Elizabeth Proctor (Norton) - Trouble

Found this, confirms marriage but not origin of Elias: Spotsylvania: DEED BOOK F 1761-1766, page 242
June 3, 1765. George Sharp and Mary, his wife, of Spts. Co., to Thomas James of Fredksbg. £35 curr. 150 a. in Spts. Co., part of a tract of land devised by George Proctor, Decd., to his daughter, Margaret, who inter-married with Elias Sharp, father of the sd. George Sharp, who is eldest son and heir at law of sd. Elias, who dying intestate, whereby sd. land descended to the sd. George, party to these presents, etc. Witnesses, J. Lewis, Chs. Robinson, Geo. Stubblefield, Francis Taliaferro, John Chew. June 3, 1765."

and this from a Sharpe researcher who is convinced Elias is the transported felon (he stole a pair of breeches): https://www.genealogy.com/forum/surnames/topics/sharp/6188/
" I have highlighted both Elias Sharpe and William Longmire since we need to show that this is the Elias we are discussing in this article.Why do I say that this is the Elias Sharpe who married Margaret Proctor?

1. I have researched the northern neck counties of Virginia for the past year. This research consisted of in depth study ofKing George county.I can find only one Elias Sharpe."

I'm not convinced that the Widow Marriott who married George Proctor was the mother of John Bishop Jr. We do have that odd statement on House Of Proctor saying that Elizabeth Burgess died a couple of months before Marriott did. I haven't seen any documentation for this, or even for the fact that her name was Elizabeth Burgess. But if they're right about her death, Marriott could have married someone else shortly before his own death. He probably wouldn't have done it if he already knew he was dying, but he might have seemed pretty healthy and then suddenly had a heart attack or something.

Widows apparently didn't inherit anything from their husbands except the right to use some of his property for the rest of their lives, but it was the children who actually got the ownership of the property. She married Marriott after the first John Bishop died, and might not have had any more right to use his property at that point. I don't know what happened to the property of children whose widowed mother lived longer than they did. If John Junior's mother and the Widow Marriott are the same person, she promptly married George Proctor so she was well taken care of. The law might have not have seen any need to provide for her out of her son's estate.

I don't think I have the power to disconnect anybody. I haven't seen any information on who Sharpe's parents were, whether it's Sharpe the felon or the apparently different Sharpe who married into the Proctor family. So the identified parents for him are probably wrong, but I don't have any proof of it. That tree doesn't go back too far so I'm not as concerned about it as I would be if it led to all kinds of famous people.

I'm more concerned about the daughter of Elias Sharpe and Margaret Proctor who married John Parks and had a daughter Susannah who may not actually be their daughter. It looks like John Parks and Mary Sharpe have about 12 kids too many, and I might have one of the extras is in my family tree. There's evidence that her father's name was John Parks, but it might not be the same one. The John Parks who has too many kids served in the Revolutionary War so he's a desirable ancestor.

P.S. I've been operating on the assumption that Francis Mason was the closest male relative, and that's why he was appointed guardian and also why he was the heir. John Junior apparently had some Marriott half-siblings, and I'd expect them to get part of his estate too. Maybe he had some other property that he left to them, like cash. Or maybe it wasn't considered proper to give them a share, since everything that Junior had came from his father, and the half-siblings were the children of a different man.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if John Junior's mother was a Mason, not a Burgess. Or maybe someone in the Mason family married a Burgess girl and they were connected that way. In any case, I think Francis Mason must be a relative, not a random guy who liked taking care of orphans and ended up with a piece of land because of it.

I don’t think that the “comment added death date” for widow Marriott makes much sense. She married 3 men. It’s her children that are in question. By the law of parsimony, she was the mother of those where the marriage dates allow for it; probably best we can do.

Was she related to the Masons or his wife? I don’t think so? Worth looking at.

Go to the link I posted above, lots of research on the “Parks” connection

Kathryn Forbes I somehow missed seeing your previous posts so I'm glad you called my attention to it. We still have a timeline problem. Your link agrees that Elias Sharpe the felon was transported in November 1725. Our Elias Sharpe married Margaret Proctor in Virginia in 1712 and they had a daughter in 1715 according to his profile. This timeline fits well with the subsequent marriage and childbearing of their daughter, and shifting it forward in time by 10 years or more would cause problems.

It's my understanding that transported prisoners usually had to serve a term of indenture after they arrived in the colonies. But we have documentary proof that Elias Sharpe was not only married to Margaret Proctor but was being given the deed to land by the Proctor family in August 1727, less than two years after the transportation for theft. The Proctors were a prominent family, and it seems unlikely that a convicted felon could get his freedom and improve his standing in the community that much in such a short period of time.

The link's argument for it all being the same guy is very weak. Argument #1 is "I can find only one Elias Sharpe" which is meaningless. The records in this time period are sparse. It's often hard to find people, and hard to tell the difference between two people with the same name. Argument #2 is a story about somebody else who was transported as a felon and was freed from his 14-year indenture 3 years early, then made good in the community. The feat that's being credited to Elias Sharpe is a lot more spectacular than that, and it's not plausible.

Do we know anything about Francis Mason's mother? If she married a Burgess and a Mason and had at least one child with each, then Francis Mason and the mother of John Junior could be half-siblings.

We still have this little conundrum if John Junior died in 1677 or 1678:

"John Bishop Estate. Admin granted to Francis Mason. Signed at James City by the Governor, 14 June 1676."

Maybe they meant 1678 instead of 1676? I doubt that the original clerk would have made a mistake like that, but if the handwriting on the original document was hard to read then the person transcribing it into the computer might have made a mistake. If the court clerks had all kinds of documents (not just land patents) hanging on strings waiting around for someone to deal with it, the documents wouldn't be recorded in chronological order and you couldn't guess the correct date based on the surrounding documents.

I've been thinking that the "hanging on strings" method gave the clerks' boss an easy way to see how far behind they were. He could yell at them if he caught the clerks goofing off when they had a lot of unrecorded documents literally hanging over their heads.

I found Part 2 of the Elias Sharpe saga on genealogy.com: https://www.genealogy.com/forum/surnames/topics/parks/4790/ It doesn't say anything more about the identity of Elias Sharpe, but it has some info on his children and also the subsequent history of the Proctor family. Plus a humorous comment about the excessive children of John Parks and Mary Sharpe:

"Other Parks genealogies have children born first in Virginia, then North Carolina, then back to Virginia then back to North Carolina, then to Georgia and then back to North Carolina.Near as I can figure John and Mary lived on a pair of roller skates."

I am a Parks, but not aware of any connection to this pair where ever it was they lived!

I went through the list of children for Mary Parks and made a spreadsheet comparing it to the information at https://www.genealogy.com/ftm/w/i/l/Larry-M-Wilson/GENE21-0003.html...

The will of John Parks gives specific bequests to 3 children and mentions two others by name. One of these children needs "care and management" and a son is appointed for that task. The rest of the estate is to be sold at public auction and the money divided equally among "the rest of my children" who are not named, creating the impression that there are more than just the two who were mentioned by name but not given specific bequests.

Children who are named in the will:
John Parks
Benjamin Parks
Sary Sails, aka Sarah or Sally
Samuel Parks
Milly, the one who needs care and management. For some reason she is not included on the list of children at https://www.genealogy.com/ftm/w/i/l/Larry-M-Wilson/GENE21-0003.html...

Children who are highly suspect because they have no specified birthplace or were not born in North Carolina:
William Parks
Ann Parks Botts
Windfield Parks (the link says there's a twin named Willy, but Geni doesn't list him)
Frances Parks Street
Charles Parks
George Parks

Children who are not mentioned in the will but are at least semi-plausible because they were born in North Carolina:
Rachel Stamper
Elizabeth Gray
Mary Carrell
Thomas Parks. He was born in the "wrong" county, but some of the sons mentioned in the will are also attributed to wrong counties.
Susannah Parks Jarrell
Linchfield Parks

Children listed on Geni who are not included in the lists at https://www.genealogy.com/ftm/w/i/l/Larry-M-Wilson/GENE21-0003.html...
James Parks
Mary Middleton

P.S. Geni also lists Mildred (Milly) Parks, (Twin) as a child, so we do have Milly on the list.

This is promising: https://www.genealogy.com/ftm/r/a/n/Richard-W-Raney/GENE48-0012.html It looks like they have pretty much the same list of children, but it's better documented. It specifies that some of the birthplaces assigned to the children by other sources was actually the place where they died. I'll go through it and see how well it hangs together.

At https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/sources/JXNZ-N7Z they're saying that there is a Parks family Bible, but I can't view it. http://mv.ancestry.com/viewer/b2501bc9-929c-4c1b-96b5-1edf516833a0/...

I'm going to declare myself satisfied that John Parks and Mary Sharpe really did have 17 children. I found this: http://www.phys.utk.edu/jeparks/Genealogy/Parks Genealogy 2008.pdf Click on the link for page 101 on the side and there's a whole section on them. The organization is a little strange, and it's best to keep scrolling because it may not actually be finished when you first think that it is. It's obvious that the whole document has been carefully researched and the author is selective about what they believe. This would be a good document to compare to the children's profiles on Geni.

The link at https://www.genealogy.com/ftm/r/a/n/Richard-W-Raney/GENE48-0012.html is generally coherent. My main complaint is that they said the Parks moved to Orange County VA in 1736 then continued to show children being born in King George County for another 15 years. My second complaint is that they said the elder parks moved to North Carolina in 1767, when many of their children were in their 20s and 30s, and most of these children ended up in North Carolina too. That seems a little improbable.

The link at http://www.phys.utk.edu/jeparks/Genealogy/Parks%20Genealogy%202008.pdf is less specific about which county the children were born in. It shows the Parks buying land in Orange County but doesn't say they moved there. It agrees that a lot of the children ended up in North Carolina, and I'm sure they know more about it than I do.

BTW both of these links agree that the twins were Milly and Winfield, not Willy and Winfield.

The correct link is http://www.phys.utk.edu/jeparks/Genealogy/Parks%20Genealogy%202008.pdf For some reason it didn't copy correctly the first time in the post above.

Transcript of the Parks family bible: http://files.usgwarchives.net/nc/wilkes/bibles/parks02.txt

Copies of the actual document:
http://www.geocities.ws/parksplace_99/parksb3.jpg
http://www.geocities.ws/parksplace_99/parksb2.jpg
http://www.geocities.ws/parksplace_99/parksb1.jpg

P.S. on the family bible: as mentioned at http://files.usgwarchives.net/nc/wilkes/bibles/parks02.txt the book belonged to Elijah M. Parks, the great-grandson of John Parks. It's pretty obvious that everything was written down at the same time, instead of entries being made as the events occurred. My guess is that he probably copied the information from an original family bible, adding his own notes as he saw fit. This link calls the book a diary, not a bible: http://files.usgwarchives.net/nc/wilkes/bibles/parks02.txt

It's well documented that John Parks died in Wilkes County NC, so the book made an error when it said he died in Tennessee. Either the person who wrote it in the original bible wrote something on the wrong line, or Elijah made a mistake when he copied it.

I went through the Parks children on Geni leaving notes and looking for discrepancies. It was generally pretty good. There are a lot of discrepancies on the death dates, but the sources tend to disagree and I don't know which dates are correct so I left it alone.

Geni lists the children of John Parks as being born in half the counties of Virginia. This is obviously not correct but I don’t have firm information on exactly where they were born so I didn’t change that either. It does look like all of them were born somewhere in Virginia, so at least the state is correct.

There are two James Parks, one listed as a half brother and one as a full brother. Neither one seems to belong to this family. According to http://www.phys.utk.edu/jeparks/Genealogy/Parks%20Genealogy%202008.pdf it's very doubtful whether this John Parks had a wife named Sarah, and there isn't a James Parks listed in the family bible. The Jameses should probably be disconnected.
James Parks
James Franklin Parks, I

Mary Ross Middleton obviously does not belong with this family. She was born in Maryland, and there is no source listing her as a sibling.

P.S. Frances Street
has a different husband than the one that’s usually attributed to her. It was John Mays according to http://www.phys.utk.edu/jeparks/Genealogy/Parks%20Genealogy%202008.pdf and https://www.genealogy.com/ftm/r/a/n/Richard-W-Raney/GENE48-0012.html She may have had more than one husband so the other guy that's currently listed as her spouse is not necessarily wrong.

Just dropping off this link

QUISENBERRY, A. C. “THE FIRST PIONEER FAMILIES OF VIRGINIA.” Register of Kentucky State Historical Society, vol. 11, no. 32, 1913, pp. 55–77. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23367151

Interesting. I see John Bishop of Surry in 1653 and John Bishopp of James City in 1643. There are no Marriotts or Proctors, so however they got their land it didn't involve getting a patent. There's a James Mason of James City in 1648 and James Mason of Surry in 1653. The first part of the article says that James City morphed into Surry County in 1652, so it's really all in the same place.