Andersons of Colonial N. Carolina

I joke with my email buddies and budettes that “Oh so now you want to get out into the Tall Grass”… meaning “let’s get down to nitty gritty details”. My grandson will stop by and notice a map or notes I have up on my computer screen and quip “back in the weeds, I see”… or something to that effect.

Such is this “study” of some properties along the western bank of the Chowan River in the early 1700s. In one particular patent… involving numerous people… the intricacies of tracking the information down has taken weeks for me to accomplish. And I continue to unravel new details.

I am posting this mainly because it has gotten too huge for me to email to my “insider” cohorts…those being that California gal, the Librarian and that Abstractor dude… so I can just refer them here.

I’ve recently made some Posts mentioning Lawrence Mague (a shoemaker), Thomas Bray (married a daughter of Thomas Pollock), John Bryan, Media White, and others… the list is beginning to get rather long… the property was swapped around like a hot potato. Go ahead, take a look… but I offer a warning…if you catch my drift.

…as usual, click on the blue filename to open in a better view

I recently made a Post about an obscure PERRY clan I have begun researching… yep, he showed up in this patent, owning it (or at least part of it) for a while. The details just don’t seem to end…

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So…what is my takeaway? What have I learned from this research?

Lewis Bryan from Nansemond arrived in the area by 1713 at least, likely earlier. Jennifer from California began calling him Lewis the Importer because he was documented in Court minutes along with his family (this was unique among these early Bryans) which allowed us to ‘begin’ to get a handle on his group. Edward Bryan, also from Nansemond, arrived by 1710 (perhaps earlier we just can’t document when exactly). Edward is a little more murky but he is beginning to emerge.

Lewis TI had numerous sons who settled along this stretch of the Chowan River. The old man himself first shows himself, as we have slowly figured out, by buying half the 640 acre patent of Henry Bradley directly on the Chowan River. His son Edward, a year earlier in 1713, bought half of a patent of 640 acres from Thomas Mann… this Edward we will soon begin calling Edward the Mariner. Two other sons of Lewis TI, Lewis Jr and Simon will, in a few years, get patents close by. The old man, Lewis TI will die about 1718… I have arrived at that conclusion by unraveling some clues in several deeds which state the old man had left the sons property which mentioned his “missing” Will. That is the condensed and simplified “backstory”.

John Bryan, son of Lewis TI, is a bit more complicated… which is decidedly not to say the others were easy to unravel. Traci the Librarian coined the term Curilicue John Bryan for him because we had an amusing flurry of emails where we compared his unusual signatures… he sometimes just seemed to lose his mind and swirl wild flourishes with his pen (we were highly amused and it kind of allowed us to track him). This John Bryan was not listed in the headright list of Lewis TI. That threw us off but he was mentioned a few times in the records as “the son of Lewis Bryan”… so we just put the pieces together and concluded he HAD to be his son… no one else fit. This Curlicue John married the daughter of Lawrence Mague the Shoemaker (a shoemaker’s bench was noted in his Estate papers). But Lawrence Mague seems more like some sort of Real Estate wizard to me. It was at this point I began unraveling this freaky hot potato patent.

But Lawrence Mague was not what interested me… I was researching the guy who married his daughter- Curlicue John. But everywhere Mague showed up… there also was CJ. So I was compelled to track down Mague whether I was interested or not. And Mague was seemingly all over the place… along the VA/NC boundary line, near the Meherrin River dealing property, on both the West and East side of the Chowan River and he had several properties on the Chinkapin Creek and Cypress Creek to the west of Chowan River. Mague was a very busy shoemaking Real Estate mogul… CJ was kept busy just witnessing his contracts and deeds. The merry-go-round only ended after Mague wrote his Will and died after 1741 or so… and apparently a smallpox epidemic rolled through NC and CJ and his wife died about the same time as Mague.

Edward the Mariner, brother of CJ went on to live until 1761 when he wrote his Will. The remaining sons of Lewis TI left their trails along the byways.

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The “details” of this research that percolated out of history is what I am left with… and there are trails that give clues for modern researchers to search for genealogies.

The Howell MILL winds up in the hands of a second hand BRYAN… odd how that works out huh.

Once you figure out who Mourning Howell McGlauhan was in the above Will extract (at Eighthly) perhaps then you can figure out who this James Maglahan was… because I do not have a clue.

Or this James McGlohon…

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Elizabeth (Booth) Dunn