Chapter one · 1776
The Williamsons of Halifax
A boy in the town that voted for independence, and the war that came back to his doorstep five years later.
Eight generations. One stretch of Carolina ground.
A Continental soldier on the Roanoke. A Scots immigrant with the King's signature on 150 acres. The sons and daughters who carried the name west to the foothills and stayed. This is the Williamson family, told from the records.
Prologue
In the spring of 1776, two men who did not know each other stood at opposite ends of North Carolina. One was a farmer named William McMurray, thirty-one, working a square half-mile of red clay near Sugar Creek, in a county Cornwallis would soon call a hornets' nest. The other was a sixteen-year-old named Anderson Williamson, in a river town called Halifax that was about to become the first place in America to call, officially, for independence. Their great-great-grandchildren would marry. Everyone on this site descends from that marriage.
What follows is the family's own record: what the documents say, what they don't, and what we are still trying to find.
Chapter two · 1773
A Crown grant in the Hornets' Nest
One hundred fifty acres, a black oak at a mill path, and a signature in the King's name five months before the land offices closed.
The line
From George Williamson of Halifax County, through seven generations in Rutherford and Cleveland counties, to the people in the photograph above. Read the line, generation by generation.
How this is written
Every claim here is tied to a record we can point to, or labeled as family tradition when we can't. Where the records disagree, we say so. Where a link in the chain is plausible but unproven, we say that too. The Sources page lists what we've used.