This blog was created to track, document and share my research into the history and origin of our most distant Wilson (male line) ancestor, James Wilson (Sr.) who died in 1777 in Henry County, Virginia.\u00a0 Not surprisingly, there are many, many family trees that can be traced back to him, and the documentation leading to his patriarchy of the Henry County clan is generally pretty good.\u00a0 My own search began with my great-grandfather (and namesake) James Allison Wilson from Kansas.\u00a0 Through some fortunate clues and documentation, such as his old “autograph” book and a biography of his father in an old Kansas history book, over the last 4 years I have made pretty good progress in identifying his father (James C.), grandfather (Thomas G.), g-grandfather (James, again), g-g-grandfather (Thomas) and finally his g-g-g-grandfather (James, Sr., the subject of this blog).\u00a0 Much of this trek through time could be the source of another blog or book, but I’m particularly excited that I seem to be the first descendant that has made this entire connection – especially the link from James of Kentucky (d. ca. 1831) to Thomas of Virginia (died 1817), which I could not find anywhere else.\u00a0 At this point, the next link to Thomas’ father James Sr. was well-documented and clear.\u00a0 However, in looking at various trees and claims on the internet and in on-line family trees, I have seen many, many obviously incorrect entries about James Sr.’s birth and parentage, and some less obviously incorrect\u00a0 “facts” about his marriage and residences before Henry County.\u00a0 Thus, the purpose of this blog is to document my studies into these various claims and trees, which is usually to disprove them, and then present and develop some ideas of my own.\u00a0 I hope that other descendants of James Sr. find this useful and are able to use this information to help their own research, or perhaps to contribute new ideas and sources.\u00a0 Since records of early-1700’s Virginia can be sparse, and Wilson is such a common name, it can quite difficult to find and verify true links.\u00a0 Perhaps somebody will be able to dig around in the basement of a Virginia courthouse or library to find a relevant document, or even have a family story that will provide a new clue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This blog was created to track, document and share my research into the history and origin of our most distant Wilson (male line) ancestor, James Wilson (Sr.) who died in 1777 in Henry County, Virginia.\u00a0 Not surprisingly, there are many, many family trees that can be traced back to him, and the documentation leading to … Continue reading “About”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-13","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P9qs8v-d","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameswilson.family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameswilson.family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameswilson.family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameswilson.family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameswilson.family\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jameswilson.family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25,"href":"https:\/\/jameswilson.family\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/13\/revisions\/25"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameswilson.family\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}