Molly Marchbanks

• Not the daughter of Captain Elijah Smith
• Not the daughter of Elizabeth Smith

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Mary “Molly” Smith, the wife of Lt. William Marchbanks of Virginia and the Carolinas, was unequivocally NOT the daughter of Capt. Elijah Smith of Barnstable County, Massachusetts. She was also not the daughter of Elizabeth Beckwith, who was married to a completely different Elijah Smith in Lyme, Connecticut.

The original person who glommed Molly Smith on to Capt. Elijah Smith did so without any source documentation. He or she may have found Capt. Smith’s Mayflower ancestry difficult to resist, and unfortunately many people just copy their ancestry without question. As the National Genealogical Society and other authorities continually stress, unsourced trees from websites and books are never considered valid sources, nor even sources at all.

Furthermore, not only is this connection unproven and unsourced, many stubborn facts clearly make the imagined ancestry impossible.

Smith is the most common English surname in the English language. It can be extremely difficult to research, and it is very easy to confuse people with the same name. This is true even with Smiths in the same village or county.

The Capt. Elijah Smith referred to here and automatically copied innumerable times on ancestry and elsewhere was born, married twice and died in Barnstable County, Massachusetts. His children were all born in Barnstable. He and his wife did not pop 1000 miles down south, have a child and then return to Massachusetts. (And of course there is no such thing as “Pickens, SC Pendleton, Anderson County, South Carolina”).

Yet even were this extremely unlikely journey to have occurred, Capt. Smith could not have been Molly Smith Marchbanks‘ father due to basic biology. Elijah Smith was baptized in Chatham, Barnstable County, Massachusetts on 24 February 1737, according to the Chatham Church Records. This is confirmed by his tombstone inscription (source: Elijah Smith tombstone inscription, Lothrop Hill Cemetery, Barnstable, Massachusetts).

Capt. Elijah Smith married his first wife Elizabeth Myrick - not Beckwith - in Chatham on 9 August 1760. (source: Chatham, Massachusetts Records of Births, Marriages, Deaths and Private Marks, 1693 to 1789).

This means that even if Molly Smith later Marchbanks were the eldest child, the earliest she could have been born would have been 1761. However, Molly Marchbanks was already proven to be having children in the 1760s. A scientific impossibility if she were also born in the 1760s.

Not to mention the fact that in 1802 this Capt. Elijah Smith left a will, wherein he leaves a bequest to his daughter Molly Smith, the wife of Benjamin Howes of Barnstable County, Massachusetts. (source: Barnstable County Probate Records, v. 10, p. 158).

Even without all of the above, this profile gives Molly Smith Marchbanks an unsourced yet frequently copied birthdate of 4 July 1747. If believed, this would have made her reputed father ten years old, and a clue that there may be something fishy in the state of Massachusetts .

- Michael W. Walker

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• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Jan 15 2018, 22:26:30 UTC

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• Reference: Ancestry Genealogy - SmartCopy: Jan 15 2018, 22:26:30 UTC

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• Reference: FamilySearch Genealogy - SmartCopy: Sep 3 2022, 12:41:37 UTC