Basil Williams of South Wales, and Seneca Hundred, Montgomery County, Maryland by 1748

With some notes on his distinguished kinfolk in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky and elsewhere

Basil Williams cane with a young family from South Wales about 1748, collected an entitlement to 50 acres in Montgomery County, Maryland, and left an ambitious posterity that abandoned the paternal homestead in 1756 for better opportunities elsewhere. His son, Captain Basil Williams II, was a Quartermaster in Washington County who ruthlessly impressed blankets for the Revolutionary army to the hurt of the Maryland citizenry, while his brother Elisha was serving in the Maryland legislature. Basil I's first-born grandson, left an orphan, was the heroic Brigadier General Otho Williams (whose popularity produced dozens of Otho namesakes), and a much later great-grandson, Brigadier General James Harvey Carson, collected all of the "efficient" arms in and about Winchester for Stonewall Jackson. This book makes considerable use of materials in private hands, old letters, family memoirs, the Williams papers at the Maryland Historical Society, and a forgotten printed genealogy from 1847-all sources that proved invaluable when the local records failed. The daughters of the family tended to marry men who were largely as accomplished as their fathers and brothers. finding husbands from (among others) the Carter, Combs, Davis, Minor, Stonestreet, and Stull families-all restudied for this book.

Warren Skidmore is the author of several fine genealogies and the recent book on Lord Dunmore's men in the last colonial war in America.

Warren Skidmore

2004, 8.5" x 11", paper, index, 86 pp.

ISBN: 9781585499397

101-S0939