William and Margaret Williams
William Williams, son of Richard and Margaret Williams, was born in 1719 in the
Welsh settlement of Gwynedd (or North Wales) located 20 miles north of Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. This area had been settled by Quakers from Wales beginning in 1698.
Richard
Williams and his brother John are believed to have come to Gwynedd about 1704. On
December 7, 1717, Richard Williams was married to the widow Margaret Eaton at the
Gwynedd Friends Meeting. We have no further record of Richard and Margaret or any of
their other children.
About 1739, William Williams married Margaret at the Chester Friends Meeting.
According to later Quaker records she was born in 1721. We do not know her maiden name.
(The Webster Perry Collection of Quaker Families at the Fort Wayne Public Library states
that her maiden name may have been Hugh, but I have not found any records to support
this.)
In 1746, William and Margaret with their two young children moved from Gwynedd to
northern Virginia near the present town of Waterford in Loudoun County. At that time the
area was still part of Fairfax County, and they belonged to the Fairfax Monthly Meeting
of
Friends. Sixteen years later, in 1762, they migrated with their 10 children to Cane
Creek
Monthly Meeting in North Carolina. They settled in Chatham County (originally part of
Orange County).
William Williams died in Chatham County, North Carolina, on September 11, 1773.
His will was drafted three weeks before his death. It was never officially recorded in
Chatham
County, but is on file at the North Carolina Archives. At the time of his death, William
owned about 700 acres on Deep River and was still awaiting payment for land that he had
sold
in Virginia.
His widow Margaret married Anthony Chamness on May 9, 1776 at Cane Creek
Monthly Meeting. Both still had teenage children at home. A few months after this
marriage,
her daughter Rachel and his son Joshua were married and disowned by the church. Anthony
died September 20, 1777. Margaret survived him by several years.
William and Margaret's youngest son, William, was born in North Carolina in 1763.
In his journal, he states that he was "carefully educated by religious and believing
parents,
particularly my mother." He also reports that he was apprenticed to a Friend at
Center
Monthly Meeting with his mother's consent in about 1782. She may have witnessed his
marriage at Cane Creek in 1786.
William Williams, Jr. later moved to Indiana and became a traveling Friends Minister.
He made several trips on horseback to Friends' meetings in Ohio, Tennessee, and North
Carolina. In 1818 he recorded an attempt to trace his Pennsylvania roots:
We rode eighteen miles by ten o'clock, and met Friends at their meeting house
called Gwynedd, and had a good meeting with them. This is the place formerly
called North Wales where my father was born and raised of Welsh parents;
but I being the youngest of my father's family, and my father being long since
dead, I could not find any whom I knew to be my relations.
His journal, published in 1828, is available in the archives of DePauw University and
Earlham
College.
Several of William and Margaret Williams' other children also migrated west, to
eastern Tennessee, western Ohio, and Wayne County, Indiana. An account of the William
Williams family is recorded in The Family History of John and Mary Williams, Wayne
County Pioneers, by Maude McCorkindale Bereich and Ethel McCorkindale, privately
published. A copy is available at the Wayne County Library in Richmond, Indiana.