Evolution of a Myth

For nearly three hundred years it was generally accepted that William Lee, son of Col. Richard Lee and Anne Constable, did not marry and/or left no legitimate offspring. There was some head-scratching over his attempt to leave his estate to a Ms. Mary Heath, which was foiled by his older brother Richard "the Scholar" Lee on a legal technicality. Who she was, and why William favored her so, no one knew.

Edmund Jennings Lee, in his monumental "Lee of Virginia" (published 1895), scratched his head over the issue but just assumed the mysterious Mary was probably William's daughter. He drew no further conclusions before he died in 1896.

Burton J. Hedrick, in "The Lees of Virginia" (copyright 1935), made nothing of it either.

Books, essays, monographs, all got nowhere and/or said nothing.

Then, somewhere between the 1950s and the 1970s, someone (who was either a mathematical imbecile or a crook of the Gustave Anjou stripe) "rediscovered" the Surry County Land Records, and unearthed a "William Lea" (*always* spelled with a final A, *never* with an E) married to an Alice Lea who was the widow of one Thomas Felton - and *never, ever, ever* checked the dates (or ignored them if they did). "Aha!", said this person, "that must be William Lee, son of Col. Richard Lee, and Alice was whom he married, and Mary must have been their daughter!"

There was just one *little teensy problem* with this theory, which was duly and totally ignored: records of William Lea, of Chippoakes dealing in Surry County land go back to 1654...when William Lee, the Colonel's son, was scarcely out of diapers (he was born about 1651-1652).

Alice was a widow and remarried to William Lea before 1660 - when the Colonel's son was still in the schoolroom (about age 8).

Nevertheless, the findings were taken as fact and published in various anecdotal accounts of Lee history and Virginia history and whatnot, until everyone believed in it. Even an "updated" edition of EJ Lee's "Lee of Virginia", reissued around 1983 with additions and "corrections" by divers hands, had an annotation added concerning William Lea and Alice Felton.

The myth continued to grow and add more personalities, such as the "three sons" of William and Alice, and how their "wicked uncle" "cheated" them out of "their inheritance". No one asked why, if William had sons, he left them nothing and tried to pass his estate off to their alleged sister. (The land issues involved the three younger sons *of Col. Richard Lee himself*, vizt. William, Hancock and Charles, and the legal technicality was that Col. Richard had neglected to add the words "and his/their heirs forever" to the bequest. Richard "the Scholar" did not interfere with the inheritances of Hancock or Charles, both of whom were properly married and begtting legal heirs - but the irregularity of William's situation had caught hs attention.)

Surry County records have nothing on whether William Lea and Alice Felton had any children together. (Alice may possibly have been the mother of John Felton, described as Thomas Felton's son but with nothing about his female parent.)

The bottom line, though, is that the William Lea who married Alice widow Felton and dealt in Surry County land before her and with her, cannot possibly be the same person as William Lee, son of Col. Richard Lee.