The Elusive Miss Ann

I still find that a surprisingly large number of people believe the first Henry Tapscott (Henry The Immigrant) to have married an Ann Lee or an Ann Davis or even an Ann Lee Davis despite the fact that there is not a single reliable record-i.e., something other than trees based on imagination (see post of 3 Nov 2013). The latest score shows 98 Ancestry.com user-submitted trees showing Ann Davis as Henry's wife and 13 showing Ann Lee as Henry's wife. I had hoped that reliable research had put this ridiculousness to rest. Allow me to quote from my recent book:

On 16 May 1711 Elizabeth Nigings bound her son as an apprentice to ‘Henry Tapscott & Ann his wife.” Ann (sometimes “Anne”) appears in several records, but always, it seemed, with her married name, “Tapscott.” At first, attempts to establish Ann’s parentage were unsuccessful. The surname “Lee” was (and, regrettably, still is) assumed by many since Richard Lee was the recipient of a deed of gift from Henry. Richard Lee of “Ditchley,” a prominent Northumberland County citizen and Northumberland County Court Clerk from 1716 to 1735,  was often involved in legal transactions and signed numerous documents. This was one of those. In the deed of gift, which was restricted, Richard Lee was essentially (though not officially) acting as a trustee, not a member of the family.

Since one of Henry’s three sons was named Edney (as well as a great-grandson and a great-great-grandson), it was proposed that this might be Ann’s last name. Virginian first-borns were often named after grandparents, and the use of surnames as forenames to show family connections was common.  (The first-born children of Henry’s son Edney were named for a paternal grandfather and a maternal grandmother. The first-born of Henry’s son James was named for his maternal grandfather.) 

One of the grandchildren from Ann’s second marriage, to Benjamin George, was Ann Edney George.  But the name “Edney” was almost nonexistent in the colonial Northern Neck—almost nonexistent, but not quite. For in Northumberland County near the end of the seventeenth century lived a James Edney with a daughter Ann, who would one day be of marriageable age and appropriate residence—Wicomico Parish—to become Henry’s wife. Not only are James and Ann the only Edneys found in either Lancaster or Northumberland County documents of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, three legal records reference the name “Ann Edney,” or a variant thereof, before Henry’s marriage and none afterwards, when the name “Ann Tapscott” first appears. And James Edney owned property in the area in which Ann and Henry settled. Finally, there is no negative evidence, nothing that needs be explained away. The evidence detailed below allows us to conclude that Ann Edney, the daughter of James Edney of Wicomico Parish, and Ann Tapscott, the wife of Henry, were one and the same.

The next nine pages of the book, which is available at several libraries (see post of 20 Mar 2015), provide fully documented evidence for Ann Edney, her parentage, and her marriage to Henry citing over 100 historical records. Not a single record of any kind, other than duplicated, erroneous trees, created by who-knows-who from who-knows-what, exists with even the slightest hint that Henry Tapscott knew, let alone married, an Ann Lee or an Ann Davis. Unlike "Edney," neither "Lee" nor "Davis" is found as a given name among Ann's known descendants.