Ancestry of Zachariah Moorman Research

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: [unknown]
Surname/tag: Moorman

This is an assembly of research information for those interested in greater details on the probability that Andrew Moorman b 1689 in New Kent, Virginia was the father of the Andrew Moorman associated with this free space page.

Parentage of Zachariah Moorman

Research by Lorraine Keith

• Andrew Moorman probably was the father of Zachariah Moorman but the evidence is circumstantial. This researcher has not located a probate record for Andrew Moorman.

A deed dated October 11, 1763, indicates a relationship between Zachariah and Andrew Moorman. In this deed, Thomas and Zachariah Moorman of Anson County, North Carolina, planters, transferred to Isham Hailey, also of Anson County, land that was once in the possession of Andrew Moorman. (Anson County deed, Thos. Moorman & Zachariah Moorman, grantors, to Isham Haily, grantee, Vol. 3, pp. 54-55.)

Andrew did not sell this land to Thomas and Zachariah. No deed was recorded for such a transfer. It is probable that the land passed to them at Andrew's death. Isham/Isom Hailey was married to Elizabeth, daughter of George Matthews. (Hinshaw, 1:408)

In 1764, Zachariah and Archilous Moorman jointly purchased 300 acres in Anson County from John Ekens. This land had been part of Benjamin Moorman's original patent. (Maybe Doug Tucker is correct when he says that Andrew Moorman had a son Archelous.)

Besides the deeds mentioned above, Zachariah Moorman sold land in Anson County to James Matthews on January 25, 1777. His wife did not sign this deed. Zachariah had acquired this land from Drury Sims in 1775.

In 1774, on the 7th of the fifth month, Cane Creek Monthly Meeting in Orange County, reported that "Mary Moreman, formerly Matthews, married out of unity." Unfortunately, the report did not include the name of her husband. It is possible that she married a different Moorman. It is also possible that she was a widow of a Matthews when she married a Moorman. Further complicating the matter, Gloria Holder gave her name as Mary Matthews Brooks.

Coincindentally, Zachariah Moorman, a member of the Virginia South River Monthly Meeting was married the same year. He probably was the son of Thomas Moorman and Rachel Clark and grandson of Charles Moorman. This Zachariah Moorman married Elizabeth Johnson after his first wife died in 1773, and then was disowned because he was married by a priest. (Hinshaw, Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy, 6:333)

Zachariah Moorman of Anson County, North Carolina, may have married Mary Matthews. George Matthews, supposedly Mary's father, purchased land in Anson County from Thomas and Zachariah Moorman in 1765. (Anson Co., NC, Deeds, 3:202) Isham (Isom) Hailey was married to another daughter of George Matthews.

Ten years later, George Matthew, along with Thomas Moorman and Francis Clark, purchased from Benjamin Moorman, two acres of land "including the Burying Ground and Meeting House of the Society of People called Quakers." This land was part of William Stone's original patent in Anson County. Stone sold two hundred acres of his tract to Andrew Moorman in 1751. [Anson Co., NC, Deeds, A:79.) Andrew deeded this land to Benjamin and Charles Moorman in 1754. (B#1: 500.) These documents establish that George Matthews was a member of the meeting of the Society of Friends who built a meeting house on land once owned by Andrew Moorman. Unfortunately, these records don't prove that Zachariah Moorman married Mary Matthews.

Some have claimed that Zachariah was previously married to Sarah Hall but there is no evidence of this marriage in deeds signed by Zachariah Moorman in Anson County. (Deeds were claimed as a source.) A misinterpretation of an Anson County deed, dated June 20, 1774, may have led to this conclusion. Zachariah Moorman, his wife, Mary Moorman, and Sarah Hall were grantors of this deed with Zachariah and Mary Moorman signing with their marks. (Zachariah Moorman, his wife, Mary Moorman and Sarah Hall, grantors, to David Snead, grantee, K:270.) Zachariah had previously purchased this land from Joseph Hall. Sarah Hall may have been mentioned because she released her dower interest.

About, or prior to, April 1770, Zachariah Moorman and his wife, Mary, signed a deed for the sale of 300 acres to Archilus Moorman. The deed was recorded during the April 1770 Anson County Court session. Unfortunately, the first part of this deed with the date and the description of the property is missing. It does establish that Zachariah had a wife named Mary as early as April 1770. The Quaker marriage record of each of their children, including the two older children, gives Zachariah and Mary Moorman as the parents. An exact transcription follows.

Piney Grove Monthly Meeting MOORMAN

1800, 5, 8. Edward (Morman), s Zachariah & Mary, Marlborough Co., S.C., m Mary Thomas. (Hinshaw, 1:1071)

1803, 3, 25. Mary, dt Zachariah & Mary, Marlborough Co., S. C., m Obadiah Harris. (Hinshaw, 1:1071) Edward, born the 19th, 3rd month 1768, and Mary, born 3rd, 11th month, 1773, were born before the date that Mary Matthews was reported to have married out of unity.

Zachariah's wife may have been Mary Matthews but more evidence is needed.

Zachariah Moorman's name appears on the 1790 Census of Fayette District, Richmond County, North Carolina. (Richmond County was established from Anson County in 1779.) Zachariah's name also appears on the 1800 and 1810 Census of Marlboro County, South Carolina.

On August 10, 1810, Zachariah Moorman, Sen'r, of the state of South Carolina deeded to John Moorman of the same place, for five hundred pounds, a 225 acre tract of land on the east side of Pee Dee River above the mouth of Hitchcock Creek. This land, beginning at the corner of the survey of Andrew Moorman, Jun'r, was part of three hundred acres granted to the said Andrew Moorman the 4th April 1750. (Richmond County, NC, Deed Book I [letter i], p. 143.)

The following items were found in Hinshaw, Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy, Vol. 1: p. 831 (Deep River Monthly Meeting minutes): 8-6-1798 - Zachariah Moorman received on request. On the same date, Uriah Moorman [was] received on request of his father.

Deep River Monthly Meeting was in the western part of Guilford County, North Carolina. In 1794, Mary Moorman was received by Deep River Monthly Meeting by certificate from Piney Grove Monthly Meeting. In 1798, Susanna and Anna of Muddy Creek, were received at the request of their mother, Mary. Other Moorman individuals had been members of Deep River Monthly Meeting as early as 1789.

From the above, we surmise that Zachariah Moorman and his family lived in the area served by Deep River Monthly Meeting from 1794 until after 1798. Then they were in Marlboro County, South Carolina when the 1800 census was taken.

According to the Piney Grove Monthly Meeting minutes, on 4-20-1811, Uriah Moorman & family [were] granted certificate to a Monthly Meeting in Ohio. One the same day, Zachariah Moorman & family [were also] granted certificate to a Monthly Meeting in Ohio.

The next record of the family is found in Heiss, Abstracts of the Records of the Society of Friends in Indiana, Part 1, p. 144, (Whitewater Monthly Meeting, Wayne Co., IN): On 2-29-1812, Zachariah Moorman & grandson, Eli, [were] received on certificate from Fairfield Monthly Meeting, Ohio. On the same date, Mary Moorman & daughter, Susannah, [were also] received on certificate from Fairfield Monthly Meeting, Ohio.

Except for the marriages of one or two of their children, this was the last time Zachariah and Mary Moorman were mentioned in either the Hinshaw or Heiss Abstracts of Quaker records. Whitewater Monthly Meeting did not record their deaths.

The Pee Dee Monthly Meeting and Zachariah Moorman

• Posted 26 Jan 2018 by OLD QUAKER CEMETERY IN RICHMOND CO, NC

Trent Strickland of Hamlet, NC started with little more than a long-abandoned cemetery with mostly unmarked stones when he began researching a lost chapter of Richmond County history. The cemetery was known as "the old Quaker cemetery" near Cordova and the mostly unmarked stones bore mute testimony to the Quaker "plain" tradition.

"It's part of the Quaker simplicity testimony. They wouldn't use inscribed grave markers, only a plain rock or stone. They didn't make much over dead bodies because the soul is all that counted," Strickland said. But his search for records of Quakers in early county history along the way also unearthed what may be the county's first settlement and its first church and cemetery. Strickland retired as a Richmond County Schools administrator in 1995 and had time to indulge an interest in history, which was his first major in a long academic career. His wife Clara comes from a Quaker family in Surry County, so he began looking into the history of early Quakers and found evidence of a forgotten settlement here in the county.

"I first heard about the old Quaker cemetery in the 1980s and a friend took me to see it," Strickland said. "I was intrigued and puzzled. There had to be a story there about a Quaker meeting." Quaker cemeteries usually are located at Quaker churches - called meetings - but Strickland said there were no known records of a Quaker meeting in Richmond County. Local historical records of an early settlement known as Hailey's Ferry did exist about half a mile from the Quaker cemetery at a ferry crossing on the Pee Dee River."

First settlement? -

Hailey's Ferry was a ferry crossing built by a Quaker from Virginia named William Hailey, who settled on the Pee Dee River about five miles south of Rockingham in the early 1750s. And the crossing was also the site of perhaps the first settlement in the area, settled by Quakers in the Hailey, Clark and Moorman families, who all came from Louisa County, Va. Hailey's Ferry is the earliest settlement in the county cited in "No Ordinary Lives, A History of Richmond County, North Carolina 1750-1900" by John Hutchinson. "I don't know of any earlier settlements," Strickland said. "It was one of the first if not the first river crossing on the Pee Dee River," he said. "I'm sure it was the first church and pretty sure it's also the earliest cemetery."

But it took a lot of work to find the documentation to prove those assertions. "If there was a cemetery, there had to be a Quaker meeting, a place to worship. And there had to be a name. I saw it as somewhat of a mystery I wanted to solve." Where was meeting? The only two Quaker meetings in historical records of the area are the Pee Dee and Gum Swamp meetings, both of which were believed to have been in Marlboro County, S.C. The Gum Swamp Meeting was believed to have been near Rowland, S.C., and the Pee Dee Meeting was believed to have been "somewhere on the river close to the North Carolina line," but no exact location of either meeting had ever been determined.

"I was convinced this had to be the location of the Pee Dee Meeting, but I needed to prove it," Strickland said. So he began his search through early land deeds, minutes from early Quaker meetings in North and South Carolina and the diaries of early Quaker missionaries traveling through the area. One of those diaries in the Quaker historical records at Guilford College in Greensboro provided the solution to the puzzle.

The final clue -

A female missionary traveling from South Carolina to Cane Creek Meeting near Snow Camp in North Carolina mentioned visiting a Quaker meeting on the Pee Dee River in December 1753 and said a meeting house was under construction. The Pee Dee Meeting was officially approved as a preparative meeting in 1755 by Cane Creek Meeting, which also has marriage records of the Quakers from the Pee Dee. The confusion over the location of the Pee Dee Meeting being in South Carolina arose from a boundary dispute between the two states which was not settled until the 1760s. Strickland submitted his research to Guilford College to the North Carolina Friends Historical Society in 2000 and it was published as an article in their Spring 2001 journal. He applied to the state historical archives departments for an historical marker and that was approved and erected in summer 2001 on U.S. 1 at Rosalyn Road near Cordova. The N.C. Friends Society also approved funding for a marker at the cemetery, which was dedicated in November 2001.

What happened to the Richmond County Quakers? -

Two events transpired that spelled the end of the Quaker community by the early 1800s. A disastrous fire on Dec. 23, 1792, at Hailey's Ferry resulted in "complete destruction of the settlement," according to Joe M. McLaurin in "Richmond County Record" in 1999. He adds that following the fire, the settlement "was apparently not rebuilt."

The other factor -

And perhaps even more important than the fire was slavery. Ironically, one of the early Quakers sold the first land purchased by Gen. Henry William Harrington, who became in the late 1700s one of the largest slaveholders in the region. "The Quakers were so bitterly opposed they began leaving for slave-free territories in the late 1700s and were mostly gone by the early 1800s," Strickland said. Hutchinson writes that some of the Richmond Quakers settled in Wayne County in Indiana, where the county seat is named Richmond, perhaps by those early settlers.