Thomas Cobbs Tapscott, Amanda Davis, and Bill Cosby

I just received the following note on Facebook from Robert J. Tapscott, Great Grandson of George Nicholas. and Ann Ethyl (Scruggs) Tapscott (and Great Grandnephew of Thomas Cobbs Tapscott)

re Black Tapscotts possible link in Buckingham: There was a black man named George Tapscott in Buckingham in the 1930s. A possible link might be Thomas C Tapscott, a brother of George Nick, who was never married but willed some land to a black woman and her offspring???

Since my comments are a little lengthy, I thought I would put them here.

Coleman and Samuel Cosby were children of
Zacharia and Louisa Crosby

Thomas Cobbs Tapscott founded a large line of mixed-race descendants. Never legally married, Thomas is believed to have fathered two children, Amanda Lee Davis and George Davis (who later adopted the name “George Thomas Tapscott” ), probably with Amanda Davis, a black cook living in nearby Maysville Township.  The two children, born around 1864, were living with Thomas (Amanda as a servant and Gorge as a farmhand) at the time of the 1880 census.  Thomas’s 9 November 1881 will left some land to “Amanda J. Davis,” probably the daughter rather than the mother.  Thomas’s grave, birth date 14 February 1814, death date 6 May 1882,  lies on or near his father George’s land on Rock Island Creek.  The plot contains a second stone with no markings.

Of particular interest is that Amanda, the daughter, married Enoch L. Parson. In 1900 she and her husband were living in Buckingham County, Virginia, and had taken in as a boarder her first cousin once removed, Napoleon Bonaparte Tapscott (grandson of George Tapscott Sr.). This possibly surprising connection helps verify Amanda's relationship to the Tapscott family.

Perhaps of even greater interest is that Amanda and Enoch's daughter Edna E. Parson married Coleman Vernon Cosby, great uncle of the well-known entertainer Dr. William Henry "Bill" Cosby (See Johni Cerny," From Maria to Bill Cosby: A Case Study in Tracing Black Slave Ancestry," National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Vol 75, No. 1, pp. 5-14.) Thus we Tapscotts are connected to Bill Cosby, but not by blood since Cosby is descended from Coleman Vernon's brother Samuel not from Vernon Coleman.

Some of this appears in the second edition of my book, perhaps I will include all of it.