Morgayne on January 22, 1614 in a nearby parish, St. Lawrence Pountney. If this is the woman we meet as Katherine Toms, her French-Welsh genes may have saved her from the plague.)

C) We don’t know the names of any of Giles’s hypothetical sons, including the one who was our Robert’s father. The naming protocol would dictate “William,” if it were followed. But there’s no William Lee in the Stepney St. Dunstan christening register for the 1770s.

D) Our Robert “the Immigrant” named his first son Giles (1737-1817) “Giles 1” in Essay 3), which we are proposing was his grandfather’s name, not his father’s.

E) This Giles named his first son Robert (1765-1837), which was indeed Giles’s father’s name. Giles’ second son, James (1767-1851), may have been named after the father of his wife, Ann Lee. There is no known James previously in this branch of the Lee family tree.


Link to Family Tree of Giles Lee