Rebecca (Bowen) Schmidt (1740 - 1826)

Born 1740 in Augusta, Colony of Virginia

Ancestors

Wife of Jonathan Whitley — married 1762 (to 1764) in Augusta, Colony of Virginia

Wife of George Johannes (Schmidt) Smith — married 1766 in Botecourt, Colony of Virginia

Descendants

Died 1826 at about age 86 in Overton, Shelby, Tennessee, United States

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Biography

Rebecca and her twin brother, Robert, were born in 1740 in Augusta, Virginia, to Lily McIlhaney and John Bowen.

Virginia Connections : a Genealogical History of the Thompson- Ward Family Originating in Southwest Virginia : in Three Parts, by Judy B Anderson, Family History Publishers, 1992. Pp 207 Ff.

The Smith Official DNA Project at FamilyTreeDNA Project

Irish

[Rebecca parents]

More is known about the family of John’s mother, Rebecca Bowen Smith, and in fact more about Rebecca herself. She was born either in Pennsylvania or Virginia about 1747 and spent at least part of her childhood south of the territories of the upper James, on Glade Creek, where her parents cleared and maintained a farm before her father John’s death in 1760. Born about 1696, John Bowen was a Pennsylvania native of full-blooded Welsh ancestry. His parents, Moses Bowen and Rebecca Reece (Rhys), had both come from the Old Country and changed their Welsh patronymics ap Owen and verch Rhys to the closest English equivalents (any brothers of Rebecca Reece Bowen would have used the masculine form ap Rhys and assumed the surname of “Preece” or “price” but oddly, verch Rhys has survived as a given name “Vertrice” in many rural southern localities. John married Lily or Lillian McIlhaney, daughter of Irish immigrants Henry McIlhaney and Jane McGeehan, in Chester County, Pennsylvania, about 1730. They moved south to the Virginia frontier and raised a family of thirteen tough sons and daughters whose descendants long maintained the Bowen reputation of skill and prowess in frontier survival. Of the branch of the family that ultimately wound up in eastern Kentucky it was often said, sometimes by family members themselves, with a touch of pride, that “All a Bowen ever needed was a dog, a skinning knife and a rifle gun. With [those], he could make it.” Many of the Bowen men likewise enjoyed the reputation of being great storytellers, tall tales of hunting and humorous yarns being their specialties, and in his own way Raccoon John Smith would carry on this tradition of his mother’s people all his life.

Two of the older daughters of John and Lily Bowen, Nancy and Agnes, married into the Buchanan family in Augusta County, Virginia, from which Botetourt County was formed in 1770. Two younger daughters, Jean (Jennie) and Mary, married Joseph Looney and William Porter, respectively, scions of other families renowned for their pioneering abilities. Two of John and Lily’s sons, Reese and Henry, married Smith girls, Levissa or Louisa and Lily, respectively, who appear to have been sisters of George Smith. After his father’s death, Reese Bowen moved southwestward and in 1772 became a pioneer settler at Maiden Springs in what was to become Russell County, Virginia, joining other Virginians, including some of the Looneys and Porters, and perhaps more numerous North Carolinians who were escaping the ravages of the Regulators’ War in that province, constructing the rude combination cabinforts that were the only dwellings remotely safe in western and southwestern Virginia at the time. The respect that Reese Bowen gained in the trailblazing of the Russell County area was high; even after the family branched, many members in later generations christened sons after him, and his name is still revered by southwestern Virginia historians and genealogists.

[Rebecca]

John and Lily’s daughter Rebecca, who was among the youngest in this large family, was thus half Welsh, half Irish, and all Celt, and her hardiness through a life of nearly ninety years more than matched the toughness of her brothers. Raccoon John remembered her as having a quick and nervous temper, and thus was more ready to discipline her children by corporal punishment than George Smith ever was, but he also recalled that her anger dissipated quickly and, more often than not, with a touch or two of characteristic humor. That hard-bitten Celtic sense of humor, and her aggressive temper as well, had both been absolute essentials to her survival in the days of her own youth and young womanhood, though not in ways that John cared to discuss with John Augustus Williams or anyone else. In fact, if, during much of his life, any historian or biographer had penned the paragraph following, the antebellum southern society in which Raccoon John, his brothers, and even his sons lived would have considered it appropriate for any of them to challenge the troublesome scribbler to a duel.

When Rebecca was about fourteen years old, her father having died only recently beforehand and perhaps in some measure because of that tragedy, she married one Jonathan Whitley. He is supposed by family historians to have been either a native Englishman or Ulster Irishman, and perhaps a former British soldier who had been stationed at a frontier outpost somewhere in the Augusta/Botetourt area. The marriage was extremely brief and evidently very unhappy. Whitley left her, moved to York County, South Carolina, and remarried in 1764 to one Katherine Brush who in turn divorced him in 1767 on the grounds of “cruelty.” Rebecca’s first groom is said by some to have gone home to the British Isles after this second failed marriage, but other records have him returning to Virginia and marrying a third time, to Sarah Cunningham in 1773. A divorce for Jonathan Whitley and Rebecca Bowen has never been discovered in any Virginia court records. Apparently the couple had at least one son, Moses, who may have lived with one of his Bowen uncles in southwestern Virginia, and a daughter Rebecca, though we cannot say with certainty whether this younger Rebecca belonged to Jonathan Whitley or George Smith. If this whole affair and its eventual resolution appears to us as sufficiently sordid only to have occurred in our own degenerate modern times, we must remember that early backwoods American individuals, couples, and communities often had to exercise their own kind of commonsense law and justice without the benefits of either formal clergy, court niceties, or record keeping. Moreover, if Jonathan Whitley’s second wife obtained a legal divorce from him on the grounds of “cruelty”, we can hardly expect that Rebecca had fared any better at his hands, although if she had a quick, nervous, and aggressive temperament that the aged Raccoon John remembered it’s not likely the Rebecca ever really let Jonathan Whitley get the best of her. One wonders if he may have departed Virginia for South Carolina with a black eye or two and minus a few of his teeth. It is a testimony to Rebecca’s resilience that she could bounce back from an extremely bad marriage and take control of her own life once again. Much the same could be said of a young Philadelphia girl of a generation earlier named Deborah Read, whose own first marriage to a potter named Rogers ended with his departure to the West Indies before she exchanged vows with her better-known second husband, Benjamin Franklin.

But at any rate, by the age of nineteen or so Rebecca found herself completely content to settle down with a mild-mannered, gentle husband rather than a wild and unpredictable one. She seems to have suffered no persecution whatsoever from either family, community, Church, or State when she remarried to George Smith (whether in legal or common-law fashion, we can’t really say for sure) about 1766. Her father had been dead some six years, though her mother and her grandmother McIlhaney were apparently still living, and so many of her brothers and sisters were already married into both the Buchanan and Smith, or Schmidt, families that they may all have served actively as matchmakers for a shy, slow-spoken suitor to a tough, outspoken, and even formidable young Welch-Irish heiress to the traditions and spirit of princess Eva de Clare. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, Rebecca even named one of her younger sons by George Smith as Jonathan. No more eloquent testimony survives either of Rebecca’s grit or backbone, or of George’s essential mildness; few women either then or now would dare to name a son by a second husband after a first one, whether he was wild, risky, and just a bit cruel or not, and fewer second husbands would acquiesce to such a christening with anything close to good humor.

Sources

• [1]
• Source: S-1784441803 Ancestry Family Trees Publication: Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com. Original data: Family Tree files submitted by Ancestry members. Note: This information comes from 1 or more individual Ancestry Family Tree files. This source citation points you to a current version of those files. Note: The owners of these tree files may have removed or changed information since this source citation was created.Ancestry Family Trees Ancestry Family Tree 44800296

• family notes

• Biography compiled from excerpts from the book Raccoon John Smith: Frontier Kentucky’s Most Famous Preacher by John Sparks (pages 3-5) entered Wednesday, August 27, 2014, by J. McClary

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Jared Goodpasture for creating this profile. See the Changes page for the details of edits by Jared and others.

WikiTree profile Bowen-951 created through the import of White.wiki.ged on Oct 25, 2011 by Pam Wade. (Merged into Bowen-593 by J. McClary on July 10, 2016.)