Rosannah Moore

Rosannah McCord Moore BIRTH 1715 Pennsylvania, USA DEATH 1766 (aged 50–51) Lincoln County, North Carolina, USA BURIAL Goshen Cemetery Belmont, Gaston County, North Carolina

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/156820559/rosannah-moore

ROSANNAH McCORD MOORE was born circa 1715 in Pennsylvania (or Massachusetts). She was a member of the McCord family, Scotch-Irish immigrants that built McCord Fort in Pennsylvania in 1756. On an unknown date in Pennsylvania, she married John Moore, Sr. (1719-6/30/1806), an immigrant from Northern Ireland who saw service with the Continental Army as a commissary supply official.

Around 1757, Rosannah and John Moore, with their young children, moved south to what was then Anson County, North Carolina (later Lincoln and now Gaston County). They were the parents of six sons: Captain William Moore (1751-1839), who married Rebecca Gullick; Private Alexander Moore (1753-1837), who married Elizabeth Robinson; General John Moore (1759-1836), who married 1st Betsy Annie Adair and 2nd Mary J. Scott; Private James Moore (1764-1838), who married Eleanor Irwin; Wallace Moore (u/k); and Gideon Moore (u/k). The first four sons were patriots in the American Revolution. The couple also had five daughters, namely, Rosannah Moore (1757-1813), who married William Henry, Jr. in 1776; Mary Moore (1762-1849), who married 1st Thomas Campbell and 2nd William Rankin; Agnes Nancy Moore (1766-1847), who married James Dickson; Susan Moore (u/k), who married William Hill; and Jane Moore (u/k), who married William McCord in 1790.

It is handed down in family lore and documented in the obituary of her granddaughter, Jane Henry Byers (see below), that Rosannah McCord was among the 26 murdered, scalped or captured pioneer settlers (nine women and children were captured) in the Delaware Indian massacre in 1756 at McCord’s Fort. This fort built by William McCord, Sr. and his brothers as part of a line of frontier forts in Pennsylvania during the French and Indian War. It is also documented that some of the female members of the McCord family, who had been captured at Fort McCord on April 1, 1756, were recaptured in a daring rescue in September 1756 at Kittanning, near present-day Pittsburgh, by frontier militia rangers headed by Colonel John Armstrong, who became one of Pennsylvania’s two major generals in the American Revolution (others escaped in another incident at Sideling Hill). In this list of victims were recorded, “Mrs. John Thorn and babe, Mrs. Annie McCord, wife of John McCord, and two daughters [of William McCord ?], Martha, then a young mother with unborn babe, and a young girl.” Another documentation records, “The Orphans’ Court, Chambersburg [Pennsylvania] shows one Samuel Bell, who died Oct. 1823, leaving a sister Rosannah, wife of Andrew McCord.” John McCord, a surviving brother of the murdered William McCord of Fort McCord, and his wife Anne, brought the McCord family survivors, his own and his brother’s, to Anson/Lincoln/now Gaston County, North Carolina about 1760.

Rosannah McCord Moore died in Lincoln (now Gaston) County, North Carolina, circa 1766 and is buried somewhere at Goshen Presbyterian Churchyard, as is her husband John Moore, Sr. The following obituary abstract from the Raleigh, N.C., newspaper “The Minerva,” found in volume 1 of “Abstracts of Vital Records from Raleigh newspapers, 1799-1819” reads of her husband: “Died in Lincoln County, on the 31st of June, Joen (sic) Moore, sen., in the 87th year of his age… He had been a resident of the same neighborhood for fifty-three years… Among the patriots of ’76… he left behind him a numerous progeny… four sons [Captain William Moore, General John Moore, James Moore and Alexander Moore] and four daughters, seventy-two grandchildren and thirty great grandchildren. Monday 28 July, 1806.”

There has been some confusion in the Moore-McCord relationship (between John Moore, Sr. and William Moore, Sr., who are likely the same person) among family genealogists, as it has with me. There is also confusion between two Rosannah McCord Moores, one buried at Goshen Churchyard, the other at Olney Churchyard near her brother Captain William Moore and his wife, Rebecca Gullick. This is surely a case of mother-daughter, due to age differences. I feel the sources I have followed are essentially sound.

(*) Note: Robert Cope, a Gaston County historian, researched much of the genealogical data of the Moore family in the 1950s.

An 1884 obituary of Jane Henry Byers of Louisiana, Pike County, Missouri, confirms the McCord Fort massacre story, recording, “Her maternal grandfather and [grand]mother Moore were both murdered by the Indians in the massacre at McCords fort, in Pennsylvania, in 1756.”

From Find-a-Grave. Contributed by Robert A. Ragan, a descendant, January 7, 2016.