Patience
Stiball
Born about in Perquimans, North Carolina
Daughter of Richard Stiball
and Hannah (Unknown) Stiball
[uncertain]
[sibling(s) unknown]
[spouse(s) unknown]
Died after
after about age 15
[location unknown]
Profile last modified
| Created 11 Jun 2014
This page has been accessed 1,752 times.
There are some trees that indicate that Patience Stiball was the wife of Stephen Swain, but that is an error It stems from an early misreading of the almost illegible scrawl of Richard Stiball's 1695 will. The problem originates about halfway into the will where the following line appears [the version here, lacking any and all punctuation, is as it appears verbatim in the will]: "Item I give to my daughter Mary my horse and I give her colt to my daughter Pashens Item I give my daughter Mary and my daughter Pashens my plantation, only my loving wife to have her lifetime in my plantation." An early researcher misread the word "Item" as Swain, and the error propagated from there, and appears today in many trees, as well as in some publications. Some also point to the name of Stephen Swain's third son, Richard [named after Stephen's grandfather Richard], as proof that Patience was the daughter of Richard Stiball. This too is an error. Stephen named all of his children in accordance with the traditional naming pattern that prevailed at the time: First son/daughter named after Stephen and his first wife Elizabeth's parents (hence Mary and John, for Stephen's parents, then Elizabeth, for Elizabeth's mother); then son James, possibly after Stephen's 2nd wife Patience Parris' father (there were no James in Stephen's extended family, while there were James in the Parris family in both Barbados and Virginia. Note there were also no James in the Stiball family); third son Richard, after Stephen's grandfather. If Stephen had named a son after Richard Stiball, it would have been the second son, not the third. Lastly, some also point to land purchased by Stephen that once belonged to Richard Stiball; however that too is not accurately understood. Stiball had sold his land to a third party, David Perkins (died 1702), long before Stephen Swain arrived in Chowan County, and in fact David Perkins had resold the land to a fourth party, Charles Naughton, who then in turn sold it, again, to a fifth party, William Wilkinson, before Wilkinson then sold it to Stephen Swain - long after Richard Stiball had originally sold the land, and in many fact years after Richard Stiball had died. There was no transaction between Stephen Swain and Richard Stiball, and as stated elsewhere, there is absolutely nothing, no other record, no evidence, nothing at all, other than the misreading of Richard Stiball's will, that links Patience Stiball to Stephen Swain. Patience Stiball can safely be dismissed as a likely wife of Stephen Swain.
Patience Stiball disappears from the record after her mention in her father's will. No marriage or death information is known.
Is Patience your ancestor? Please don't go away!
Login to collaborate or comment, or
contact
the profile manager, or
ask our community of genealogists a question.
Login to collaborate or comment, or contact
the profile manager, or ask our community of genealogists a question.
Sponsored Search by Ancestry.com
DNA
No known carriers of Patience's ancestors' DNA have taken a DNA test.
No known carriers of Patience's ancestors' DNA have taken a DNA test.
Have you taken a DNA test? If so, login to add it. If not, see our friends at Ancestry DNA.
The entire line, written in a highly-embellished scrawl, is almost impossible to read and understand. The word "item" following the name "Pashens" does at first appear to be Patience's last name - and with some effort it could be read as "Swain." This writer originally read it as her last name, but as "Stone." With a little time, however, and a much longer and closer look, the full text became apparent, initially by recognizing the same word "Item," as it reappears in several other places in the document. Also, importantly, Richard Stiball died in 1695; by that time, Stephen Swain was already married to his wife Patience; if she were the daughter of Richard Stiball, he almost certainly would have included her full name as "Pashens Swain." And other than Richard Stiball's will, there is absolutely no other documentation, or any other type of connection, to indicate any relationship at all between the two families; yet it has been repeated in numerous poorly-researched trees over the past two decades.
Stephen's wife was most likely Patience Parris. While there is no documentary proof, there is a great deal to suggest the validity of the suggestion. The support comes from Patience's 2nd marriage to Henry Speller. Henry, in his will, names Thomas Parris as his "loving brother." At the time, the term was used interchangeably with the term "brother in law." It was also used in place of the term "cousin," but much less commonly. Henry Speller and Patience also named their son "Thomas Speller," presumably after Thomas Parris. This of course lends strong support to the contention that Thomas Parris was Patience's brother, and of course that Patience's family name was Parris. This is further supported by the fact that the Parris family was extensive and prominent in the Massachusett's Bay Colony, at the time Richard Swain was settling in Nantucket; in fact, one of the family scions was the Puritan minister Samuel Parris, whose daughter initiated the witch burning hysteria in the town of Salem. While the Parris family was centered in Boston and neighboring towns, there was enough intercourse between the mainland and Nantucket that a relationship of some sort, perhaps a commercial relationship, may have existed between the families.
It is possible though that Thomas Parris was not Patience's brother; rather, he may have been the husband of an unknown sister of Henry Speller. There is nothing, no other documentation, to suggest that Henry Speller had a sister married to Thomas Parris, but the possibility remains, and thus it cannot be said with certainly that Patience, the wife of Stephen Swain and Henry Speller, was the sister of Thomas Parris.
Regarding the Gardner reference, in the comment below, the suggestion is intriguing, but beyond the circumstantial location in place and time, there is no other support. In particular, there is no record of a marriage between Stephen and Patience Gardner in the typically very complete records of Nantucket. Also, the absurd suggestion, in the linked document, that Stephen and Patience's son John Swain married Mary Chesson is easily proven false; the John Swain who married Mary Chesson was John's great-grandson; the marriage was in 1780.
Richard Stiball's will is online; readers can see it and judge for themselves the source of this now commonly-repeated error.
edited by Ken Green
Someone may wanna take a closer look....