A post from January 27, 2015 described the life of Richard Thompson, a real adventurer when the country was first being settled, and the first of any family members in this family to come to what is now the United States. Though he lived to be less than forty years old, he and his wife Ursula had a daughter named Elizabeth who went on to continue our family line.
After Richard died, Ursula went on to marry John Mottram, perhaps the most influential man in the Northern Neck of Virginia, and a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. Ursula’s daughter Elizabeth, also married a member of the house of Burgesses, Peter Presley. Not surprisingly, they named their first daughter, Elizabeth. Elizabeth Presley, when she grew up married a man named John Cockerill, and they named their son Presley Cockerill. It is interesting to see how the generations assured their connectedness to each other by making sure that the names of parents and grandparents stayed in the family.
With Presley Cockerill, who was born in 1704, we once again start to get a feeling for how unstable living was in colonial days. In 1727, Presley married Susannah Lyne Whaley. By that time Presley was parentless, his father having died when he was 14 and his mother when he was 19. Susanna had problems of her own. She had been born Susannah Lyne but at a young age was married to a small time farmer named Oswald Whaley. When she was pregnant with their first (and only) child, Oswald died. Thus when Susannah married Presley Cockerill, she was already pregnant with her first daughter who they named Elizabeth. In the next few years they had two other children, Presley Jr. and Susannah.
The stability did not last long, however. By 1735 both parents (Presley Sr. and mother Susannah) were dead, Susannah having died first. Thus the three children, Elizabeth, Presley Jr. and Susannah were all orphans. On top of that, they were split up. Elizabeth’s maternal aunt (her mother’s sister) took her in and moved her up to Westmoreland County. She lived to the age of 22. Long enough to be married to a man named William Butler. Presley and Susanna were taken in by an uncle, Willoughby Cockerill, who had been in charge of administering their father’s estate. The younger Susannah died sometime before her sixteenth birthday. Presley Jr., however, survived to live a relatively long life. He married a woman named Sarah Ball (remotely related to George Washington’s mother Mary Ball), and, of course, named their firstborn son, Presley. It was this line that eventually married into the Lewis family, my paternal grandmother Mattie Lewis’ side of the family tree.
Northen History 