Anglins in Central Virginia, Early to Mid-1700's

Anglins in Central Virginia
in the early and mid-1700's

Hanover and Buckingham Counties are both "burned" counties, so aside from the royal patents, there are very few records. The only county records in Hanover County during the period our people were there are for 1734 and 1735. The fact that we have a copy of Adrian Anglin's will we owe to our ancestors' litigiousness: Philip Anglin needed a certified copy to use as evidence in a lawsuit, and this copy was included in a collection of family papers deposited with the Library of Virginia.

Adrian Anglin and William Anglin both lived in Hanover County, Virginia, in the early 1700's, but DNA evidence has shown that they were not related. Whether the 1726 grant to William "Anglea" really refers to William Anglin is unknown. The William and Adrian that we know are Anglins have often been referred to as Anglea (e.g. in the Buckingham County tax lists), but some real Angleas ended up in Goochland (later Cumberland County), just south of Hanover County, and one of them was a William from St. Martin's Parish in Hanover County. Since Adrian Anglin is mentioned the very next year by someone in St. Martin's Parish in Hanover County, there is considerable opportunity for confusion. These Goochland/Cumberland County people pronounced their name "Angel" or "Angela," and lived on Angola Creek. They don't appear to have any connection with our Anglins. (Does this sound familiar? Evelyn Williams reported that an Anglin descendant had been told that the Anglins were French and that their name had been pronounced "Angelo" in France. Perhaps the Anglea/Anglin confusion led to that mistaken idea.)

Chronology
       
1 1705   Headright is granted for transportation of William Anglin to the Colony of Virginia
2 1726   William Anglea (Anglin?) is granted land in Hanover County, Virginia
  1727   Adrian Anglin is mentioned John English's will in Hanover County
  1734   Adrian Anglin witnesses lease in Hanover County
3 1734   William Anglin is granted land in Hanover County
4 1746   Adrian Anglin is granted land in Goochland (later Albemarle, then Buckingham) County
5 1758   William Anglin is granted land in Albemarle (later Buckingham) County
6 1767   William Anglin has land on Locust Creek in Louisa County

The numbers to the left of the dates above correspond to the numbers on the map below.



Below is a closer view of part of the area represented in the map above.


It appears that William Anglin's Hanover County land was in the part of Saint Martin's Parish that fell within Louisa County when it was formed in 1742. St. Martin's Parish extended from the confluence of the North Anna River and the South Anna River westward between those two rivers; and below the South Anna west of Stone Horse Creek. The western boundary of St. Martin's Parish was approximately where I have drawn the broken line running generally north and south on the map above. Thus, after Louisa County was formed in 1742, most of St. Martin's Parish was still in Hanover County; the fact that only a small part of St. Martin's Parish fell within Louisa County after 1742 helps us narrow down the area where our Anglins lived.

The 1726 and 1734 patents did not mention a watercourse, so in order to locate the general area of the land in question, I referred to watercourses named in the grants to adjoining landowners. That means the locations given for the 1726 and 1734 grants are only approximate. If anyone has any better information, I would welcome it.

John English, whose estate papers mention Adrian Anglin in 1727, had land in the Taylor Creek area, as close as I can tell. To give you an idea as to scale, there's only about a mile or two between Cub Creek and Taylor Creek and about 6 miles between Locust Creek and Taylor Creek.

The map below shows our people over a wider area. If I knew approximately where the land was, I colored the area and constructed a legend on the left side. If I only knew that someone was in a county at a certain time, I just made a rectangular box with his name and the date in it. To show the same person, I used the same color box. It's possible that the Williams in Lunenburg County and in Chesterfield County are the same person, but I have no evidence either way. The one in Lunenburg County was deeded 94 acres of land in 1755, and the one in Chesterfield County was fined in 1760 for showing up for muster without his bayonet.



We can see from the dates that there must be at least two Philip Anglins with a Buckingham County connection. In Buckingham County in 1764, Adrian Anglin was taxed on 400 acres, William Anglin on 500 acres, and Philip Anglin on 630 acres. The information for the Philip who moved from Buckingham County to Amherst County to Bedford County to Henry County came from his application for a Revolutionary War pension. The date he gives for his birth in that application accords with the birth date given for Adrian's son Philip in the list dated 1859 which Leslie Ross found in her deceased aunt's things and which showed Adrian Anglin's year of birth and the names and dates of birth of his children and the names of his wives. Adrian's son Philip would have been 22 in 1764. That seems to be a lot of property for a 22-year-old, so I wonder whether the Philip on the tax list was a brother of Adrian's. As scarce as records are for that area then, the fact that we don't have any earlier records of Philip doesn't mean he wasn't there accumulating property. The 1774 Buckingham County tax lists are extant, and while Adrian and his son William were tithed that year with some of their respective sons, Philip does not appear on that year's lists. There is no evidence that this Philip ever married or had children. If anyone has any evidence to bring this Philip's identity out of the realm of speculation, I'd love to see it.

I long believed that the William Anglin who in 1758 was deeded land in what later became Buckingham County was Adrian's son because of his physical proximity to Adrian, together with the fact that he and his descendants used the name Adrian for several generations. That William is shown consistently in Buckingham or its predecessor county from 1758 through 1774. Tax lists for the next few years are not extant, but his family appears in Greenbrier County within a few years after Adrian's death, so it appears that William and his sons lived near Adrian until the end of Adrian's life, and then they moved on. When she wrote her book, Evelyn Williams thought that the William who moved from Louisa County to Caswell County, North Carolina was Adrian's son, but it's my understanding that as more evidence became available, she came to believe that the William who was Adrian's son was the one whose family moved to Greenbrier County (West) Virginia and later to Harrison and Randolph Counties, (West) Virginia.

I thought that the William who moved from Louisa County, Virginia, to Caswell County, North Carolina, might have been a nephew of Adrian's, but his descendants believed that he, and not the William who died in (West) Virginia, was Adrian's son. Our DNA project has answered these questions unequivocally: the William who died in (West) Virginia is Adrian's son, and the William who died in Caswell County, North Carolina, is not related to Adrian's family. Our DNA project has also established that the James who appeared in Augusta County, Virginia, in 1755 is not related to Adrian's family or to the family of the William who died in Caswell County, North Carolina, in 1803.

It has been suggested, I think on the basis of undocumented statements in an early county history, that the Philip who was born in 1742 and moved from his birthplace in what is now Buckingham County and ended up in what is now Henry County was not Adrian's son, but I think the list of Leslie Ross's aunt is substantially more reliable. No birth records were kept by the counties then, and there has been no sign of any church records showing our Anglins. Our people would have moved from parish to parish during the years when Adrian's children were born, so even if one parish register had shown some of Adrian's children, it wouldn't have shown them all. It appears to me that the most likely source for the list was a Bible or other family record. Nothing else is likely to have shown all the children's birthdates. There could be transcription errors, but there wouldn't be an error as to who the father of the family was. County histories, on the other hand, were often based on hearsay rather than documented research and often contained egregious errors. DNA evidence has shown that Philip and Adrian were closely related, and Philip was involved in a lawsuit in which Adrian's estate was an issue. ADDENDUM: The suit papers in the litigation between the Philip Anglin born in 1742 and his brother-in-law William Hays prove that this Philip was indeed Adrian Anglin's son and that once again the country history is in error.

The William Anglin who had been in the part of Hanover County which became part of Louisa County moved to Caswell County, North Carolina, right across the state line from Henry County, Virginia, where Adrian's son Philip settled. We know that from the pension application filed by his son John stating that he was born in Louisa County in 1757. John's father William died in Caswell County, North Carolina in 1803.

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