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Support Our Troops - Not the War! |
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Support Our Troops - Not the War! |
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Was a Revolutionary Soldier? There is a very simple answer: No one knows where he was living during the Revolution. It would help if you first read the article at LINKLINK which shows that William was not a son of Madison Smith, Jr who with his father, Madison Smith, Sr, supposedly came to Georgia in the 1730s. The Madisons never existed. Therefore, I can write with confidence that we do not know who William's parents were. We do not know where he was born. If he were not born in Georgia we do not know where his birth did occur and we do not know when he came to Georgia. Joel William Smith, II, a first cousin of this writer's grandfather, has been "outed" as the Mythmaker in another article on this website. See Mythmaker Identified. It was he who claimed that William was born in Georgia. It was he who claimed that his date of birth was 16 March 1765. There is no part of those statements that can be proven. In fact, if he were born 1765 and if he were a Revolutionary Soldier he was age 11, not even a teenager, when the Declaration was signed in 1776. He would have been 13 when the British captured Savannah in 1778 and 17 when they gave it up in 1782. He could not have been more than a drummer boy or a gofer during most of the war. But, no one knows anything about his service record so no one can say with any confidence what he did during the war, if he were in it, or where he did it. In fact, this writer has adopted c1760 as a better estimate of his birth year. How did anyone get into the Daughters of the American Revolution on William's "service"? Originally, and for decades after its founding, the DAR was notoriously lax in its requirements for membership. In 1920 Lucian Lamar Knight, a Georgia historian, under authority of the Georgia Legislature, had published Georgia's Roster of the Revolution. It was an abstract of every Georgia record Knight could find that named someone claiming to have been a Revolutionary Soldier. The DAR readily accepted Knight's "Roster," as it came to be called, as a reference. The first descendant to became a member of DAR under William's "service" was a great-granddaughter, Cora (Smith) Sweat of Homerville, GA. Many other descendants became members, most, if not all, "attaching" their application to Cousin Cora's, thereby using her "proof" of his service. DAR is such a large organization it was not possible for the National Offices in Washington to verify any application. That was left to the individual chapters and that is where all the mistakes were made. And, of course, it was decades after the DAR was organized that copiers were invented. Cousin Cora, whom this writer knew personally, was the widow of a sheriff of Clinch County, GA. Her brother, Ezekiel J Smith, was a prominent businessman and judge. Cousin Zeke's wife was Clifford Huxford, sister to Judge Folks Huxford, the genealogist, lay Baptist minister, county clerk, historian, etc. There was no way the members of her chapter would have questioned her application. And, yet, they should have asked her how she knew that the William Smith she cited as her ancestor was really hers. When the Revolution ended Georgia was a small state, most of the present area still held by Indians. It was a narrow strip of land, seldom more than one county wide, stretching from above Augusta to the Florida line. An acquisition from the Indians nearly doubled the area on the west and two huge counties, longer north to south than east to west, were created from it. The upper county was named Franklin and the lower Washington. To encourage population growth the state legislature organized a land distribution system which allowed new citizens who had been in the state at least a year to apply for a grant of land. If the man convinced the authorities he had fought in the Revolution (whether he had or not) he was granted 287 ½ acres of land. This writer does not know what was so special about that quantity of acres but that is the way the law was written. That amount was granted to anyone who would swear to Revolutionary service, something that would be difficult to prove or disprove owing to the slack record keeping by the military of that time. Additional affidavits from friends and relatives who claimed to have no interest in the matter boosted an applicant's veracity. A man named William Smith was granted 287 ½ acres in Washington County 10 Apr 1785, a fact found in Knight's "Roster" on page 291. At the time the southern end of Washington County adjoined the northwestern border of Liberty (now Long) County and was not far from what became the Smith acreage in present Rye Patch community of Long County. Some who would use this record to support service by our William Smith, Sr claim (but cannot prove) that because of a surveying error that grant was actually in then existing Liberty County, not in the new county of Washington. The basic Smith acreage at Rye Patch was acquired by purchase in 1806 and has been owned in turn by six generations of Smiths. For lack of supplemental information, it is impossible to prove that, of all the William Smiths in the Revolution, the one in Washington County was ours. In 1974, in the very first issue of the Huxford Genealogical Society Quarterly (v1, #1, p57), the late Patrick H Sellers of Waycross, a descendant of William Smith, Sr and a co-editor of that magazine, included a record he called "Family Bible Record of John W Smith Family, Berrien County, Georgia". In a descriptive paragraph he described John W's father, John Smith, as ". . . the son of William Smith, Revolutionary War Soldier, who served in the Georgia Line. He was born March 16, 1765 in Moore County, North Carolina, and died in Ware, now Clinch County, Georgia, on July 16, 1841. . ." Sellers gave no source for his information. By the time this writer saw the mentioned record Sellers was dead so he has no idea how some in Ware County, GA was aware of a Moore County, NC record. Perhaps he had seen it in a publication. Some years later this writer investigated the possible Moore County connection. A professional genealogist was contacted. She wrote back that there was little information available. The Moore County court house in Carthage, North Carolina, had burned and only a few books had been saved. She quoted this power-of-attorney from Will Book A, page 156: |
| William Smith, of Washington County, [Georgia,] appoints William Miers of Moore County, [North Carolina,] his power-of-attorney to receive from Jason Wadsworth all papers left by me in his hands and take possession of land sold by Thomas Wadsworth to Kenneth Black and mortgaged by him the said Kenneth Black to me. [To] receive from the executors of Kenneth Black, dec'd, all money due me. 20 December 1790. |
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Again, standing alone, the above document does not prove that William Smith of Washington County was our
ancestor. If there were any connection to our family it would suggest that William Smith, Sr was born
perhaps in North Carolina, not in Georgia. However, it was surprising to learn from the Moore County
genealogist that Smith has never been a common name there.
Some years ago now, at a time characterize as when a younger generation took the reins at DAR, they tightened membership requirements. While they did not dismiss any members, they froze the early lineages and service records. That required new applicants to prove again the Soldier's service record and to prove their lineage from him. At the same time they removed many sources from their list of acceptable ones. Knight's "Roster" was removed as well as Folks Huxford's Pioneers of Wiregrass Georgia series. Several cousins have written this author for help in proving a service record for William but he has been unable to do so. One had been given the idea that present Greene County was the area of old Washington County where grants were made to Soldiers. Unfortunately the Washington County court house has suffered fires, too, so there is no way to physically locate William Smith's land, nor to learn how he disposed of it. Just in case someone finds a signature that can be identified as that of William Smith, the Soldier, the image below is copied from Huxford's Pioneers of Wiregrass Georgia (v1, unnumbered page at end of book). However, remember this signature was made some fifty years after the start of the Revolution and one's signature does change over the years. |
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