Probate of estate 20 Aug 1761, Halifax Co.

A great many genealogy books list Elizabeth’s maiden name as Dalton, and say that she is the daughter of Timothy Dalton of Bedford Co., Virginia. I had her entered as such for several years, based on a 6-generation pedigree chart for Andrew Quesenberry on p. 71, Vol. 5, No. 3, May 1991, of the Cox-Phillips Newsletter. (This is why there is a lot of pre-1730 Dalton data in my database. While I now believe I have no Dalton ancestry, I once thought I did. I do, however, have a lot of Dalton cousins, mostly through Dalton-Phillips marriages.)

Evidence is strongly against its truth, due to both the relative ages of this Elizabeth and of Timothy Dalton (they were of the same generation, and Elizabeth may even be the older of the two), and due to geography (they were not living in the same part of Virginia in the 1730’s when Elizabeth was married, although they were by the 1760’s.) It seems to be based ultimately only on two 1763 deeds in which Timothy Dalton transferred land to James & Elizabeth’s sons John Bobbitt and William Bobbit for the token price of 5 shillings. Some Bobbitt researchers who did not know the age of Timothy Dalton concluded that this meant that John Bobbitt and William Bobbitt were grandsons of Timothy Dalton. What they overlooked was that these transfers were leases only, and that the same plots were transferred the next day at the “going rate” of 23 pounds and 20 pounds respectively. The first pair of deeds were apparently something in the line of receipts for a deposit. So there is no real evidence as to Elizabeth’s maiden name.

For further details, see the page “Timothy Dalton and the Bobbitts” at the Dalton Myths web site, http://www.wam.umd.edu/~jklumpp/gen/dalton/Bobbit.html .