B.1.a. William Berry {B.1.a.}
William Berry was born at an unknown date and place although analysis of indirect evidence allows a reasonable interpretation of both the date and place of his birth. Due to a lack of primary source data on the subject, the best approach to defining the date of William’s birth is from an analysis of court records resulting from legal wrangling over the guardianship of William and his two brothers (John and James) who were “orphaned” after their father’s untimely death in 1749. A March 1758 guardianship record notes the age of the orphan John Berry as being 15 (so his birth date calculates to being 1743 or late in 1742). None of the other two orphaned Berry boys were identified as being under the age of 16 in this record, so, if they were still alive, they must not have been minors (i.e. under the age of 16), and, thus, no legal guardianship needed to be determined. The logical conclusion is that both boys must have been older than 16 if still living. It should be noted that Hugh Campbell Berry, a grandson of one of the orphan brothers, John Berry, noted in 1875 that his grandfather was an orphan and thought he was an only child. Obviously the grandson was not aware of the fact that his grandfather had any brothers, so they either moved away at an early age or they died fairly young. As far as William Berry, the older orphaned brother of the orphan John Berry is concerned, this obviously places his birth date, as well as that of his brother James at sometime before 1742/1743. A lower end on the date range can be roughly determined by ascertaining the marriage date of the parents. While the date and place of the marriage of William’s parents is not known with certainty, an undocumented marriage date of 1737 has been found in the Berry/MaGill literature. If the marriage date is correct, then William and his brother James were probably born sometime between 1737 and 1742. This is a five-year gap, giving plenty of time for two births to take place. It is not known which of these two “orphans” is the older one, so the birth order for the purposes of this report is arbitrarily selected. Since William was the given name of Elizabeth Eleanor MaGill’s father, his birth is considered to have occurred first. Consequently, William’s birth date has been interpreted as having occurred about 1738, about a year after the marriage of his parents, which was not an uncommon occurrence in this frontier Scotch-Irish community.1,21,29,93,94,98,99,100,110,169,204,206,208,321 |
As far as William Berry’s place of birth is concerned, there is an equal amount of ambiguity resulting, ultimately, from the same problem - a lack of primary source records. At the time that their father passed away in 1749, the orphaned boys of this Berry family, as well as their maternal grandfather’s family, the MaGills, were living in Augusta County, Virginia. Seven years earlier, in 1742, no Berry or MaGill family members appear in the 1742 Augusta County militia list, and, since all able-bodied males were expected to participate in community defense through the militias, it is reasonable to conclude that neither the Berrys nor the MaGills had yet arrived in the area. Consequently, the only certain statement concerning the birth place of William Berry is that he was not born in Augusta County, Virginia. So where was the family living from 1738 through 1743? No primary source material has yet been uncovered definitively placing any members of this Berry family anywhere in time and space prior to their arrival in Augusta County, Virginia. However, their close association with the MaGill family, as documented by the marriage of two Berry brothers to two MaGill sisters, strongly suggests a fairly close geographic positioning between these two families. Consequently, knowing the location of the MaGill family in this time period most likely defines the location of the Berry family, but therein lies a thorny and complicated issue.21 |
346,347,350,351,352,353,354,355,356,357,358,360,367,381,393,394,497 |
Other than a possibly that he may have passed away as a child, no information is available on the date or place of William’s death, or any other aspect of his life for that matter. |
Timeline of William Berry
28 Feb. 1750/51204 |
Augusta
County, Virginia Will Book No. 1, page 318 |
28 Feb. 1750204 |
Augusta County, Virginia Will Book No. 1, page 319 |
29 Aug. 1751205 |
Augusta County, Virginia Order Book 3 |
28 Nov. 175121 |
Augusta County, Virginia Order Book 24, page 439 |
Analysis of the Timeline
William Berry emerges from the mists of history for a very short period of time in 1751, but before the sparse records for him are examined, it is necessary to review the related court records from that time period that dealt with the death of his father and the distribution of his late father’s estate. In November of 1749, apparently not long after the death of his father, William’s mother was appointed to administer the inventory and appraisal of her late husband’s estate. Several months later, in February 1750, she married John Jones and a month after that, in March 1750, the estate of her deceased first husband, James Berry, was inventoried and appraised at a value of just over £48. About a month and a half later, on the 26th of May 1750, the results were accepted by the court. Presumably, during this time, William’s mother and her second husband, John Jones, had custody of the three boys from her first marriage and were responsible for the wealth and value of her first husband’s estate, but about nine months later, in February 1751, for some reason, the elder James Berry, presumably the oldest member of the Berry clan in the area at the time and probably the brother of the orphan’s grandfather, was appointed as guardian of the orphaned boys and charged with the responsibility of ensuring that they receive any inheritance from the proceeds of their deceased father’s estate when they reached maturity. By late August 1751, it appears that there is some problem with in the household of Elizabeth and her second husband, since the elder James Berry petitioned the court for custody of one of the orphaned brothers due to misbehavior on the part of their step father, John Jones. Several months later, in November of 1751, James Berry, the orphan’s guardian, complained to the court that John Jones, the step father of the orphans, had taken all proceeds from the estate sale of his wife’s first husband and used them for his own purposes rather than reserving the money for the orphans. After this flush of information, the records are completely silent for William Berry, and it is not known whether he survived to maturity or died in childhood.
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Last Revised: 04/08/2006