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       " ...He further states that he served the said two tours, one as a substitute, making in all six months. That he knows of no living witnesses by whom he can prove his services nor has he any documentary evidences to establish the same. And further states that he is not on the pension role of any state and that he hereby relinquishes every claim to a pension except the present.

      "Question by the court: Where and in what year were you born?

"Answer: I was born in Botetourt County, Virginia on the fifth day of February 1763 as I have been told."

       These words are quoted from the 1834 deposition of William Nash for a Revolutionary military pension. When I read them, I realized he probably did not have childhood memories of his birthplace, but was only repeating what he had learned from others.      
       In researching our family histories, we are doing the same. This collection of information is what we have been told about our Green and Pearson families.

       And this is what we know about William Nash himself.

       In 1780, when he was residing in Guilford County, North Carolina, he became a 17-year old private in the Carolina Campaign of the Revolutionary War. He served first as a substitute and then, a few days after he returned home, was drafted himself. He participated in the Battle of Charleston, South Carolina. Later he was among those who formed a battalion of light infantry under Major Armstrong and General Griffith Rutherford. He was among the troops at "Gates Defeat" by Lord Cornwallis near Camden, South Carolina, although he was out of action during this engagement because of sickness.

       After the war he lived in Montgomery County, Virginia, and the southern part of the present state of Kentucky, then called Lincoln County. By 1785, he was one of the earliest inhabitants and on the first tax role of the frontier village which had, the previous year, become the city of Nashville, named for his uncle, the Revolutionary hero, Francis Nash. He was a Justice of the Peace in both Davidson and Rutherford Counties, and surveyed the boundary line between those counties. Sometime in the late 1820s, when he was in his 50s, William and his family left their home in Rutherford County where he had lived for 18 years and moved further west - this time to Dyer County, where he was again one of the original settlers of a Tennessee county.

       The original copy of the interview he gave to obtain this pension is in the National Archives and a hand-written note verifies the fact that he was to be allowed a pension of $20 a year. Unfortunately, he died a few months later.