Deputy Name Study

Profile managers: One Name Studies WikiTree [send private message] and S Bechman [send private message]

Deputy Name Study Project

• Study Coordinator: Stuart Bechman
• Category: Deputy Name Study (View names listed in study)
• Study Research Links Page: Deputy Research Links
• Study: Deputy DNA Connections
• Study G2G Tag: Deputy_Name_Study
• Deputy Name Study Category Tag: As you encounter profiles with the surname Deputy or any variations of the same, please add the Deputy Name Study Category to the ancestral profile. To do this, copy and paste the following template into the profile at the top, before the biography section. This will categorize the profile as belonging to the name study.

{{One Name Study|name=Deputy}}

If the profile is included in multiple projects, use the category template below instead, as shown here:

[[Category:Deputy_Name_Study]]

Deputy Name Study

This One-Name Study page was developed to attempt to bring together the researchers for the Deputy line who appeared to arrive in the Americas in the 17th century. The hope is that other researchers like you will join our study to help make it a valuable reference point for people studying lines that cross or intersect. Please contact the project leader, add categories to your profiles, add your questions to the bulletin board, add details of your name research, etc.

The best-known / best-published Deputy originations legend appears to have been compiled and published by a Belvah Deputy Perkins of Jennings County, Indiana in the 1970s:

The DEPUTY's [sic] were French Huguenots who emigrated to Wales because of religious persecution. While in Wales they changed the name to Depaty. When they emigrated to American they changed the name to DEPUTY.

At the world's Fair in Chicago in 1893, in the Delaware State building was an old Hominy Mortar, with an inscription stating it had been in the possession of the family of the present owner 200 years. Made of an oak tree that grew in Wales, and brought to this country by a family named DEPUTY about 1658.

Belvah also provided a profile of a Sylvester Deputy who was apparently born in 1637 (unknown location). This Sylvester Deputy, who apparently migrated to Delaware about 1658, apparently sired another Sylvester Deputy who was allegedly born in 1675 and who became the patriarch of all of the Delaware Deputys that followed.

The above story was, and remains, unsourced.

The earliest documented evidence of DEPUTYs in the Americas as identified by Belvah comes from a Delaware will, dated Jan 1 1728, from a William TOWNSEND of Sussex County, Delaware. In the will, William lists his heirs as sons Stephen TOWNSEND, Costin TOWNSEND, Solomon TOWNSEND, Charles TOWNSEND, and daughters Abigail TOWNSEND and Elizabeth DEPUTY, and son-in-law Sylvester DEPUTY. (This will was probated 1-17-1736 - See Delaware Archives vol. A 102, page 83.) Actual quotes from the will regarding Sylvester and Elizabeth DEPUTY:

Item: I give unto my son-in-law Sylvester DEPUTY a plantation whereon he now dwells with all the appurtenances situated on Gum Branch the same to be held and enjoyed by him his heirs and assigns forever…

Item: I give unto my daughter Elizabeth DEPUTY twenty shillings…

Gum Branch is the northeasternmost branch of the Nanticoke River at its headwaters. As the Nanticoke drains into the Cheasapeake rather than the Delaware Bay, the Calverts of Maryland considered this area to fall under their domain up until the 1753 resolution of the Maryland/Delaware boundary dispute when the Mason-Dixon line fixed the area as part of Sussex County, Delaware.

In Virginia, we have earlier records of (one or more) Robert Deputys:

Parish Register of Christ Church. Middlesex County, Virginia from 1653 to 1812:
• 23 Feb 1679, Marriage: Robert DEPUTY & Ann WRIGHT (p.18)
• 9 Oct 1707, Marriage: Robert DEPUTY & Mary HUDDLE (p.80)

Indexes to Virginia Marriages 1851[1651?]-1929:
• 23 Feb 1679, Robert DEPUTY & Ann WRIGHT
• 1703, Robert DEPUTY & Elizabeth MEADE
• 9 Oct 1707, Robert DEPUTY & Mary HUDDLE

Parish Register of Christ Church, Middlesex County, Virginia, p. 90, 10 April 1715
Baptized: Thomas DEPUTY, son of Mary DEPUTY (illegitimate), born on 15 Jan

And in Maryland, we have a record of a Thomas Deputy who apparently died in 1733 and left behind a widow who filed his probate.

[Skinner, V.L., Jr., compiler. Abstracts of the Testamentary Proceedings of the Prerogative Court of Maryland. Publisher: Clearfield Company, Baltimore MD, 2009]

Volume XIX: 1730-1734 (Liber 29: pp. 65-392)
29:303 (1733, 31 August). Capt. John PITT (Dorchester Co.) exhibited:
• Bond of Katherine DEPUTY administratrix of Thomas DEPUTY. Sureties: Richard MANYNG, William ROSS. Date: 18 July 1733.
29:392 (1734, 7 May). Capt. John PITT (Dorchester Co.) exhibited:
• Inventory of Thomas DEBUTY.
Volume XX: 1734-1736 (Libers 29: pp. 393-479, 30: pp. 1-207)
30:17 (1734/5, 18 March). Capt. John PITT (Dorchester Co.) exhibited:
• Accounts of Charles DENT & his wife Katherine administrators of Thomas DEPUTY.

This project is also interested in the originations of the Deputy family line. If the Deputy line came from France (as is claimed with Belvah's "French Huguenot" attribution), they may have lived in or around the city of Poitiers (pronounced "Pwah-TAY"), and may have taken the city name as their surname ("dePoitiers") when they fled the country during the Huguenot persecution in the late 17th century. And the French "dePoitiers" became the Anglicized "Deputy". But the evidence of this connection remains to be uncovered at this date.