I did a bit more searching recently through the Henry County tax lists in the early 1790’s to see if I could get a bit more clarification on the reaons for the Culpeper designation for John Wilson in 1791 and 1793. One theory I wanted to investigate was whether there was a geographic area with that name at that time. Virtually all the extraneous designations I have found in the tax lists, other than Jr. and Sr. and “son of”, were indications on which river or creek the taxpayer lived on, in order to distinguish them from others with the same name. For instance, one of our Moses Wilsons was often designated with “Home Creek”, and the aforementioned John was likely the one designated “Leatherwood”. By looking at all the taxpayers listed in the years around those with John’s Culpeper descriptor, I was hoping to either find others with the same designation, which would likely indicate it was a body of water or area that once had that name.
But in all of the years I looked at every taxpayer name (roughly 1790-1795) I could find no others that contained “Culpeper” or anything other than the known standard designations — except the Wilson clan! What is even more interesting is that none of the other designations added to our Wilson taxpaying relatives such as “Big” and “Little” could be found on any other listed name (I can envision the family gatherings where they referred to “Big Moses” or “Little John” around the fire :-)). The conclusion I draw from this is that those designations were “self-assigned” – i.e. the Wilsons gave themselves those extra nicknames, if you will, and communicated them to the local deputy who was compiling the list and assessing taxes. The implication of this is that John himself probably added the moniker “Culpeper” to his name which means it could very be his middle name, or some other family name he used to distinguish himself from the other John Wilsons (at least one) in the family and county.
Of course, this doesn’t really tell us anything new since I haven’t been able to find any link to Culpeper County or other Culpepers in Virginia, but it does help to perhaps make some sense of why John, and John alone, had such an extra designation.