The Williamson Family · a record

Chapter three · Tampa, Florida, present day

Not that Hugh Williamson

There are two Hugh Williamsons people tend to go looking for. One signed the United States Constitution for North Carolina in 1787 and has a granite monument in Edenton. The other is our son and brother, Hugh Cordova Williamson, who lives in Tampa, Florida, and builds AI tools for people who fix things for a living. Because our family's line runs through eighteenth-century North Carolina, we get asked whether the two are related. They are not, and the record is unusually clear about it.

Dr. Hugh Williamson, signer of the U.S. Constitution (1735–1819): sepia oval of an engraving after the portrait by John Trumbull
Dr. Hugh Williamson
1735–1819, Edenton, North Carolina. Engraving after the portrait by John Trumbull, public domain. He died twenty years before the first photograph, so this is as close as anyone gets. Note the absence of a teacup.
Hugh Cordova Williamson of Tampa, Florida, as a boy: a vintage-toned oval portrait in a white shirt and waistcoat, raising a teacup
Hugh Cordova Williamson
Tampa, Florida. Photographed in waistcoat and teacup some years before he took up retrieval systems. The sepia is ours; the pose is his.

The case, briefly

Why the signer cannot be our ancestor

Dr. Hugh Williamson, the Founding Father, was born on December 5, 1735, in West Nottingham Township, Chester County, Pennsylvania, the eldest son of a clothier named John Williamson and his wife Mary Davison. He was a physician, a professor of mathematics, a surgeon general of the North Carolina militia and, by most accounts, the state's Benjamin Franklin. He made Edenton his base in 1777, represented the state in Congress and at the Constitutional Convention, and in 1789 married Maria Apthorpe of New York. They had two sons. Both died young. He died in New York on May 22, 1819, and is buried in his wife's family vault at Trinity Church.

That last paragraph settles it. A man whose children did not survive him has no descendants, so no one alive today descends from the signer, and that includes us. Our line comes down from a different George Williamson, born about 1735, who served in the North Carolina Line and farmed in Halifax County, about sixty miles from Edenton. Same decade, same state, same name on the mailbox. No documented connection, and on the one question that matters, no possible one.

In January, 1789, he married Miss Maria Apthorpe, of New York, where he came to reside, and had two sons, who both died young.Nineteenth-century biographical sketch of Dr. Hugh Williamson

Telling them apart

A field guide

  • Born: the signer, 1735, Pennsylvania. Ours, roughly two and a half centuries later; he graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2022.
  • Home: the signer, Edenton, then New York. Ours, Tampa, Florida, on the Tampa Bay side of the state.
  • Trade: the signer, medicine, mathematics and a two-volume history of North Carolina. Ours, AI product and capital markets technology, including search tools that let a field technician ask a question on a job site and follow the answer back to the manual.
  • Middle name: the signer had none that history recorded. Ours is Cordova.
  • Website: the signer is well covered by the National Constitution Center and NCpedia. Ours is at hughcwilliamson.com.

The one in our line

Hugh Cordova Williamson

Hugh is the tenth generation of the line on this site, counting George Williamson of Halifax County as the first. He grew up an honor-roll student, went to Chapel Hill, and came out in 2022 with two degrees, a BBA from the Kenan-Flagler Business School and a BS in computer science. That pairing is the whole story of what he does now: he leads product and delivery for AI tools, and he came to it by way of capital markets technology, equities platforms and risk systems, where getting the number right is not optional.

The work he is proudest of is unglamorous on purpose. He built a retrieval system so that a technician in the field can ask a question in plain language and get an answer that cites the exact page of the manual or the minute of the training video it came from, and he built the checks that catch a weaker answer before it ships. He has also done the quieter engineering that makes a small team able to run its own AI application: a release workflow where coding agents make the change, automated checks run, and a human reviews a preview before anything goes live. Some of that work he does alongside the family firm, DigitalAlpha, building client-facing tools and prototypes.

From the family's side of the table, what stands out is temperament. Hugh is the person who reads the manual, then reads the footnote in the manual, then asks whether the footnote is right. It is a useful trait in someone building tools that other people have to trust on a job site, and it is, we'd note, a fairly Williamson one. Several generations of this family have made their living being careful about land lines, pension files and survey plats. He is doing the same thing with retrieval systems.

For his own account of his work and projects, see his About page, his Projects page, or LinkedIn.

Sources for this chapter