Benjamin Harris (1714 - aft. 1763)

Born 10 Aug 1714 in All Hallows Parish, Anne Arundel County, Maryland

Ancestors

Descendants

Died after 1763 after age 48 in Lower Potomac Hundred, Frederick County, Maryland

Biography

Benjamin was baptized at All Hallows Church in Anne Arundel County, Maryland in 1714. He was the son of Thomas Harris and Rachel Maddox.

Benjamin married Sarah by around 1739. Helms gives dates for three children, but it is likely there were more:^[1]

• Sarah b. 13 March 1739
• Mary b. 8 September 1740
• Benjamin b. 22 December 1742

Research Notes

Benjamin is last identified in Maryland in a deposition from 1774.

There is a possibility that he moved to Georgia. A will from 1785 in Richmond County, Georgia fits well with known information about Benjamin.^[2] The will book at that link is possibly an incomplete copy of the original will. A different abstract of the will includes one additional legacy to a daughter Mary.^[3] So the original will should be sought to see if it does indeed mention a daughter Mary. The legatees from these wills are:

• sons George, Benjamin, Zephamiah [sic, Zephaniah] Ezekiel, and James
• daughters Mary, Sarah, Belinda [sic, Verlinda?], and Rachel
• wife Sarah

This fits well with the suspected wife's name Sarah and suspected children's names Benjamin, George, and James. Son George came to the same part of Georgia a little over 10 years later. And son Benjamin was probably in Richmond County, Georgia in the 1780s until almost 1798, as a Benjamin Harris is in legal records there over that time period.

One might think this is a coincidence of common names. But Benjamin Jr.'s daughter Rachel is known to have married Benjamin Drain, as proved by land record in Washington County, Tennessee after Benjamin Jr.'s death. A marriage bond Richmond County from 1788 shows that Rachel Harris married Benjamin Drain in Richmond County, with consent from her father Benjamin Harris. This is undoubtedly the same Rachel Harris who later came to Tennessee. Benjamin Jr. also had a daughter, who was Sarah Parker by the time she sold her part of her inherited land, and a James Parker posted bond to marry Sarah Harris in Columbia County, Georgia in 1793. It would be unusual for the underage Rachel to be living far from her father before she was married, supporting the notion that the present man was the Benjamin Harris appearing in at least some of the Richmond County records of the late eighteenth century. (At least one other man, a Benjamin F. Harris of Augusta, had the same name and lived in that same area around that time.)

Sources

1. ↑ Crampton Harris Helms, Echoes From the Valley (XLibris US, 2013), page 66.
2. ↑ Richmond County, Georgia, wills vol. 1 pages 62–4
3. ↑ Historical collections of the Georgia chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution vol. 2 page 8

• https://www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us/getperson.php?personID=I15325&tree=Tree1