All tangled up

I’m still tangled up with this Morris family in Brunswick County, Virginia. This all started with a YDNA match who descends from John Morris Sr. (1742-1815) who lived in Granville County, North Carolina. John Morris Sr. married Phebe Tudor, daughter of John Tudor and Elizabeth White of Brunswick, Virginia, who also, interestingly, had a son named Henry Morris but he was born 1775 and migrated to Graves County, Kentucky.

While researching John Morris Sr. of Granville, I found Henry Morris Jr. among the court records who had ties back to Brunswick, Virginia through two 1754 court cases with men named Walter Campbell and Nicholas Lanier whom Henry Jr. was indebted to. Both Lanier and Campbell seem to have had land deal ties to Henry Morris Sr. who lived in Smoky Ordinary, Brunswick, Virginia.

I have spent countless hours trying to determine if John Morris Sr. and Henry Morris Jr. were related. So far, no connection has been found between the two. I lost track of Henry Jr., and it took me some time to find him, or at least I think I found him in Orange County, North Carolina. Orange County, North Carolina was formed from parts of Granville, Johnston, and Bladen in 1752, so the dates between the court cases would be close. Henry Morris Jr. was settled in Orange County, North Carolina by 1755 as he is shown on tax lists there. The final Granville County court rulings came in 1754, so the cases were started before that time. So, it is possible that Henry Jr. was in Granville, living in those parts that became Orange, in 1752.

Whether or not the Henry Morris of Granville County is the same man found in Orange County, North Carolina is debatable. Without a doubt the Henry Morris Jr. living in Orange County, North Carolina is the son of Henry Morris Sr. of Smoky Ordinary, Brunswick, Virginia. I know that because I found his deposition in Virginia Chancery records. When Henry Morris Sr. of Brunswick, Virginia died in 1783, it kicked off a decades long court case by his daughter, Mary Morris Rainey along with her husband, William Rainey, who disputed deeds for slaves that Thomas Stith claimed Henry Sr. signed on his death bed. Henry Jr. from Orange County, North Carolina provided a deposition of what he knew about that situation, and he claimed three times in that deposition that Henry Sr. was his father. That would make Mary Morris Rainey his sister.

I’ve spent my free time (what little there is of it) reading court records in Orange County, North Carolina and Brunswick County, Virginia. It seems that Henry Morris Jr. migrated to Orange County, North Carolina with a Lloyd (Loyd) family. Henry Jr. wrote his will in Orange, North Carolina in 1801 naming William Hogan and Thomas Brewer his executors. They, in 1803, sold the land “whereon Richard Morris (son of Henry) now lives” belonging to Henry Morris Jr. to Henry Lloyd. Thomas Lloyd signed as witness to that deed.

Henry Lloyd and Thomas Lloyd can be found in an 1819 deed named as the sons of Martha Lloyd, widow, along with brother Stephen Lloyd. Martha deeded 443 acres of land in Orange County, North Carolina on the waters of Morgans Creek to her sons for “natural love and affection” and “five shillings.”

On 1 Mar 1791, Martha Lloyd, widow of Stephen Lloyd (I) entered into bond with Henry Morris Sr. and Thomas Brewer for three thousand pounds to administer the estate of her husband, Stephen Lloyd (I).

I am currently of the belief that Martha Lloyd is the daughter of Henry Morris Jr. (shown as Sr. as he had a son named after him) of Orange County, North Carolina and the granddaughter of Henry Morris Sr. of Smoky Ordinary, Brunswick County, Virginia.

Martha Lloyd, widow of Stephen Lloyd, and of Henry and Stephen Lloyd infants and Thomas Lloyd, the father and husband of the petitioners, in Aug 1795, petitioned the court of Orange County, North Carolina to divide the estate of her deceased husband, Stephen Lloyd Sr. (sometimes seen as Stephen Lloyd I because he had a son (II) and grandson (III) named for him), who had died in the year 1791.

By 1823, Martha had also died and her three sons, Thomas, Henry, and Stephen Jr., petitioned the court of Orange County, North Carolina to divide the dower lands of their mother, Martha, between them. Which the court, appointing commissioners, did.

Stephen Lloyd Sr. was the son of Thomas Lloyd III of Brunswick County, Virginia. Thomas Lloyd III has quite the story to tell. While in Brunswick, Virginia Thomas Lloyd III lived on Lloyd’s Run and Sturgeon Creek, near Smoky Ordinary, the same place Henry Morris Sr. lived.

Thomas Lloyd III migrated to Orange County, North Carolina sometime after 1752. He sold two tracts of land amounting to over 1,000 acres in Brunswick County, Virginia at that time. One of the deeds shows his wife was named Tabitha.

Some family trees show Tabitha Campbell but none that I reviewed provide any proof of that. Although the name Campbell is interesting because it was Tabitha Campbell, widow of Walter Campbell, who sued Henry Morris Jr. in Granville, North Carolina for a debt owed to the estate of Walter Campbell.

According to an article at NCPedia, Thomas Lloyd was a Loyalist planter and colonial official of Orange County, member of the colonial Assembly, an officer in the Orange County militia, and sometimes accounted the most influential citizen of Orange prior to the Revolution. He was apparently of the third generation of Lloyds and the third of his name in Prince George County, Va. (a part of which became a part of Brunswick County when it was formed in 1720). The first of the Lloyd family line in Prince George appears to have been Thomas Lloyd, a modest draper or cloth merchant who died before 11 Mar 1717. He married Jane Mackmahon, daughter of Hugh Mackmahon of Martin's Brandon Parish. The second Thomas Lloyd, son of Thomas and Jane and the father of Thomas Lloyd of Orange County, was an acquisitive man who managed to collect various chattels and plantations on the lower side of Sturgeon's Run in Brunswick County. The third Thomas appears to have secured a land patent of 2,000 acres for himself on 6 Aug. 1747 "including the Plantation he lives on." This was the Thomas Lloyd who moved with his family to Orange County either late in 1752 or early in 1753. On 22 Dec. 1752 he sold 995 acres on Lloyd's Run, Reedy Creek, and Sturgeon's Run in Brunswick County to Edmund Tabb and others (deed registered on 26 Dec. 1752), the deed providing, however, that his father be allowed to remain on the property for his lifetime. (According to the evidence of a deed, the older Thomas Lloyd was still alive on 22 Feb. 1757.) Apparently at an early age the third Thomas Lloyd had married one Tabitha, and at least four of their seven children appear to have been born in Brunswick. In Orange County, Thomas Lloyd promptly entered for two adjoining land grants on "Marks Creek the north side of the Piney Mountain," about three or four miles north of present-day Chapel Hill. The two grants, totaling 783 acres, were issued on 11 and 12 May 1757 and became the nucleus of Lloyd's well-known "Meadows" plantation home, marked "T. Loyde" on the Collet map of 1 May 1770.

Significant dates relating to Thomas Lloyd of Brunswick, Virginia and Orange, North Carolina

1751: Appointed to "do procession"—that is, trace out the boundaries of St. Andrews Parish in Brunswick County, VA
1754: Commissioner of roads on Orange County, NC
1755: Received captain's commission in the regiment of Orange County militia
1757: Qualified as a justice of the peace for Orange County; sat regularly, sometimes as chairman on inferior courts, deciding and guiding the affairs of the vast new county of Orange
1761: Took his seat with surveyor William Churton as one of the two representatives of Orange County in the Provincial Assembly at New Bern
1775: High sheriff of Orange County
1779: Orange County tax list shows Thomas Lloyd's assessed worth as £10,871 and his son Stephen's, £7,065.8

Stephen Lloyd (II), son of Stephen and Martha Morris Lloyd married Mary ‘Polly’ Edwards in 1800.

Henry Lloyd, son of Stephen and Martha Morris Lloyd married Elizabeth Stroud in 1803.

Thomas Lloyd, son of Stephen and Martha Morris Lloyd married Dilley Edwards in 1805.

Of particular interest is John Morris, the son of Henry Morris III (son of Henry Morris Jr (II) and nephew of Martha Morris Lloyd. John was born about 1781 in Orange County, North Carolina. He married Nancy Caruthers in 1804, and this couple migrated to Madison County, Alabama after 1820.

John Morris and Nancy Caruthers lived their lives in Madison County, Alabama where John died about 1860. 

John and Nancy and had the following children:

Henry b. 1810
John b. 1814
Mary b. 1816 m. Withrow
William b. 1824
Joseph b. 1826
Nancy b. unknown m. Kirksey
Thomas b. unknown
Elizabeth b. unknown m. Dickey
Louisa b. unknown m. Campbell

I am looking for male descendants of Henry Morris (I) of Smoky Ordinary to Y-DNA test at Family Tree DNA in hopes of furthering the research for this Morris line.