The Williamson Family · a record

Chapter one · Halifax County, North Carolina

The Williamsons of Halifax, 1776

Our fifth great-grandfather Anderson Williamson was born in 1760 in Halifax, North Carolina, a small river town on the Roanoke. His father was George Williamson, who would later serve in the North Carolina Line. His mother, Marian Morning Thompson, died when Anderson was ten.

April 12, 1776

When Anderson was sixteen, his hometown became the center of the American independence movement. Eighty-three delegates of the Fourth Provincial Congress crowded into Halifax, and on April 12 they voted unanimously to authorize North Carolina's delegates in Philadelphia to vote for independence. They called it the Halifax Resolves.

Resolved, that the delegates for this Colony in the Continental Congress be impowered to concur with the delegates of the other Colonies in declaring Independency.The Halifax Resolves, April 12, 1776

It was the first official act by any of the thirteen colonies calling for independence, and the date is on the North Carolina flag to this day. Whatever a sixteen-year-old was doing in a town suddenly full of delegates, riders and rumor, he was watching the Revolution start from his own street.

August 1, 1776

Four months later, Cornelius Harnett stood in Halifax and gave North Carolina its first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. The news of July 4 reached our family not by newspaper but out loud, in their own town.

May 1781

The war came back to their doorstep. Tarleton's dragoons stormed the town, the Halifax militia was driven back across the Roanoke, and Cornwallis's army camped at Halifax for about a week before marching north into Virginia. Anderson was twenty-one. The army that occupied his hometown surrendered at Yorktown five months later.

1788

After the war Anderson married Elizabeth Hart, and moved his family west to Rutherford County, in the foothills below Kings Mountain. It was a long trip by wagon and horse with everything they owned. He died there on 4 June 1803, only 43. The Williamson presence in what became Cleveland County begins with him. The line runs from Anderson to his son James Archibald Bauldy Williamson, born 1794 in Rutherford County, to Anderson Crowder Williamson, to Percy Decatur Williamson, to Charlie Williamson, who married Hassie McMurry, to Pierce, and on to us.

What the record holds

What we can prove

George Williamson's service is accepted by the Daughters of the American Revolution (Ancestor A126874), sourced to Haun's transcription of the North Carolina Revolutionary Army Accounts. George's compiled service record is in the National Archives (NARA M881). Anderson's birth, his 1788 marriage, his residence in Rutherford County in the 1800 census and his 1803 probate are all documented.

One honest caveat: we have no muster roll for Anderson himself. Teenage militia service in the Halifax District is plausible and worth chasing, but not yet documented. What is documented is enough. In 1776 the family stood in the two hottest corners of revolutionary North Carolina: William McMurray farming the Hornets' Nest outside Charlotte, and the Williamsons of Halifax living in the town that called for independence before anyone else did.

Sources for this chapter