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Watts- Edmondson-Perry
EDMONDSON STORY
The Edmondson African American Family story begins in Lunenburg County, Virginia where our great, great grandfather was a slave of Upton Edmondson as the story goes. What is surprising is that the European Watts, Perry, and Edmondson Families were all connected and intermarried in Lunenburg County, Virginia. Through DNA it showed that my mother Vera E. Edmondson-Perry and her sisters and bothers were related to my father Isaiah B. Perry through the European Watts-Edmondson-Perry families. During the American Colonial Period, European white slave owners had relationships with their slaves and created a large number of mulatto offspring. Virginia was famous for having Breeding farms made up of African slaves after 1810, and plantation owners had no problems with having mulatto offspring. What they did not plan on is that some of these offspring would look so much like the slave's owner that it became difficult for them to treat mulatto offspring the same as other slaves. There are serval recorded incidents where the slave owner gave special treatment to these offspring or freed them. This is the story of our family on all sides: Watts-Thompson-Wilson-Edmondson, and Perry.
The European Watts Family connection to the European Edmondson Family was through Joseph Edmondson, who married his wife Frances on Oct. 1, 1804, and she sold her land to Richard Durrett, Sr. (The Virginia Genealogist, Vol. 16, p. 98, Albemarle County Deed Book 15, p. 19). Frances Watts, wife of Joseph Edmondson, was born after 1767 in Albemarle County. Her first husband was Joseph Edmondson. She married secondly Mr. Smith. Mrs. Frances Watts Smith's children were included in her father Jacob Watts' will who was from Westmoreland County, Virginia. Jacob Watts is thought to be a native of Scotland (From Anne Kemp, 2006).
"COLONIAL FAMILIES OF THE SOUTHERN STATES OF AMERICA," states on p. 531, that Frances Watts, daughter of the Rev. Jacob Watts, born in 1731, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Elizabeth Durrett, married Joseph Edmondson and had issue. The Rev. Jacob Watts died in 1821 in Albemarle County, Virginia.
The European Edmondson family in Lunenburg County, Virginia, by historical records, indicates that they were a large family with many slave owners in the county and throughout the surrounding areas.
Our line of the family stories and documents indicate that Upton Edmondson's line was the slave owning family of my great, great grandfather, John Edmondson. Records also indicate that he was an African American listed as mulatto and farmer in the 1850 census.
As the family story goes, my mother, her mother, great aunts, and uncles all indicate that John Edmondson was born in 1830, and was the offspring of the slave owner Upton Edmondson and his mother was an Edmondson family slave named Fanny. DNA verifies this relationship through 91 DNA matches with Upton Edmondson's current family members.
John Edmondson born 1830
John Edmondson was very industrious by all accounts and was a very profitable farmer raising eight children. One indication that Upton Edmondson and John might have been close was that John named most of his children after Upton Edmondson's family members. John Edmondson's wife was Lucretia Inge Graves.
John Edmondson and Lucretia Inge Graves had a son named John Isom Edmondson who was my grandfather, the father of my mother.(Vera Elizabeth Edmondson-Perry)
John Isham Edmondson married my grandmother, Daisy Wilson who was from Mebane, North Carolina. They met in the state of Connecticut in the early 1900’s. You might ask, "How did this happen?" The answer is quite simple. Many African Americans left the south to work in the North to earn more money. After John and Daisy got married, they moved to Lunenburg County, Virginia, in the city of Kenbridge (Brown's Store) where John had family and there was land to farm so that he could feed his family. John and Daisy had five children together. John was killed in an accident during the 1920’s.
After John's untimely death, Daisy's house burned to the ground in the early 1920's, and during that time she moved her family home to Mebane, NC, her home place. Daisy taught school in Mebane until the State of NC changed the rules regarding the amount of education one must have to teach in NC. After that, Daisy moved her family to Stamford, Connecticut where my mother and her siblings grew up. Daisy taught at the Cooper School in Alamance County, NC which was on the land that her father and others sold to the American Missionary Society and during the same time her father and others gave land to Mary Grove Congregational Church to build a church on Mary Grove Road, Mebane, NC.
Daisy also married Franklin Nash from Burlington, NC and had two other children Wilson Nash and Monroe Nash. Their father, Franklin Nash, was from Alamance County, North Carolina.
John Edmondson Father Upton Edmundson (Edmondson) -White Slave Owner-John Edmondson (African American) mother was 'Fanny' - Edmondson Family, Slave Lady Detail Source
| John Edmondson 1830 our Great, Great, Grandfather (African American) Detail Source
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Below is an 1800s Map of Lunenburg County, Virginia
You will find the location of the two Edmondson Family Plantations, one under the name Brown's Store, and the other, to the right of the name Brown's Store.
Below you will find part of the European Edmondson Family Tree. On the Family Tree you will see Upton A. Edmondson 1796 to 1871. He was the slave owner and father of John Edmondson who was the father John Isham Edmondson who was Daisy Wilson Edmondson's husband.
On the same Family Tree you will find "Fanny" Edmondson, Family Slave Woman, who was the mother of John Edmondson's father of John Isham Edmondson
Below you will find the African American offspring of Upton A. Edmonson (White Slave Owner), and "Fanny" Edmondson, Family Slave Woman
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John Isham Edmondson Ancestry. Com Record Below
In the 1920 Census, John Isham Edmondson and Daisy were still in Lunenburg County, Virginia.
Aunt Bettie Edmonson-Young had not been born yet.
DNA Indicates that the same European Watts Family that lived in Lunenburg County, Virginia during the 1700s and 1800s were relatives to the European Watts Family that the Tidewater, Virginia Watts Family (African American) were associated with. Below you will find an outline of their stay in Lunenburg County, Virginia. They married into the Edmondson Family of Slave Owners in that Lunenburg County, Virginia. Later they moved together as multiple families to South Carolina.
Watts Family of Lunenburg Co. VA
Lunenburg Co., VA (1747–54)
- · THOMAS WATTS, born ca. 1725, the subject of this paper
- · WILLIAM WATTS, born ca. 1727; obtained 1762 land grant on Little River (present Fairfield County, SC, adjacent to Thomas’s brother-in-law Ambrose Mills; obtained 1763 land grant on Wateree River adjacent to brothers Thomas and Edward.
- · EDWARD WATTS JR., born ca. 1729, d. Fairfield Co., 1809; owned land in 1756 adjacent to Thomas’s father-in-law William Mills Sr.; 1763, petitioned for grant on Wateree River adjacent to brothers Thomas and William; 1765, settled on Little River near William and Mobleys from Lunenburg and Bedford Counties, VA.
- · MARY ELIZABETH WATTS, born ca. 1731; alleged wife of John Earl of Lunenburg County, in whose household Thomas Watts was taxed in 1748.
- · GEORGE WATTS, born ca. 1733; died 1772, Tryon County, North Carolina, leaving widow Frances (possibly Frances Woodward, later Taylor); lieutenant from Bedford County, Virginia, in French and Indian War.
- · JOHN WATTS, born ca. 1735; aged 16+ at first appearance on record as a tithe in his father’s Lunenburg household, 1752; private in French and Indian War.
Residences: Lunenburg Co., VA (1747–54)
Bedford Co., VA—cut from Lunenburg (1754–54)
Craven Co., SC—later Camden, Fairfield, Lancaster, Kershaw / Wateree River (1763–96)
Children: Thomas Watts and wife Sarah Mills were the parents of nine children, as proved by associational evidence and confirmed by the estate settlement for their unmarried son Thomas Jr.:9
- · JOHN WATTS (REV. JOHN WATTS, ESQ.) b. ca.1749; m. [possible daughter of Moses and Catherine (King) Smith] ca. 1768;10 married Judith [–?–] bef. 12 May 180811; died aft.
Because the Watts Family did not to well in Lunenburg County, Virginia the family moved to South Carolinia
6 AUGUST 1754 LUNENBURG COUNTY, VA
Legal suit. “John Hanna agst Thos Watts dfdnt; petitioner to recover debt/costs.”53
Note that the suits against Watts are being prosecuted in both Lunenburg and Bedford. 1754 is the year that the county split. Some suits apparently were filed in Lunenburg before the split.
Amos E. Edmondson, 1784, had a son James Edmondson, 1810-1873, who was born in Salem, Sumter, South Carolina. His son was Robert S. Edmondson , 1881, married Catharine Watts, 1839-1880, South Carolina.
Edward Watts, Jr. and his brothers William Watts and Thomas Watts, and the latter’s brother-in-law Ambrose Mills, all surfaced living along the Wateree River of old Craven County in land grants of 1761–63, with several supplemental grants after that point. No grant exists for John, who would have married about 1768. The royal land-grant process was suspended in 1773 (temporarily), and 1774 (permanently) amid political unrest.
The Map below is of South Carolina Watts and Perry Connection
Fairfield & Kershaw Counties:
Watts Settlements along the Wateree River, 1763–ca.180068
Map 4
West-Central Fairfield County (Little River area)69
Site of William Watts, Edward Watts Jr., and Ambrose Mills
COMMENT:
- · Ambrose Mills was the first in this family cluster to petition for land (1761), locating at the strategic forks of Little River, which was surveyed for him in 1762.
- · William Watts, in 1762, petitioned for Little River land below Ambrose Mills, on a stream that joined his grant to Jackson Creek; it would be called Watts’s Branch of Jackson Creek.
- · Edward Watts Jr. in 1765 left the Wateree and took a new grant on Little River, northwest of Ambrose, on the fringes of the Mobley Settlement. (The Mobleys of Lunenburg-Bedford had begun the Bedford- to-Craven/Camden migration about 1756.)70
- · From Little River, Edward Jr. spread southwest down Trouble Creek.
- · In the region where Little River branches, east of Mobley’s Meeting House, note Dampier’s Creek. The Dampiers can be found amid the John Watts clan in both Tattnall County, Georgia, and Covington County, Mississippi.71
Estate may be, in the said State of South Carolina, or in the parish of Ouachita in the State of Louisiana, or elsewhere, now particularly of, in, and to, those portions of the said estate the said Deceased, which is in the hands of William Guphill, Executor of the last will of said Deceased, in the said Richland in the state of South Carolina, and in the hands of James Fort Muse, attorney in fact appointed to administer the Estate of the said deceased for the said William Duggans, nephew to the said deceased, and curator of that portion of the said Estate of the said deceased, which lies in the said parish of Ouachita, in the said State of Louisiana, and which is in the hands and possession of Joseph Watts, a man of color, who had the charge and care of said portion of said Decedents property in said parish of Ouachita, at the time of his death, hereby vesting him the said William Duggans, my said nephew, with all the rights and powers which I derived from my said Brother, Thomas Watts, dec’d, by the effect of his will, and the laws of the said States of South Carolina and Louisiana. To ask, demand [illegible word] for, recover, and receive such portions, or parts to which I am or have been entitled, as aforesaid, in whatever state, and in whosoever hands or possession the same may be found, and to certain of such of said Estate, as may be in the hands of his said attorney in fact, as will make his full part or portion of said Estate of said Deceased, after the payment of the just debts or demands which appear legally established against said Estate of the said deceased, hereby warranting the same from and against all persons or claims whatever, to the said William Duggans, his heirs and assigns forever. In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and Seal, this twenty-ninth day of November, in the year of our lord one thousand Eight hundred and twenty-one, and in the forty-sixth year of American Independence.
In the presence of
(Signed) (Signed)
A. Morrison John Watts
Jesse Wiggins
Map of Lunenburg County, Virginia 1871
MAP of the Perry Family In Lunenburg County, Virginia
Martel Perry's European Edmondson Family
Edmondsons in Virginia, Hampshire to Westmoreland
Edmondsons in Virginia, Albemarle to Dinwiddie.
Family Blackweell and Edmondson Group Sheet
THE EDMONSON SISTERS (1832–1895)
WattsDillardAmherstCoSurvey.pdf
H011575.pdf Old Free State Lunenburg County, Virginia History
Watts of Lunenburg County, Virginia
Free Negroes and Mulattos-Lunenburg
Lunenburg County, Free Negro & Slave Records, 1802-1803
Edmondsons in Virginia, by county