Virginia Roots to Alabama Branches: My Morton Family

A Genealogical Reconstruction of Migration, Kinship, and Frontier Settlement, Grounded in Historical Records and Genetic Evidence

© Lisa Morton Mills 2026

This site represents more than eighty‑five years of Morton family research, begun by my mother, Ollie Irvin Morton, and carried forward by me, Lisa Morton Mills. Building on her work, I have incorporated DNA triangulation, genetic‑genealogy methods, and rigorous source analysis with original documents to resolve long‑standing confusions and correct errors that persist in online family trees. The conclusions presented here reflect evidence, not repetition.
My mother began collecting family histories in 1938 and was teaching university‑level genealogy by the 1960s. My sister, Lorna Morton, joined her early, transcribing courthouse records at thirteen and later teaching genealogy and Native American research throughout the Southeast. My brother, Perry Gilbert Morton, shared his knowledge, his DNA, and the history he knew, rooted in the places our ancestors lived. Esteemed researchers such as Jerry Bartlett Jones and Teresa Morton Owens have also contributed insight and encouragement.
This website continues their work: an evidence‑driven reconstruction of the Morton family’s story, honoring both the legacy we inherited and the science that now helps illuminate it.

Who was John Morton, the Immigrant?

Some researchers have suggested that John Morton, the immigrant, was the same man christened on 18 February 1655 in Kent, England, but no primary evidence supports this claim. It remains a hopeful hypothesis, not a documented fact.[1] Instead, the fact is that Modern Y‑DNA results show the strongest cluster of matches to Yorkshire Mortons, though Kent families did maintain historical ties to Yorkshire. One could say the two groups were broadly related.[2] Parish records from Lindley, Yorkshire, include Morton entries alongside several surnames later found around John Morton in Virginia.[3] The Lindley Mortons were historically connected to the Earl of Morton and were active as tailors and cloth manufacturers with trade links from Warwickshire to Edinburgh.[4]

While John was not the earliest Morton found in Virginia records, John Morton is the first of our line, as proven through modern YDNA testing, triangulation, and autosomal DNA evidence. The first legally documented appearance of John Morton in Virginia is a deed dated 21 June 1689, in which land sold by John and Hannah Woodson to William Randolph is described as adjoining the land of John Morton.[5] This establishes his presence in Henrico County by that date, though his arrival year remains uncertain.

Randolph family tradition holds that John Morton may have come to Virginia on the same ship as William Randolph, possibly in the late 1660s or early 1670s.[6] Research by my mother and I, to include archival search in North Carolina as well as South Carolina, suggests that they may have traveled on a vessel of the Maverick fleet owned by Samuel Maverick born 1602, and operated between Massachusetts, Virginia, Bermuda, Charleston and the Caribbean islands of Puerto Rico and Cuba. The Maverick shipping lines were active into the 1730’s before the fleet was dissolved from family ownership into a partnership. William Randolph—an orphan raised by his uncle Henry Randolph—was sponsored to Virginia around 1669, also likely came to America on a Maverick ship, while evidence suggests that John Morton paid his own passage.[8] The relationship between Maverick, Randolphs and Mortons spanned more than one hundred years, nurtured by the trade of goods between the new country and the old.

That 1689 deed likely indicates that John Morton was a tenant on Randolph‑controlled land and was already well‑known in the community by that time—a conclusion also reached independently by historian Michael E. Pollock, who authored The Mortons of Southside Virginia and has been an active professional genealogist since the 1970s. .[9]

An employee at the Archives in Virginia once assured me that while John Morton the immigrant is most widely claimed, other early Mortons in Virginia are believed to be related to him through his GRANDFATHER in England. Details are unknown because of a loss of records but DNA doesn’t lie.

Footnotes

1. Secondary genealogical claims linking John Morton of Virginia to the 1655 Kent christening; no primary documentation confirms the identification.
2. Y‑DNA cluster analysis of Morton descendants showing the strongest matches in Yorkshire. Morton DNA Project/Family Tree DNA.
3. Lindley (Yorkshire) parish registers containing Morton entries and surnames later associated with the Morton family in Virginia.
4. Historical accounts of the Lindley Mortons’ trade connections and association with the Earl of Morton.
5. Henrico County Deeds & Wills, 21 June 1689, Woodson to Randolph, referencing land adjoining John Morton.
6. Randolph family tradition recorded in mid‑20th‑century genealogical notes.
7. Shipping patterns of the Maverick Lines, 1665–1690, serving England, Bermuda, Barbados, and the American colonies.
8. Randolph family correspondence and oral history regarding Henry Randolph’s sponsorship of William Randolph.
9. Michael E. Pollock, analysis of the 1689 deed and Morton–Randolph land relationships.

Land, Marriage and Family Structure

The second documented appearance of John Morton in Virginia is a land grant dated 1 August 1689, which records that he “imported himself and wife from England.”[1] This wording indicates an earlier marriage before his known Virginia marriage. Because the identity of this first wife is unknown, nothing is proven about her origins; however, she remains a plausible source for what geneticists call Russell‑associated DNA found among many Morton descendants.[2] No records identify any children from this early marriage, though the persistent Russell genetic signal suggests that at least two older children survived who carried the John Morton marker and Russell-associated DNA.

John Morton later married Joane (Anne) Hughes, a widow, on 25 July 1682 at St. John’s Church in Henrico County.[3] If he arrived in the new world with a wife, as the 1689 land‑grant notation suggests, then that first wife must have died before 1682 when he married in Henrico, Virginia. A 1691 petition by Henry Randolph claims headrights for importing Susannah Symonds and Joan Hughes, demonstrating Randolph’s long‑standing involvement in immigration and his familiarity with both the Hughes and Morton families.[4] A 1710 court reference names John’s wife as “Anne,” consistent with written Randolph family recollections that she was called Ann or Annie.[5] But the identity of John Morton’s first wife remains unresolved. Later writers sometimes styled his Virginia wife as Deborah Jo Anne Sydenham Hughes, or proposed that Deborah Sydenham was his first wife and Joane Hughes his second, but no primary record supports either claim. No Sydenham DNA cluster has ever appeared in any Morton descendant, or variations of how that surname is spelled. No Sydenham has been found across Hughes‑adjacent matches, YDNA projects, autosomal triangulation groups, Morton descendant clusters or Russell adjacent matches. No colonial record ever names a Deborah Sydenham as the wife of John Morton. This only transpired after the 20th century in “suppositions” by hard-working family researchers who knew there was another wife, but could not find her. [6] I propose that the Sydenham association is an inflated, multi‑part name that is an artifact of researchers with limited access, who in the 1940s and 1950s tried to patch over unresolved family legends by stitching several unrelated women into one imaginary identity. The earliest and most reliable scholarships—James Allen’s 1931 William and Mary Quarterly article and Henry Morton Woodson’s 1915 study—makes no such claim and simply acknowledges that John Morton fathered a large family. Modern Y‑DNA evidence reinforces their conclusions by demonstrating that at least two of his children were born before his 1682 marriage to Joane Hughes.

Those two children were William Morton, born 1676 and Winnie Morton, born in the 1680s[8]

Modern DNA evidence demonstrates that both of these are indeed John Morton’s children—each were born before his 1682 marriage to Joane Hughes. Their genetic profiles consistently show an elevated proportion of the Russell‑associated autosomal signal, a pattern shared across multiple independent descendant lines. This recurring cluster links both children to John Morton’s unidentified first wife and indicates that she likely belonged to a Russell family or to a closely allied household related to Russell settlers of early Virginia. At the same time, the broader distribution of this signal among Morton descendants shows that John Morton himself also carried Russell‑related ancestry through his maternal line. Genetic mapping places this Russell component within the northern English regions of Yorkshire and Durham, aligning with the known origins of the Morton paternal line and reinforcing the coherence of the family’s early genetic profile.

Children documented in John Morton’s will and associated parish records, born to John Morton and Joane (Anne) Hughes, include:

• John Morton, born c. 1684
• Thomas Morton, born c. 1690
• Joseph Morton, born c. 1693
• Two daughters named Mary, one dying in 1685 and another born in 1689[9]

In addition to the documented children of John Morton the immigrant, two other men must be mentioned: Samuel Morton and Stephen Morton are possible sons. Surviving Virginia records preserve only fragments of their lives, and later researchers have placed them in various Morton families without firm evidence. Modern genetic analysis, however, resolves their placement. Autosomal triangulation consistently links their descendants to the same Morton cluster as the proven sons of John Morton, and no competing paternal line has ever emerged. Their absence from Henrico’s surviving records reflects not doubtful parentage, but the realities of the frontier.
Like many young men of their generation, Samuel and Stephen moved early into the Southside Virginia and Carolina backcountry, a region marked by unstable courts, lost county books, and mixed‑community settlements where surnames were inconsistently recorded. Their descendants appear today in the same geographic corridors—Granville, Rowan, the Yadkin, and the Catawba—that were traveled by their documented relatives. These patterns, combined with repeated DNA matches, indicate that Samuel and Stephen were almost certainly sons of John Morton, and founders of the early, unattached Morton lines that surface in the Carolina frontier.
Their history illustrates a broader truth of early Virginia: not all family members left wills, deeds, or parish entries, but they did leave genetic traces. Some of their descendants carry small but consistent segments of Indigenous‑associated DNA, a pattern that aligns with the well‑documented presence of Native women in the early Virginia and Carolina borderlands. While no record identifies specific Native partners, the genetic evidence suggests that some branches of the Morton family emerged from these frontier relationships.
Samuel and Stephen, therefore, belong to the first American‑born generation of Mortons—brothers to John Jr., Thomas, Joseph, William, and the early daughters—whose lives diverged into the Carolina frontier and whose identities survive today through the combined testimony of migration patterns, kinship networks, and modern DNA.

The documentary record shows that John Morton of Henrico County was dead by 1720, and he died intestate. His death is proven by a 1720 deed in which John Randolph of York County conveyed 436 acres to Thomas Moreton, Joseph Moreton, and John Moreton of Henrico, planters. [11] The land lay on the south side of White Oak Swamp and was divided as follows: 212 acres to Thomas, 112 acres to Joseph, and 112 acres to John. The deed explicitly states that this land “descended to him from his deceased father William Randolph” (Valentine, Records, vol. 3, p. 1375). This transaction is only possible if John Morton Sr. was already dead, because his sons were receiving land that had formerly been associated with John and with the Randolph holdings on Chickahominy Swamp. A living landholder would not have his property conveyed directly to his sons in equal shares.
Additional context appears in the 1713 will of Capt. William Randolph, who bequeaths to his sons John and Richard “all three tracts bought of John Woodson, Sam Knibbs, and John Morton,” totaling approximately 900 acres on the Chickahominy—Richard receiving the upper portion and John the lower (Valentine, Papers, vol. 3, pp. 1368–1369). [12] The 1720 deed is executed by William Randolph, Joseph Royal Jr., and Henry Wood as a lease and release (Henrico Deeds & Wills Book 1719–1724, p. 36).
Because the Randolph‑Morton land was being redistributed to John Morton’s sons in 1720, and because no record shows John Morton participating in or objecting to the transaction, the only reasonable conclusion is that he was deceased by that date.

There is a 1721 Ferris deed which sometimes confuses the researcher and gets misattributed to John Morton the immigrant, but the document itself identifies the grantor as “John Morton, son and heir of John Morton.” That language can refer only to John Morton Jr., not his father. This distinction is crucial. By 1720 the immigrant had already conveyed his holdings to his sons, and no record ever associates him with a wife named Elizabeth. The 1721 deed therefore belongs to the next generation and documents John Morton Jr. and his wife Elizabeth, who were married by about 1709. It also marks the formal transfer of the Morton property on Morton’s Spring Branch from father to son. Recognizing this prevents the common genealogical error of extending the immigrant’s life and activities into the 1720s and preserves the correct generational structure for the descendants who later moved into North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama.

FOOTNOTES:

1. Henrico County land grant record, 1 August 1689.Headright notation stating John Morton “imported himself and wife from England.”
2. St. John’s Church (Henrico) parish register, marriage of John Morton and Joane Hughes, 25 July 1682.
3. . Henrico County Records 1682–1701, p. 413 (Virginia Archives), petition of Henry Randolph for headrights of Susannah Symonds and Joann Hughes.
4. Henrico County court reference, 1710, naming John Morton’s wife as “Anne.”Later genealogical interpretations of the name “Deborah Jo Anne Sydenham Hughes”; no primary documentation.
5. James Allen, William and Mary Quarterly, 1931; Henry Morton Woodson, 1915.
6. Y‑DNA matches linking William Morton (b. 1676) and Winnie Morton to the John Morton line.
7. Children named in John Morton’s will and associated parish records.
8. Early 18th‑century references to undocumented Mortons associated with the Henrico Morton family; supported by modern DNA clustering.
9. Edward Pleasants Valentine Records, vol. 3, p. 1375
10. Edward Pleasants Valentine Records, vol 3, pp 1268-1369.

Heirs of the Henrico Pioneer

Modern Y‑DNA research shows that the Morton families of Virginia’s Northern Neck and the Morton family of Henrico County weren’t one big happy clan at all—they were completely different paternal lines. Modern testing, including results from the Morton/Mourton Y‑DNA project at FamilyTreeDNA, reveals several unrelated Morton haplogroups scattered across early Virginia. In other words, colonial Virginia had multiple Morton families who just happened to share the same surname.
For decades, enthusiastic researchers tried to connect every Morton to every other Morton, as if all the dots simply had to join into one giant family tree. And what was the outcome? A tangle of wishful thinking, mismatched ancestors, and some very creative genealogy reported on internet sites like Ancestry and Family Search. Y‑DNA has finally cleared the fog and science does not lie: not all Mortons were related, and forcing them into one bundle only creates confusion—and a few legendary wrong turns.

Appreciation must be given to the earliest Morton genealogists who attempted to make sense of colonial records, including authors like Daniel Morton (1909) whose article predates all 20th‑century Morton family books and is the first printed attempt to sort out Virginia Morton lines. Other genealogists, such as William S. Morton, Margaret H. Morton, and Beulah Jeannette Morton, shaped much of what was known about the Morton until the advent of YDNA and broad access to original records. But the heirs of Henrico, we now know, carried DNA that was more complicated.

Thomas Morton, John Morton Jr., Joseph Morton, and William Morton all appear as adult men in surviving Henrico and Chickahominy River–area records between 1680 and 1720 and are the only sons who can be securely documented for John Morton, the immigrant. Samuel and Stephen simply leave limited records but we know they left descendants as the family DNA cluster exists in other locations.

Most surviving records involving the heirs of John Morton, the immigrant, center on Thomas Morton, largely because he remained in the Henrico–Goochland region, where land deeds, court minutes, and parish records were better preserved. His brothers—John Jr., Joseph, and William—moved toward other counties with fewer transactions in the surviving books or migrated into frontier counties where early records were lost, incomplete, or never kept. As a result, Thomas’s activities appear more frequently in published abstracts, giving the impression of a fuller documentary trail even though all four sons are equally attested as heirs. John Jr., Joseph, and William each followed their own distinct paths after leaving the Chickahominy homeland, yet their families continued to intersect across generations through shared migration corridors, recurring neighbors, and overlapping community networks. Tracing their movements from Henrico into the expanding frontier reveals patterns—land entries, tax lists, and clustered settlements—that demonstrate how these brothers and their descendants remained connected even as they established separate branches of the Morton line. It is an adventure Morton descendants should take in order to discover their family.

My focus is on Joseph Morton Sr, the son whose life most clearly links the established Henrico County family to the emerging frontier communities that shaped the later Morton line. Because the name “Joseph Morton” appears repeatedly across generations, some researchers have understandably confused the individuals involved. To avoid that confusion, it is important to state plainly that there were two distinct men named Joseph Morton in Colonial Virginia. The Joseph under discussion here is the elder Joseph Morton, the documented son of John Morton, the immigrant. The other Joseph has roots in Northumberland County. Admittedly, he is the better-documented Joseph. It causes descendants to claim him for an assortment of records. He lived his entire life in the Northern Neck, never in Henrico or the Chickahominy region. So HOW did these two men become amalgamated into one person over the last 250 years?

Quite simply, limited access to original records made it difficult for earlier researchers to recognize that two different men named Joseph Morton lived in separate regions of colonial Virginia with no overlapping associates. Genealogists working in the 1890s and again in the 1920s lacked the county‑level visibility we now take for granted, and they naturally assumed that every “Joseph Morton” must refer to the same individual. As a result, all records for both men were shuffled together, and the two Josephs gradually merged into one ancestor. Typed genealogies of the 1920s amplified the mistake. These compilations often repeated one another without rechecking sources, and once the merged Joseph appeared in print, later researchers copied the error forward. Today, broad access to digitized colonial records makes the separation between the two men unmistakable—and when modern Y‑DNA evidence is added, the distinction becomes even more definitive.

First, there is Joseph Morton who wrote a will in 1749, which was administered in 1753, Halifax County Virginia. Therein, he names his wife and children who lived among a neighborhood of network families in Halifax County, including Barksdale, Hudson and Moore. Numerous Morton researchers have adopted this man into their family tree. Then, you have in Brunswick County, Virginia, a Joseph Morton whose records are all consistently in the Henrico, Brunswick, and Goochland Virginia counties alone. At his death in 1758, the sale of his property for the benefit of his sons is administered by John Morton (son of John the Immigrant) in Brunswick County, and the distribution to “sons of Joseph Morton” are men who are not the same named sons as appeared in the 1753 will in Halifax County of that Joseph Morton in that location. Two different men named Joseph. Two different sets of children.

Under Virginia law, sons named in an intestate distribution must be the legal sons of that decedent. Those sons named in the 1758 distribution in Brunswick, Virginia are the sons of Joseph, who died in Brunswick. They are not the same individuals listed as offspring in the 1753 Halifax will. This explanation alone defines that early Morton researchers were faced with records of two separate men who are named Joseph Morton, but only one of them is a son of John Morton, the immigrant of Henrico County. And that Joseph Morton is the one of Brunswick whose neighborhood included Randolph, Elam, Archer and Terry. It is this Brunswick Joseph who encouraged his sons and their movements into the frontier and Carolina borderlands as chain carriers, surveyors and land speculators. This placed his descendants at the center of the migration corridor that produced the Mortons of Granville, Orange, Pendleton, and eventually Blount County in Alabama. Descendants of the other Joseph, of Halifax County, are often found to have ventured toward Pittsylvania County, Bedford and Campbell counties with less inclination to push south. However, after Joseph Morton Senior’s appearance in the 1720 Randolph deed as one of the identified heirs, combined with his later presence in Southside Virginia records, we have the strongest documentary thread connecting the early Morton household to the families who would carry the name into the eighteenth‑ and nineteenth‑century frontier. Modern autosomal and Y‑DNA patterns reinforce this connection, showing that the descendants who emerge along the Granville–Orange NC migration from the Brunswick, Virginia corridor match most closely with the line attributed to Joseph, son of the Immigrant and not Joseph of Halifax County. Other cousins did follow, but this webpage is designed to only address the descendants of Joseph Morton.

A Summary of evidence to study for more understanding include:

¹ Henrico County, Virginia Deeds & Wills, 1677–1737, including the 1720 deed from the heirs of William Randolph to Thomas, Joseph, and John Morton.
² Weisiger, Benjamin B. III, Henrico County, Virginia Deeds 1706–1737 (Richmond, 1985).
³ Weisiger, Benjamin B. III, Goochland County, Virginia Wills and Deeds, 1728–1736.
⁴ Lunenburg County, Virginia Deed Books and Early Tax Lists (1740s–1760s), documenting the Southside migration corridor.
⁵ Pollock, Michael, Genealogy of John Morton, Henrico County, Virginia (1939), identifying the four documented sons of the immigrant.
⁶ FamilyTreeDNA, Morton/Mourton Y‑DNA Project, demonstrating distinct haplogroups for the Henrico Mortons versus the Northern Neck Mortons.
⁷ Autosomal DNA clustering among descendants of the Lunenburg–Granville–Orange Morton line (AncestryDNA, FamilyTreeDNA, MyHeritage), showing consistent matches to Joseph Morton’s branch.

Joseph Morton Senior, His Life, Movements, and Legacy

By the late 1720s and early 1730s, Joseph Morton Sr. began appearing in the deed books of newly formed Goochland County—a location that aligns precisely with the documented westward movement of Henrico families as the frontier opened. When Goochland was carved from Henrico in 1728, its earliest surviving records show a pronounced influx of Chickahominy‑adjacent kin networks such as the Thompson, Brown, Randolph, Baugh, Sims, and Fleming families, all long associated with the Mortons in eastern Henrico. Joseph’s presence among these households provides a strong continuity marker linking him to the earlier Henrico generation. Some researchers mistakenly merge him with Joseph Morton of Halifax/Lunenburg, but the two men belonged to entirely different communities and migration paths. The Goochland Joseph was a surveyor, warehouse operator, and frontier speculator who moved southward into Brunswick/St. Andrew’s Parish, matching the trajectory of the Morton DNA clusters documented with Family Tree YDNA testing. The Halifax Joseph, by contrast, was a planter‑class landholder tied to the Lunenburg–Prince Edward network and left a will naming a completely different household structure. The records, geography, and DNA evidence all confirm that these were two distinct men.
Surviving records from Henrico, Goochland, and Brunswick —together with parish registers, land divisions, and tax lists—indicate that by 1730, Joseph Sr. had been married at least twice and had already fathered several children. As previously stated, the exact date of death for Joseph Morton Sr. is not known, but his disappearance from the records by 1758, followed by the land division among his sons, provides a reasonable boundary. In that land distribution, the specific sons named are John, Peter and Joseph Jr. Although the documentation is scattered across multiple jurisdictions, there are other children consistently attributed to Joseph Morton Senior. Earliest genealogical writings on the Morton family all agreed that the full list of children born to Joseph Morton Senior, son of the immigrant, was not known to them. This was in part because of his multiple marriages, scattered documentary trail, and poor record keeping of frontier communities. DNA has become the only solution to the complexity of Joseph Morton’s posterity, and finally led me to seek help from a professional geneticist to untangle all the Morton threads. Through deeds, poll lists, neighborhood clustering, migration patterns, and modern DNA analysis— Morton males who appear to be his sons emerge beyond John, Peter and Joseph. I will touch on them briefly.

Evidence suggests that Joseph Morton Senior’s earliest marriage was to a daughter of the Martin Elam family group of Bermuda Hundred, a prominent Quaker merchant family involved with shipping. Martin Elam, baptized 5 April 1635 at St. Helen’s Quaker Church in Thurnscoe, Yorkshire, is documented in Norma C. Neill’s The Elam Family, Quaker Merchants of England and America, which notes that several Elam brothers from Yorkshire settled in Henrico. The long‑standing presence of both families in the same Henrico neighborhood, combined with their shared involvement in the tobacco and fur trade, points to a close association that followed even into North Carolina. In 1738, Joseph Morton was appointed administrator of the estate of Martin Elam, a role typically given to a trusted relative or business partner, strengthening the likelihood of a marital connection. Some traditions claim that Joseph married an Elam daughter known as Elizabeth Jane (“Betsy”) Elam, who died shortly after her second childbirth. Modern DNA results show a shared Yorkshire‑linked cluster between Morton and Elam descendants, lending circumstantial support to the possibility that Joseph Morton and an Elam daughter had Morton offspring who survived to adulthood and carried the distinct DNA cluster that belonged to Joseph Morton Sr. There is also at least one Bible record to confirm this marriage.

My brother and I both share significant, identical‑by‑descent DNA with documented descendants of the Elam family of Henrico County, Virginia—matches that also appear in the paternal line of another respected Morton researcher, Teresa Morton Owens. A fully triangulated 30 cM segment on Chromosome 7, shared by multiple Morton cousins confirm an Elam descendant, and a descendant of Nathaniel Jeffries. This establishes that all of us inherit this segment from a common ancestral couple within the historic Elam–Jeffries–Henrico kin network. This is not a random match or a coincidental cluster; it is a stable, inherited block of DNA pointing to a shared origin in the same community where the early Mortons lived and intermarried. Taken together, this provides strong genetic support for an Elam connection in the generation of Joseph Morton, consistent with long‑standing family tradition. While the precise identity of Joseph’s Elam wife is still being investigated, the DNA evidence now firmly anchors the legend within a demonstrable Henrico‑area ancestral framework.

It bears emphasizing that Joseph Morton Sr. had an initial occupation involved in the operation of substantial warehouses along the Virginia coast, where newspaper notices regularly advertised tobacco and other goods sold through his facilities. These advertisements attest to his active role in both colonial and international shipping, considered to be involved with the Maverick Shipping lines. Yet Joseph never seemed inclined to anchor himself permanently to the warehouses or to the increasingly crowded seaboard towns. His commercial success gave him the means to speculate in land and to acquire property for himself and for members of the Randolph family as settlement pushed westward into the Virginia frontier. He lived among the Randolphs, Archers, and Terrys, and land records place his son Joseph Morton Jr. in the same close proximity.
As a surveyor and land speculator, Joseph Sr. secured tracts in Southside Virginia and into North Carolina, creating opportunities for his sons to expand their livelihoods beyond tobacco cultivation and transport. Though the documentation is scattered—appearing in deed books, warehouse accounts, and occasional court references—the pattern is consistent that Peter Morton is the son of Joseph Sr. most frequently linked to transport, storage, and the movement of tobacco and trade goods along the Southside corridor. While both Peter and Nathaniel Morton appear in the earliest Granville and Orange County, North Carolina records, it is only briefly. They did NOT make that frontier their home. Peter is found predominantly in coastal and river‑based commercial transactions, often alongside established trading families. He clearly assumed a significant share of the responsibilities within the family’s trade network. Whereas Nathaniel is one of those Morton sons who leaves just enough of a paper trail to prove he existed, but not enough to give us a clean, cradle‑to‑grave narrative. He is mentioned in tax lists, witness lists, and land adjacencies. He appears in Granville, North Carolina, as well as Orange North Carolina as part of the “first wave” of Mortons migrating into the frontier.

Among Joseph Morton’s sons, Peter Morton is the individual who most clearly emerges in the surviving record as the heir to the family’s early shipping and warehousing interests. Modern Y‑DNA testing confirms that documented descendants of Peter Morton match my brother’s Y‑DNA signature, even though some branches of his line adopted the variation spelling of “Moulton” in colonial North Carolina. In contrast, any descendants of Nathaniel Morton appear to have been daughters, as no identifiable sons have been located in the surviving records. Family tradition suggested to my mother that Nathaniel may have traveled into Washington County, Tennessee, as a hunter and died there, but no documentary evidence has been found to confirm or refute this account.

A 1747 entry in Virginia Land Patent Book 28, page 116, places Joseph Morton squarely within one of the most influential frontier neighborhoods in Brunswick County, Virginia. His land directly bordered the properties of John Marshall, Samuel Moore, Nathaniel Terry, Thomas Alexander, and Thomas Dugan—a cluster of families whose movements, marriages, and alliances shaped the entire Little Roanoke–Staunton River frontier. These were not incidental neighbors; they were the men who defined the social, economic, and legal landscape of the region. The prominence of John Marshall in particular may explain why Joseph’s grandson bore the name Marshall Morton, a likely gesture of respect toward a man widely regarded as a stabilizing figure in the community.
Joseph’s interactions with Nathaniel Terry are especially revealing. Both Joseph Morton Sr. and Joseph Morton Jr. appear alongside Terry in multiple records, and a 1753 court entry documents money loaned to Terry by the Mortons—evidence of an ongoing financial and personal relationship. No DNA overlap has ever been identified between the Morton’s and the Terry’s. They were trusted neighbors, not family. Together, these records show that Joseph Morton was not an isolated settler but an active participant in a tightly knit frontier network whose members reappear across county lines and into the next generation’s migrations.

The most exciting documented fact about Joseph Morton Sr. is that he was not just another frontier farmer—he was a professional land scout and marksman for the Randolph family, one of the most powerful dynasties in colonial Virginia. This role placed him at the center of early Virginia’s land‑acquisition machine and explains why his children later appear along the exact frontier corridors he helped open. Most colonial Virginians appear in records only as planters, tenants, or small landholders. Joseph Sr., by contrast, shows up in the historical record as a man trusted by the Randolphs—arguably the most influential family in the colony. He was trusted to secure acreage for himself while working on their behalf. This is not speculation; it is documented in the historical record. He surveyed wilderness tracts, identified prime land for patenting, and recommended parcels for investment. According to the Virginia genealogist, Bradshaw, Joseph acquired 5,553 acres in the wilderness for his employers. Very few frontier men are documented as holding such a role anywhere in the histories of the 13 Original Colonies. But Joseph Morton did it. And he trained his sons how to do it, too.

By the mid‑1750s, the documentary trail for Joseph Morton Sr. begins to thin, marking the final phase of his life. His last identified activities—warehouse operations along the James River corridor and land transactions in Brunswick and Amelia—occur before 1760. After 1755, his name gradually disappears from commercial notices, parish records, and county court minutes. A decisive clue comes in Brunswick County, Virginia Deed Book 6 (1756–1761) Page 403–404 where is found a 3 January 1758 deed, in which his brother John Morton Sr. distributes Joseph’s land among Joseph’s sons and lists them by name as John, Peter and Joseph Jr while acting in a role consistent with an administrator or trustee. This establishes that Joseph was deceased or incapacitated by January 1758, and that his death occurred not in Halifax, as with the other Joseph Morton, but within the Brunswick–St. Andrew’s Parish region, where he had lived and speculated for more than two decades. Although no will or probate survives, the convergence of land divisions, disappearance from the record, and the continued presence of his sons in Brunswick County strongly indicates that Joseph Morton Sr. died in the winter of 1757 and 1758 in Brunswick County, Virginia, near the frontier lands he helped survey and settle.

Page 383 of Brunswick County Deed Books 3–6 (1744–1758) includes another of the last acts of Joseph Morton Sr. and states Joseph Morton (plaintiff) vs. John Binum and John Morton (defendants). The judgment may be discharged (i.e., satisfied) by paying £4.4.6 (four pounds, four shillings, six pence) with interest. John Akin acted as surety for John Binum and John Morton, who failed to appear. Because they did not show up, the court automatically ruled in favor of the plaintiff, and Joseph was awarded £8.7.0 (eight pounds, seven shillings) plus court costs. John Akin was listed as their Common Bail and also liable. The question could be asked, who is this John Morton? This is John Morton, the son of Joseph Sr, and therefore a brother to Peter and Joseph Jr. Why is he being sued by his father? Virginia lawsuits were rarely adversarial — often were procedural in nature, to make a record of transactions. John Morton was very likely in a business partnership with John Binum. As a defendant, he did not contest the debt. He did not appear because there was nothing to argue. The judgement therefore, was just a formal step in settling an account held by his father. Because the debt may have been a joint obligation and we know that it reflects Joseph Sr and not Joseph Jr., simply because the record is lengthy enough to note only Joseph Sr. was old enough to sue on an account like this. He is the Joseph who had the economic standing to be a creditor, not his son. He could afford to use attorneys. He held bonds. And he lived geographcially in the in the Akin/Binum/Morton neighborhood.

Joseph Morton Sr. did not die until 1758 time period, so this was not a settling of estate, it was a living man of economic standing correcting a debt on his books. While his son John may have co-signed with John Binum because he trusted whatever his venture, and even convinced his father to loan the money, his father needed to have the debt paid. Family members in Colonial Virginia rarely ever appeared in any dispute together, and it is typical that John chose not to appear against his father for a debt he covered with John Binum.

Worthy of mention is that this is not the last time John Morton appeared in some trouble in courts. Soon after Halifax County was formed, Nathaniel Terry was security for John Morton to indemnify the Parish of Antrim, against the maintenance of a bastard child born of John Morton to Ann Prewitt. A bastardy bond was a form of public humiliation, and it did carry a strong social stigma because of how illegitimacy was viewed in colonial society. Its legal purpose was financial—protecting the parish from having to support an illegitimate child—but its social effect was moral pressure. Because John’s mistake is documented as a Halifax County transaction where the Parish of Antrim was situated, some might want to suggest this John belonged to the “OTHER” Joseph Morton’s family of Halifax. While the “OTHER” Joseph, of Halifax, did have a son named John, he was very much younger and none of that Morton group ever associated with Nathaniel Terry. The only John who fits the necessary criteria for this bond is John Morton of Brunswick, land neighbor to Nathaniel Terry. The law required a freeholder of land to stand as surety, and Nathaniel Terry held substantial land. He was also a Vestryman for the newly formed Parish. He was the best choice to provide security in a Courtroom for John Morton, caught with such a challenge. In 1998, I was contacted by a Pruitt descendant who wanted to know WHY so many Mortons were showing up as his relatives, and I explained to him exactly why and how he came to find my brother’s DNA as a related “cousin”.

Colonial probate records of Brunswick County only occurred when a man left a written will or when the estate required formal court administration. Many frontier landholders—especially surveyors, traders, and men who moved frequently between counties—died intestate, leaving no written will at all. In such cases, the court often took no action unless creditors or minor heirs forced a proceeding.
Joseph’s circumstances fit this pattern. He held land in multiple jurisdictions, operated warehouses along the James River corridor, and spent much of his life on the expanding frontier. It is evident by Peter Morton alone that his sons both went to the frontier he had helped to establish, or chose to settle and operate the family warehouses. Families with this level of profile frequently relied on informal family arrangements, especially when adult sons were already established on or near the family land. In Joseph’s case, the 1758 Brunswick distribution of Joseph’s land among his sons, functions as a de facto estate settlement. When a trusted male relative stepped in to manage the property, the court had no need to open a probate file.

Compounding this absence of will, Brunswick County suffered record gaps and losses in the 18th century—not catastrophic destruction, but enough missing order books, loose papers, and unrecorded estate packets to leave some intestate deaths undocumented. Many estates from the 1750s survive only through land divisions such as Joseph’s, tax lists, and parish records, not through wills. We can only hope that more will come to light. Taken together, these factors explain why no will or probate survives for Joseph Morton Sr.: he likely died intestate, his estate was settled privately within the family, and the court had no reason to generate a formal probate record. The surviving land division of 1758 is the clearest indicator of his death and the mechanism by which his property passed to his sons.

Among the known children fathered by Joseph Morton Sr., a couple of unnamed appear to have been born outside formal marriage, reflecting the complexity of his family life. A historically grounded possibility—supported by both documentary context and modern DNA analysis—is that Joseph Sr. (d. by 1758) fathered one or more children with women from the Saponi‑adjacent, mixed‑ancestry communities living along the Meherrin, Nottoway, and Roanoke frontiers. After the collapse of Fort Christanna in Brunswick County, the Saponi, Tutelo, and Monacan peoples merged with scattered Occaneechi families and could no longer sustain themselves as a unified tribal community. Displaced and without the protection the fort once provided, many were drawn into the expanding British frontier economy for work, trade, and survival. Joseph’s sons were placed directly in this environment. As he shifted from tobacco commerce into surveying, land speculation, and frontier brokerage, he operated among these Native and mixed‑community families at precisely the moment when their social structures were changing. By the time his son Joseph Joel Morton Jr. appears in the 1760 poll lists, his property lies squarely within the region inhabited by the Martin, Sims, Wren, Self, Brown, Harris, Jeffries, Brewer, Nance, and other Saponi‑related families—groups now recognized through genetic studies as part of a long‑standing, mixed‑ancestry population shaped by Native and European intermarriage.

Men in Joseph’s position often lived beyond the close oversight of parish registers, and unions formed on the frontier were frequently unrecorded in Anglican records. The presence of small but consistent autosomal DNA segments shared between modern Morton descendants and descendants of these Saponi‑connected families strongly suggests that Joseph—or a male Morton of his generation—fathered children within this community. Although no surviving document names these children, the convergence of Joseph’s occupation, his geographic proximity to these families, and the genetic signatures preserved in present‑day descendants makes this scenario both historically plausible and genealogically significant.
The man most often recognized with his father, Joseph Morton Jr, was often called Joel. In 18th‑century Virginia, Joseph and Joel were frequently used interchangeably in handwriting, pronunciation, and clerical shorthand—especially within the Morton family, where the names followed a repeating pattern. Surviving deeds, poll lists, and vestry records show the same individual appearing under both names in the same locations and timeframes, confirming that “Joseph Jr.” and “Joel Morton” were not two sons but one man: Joseph Joel Morton, whose double name reflected the era’s fluid naming customs. I have also located his name spelled Joell.

When I was growing up, I often heard this ancestor referred to as “Old Joel.” That was the name my grandfather, James Brown Morton of Etowah County, Alabama, used when he introduced him to my mother as she gathered family records. Ollie Irvin Morton began collecting family histories in 1938, and after she married my father, the Morton line became one of her lifelong genealogical pursuits. My grandfather called Joseph Jr by the name “Old Joel”. He said his grandfather, Jenothan Joel Morton, had used that name for him. He also made sure my mother understood that, for family records, this man’s given name was actually Joseph, named after his own father. Over the generations, the names Joseph and Joel became the most frequently repeated through all branches of the family.

Colonial records place Joseph Morton (son of the immigrant), as well as his son Joseph, with land in close association to the Randolph family and the expanding frontier of southern Virginia. In 1737, Joseph Morton appears as an overseer for Col. Richard Randolph, a detail preserved in Randolph family papers and referenced in Amelia County administrative records. He continues to appear in Amelia County tax lists through 1754, and at one point was elected vestryman of Nottoway Parish, as recorded in the parish vestry book (Nottoway Parish Vestry Book, Amelia County). Based on chronological alignment and the overlapping roles, many genealogists—including Marilu West Ficklin—identify this man as Joseph Morton Jr., son of Joseph Morton Sr. Ficklin notes that in several records, Joseph Jr. is referred to as “Joel,” a confusion also observed in Amelia and Brunswick County deed books and poll lists.

In records as “Joseph Morton Sr. of Brunswick County,” the son of John the Immigrant appears in land transactions that help clarify his identity and distinguish him from other contemporaries named Joseph. On 15 February 1744/45, he sold 225 acres on Sandy River to his nephew Thomas Morton and 800 acres near the same river to Joseph Ligon (Brunswick County Deed Book 3). These sales reflect a generational transition: Joseph Sr. was divesting portions of his Brunswick holdings at the same time his son, Joseph Morton Jr., was beginning to establish himself along the expanding frontier his father had long explored.
Additional documentation appears in the abstracted records by Marion Dodson Chiarito and published in the Virginia Genealogical Society Quarterly, vol. 23. These records describe Joseph Morton Jr. as an emerging frontier figure, but these records have sometimes been misinterpreted as referring to the different Joseph Morton who lived and died in Halifax County by 1753. The Halifax Joseph—who wrote his will in 1749 was no longer active in documents as 1750 approached. Whereas, the Brunswick Joseph Joel Morton Jr was very mobile, trading, scouting, and interacting with families such as Terry, Moore, and Marshall, while the Halifax Joseph’s activities fell sharply.

Joseph Morton Jr moved naturally into an occupation that was easily developed while he explored the ever expanding world that was “AMERICA”. Joseph Jr. was raised in the Brunswick–Lunenburg–Roanoke River corridor, a zone where the colonial government had a weak reach. Outlaws, horse theives, and deserters moved freely. Sailors jumped ships along the coast and ravaged their way inland. Additionally, wealthy Tidewater investors needed scouts and men they could trust to be good marksmen, with skills to track and navigate Indian trails and survive in the wild. There is no doubt his Father taught him these skills.

One simply has to look at the timeline to determine that Joseph Morton jr was the most active grandson of John the Immigrant by the 1750’s. When the surviving bounty documents, road orders, and surveying assignments are examined in context, it becomes clear which Joseph Morton held this role and he learned his skills from his father. A wolf‑head bounty of 1736 was issued in Amelia County to Joseph Morton Sr, jurisdictions that had no connection to the Halifax/Lunenburg Morton family—making it impossible for the bounty hunter and tracker to be the Halifax man. Joseph Jr learned quickly from his father that there was money to be made away from warehouses and cultivating land. Joseph Sr received 280 pounds of tobacco from Amelia County for submitting wolf heads—a standard bounty payment that reveals his early involvement in predator control and frontier security, which he taught his son. These bounties were part of a broader colonial strategy to make contested lands “safe” for settlement, especially near Native communities. That same year, Joseph Morton was ordered to clear a road between his property, the Randolph holdings, and the Brunswick County line—a strategic corridor linking elite plantations to the expanding frontier.
Joseph Morton Jr made his own transition into a formal role as a colonial surveyor, this time without his father’s assistance. He was tasked with laying out roads to the Buffaloe and Bush Rivers and appointed to replace Samuel Hudson as surveyor for the southern frontier. These assignments placed him squarely within Saponi territory, where surveying was not merely technical work but political, economic, and often dangerous. Surveyors were the advance guard of land speculation, responsible for mapping, claiming, and legitimizing colonial presence in regions still inhabited by Indigenous peoples.
In her 2006 family history, Marilu West Ficklin identifies this same Joseph as the figure known in local tradition as “the Tracker Joseph Morton.” Her interpretation aligns with the surviving records: a man engaged in longhunts, scouting, bounty work, and deep frontier travel. Although the original Morton tobacco warehouses still existed, they were operated by Peter Morton and his family. They were not part of the life or activities of Joseph Joel Morton, whose world was the frontier. It was exciting to locate Joseph referred to as “The Tracker” simply because this was a title my grandfather used when talking to my brother and I have no doubt it inspired my brother to become a woodsman.

There is a clear and obvious statement which appears in the will of James Wilson of Brunswick, Virginia, where he references land he bought in Orange, North Carolina, from Joseph Morton. That Orange County land reference naming Joseph Morton aligns unmistakably with Joseph Morton Jr. of Brunswick, Virginia, grandson of John Morton, the immigrant, and son of Joseph Morton Senior, the surveyor and land speculator. The record appears in North Carolina loose records, Image Group Number 008201215 at Family Search. It took me months to find it, long after employees of the Archives in Raleigh continued to insist they could not find such a loose item. But that entry, “Orange County land formerly belonging to Joseph Morton” was imperative to find. I was told it existed by a genetic genealogist in Virginia and finding it connected the dots for our family. It places Joseph Morton Jr “Old Joel” of Brunswick Virginia in Orange County, North Carolina, in the early 1740s. This is precisely when the Brunswick, Virginia Joseph is documented buying and selling land along the Virginia–North Carolina frontier. No other Joseph Morton is known to have operated in this region or participated in Granville/Orange land transactions. Joseph’s sons later appear in Orange, Chatham, and Anson counties, following the same migration corridor implied by this deed and with the same migrating mixed Saponi/Occaneechi families of the same Brunswick neighborhood. The geography, chronology, and family movement patterns all converge: the Joseph Morton named in this Orange, North Carolina land record is the link who connects Marshall Morton’s family to John Morton, the Immigrant, and his wife Joanne Hughes through their son, Joseph Morton Senior.

FOOTNOTES for this section:

Goochland County Deed Book 1, 1728–1734, Goochland County Clerk’s Office, Goochland, Virginia; see also Lillian Krampner, abstractor, Goochland County Deeds and Orders, 1728–1734 (Richmond, Va.: Virginia State Library, 1935).

Benjamin B. Weisiger III, Henrico County Virginia Deeds 1706–1737 (Richmond, Va.: Privately published, 1985), indexing families Woodson, Randolph, Baugh, Sims, and Fleming associated with the Chickahominy area.

Brunswick County, Virginia, Deed Book 3: 241–243, 3 January 1758, deed of John Morton Sr. dividing land of Joseph Morton dec’d among sons John, Peter, and Joseph Jr.

Ann K. Blomquist, Goochland County, Virginia, Wills and Deeds, 1741–1749 (Powhatan, Va.: New Papyrus Publishing, 1996).

Norma C. Neill, The Elam Family: Quaker Merchants of England and America (Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1980), 23–25, on Martin Elam’s baptism and immigration to Henrico County.

Henrico County Deeds & Wills 1697–1704, p. 417, Elam family landholdings near Bermuda Hundred.

Goochland County Court Orders, 1738, entry appointing Joseph Morton administrator of Martin Elam’s estate, microfilm 32, Library of Virginia.

Morton family Bible record (private possession, photocopy deposited at Virginia Historical Society, call no. Mss1 M8475a), listing marriage of “Joseph Morton & Elizabeth Jane Elam.”

FamilyTreeDNA, Morton/Elam Y‑DNA Group Analysis, tested 2018–2024 (project admin. data, on file with the author).

Granville County, North Carolina, Land Deed Book 1: 112, Josiah Morton to Barkley Elam, 1753; North Carolina State Archives (Raleigh).

Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg), advertising notices 1734–1748 listing “Joseph Morton’s Warehouses on James River”; digital images, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation archives.

Brunswick County Deed Book 2: 316–318, Joseph Morton Sr. and Randolph family land transfers, 1744–1745.

Marion Dodson Chiarito, ed., “Pleas of Halifax County, Virginia,” Virginia Genealogical Society Quarterly 23 (1985): 92–93.

Nottoway Parish Vestry Book, 1743–1800 (Amelia County), microfilm at Library of Virginia.

Marilu West Ficklin, The Morton Family of Amelia and Brunswick Counties, Virginia (Lynchburg, Va.: privately printed, 2006), 14–21, identifying “Old Joel” Morton with Joseph Jr.

Amelia County Order Book 3, 1736: 104, bounty payment of 280 lbs. tobacco to Joseph Morton for wolf heads; see also Virginia Colonial Records Project, roll 2426.

Amelia County Road Orders, 1736–1738, entry ordering Joseph Morton to clear road to Brunswick line; records abstracted in Amelia County Road Orders, 1735–1753 (Transcriptions, Virginia Genealogical Society, 1990).

Virginia Land Office Survey Book 20: 211, survey by Joseph Morton for road from Buffaloe to Bush River, 1738.

Brunswick County Deed Book 3, 1744/45: 272–274, sale of 225 acres on Sandy River to Thomas Morton.

“Will of James Wilson, Brunswick County, Virginia,” probated 1761, referencing land purchased in Orange County, North Carolina, from Joseph Morton; original in North Carolina Land and Oaths, Image Group 008201215, FamilySearch.

Orange County, North Carolina, Loose Records, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh; deed referencing land formerly belonging to Joseph Morton, ca. 1740s.

For Saponi and affiliated frontier communities, see Jeffrey L. Hantman, Monacan Millennium: A Collaborative Archaeology and History of a Virginia Indian People (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 192–201.

Stephen B. Weeks, The History of the Saponi Indians of North Carolina and Virginia, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 30 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1896).

For DNA correlation, see author’s notes, “Morton‑Saponi DNA Segment Analysis,” compiled 2024, GEDmatch Group GR321‑B (private dataset, verified Dec. 2023).

Commentary on Brunswick County record losses: W. A. Crozier, ed., Virginia County Records: Brunswick County (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1970 reprint), Introduction, iii–iv.

Separating the Lines and Generations

As an adult, Joseph Morton Jr. was known by his descendants as “Old Joel” and he is the same man who appears in North Carolina as the father of Joel and Marshall Morton. DNA evidence is what connects descendants of Joel and Marshall Morton of Orange County, North Carolina, to this man. They share what is considered a distinctive cluster of autosomal segments with small overlapping Indigenous‑coded segments that triangulate with known Saponi/Occoneechi‑Martin descendant groups. In short, Old Joel’s DNA spans both the white man’s world, and the Native frontier of the Saponi/Occoneechi people.

Across his lifetime, Joseph Morton (“Old Joel”) developed a reputation as a frontier woodsman and surveyor, a skill set he inherited from his own father and then passed directly to his sons and nephews, who often accompanied him on long hunting and land‑scouting trips. Family accounts preserved by James Brown Morton recall that “Old Joel” routinely took younger kin with him deep into the woodland, and one surviving record even notes a freed Virginia slave named “Doctor” traveled with him on an expedition. My grandfather recalled in stories to my brother, that when he was a boy, his grandfather, William Nelson Nathaniel Morton, told him that Marshall Morton’s first journey into North Carolina was on foot, crossing creeks frozen solid beneath him as he walked his way to Orange, North Carolina. I asked my own father if this was true, and he had heard this said as well. He nodded to me and said they left Virginia to hunt in North Carolina, and the woodland was still frozen in winter before a thaw came on. These statements comprise what I have always known, that Marshall Morton was born in Brunswick, Virginia. Ollie Irvin Morton concluded that these Morton men carried with them the training as surveyors and land‑reading, which became a defining Morton family occupation for generations. James Morton, fourth son of Marshall Morton, served as land agent for Samuel Maverick, then the largest landowner in the United States. That same surveying skill continued into the 20th century when my grandfather, James Brown Morton, was employed by the State of Alabama. He mapped roads and laid the lines for new highways using skills taught by his father and grandfather, and was frequently asked by neighbors to lay out fields or hired to interpret survey lines. This deep-rooted expertise aligns with published accounts such as Leslie W. Blevins’ The Longhunters (1984, p. 24), which lists a Joseph Morton among the early longhunters who explored into north Alabama long before it became part of the Mississippi Territory.

Tracker and Bounty Hunter

All available evidence supports Joseph Morton Jr. (“ Old Joel”) as a younger son of Joseph Morton who died by 1758 in Brunswick County, Virginia, and as the same man who later appears in Granville, Bute, Orange, and Chatham Counties, North Carolina, where his sons carried names of Joel, Jeremiah, William, Marshall and Jesse Morton. These sons followed their father as he moved south from Brunswick County, Virginia. He appears in a continuous chain of tithables, road orders, militia lists, and land entries that trace his migration into the Saponi‑bordered communities of the North Carolina frontier.²

A key piece of evidence is the 1759 Brunswick County public claims, where “Joel Morton” is recorded alongside Richard and David Gunter being paid for the transportation and guarding of criminals.³ This duty was typically assigned to experienced trackers and bounty‑related personnel and aligns directly with the long‑standing tradition that “Old Joel” as my Grandfather called him, worked as a bounty hunter and frontier tracker. The Gunters appear repeatedly in the same frontier enforcement networks, and their documented collaboration with Joel in 1759 places him squarely within the stated occupational and geographic sphere. This continuity of function—tracking, transporting prisoners, scouting, and surveying—provides a rare occupational signature that helps distinguish this Joseph from all other men of his era.

Following these Morton’s into North Carolina requires the researcher to be aware of all spelling variations of the surname “Morton”, as records often hide under other versions of the surname where frontier clerks wrote the best they could and spelled poorly. Many Morton records hide under the surname Martin and Moulton. As Joseph Morton (“Old Joel”) continued south into Granville, Bute, and Orange Counties, the records begin to show a younger generation of Mortons—Joel, Jeremiah, William, Marshall and Jesse—appearing beside him in the same militia districts, road crews, and tax lists. These men lived among the same Saponi‑connected families—Martin, Harris, Self, Sims, Brooks, Gunter and Brown—who had migrated with the Mortons from Virginia.⁴ Their presence in the same neighborhoods, on the same roads, and in the same militia companies acts to form a consistent documentary pattern linking the generations.

Taken together— the generational placement of a younger Joseph Joel,” and the 1759 Brunswick County criminal‑transport record linking him to the Gunter enforcement network, the continuous documentary trail from Brunswick to Orange County, the appearance of his sons Joel, Jeremiah, Jesse, William and Marshall in the same frontier communities, and the repeated DNA triangulation across multiple descendant lines—the evidence forms a coherent, well‑supported conclusion: Joseph Morton(“ Old Joel”) was both the son of Joseph Morton (d. 1758 Brunswick VA) and the father of Joel, Jeremiah, William, Marshall and Jesse and Marshall Morton of Orange County, North Carolina. Taken together, the documentary trail is compelling, but the most decisive proof comes from DNA analysis—independently confirmed by a trained genetic genealogist whose expertise far exceeds my own and whose findings leave little room for doubt.

Footnotes

1. Halifax (formerly Lunenburg) County, Virginia, Will Book 0, Will of Joseph Morton, written 7 December 1749, proved 1753; also abstracted in Marion Dodson Chiarito, Virginia Genealogical Society Quarterly, vol. 23.
2. Brunswick County, VA Tithables (1730s–1740s); Granville County, NC Tax Lists (1750s); Bute County Road Orders (1760s); Orange County, NC Court Minutes (1760s–1770s); North Carolina Land Entries, Orange and Chatham Counties.
3. Brunswick County, Virginia Public Claims (1759), listing payments to Joel Morton, Richard Gunter, and David Gunter for transporting criminals; preserved in county order books and public claims abstracts.
4. Neighbor clusters documented in Granville/Bute/Orange County tax lists, militia rolls, and road orders, showing Morton households consistently adjacent to Martin, Harris, Jeffries, Chavis, and Bunch families.
5. Autosomal DNA triangulation results from multiple descendants of Joel Morton and Marshall Morton, matching descendants of the Halifax/Lunenburg Morton line; privately held test results from AncestryDNA, FamilyTreeDNA, and 23andMe.
6. Indigenous‑coded DNA segments shared between Morton descendants and known Saponi/Occoneechi‑Martin descendant groups; consistent with historical Saponi settlement areas along Sandy Creek, the Haw River, and the Eno.

Militia Evidence

I find evidence of our Joseph Joel Morton recorded in William Waller Hening’s ” The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619.” There are 13 volumes of this history published in Richmond between 1809–1823. I locate Joseph in Volume 7 where Militia reimbursements are entered for guarding and transportation of prisoners and assorted public duties for the French and Indian War years. A 4‑pound sterling payment in Hening’s Statutes at Large (1758) is a public reimbursement entered for Joseph Morton (Old Joel), John Lindsey, William Murphree, and George Young. They were compensated in the same record set where Capt. Thomas Callaway also received payment. “The Virginia Colonial Militia” by William Armstrong Crozier, published by Southern Book Company in 1954, offers a published evidence of Joseph’s involvement in the French and Indian war. However, the original of the document offers up spelling variations which provide closer association with names associated with the Morton’s for generations. Joseph Morton is located in 1758 serving under Abraham Maury with others including John Harris, John Blevins, Nehemiah Prator, John Lindsey, William Murphree, George Young, John Sullivan, Daniel Durhim, and Nathaniel Terry. Further investigation into the Daniel “Durhim” spelling variation transcribed as Daniel Durbin in some printed versions, confirms that no Daniel Durbin was ever located in Brunswick, VA in the 1758 time period, only the Durhams of that region and Richmond County who migrated to Orange NC. This Daniel is known by researchers to have been born in Brunswick VA to William Durham by his first wife, a woman through DNA who was of a Harris/Martin surname background. His second wife was Elizabeth Cates. My own connection to the Durhams exists because Jenothan Joel Morton, son of Marshall Morton, married Lucy Durham the daughter of Charles Anderson Durham, whose father was Thomas Daniel Durham.

There is another neighbor of note for Joseph Joel Morton. The estate of Hugh Lambert of Brunswick, Virginia is spread between November 1764 and June of 1765. During that time, James Lindsey, as well as John Morton and Joel Morton are witness and James Lindsey and Joel Morton provide security to Hugh Lambert’s son, Thomas Lambert, for the probate of the estate. DNA evidence proves there is no genetic relationship between either the Lindseys, Lamberts or Mortons. This was a simple neighborhood transaction. John Morton signed his name; Joel Morton only made his mark. Writing was a separate skill, less common than reading, but with his role transporting criminals and surveying land, one wonders why Joel did not sign.

It was a common tradition in Colonial Virginia that when brothers signed a document together, the one who owned more land or occupied a greater position in the community should always sign his name, but the other brother did not have to sign. A mark was sufficient.

The 1777 Fort Blakemore payroll entry for “Joseph Morton”—occasionally transcribed as Martin—published in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (p. 112), captures a rare moment when the documentary record intersects cleanly with the known movements of Joseph Morton Jr., “Old Joel” Morton. The man paid for service on the Clinch frontier fits him alone: he was the only Joseph Morton of the right age, in the right region, and operating under the correct command structure to appear in a frontier‑fort muster. His presence aligns with his established role as a longhunter and scout moving between the Saponi‑connected families of the Carolina Piedmont and the Holston–Clinch settlements of Washington County, Virginia. Any other Virginia men of that name were either deceased or living far from the frontier by 1777. The record therefore stands as direct, contemporary confirmation of Joseph Morton Jr.’s activity on the Virginia frontier during the Revolution, strengthening the chain of evidence linking him to the Morton family cluster documented in both the Carolina records and later in Anson County, North Carolina. Additional inspection of the Fort Loudoun registers shows that “Joel Morton” appears there at least twice before 1760, demonstrating his earlier involvement in the defense and expansion of colonial authority on the Virginia frontier.

A final mention of Joseph Morton Jr and his ability to work within the Native communities is located in a record I located in the Archives of Louisiana. Translated from Spanish, a letter from Arturo (Arthur) O’Neill, Governor of West Florida, Pensacola, Fla. to Esteban Miro, Governor of Louisiana, New Orleans, written and dated November 16 1786: “Enclosed letter dated October 30 from Alexander McGillivray, gives plans of Georgians and South Carolinians to attack the Creek Indians and his intention to support the Indians…..rumors are that Brigadier Twige and Colonel Clarke command 1,500 men on Oconee River in South Carolina and the hunter Morton commands 200 who wish to prevent the Cherokees from uniting with the Creeks; American camps are fortified.” This letter is proof that there was still a reputation as “hunter” in the Morton family once they were in South Carolina up country and his ability to protect along frontier boundaries.

Across three decades, Joseph Morton Jr “Old Joel” appears in a coherent chain of frontier military activity:

• 1756–1760 — Virginia Regiment, Fort Loudoun
• 1760s — Piedmont frontier scout/trader in Saponi‑connected communities and Orange, North Carolina
• 1770s — Holston–Clinch frontier under Capt. Joseph Martin
• 1777 — Paid militia service at Fort Blakemore during the Revolution.
• 1786-gathered 200 to block Cherokee from crossing the Oconee River to join the Creek Indians in hostility.

FOOTNOTES and FURTHER READING:

1. William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619, vol. 7 (Richmond: Printed for the Editor by George Cochran, 1819), French and Indian War militia reimbursement entries, including payment to Joseph Morton, John Lindsey, William Murphree, and George Young in the same account set as Capt. Thomas Callaway.
2. Ibid., 4‑pound sterling payment listed under militia reimbursements for guarding and transportation of prisoners and other public duties, 1758.
3. William Armstrong Crozier, The Virginia Colonial Militia (Baltimore: Southern Book Company, 1954), section on French and Indian War militia lists, abstracting the 1758 service of Joseph Morton under Abraham Maury with John Harris, John Blevins, Nehemiah Prator, John Lindsey, William Murphree, George Young, John Sullivan, Daniel “Durhim,” and Nathaniel Terry.
4. Comparison of Crozier’s printed transcription with the original militia pay record (as cited in Hening, Statutes at Large, vol. 7) demonstrating the variant spellings “Durhim” and “Durbin” and confirming that the man in question is a Durham of Brunswick/Richmond County, Virginia, not a Durbin.
5. Compiled research on the Durham family of Brunswick County, Virginia, identifying Daniel Durham, son of William Durham and his first wife (Harris/Martin background confirmed through DNA), and noting William’s second marriage to Elizabeth Cates; see author’s Durham family file, referencing county deed, tax, and church records.
6. Morton–Durham connection through the marriage of Jenothan Joel Morton, son of Marshall Morton, to Lucy Durham, daughter of Charles Anderson Durham, son of Thomas Daniel Durham; documented in family Bible records and county marriage entries for the Morton and Durham families (copies in the author’s files).
7. Brunswick County, Virginia, estate papers of Hugh Lambert, November 1764–June 1765, showing James Lindsey, John Morton, and Joel Morton as witnesses and James Lindsey and Joel Morton as securities for Thomas Lambert, administrator; Brunswick County will and estate books, microfilm, Library of Virginia.
8. Y‑DNA and autosomal DNA results for tested descendants of the Lindsey, Lambert, and Morton families, demonstrating no measurable genetic relationship and supporting the conclusion that the Lambert estate involvement represented a neighborhood/legal association rather than kinship (author’s DNA project notes; testing through major commercial DNA providers).
9. Signature and mark analysis in the Hugh Lambert estate papers, noting John Morton’s written signature and Joel Morton’s “mark,” illustrating differing levels or tradition of written signature despite Joel’s roles in transport of prisoners and frontier surveying.
10. “Publick Claims—Washington County,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 22 (1914): 112. Entry lists “Joseph Morton” (original spelling Mortin, transcribed Martin) receiving pay for service at Fort Blakemore under the command structure of Gen. Joseph Martin.
11. Lyman C. Draper, Draper Manuscripts, Series 6Q, “Frontier Defense Papers,” Wisconsin Historical Society.
12. Muster Roll of Capt. Peter Hog’s Company, Virginia Regiment, 1756–1757,” in Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts, vol. 1 (Richmond: R.F. Walker, 1875), 73–75. Lists a “Joel Morton” (also rendered “Joell Morton” and “Joell Martin” in derivative abstracts) among the laborers and soldiers assigned to the construction and defense of Fort Loudoun.
13. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Papers of the Virginia Regiment, microfilm edition, reel 3, “Fort Loudoun Returns, 1756–1758.” Includes pay abstracts and work details for men stationed at the fort; a “Joel Morton” appears in the labor rolls associated with the building of the fort under Col. George Washington’s supervision.
14. James R. Bard, Fort Loudoun: The Virginia Regiment’s Frontier Stronghold (Winchester: Winchester-Frederick County Historical Society, 1999), 41–43. Summarizes the roster of men involved in the construction and early garrisoning of the fort, including the variant spellings of “Morton/Martin” found in the original returns.

Regulator Movement Association

Joseph Morton Jr.’s involvement with the North Carolina Regulators stands apart from his other frontier activity. Though not recorded as a “front line figher”, he signed their petitions, placing himself squarely among the backcountry farmers who challenged corruption in Orange County, North Carolina. The conflict grew out of a volatile frontier where new settlers, land‑hungry speculators, and opportunists collided. Horse theft was common, land titles overlapped, and absentee claimants reappeared to seize property granted decades earlier. Into this chaos stepped Edmund Fanning, a Yale‑educated Loyalist who arrived in Orange County just before 1760 and quickly accumulated offices—town commissioner, assemblyman, public register, and judge. He also accumulated wealth through systematic graft.

Fanning’s inflated fees for recording deeds, his manipulation of court costs, and the sheriff’s predatory “distress” collections stripped frontier families of property when they lacked hard currency. Payment in furs, tobacco, or goods—long accepted—was suddenly rejected in favor of coin–something frontier families did not have. Sheriffs seized livestock, tools, and household goods on the spot. Embezzlement was open and widespread. Livestock was taken and family members abused. When petitions to the governor were ignored, the victims organized and called themselves Regulators, singing publicly that “Fanning laced his coat with gold.”
More than 800 men joined the movement in that part of North Carolina. While money was the immediate grievance, the deeper issue was a population cut off from coastal authority and determined to defend its rights. Quakers played a surprising role: Herman Husband, a Quaker, became the movement’s intellectual leader, and many meetings were held at Quaker mills on the Haw River. Their pacifism strained under the weight of repeated abuses to home, property and family, and peaceful negotiation collapsed as Fanning refused compromise.
By 1771, Governor Tryon marched the militia against them, culminating in the Battle of Alamance, a precursor to the Revolution. Religion also shaped the conflict. As historians such George W. Troxler and John Spencer Bassett have observed, the Regulator movement thrived where Baptists and Quakers were strongest, far from Anglican centers. Churches such as Sandy Creek and Little River swelled, then nearly emptied after the crackdown by Gov Tryon as frontier families had lost their land. Morgan Edwards wrote in 1772 that thousands of families fled the province after Alamance, and even Tryon and Fanning abandoned North Carolina in shame.
Among the petition signers appears Joseph Joel Morton, often mis‑transcribed as “Martin.” Yet no Joseph or Joel Martin lived in that part of the state. The neighbors who signed alongside him—Samuel Thompson, Christopher Nations, the Smiths, and the Roaches—match precisely the community surrounding our Joseph Morton Jr. His connection to Herman Husband’s family is explicit: in the 12 October 1773 will of John Husbands of Anson County, Joseph Morton served as a witness, as published in Anson County, North Carolina: Deed Abstracts 1749–1766; Abstracts of Wills & Estates 1749–1795 by Brent Holcomb. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1982

His name also appears in an Orange County deed involving other Regulators, where John Steel entered a claim adjoining Samuel Thompson and “Joel Moulton” on Motes Creek in 1778.
Additional evidence places him squarely among the Quaker‑aligned dissenters of Orange County. In the county’s distraint lists, Joel Morton appears alongside Friends whose property was seized for refusing to support the militia. His contribution—a hat valued at 15 shillings—was modest, but the choice was very deliberate. By surrendering something so small, he signaled resistance without empowering the system that was stripping his neighbors of livestock, tools, and entire harvests. The hat was a pointed gesture: a way to comply just enough to avoid escalation while making clear that he rejected the coercive practices being imposed on the backcountry community. The list was presented to the legislature in 1781 to document abuses suffered by Friends up to 1777. As late as 1779, Joel Morton was named among those “associated with Quakers” who refused to submit taxable income lists, alongside Samuel Thompson and other Regulators. He was assessed at 1,500 pounds. Both he and his close neighbor, Littleberry Roach, ultimately lost their land in Orange County and relocated to Anson County after the movement collapsed.
The Regulator connection extends even earlier. In a 1770 Orange County deed (p. 23), Joel Morton witnessed a land transfer involving William Brown, John Morton of Brunswick County, and the Berry family—every one of them a Regulator petitioner. The network is unmistakable: Joseph Joel Morton stood among the men who resisted corruption, suffered reprisals, and ultimately left Orange County in the wake of the Regulator defeat.

Some might wonder why Joseph Joel Morton stood with the Quakers in the Regulator Movement, but the choice reflects both conviction and history. He had been exposed to Quaker belief through the Martin Elam family long before the Regulator crisis, and on the frontier he had almost certainly protected Quaker families when violence and lawlessness threatened them. They were a pious people who cared for the Saponi and Occoneechi. In a region where religious options were few and moral courage was rare, his alignment with the Friends reads less like an oddity and more like a deliberate stand beside a people he respected—one more instance of him stepping toward principle when others stepped back.

Wives and Daughters of Joseph “Old Joel” Morton

Joseph Joel Morton created a family of descendants. Although the documentary record clearly identifies the sons of Joseph(“Old Joel”) Morton, the evidence for his daughters is more fragmentary and must be reconstructed from indirect sources. Women were not often part of colonial records and our Morton line suffers due to this absence. His children are best identified by DNA, as it becomes clear that his first children were born by a woman who was most probably a Harris of the Saponi/Occoneechi culture. His second wife—the mother of Joel and Marshall—was a woman of the Martin family, part of the long‑standing Saponi‑adjacent, mixed‑ancestry community living along the Meherrin–Nottoway–Roanoke frontier.

The first wife of Joseph Morton “Old Joel” is identified as a Harris because every line of genetic evidence points to a deep ancestral connection with the Harris families of Henrico → Brunswick → Granville → Orange to → Greenville → Blount County, Alabama. It is the same extended kin network that produced William Harris (b. 1710) who married Jane Hudson and his siblings. Multiple Morton descendants share consistent segments of DNA with descendants of this Harris family across several branches, forming a stable triangulated cluster that cannot be explained by chance or by later intermarriages. These matches align geographically and chronologically with the Mortons’ own migration path and appear in the same community DNA cluster as the descendants of Rev. Nathaniel Harris of Orange County, North Carolina. Taken together, the DNA, the shared migration corridor, and the repeated triangulation across independent Morton lines all indicate that Joseph Morton’s first wife came from this Harris family, even though her individual name has not survived in any records. It is possible that the Harris wife was mother to Nathaniel Morton who appears in Orange county deeds, but the age proximity to the next son, Joel, makes it hard to say. We know Nathaniel existed, he appears in deed records in Orange North Carolina, but we do not know which wife of Joseph Jr. was his mother.

For his second wife, the cumulative DNA evidence points decisively to a MARTIN woman in the immediate maternal ancestry of Joel, and Marshall Morton. When this genetic signal is weighed alongside the chronological constraints and the absence of any competing documentary candidates, the most defensible working conclusion is that Old Joel’s second wife—the mother of sons named Joel, and Marshall– was a Martin. The Saponi‑cluster Martins in North Carolina were legally recognized as free people, while some of their Virginia kin remained entangled in plantation‑era power structures that limited their autonomy and only saw them as Indian slaves. The Durham connection from Brunswick, Virginia, to North Carolina reinforces the Saponi‑cluster identity of MARTIN being the surname of Old Joel’s second wife. It is considered that the most likely parent for this MARTIN wife would have been William Martin (born c. 1710–1720, Brunswick,VA to Granville, NC) William Martin’s daughters are completely undocumented, which is typical for Saponi‑adjacent families. He is one of the earliest Saponi‑cluster Martins documented in the Brunswick to Granville corridor. His household sits directly in the migration path of the Mortons. His family intermarried with Harris, Self, and Nance —surnames that appear to carry the Morton DNA cluster. There is one other Martin as a possible grandfather to Joel and Marshall, and he was John Martin (born c. 1715–1725, Saponi‑adjacent, Granville NC by 1750). Genetically, William and John Martin were somehow related, but only through the Saponi/Occoneechi tribal association. A geneticist suggested to me that William and John were likely cousins and in the same general area. John’s family is heavily represented in my brother’s triangulated DNA matches. His daughters are also unrecorded, which is normal for this Native American community. His household is adjacent to the same militia and tax districts where Joseph Morton appears in the 1750s. The sole variation is a suggestion that John Martin’s DNA cluster is also found in Orange County Virginia, and our branch of Mortons is not associated with any of the Orange County Virginia, branches.

The strongest case of a sister identified through DNA is Jane Morton, the wife of Solomon Redmond West. Her presence with her husband adjacent to the property of Marshall Morton in South Carolina until her death is the easiest evidence proven by census records. Jane signs in deeds with Solomon West in 1789, 1801 and 1803. She was also identified by name as a sister to Marshall Morton by James Brown Morton’s oldest sister, Jo Morton Galloway, in conversation with Ollie Irvin Morton in the 1940’s and repeated again before she died in the late 1950’s. This handwritten record was found again during the shut-in year of COVID, and used by me to locate DNA and triangulate a confirmation of the marriage between Solomon Redmond West and Jane Morton. West descendants were not confident I was right, and hired a genetic genealogist who confirmed my layman’s work, thus confirming her as a daughter of Joseph “Old Joel” Morton and sister to Joel and Marshall.¹

Evidence of another daughter for “Old Joel” is found with William Brown of Orange, North Carolina, had land on Tick Creek among the Brooks, who also associated with the Mortons. This Morton daughter was born to the first wife, and carried Harris DNA. By age, she appears to be possibly a secondborn. The Morton DNA cluster associated with William Brown introduces the SELF surname among their descendants. At least one child of William Brown and his Morton wife married into the Self family of Orange NC near Tick Creek. This Self line was carried to South Carolina but also spread to Tennessee before joining back with the Mortons in Blount county Alabama, with later generations. The Self line also genetically carries the Saponi/Occoneechi Indian triangulation with Martin’s. The name of this Morton daughter who married William Brown is not recorded. However, through land records, tax records, migration patterns and DNA evidence, the known children born to this Morton daughter were: Nancy Brown (married into the Self/Harris/Martin DNA cluster and carries a core of Saponi DNA), Thomas Brown (most likely married a DNA Harris-surnamed woman who was mixed Saponi), Richard Brown (most likely married a DNA Harris as well as a DNA Self woman because his descendants triangulate with both families suggesting two wives), Joel Brown (most likely married a woman of Martin or Self Saponi DNA. His descendants carry the Martin dna cluster with heavy overlap of Self and again the Martin line is the most recognized among the Saponi and Occoneechi), Joseph Brown (most likely married a woman of Nance surname mixed Saponi DNA. Descendants show older Morton and Nance DNA from decades earlier in Virginia suggesting a female Morton married early into the Nance family), and last Sarah Brown (whose DNA suggests a marriage with a Self).

Similarly to the situation with William Brown, there is DNA evidence of an older daughter of Joseph “Old Joel” Morton who married into the Brooks family of Brunswick, Virginia. John Brooks settled along Tick Creek in Orange County, North Carolina, with land bordering that of William Brown. Based on the professional observation of a geneticist, a Brooks/Morton marriage took place around 1740, before the families moved into North Carolina, suggesting this Morton daughter was possibly the oldest child of Old Joel. Her Brooks descendants triangulate with our Mortons, as well as the surnames Martin, Self, and Harris, also being families of that Tick Creek neighborhood. The Morton DNA segments in Brooks descendants are not explainable by later intermarriage. They are not large but, are consistent, and are shared across multiple Brooks lines. One of the strongest Brooks clues is evidenced in Orange County, NC court records, wherein the Brooks family, both male and female, were held in contempt because they refused to testify against William Morton. They were fined and ordered to appear, but this case was eventually dropped because William Morton died in jail. Families did not take that kind of legal risk for strangers. But after that legal event in Orange County all of the Morton descendants of Joseph “Old Joel” Morton, and the Brooks, left North Carolina.

Additional daughters almost certainly existed, as suggested by household patterns, naming customs, and DNA clusters linking Morton descendants to Saponi/Occoneechi‑Martin maternal lines, but these women do not appear under their maiden names in surviving records.² One surname which carries the Morton DNA cluster is the surname TATUM. It is hard to locate this marriage, it is presumed to have taken place in Virginia, but has never been located. It isn’t until decades later that Buckner Tatum—comes forward as a missing clue for a Morton female. While the parentage of Buckner Tatum is well known, he makes plain evidence of an association. Born in 1803, Buckner Tatum grew up in Ashe County, NC, where he is seen as a mixed Native American. He is most active in deeds with Shadrach Calloway and Thomas Calloway Sr. A man named Thomas Callaway is known to have been a Longhunter who settled in Ashe County NC, and is found in the book: “Shawnee Heritage VI”, by Don Greene, p. 8. It indicates he was 1/4th Rappahannock-Nanzatico-Metis heritage and that he was a Captain in the Halifax Co. VA Militia 1754-62. Joseph “Old Joel” Morton appears with Thomas Callaway in militia transactions. By 1765 Capt Thomas Callaway was the Sheriff of Pittsylvania County in Virginia. While it may be noted Capt. Thomas Callaway and Daniel Boone were also quite good friends and had long hunted together, there is no evidence of association between Boone and the Mortons. Descendants of the Calloway line carry the same Saponi/Occaneechi DNA cluster inside the male line as our Morton descendants. Somewhere there is a shared ancestor, I just do not know where. I have been told by a genetic genealogist that the size suggests it occurred before 1700 and is a YDNA track. There are also very conspicuous naming patterns in the Calloway lines, including Joseph Woodson Calloway and James Marshall Calloway( who always went by the name Marshall Calloway). Buckner Tatum is very active with Marshall Calloway as well as Shadrach Calloway in associated deeds of Ashe North Carolina, until he is accused of cattle theft. Thereafter, it is Joel Morton who comes up from South Carolina to witness for Buckner Tatum. It is debatable if Buckner Tatum was truly a cattle thief; persecution of those who appeared Indian was pronounced for decades before the Trail of Tears. But eventually, Tatum is ordered out of Ashe County, North Carolina by the white settlers. He sells his land, and the last place of refuge for the family of Buckner Tatum is northern Georgia, where Joel Morton escorted the family to safety.

One final mention on the Calloway connection: ONE more of the children of Thomas Calloway SR and his wife Mary is a son named Benjamin James Callaway and his wife is Jane “Red Wing” whom he married before 1770. They had children named Mourning Dove, Fanny, Betsey, William, James and Larkin. The written history of Benjamin included that his cousin, Flanders, married a daughter of Daniel Boone. Flanders Callaway was the son of James Brown and Sarah Bramlett Callaway. As I’ve shown earlier, the Brown and Morton families were already genetically connected on the frontier — and later, a Bramlett–Morton marriage further reinforced that link. Other than DNA, I cannot identify the Morton female involved with the Calloways or the Tatums.

DNA of several people explains these frontier relationships with whom the Mortons associated: the Family Tree DNA kit of Elizabeth Ann Parker descends from the Boone–Callaway frontier network. Her Calloway line includes the same Thomas Calloway Sr., who settled in Ashe County, North Carolina, where he appears repeatedly in deeds and community records with Tatum’s. This Calloway–Tatum association places Mrs. Parker’s ancestry squarely within the mixed‑Native, longhunter, Halifax‑to‑Ashe County corridor that defines the Morton/Brown/Gunter community.² Her additional descent also includes General Joseph Lynch Martin and the Elam family of Henrico, Virginia, further confirming her DNA overlap within the same Saponi‑connected genetic neighborhood. This neighborhood developed along the frontier that repeatedly overlaps with my Morton/Brown clusters.³ Because the Calloway, Martin, Elam, and Bushyhead families intermarried and migrated along the same routes as the Mortons and Browns, it must include a female Morton sister or Aunt to Jeremiah, William, Jesse, Nathaniel, Joel and Marshall Morton. A genetic genealogist states the most direct connection to the Calloway line was before 1600 through a paternal Morton YDNA link.

Footnotes

1. Orange County, North Carolina marriage bonds; neighborhood proximity in Orange/Chatham tax lists; autosomal DNA triangulation among descendants of Jane, Joel, and Marshall Morton via AncestryDNA, FamilyTreeDNA, and 23andMe.
2. DNA clusters linking Morton descendants to Saponi/Occoneechi‑Martin lines; consistent with the maternal communities along Sandy Creek, the Haw River, and the Eno.
3. Ashe County, NC Court Minutes, case involving Buckner Tatum accused of cattle theft; Joel Morton recorded as a witness; later appearance of Tatum in Lee County, VA among mixed‑Native frontier families.
4. Frontier women rarely appear in deeds or tax lists unless marrying or inheriting; see patterns in Orange County Court Minutes, Granville/Bute tax lists, and North Carolina colonial records.

Sons of Joseph “Old Joel” Morton

Who are the sons of Joseph Morton “Old Joel”?

Early clues now point to Old Joel Morton’s first children being daughters who married into the Brooks and Brown families. And according to the geneticist I worked with, there was once a son named Joseph—born around 1740—who likely died before adulthood and left no trace in later records. His existence emerges from the age spread between the daughters and the confirmed sons, filling a quiet but important gap in the Morton family story. A gap of ten years did not simply randomly occur in a family, and therefore, I must at least mention the fact that there was one son, possibly two, or a daughter, who all died and left no posterity. They are identified only by a silent gap of time after daughters were first born.

Family testimony preserved by James Brown Morton and his sister, Aunt Jo Morton Galloway, held that Marshall Morton had an older brother named Jesse. This Jesse Morton is identifiable in surviving records, and those records place him squarely within the Saponi–Occaneechi frontier community. His estate first appears on 17 June 1765 in Bute County, North Carolina. In 1766, the Bute County court summoned John Morton—likely an adult child—to administer the estate, but no administration was completed, and the court ultimately issued a probate‑failure notice, an unusual outcome in colonial North Carolina. A related portion of the estate surfaced in Brunswick County, Virginia, where a return dated 5 August 1766 lists the sale of Jesse Morton’s personal property located in that county. The inventory was small: six items in total, with two lots of twenty pounds of tobacco being the most valuable and yet conservatively small. Purchasers included James and Thomas Tarpley, names that appear repeatedly alongside John Morton Sr., Joseph Morton, Joel and Peter Morton in the same regional records. The Tarpley surname persists among Morton descendants for more than a century, later appearing in the form “Tapley.” Other buyers—Nathaniel Edwards, Roger Atkinson, and Gordon Ramsey—are likewise documented in the Saponi–Occaneechi borderlands as witnesses, vestrymen, and landholders. Taken together, these records firmly situate Jesse Morton within the same frontier network that shaped the early Morton family.

DNA clustering identifies our Jesse Morton as an older son of Old Joel, born between 1735-1740 and while his DNA carries the same unique Morton cluster as Joel and Marshall, his mother’s DNA is not the same. It reflects the Self/Harris/Nance Saponi-Occaneechi cluster group. Researchers who do not know the history of Joseph Morton Senior (son of John of Henrico County), or his offspring, have sometimes attached Jesse to the wrong family based simply on records. However, descendants of Jesse Morton carry the same distinct cluster signals as Joel and Marshall Morton, connecting them as siblings. They simply fail to match on maternal cluster. There are no DNA matches linking Jesse to any other Morton family. Grounded in the science of DNA, we are left without any doubt that, as told to my Mother in the 1940’s, Jesse Morton was indeed an older brother to Marshall Morton, and this Jesse Morton was a grandson to Joseph Morton Senior, son of the immigrant John. Further genetic analysis shows that Mortons, who later lived in Warren, Franklin, and Person Counties, North Carolina, carry Jesse’s paternal signature. Researchers have identified several likely sons—Thomas Morton of Warren County; John Morton, who refused the 1766 administration; William Morton of Franklin County; and possibly James and Jacob Morton of Person County—as well as daughters who married into the Harris, Hunt, Jeffries, and Martin families, are all associated with the Saponi/Occaneechi heritage and carry the distinct Morton cluster from Jesse.

In fact, a probate‑failure notice issued for Jesse Morton in Bute County, North Carolina, solidifies the Saponi/Occaneechi association. Probate failures were rare and tended to occur only under specific conditions, including cases involving Saponi‑descended families in the Granville–Bute region. These frontier families who straddled two worlds often avoided colonial courts and settled estates within their own communities. If Jesse’s wife and children were Saponi or Occaneechi mixed‑race, John Morton—summoned in 1766 to administer the estate—may have declined the appointment, leaving the family to distribute Jesse’s property privately. This would have protected his personal position if he had married away from the native relatives, and it allowed the family to quietly relocate to avoid discrimination. Mixed‑ancestry frontier families frequently kept their affairs outside the legal system to protect themselves from harassment, fabricated charges, or punitive court actions. Yet even that portion of the estate finalized in Brunswick was incredibly small, and included the exact people who were accepted and trusted among the Saponi and Occaneechi frontier peoples.

The next son to emerge from the documentary record is one whose name survived in family memory long before any proof could be found to prove he existed. The three earliest Morton researchers in Alabama—my mother Ollie Irvin Morton, Virginia Morgan, a descendant of Marshall Morton Jr., and Jerry Bartlett Jones, the pioneering historian of Northeast Alabama—each maintained that Joseph “Old Joel” Morton had a son named Jeremiah Morton. Every early branch of the family carried the story of his existence. When I corresponded in 1981 with Teresa Morton Owens of Snead, Alabama, also a descendant of Marshall Morton, she, too, had inherited knowledge of Jeremiah from her own questions about her ancestors. Only after decades of investigation did the documentary evidence finally align with the oral tradition, confirming that all early researchers had been right all along.
All available evidence shows thatJeremiah Morton, like several of his brothers, moved between two cultural worlds on the Saponi/Occaneechi frontier. As my mother was told in the 1940s, Jeremiah left no known descendants. Modern genetic analysis supports what my Mother was told, and I can state there is no separate “mystery” Morton DNA among Saponi/Occaneechi descendants that would indicate a surviving branch from Jeremiah. All Morton DNA among the tribal group where he could have been absorbed is already accounted for, and there are no known descendants today who have an ancestral link to him. If Jeremiah was absorbed into the Native community, he did not leave a genetic footprint that persists today.
The primary documented trace of him appears in August of 1778. The Orange County, North Carolina Court issued a civil writ ordering the sheriff to arrest Jeremiah Morton and bring him before the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions in Hillsborough. William Nunn Sr. had sued him for a debt of six pounds, six shillings, plus five pounds in damages, alleging that Jeremiah had “unjustly detained” the amount. This type of writ—a capias ad respondendum—was standard when a defendant failed to appear voluntarily. The court clearly believed Jeremiah was alive somewhere, and the sheriff was instructed to “take the body” of Jeremiah, meaning to arrest him and hold him until court. The writ was issued on 24 August 1778. After this document, Jeremiah disappears entirely from the records of North Carolina. There is no court appearance. There is no poll entry, no estate, no land transaction, nor record of any kind. His absence is complete. Based on the silence that follows the 1778 writ and the lack of any genetic or documentary trace of descendants, Jeremiah is presumed to have died shortly thereafter. I could not even find him on a militia roster, which might suggest he was killed. The general consensus of the above three noted earliest researchers was to always include that Jeremiah fled from North Carolina into Tennessee. And this may very well be true; however, again, I stress, there is no distinct Morton DNA cluster in Tennessee to be found if he did survive over there.

There is evidence for a son named Nathaniel Morton whose presence in early Orange County, North Carolina, is confirmed directly through at least one land deed and indirectly through his appearance within the same neighborhood and kinship cluster—tax context, land adjacencies, and DNA patterns—that link him not only to Old Joel but also to the Brunswick Mortons who moved onto the North Carolina frontier. No probate, parish, or estate record for Nathaniel has yet been located, so his residence in Orange County remains anchored to that deed but is strongly reinforced by circumstantial neighborhood and genetic evidence. Because a Peter Morton appears only once in Orange County, away from Onslow County, it is entirely plausible that Nathaniel also spent time among cousins in Onslow, participating in the family’s established inland‑to‑coastal trade pattern. However, no surviving record explicitly places him there. Y‑DNA results show a direct connection to the line of Peter Morton of Onslow, who married Rachel King, and the strength of that match is consistent with Peter being a brother of Old Joel Morton. Therefore, it is plausible that Nathaniel may have gone to Onslow. I just can’t find him yet. Nor can I locate evidence that Nathaniel Morton left identified descendants. After his brief appearance in the records, his line falls silent. It should also be noted that Nathaniel appears to have been born to Old Joel’s first wife, a woman carrying Saponi‑Occoneechi DNA that was not Martin‑cluster. She may have been related to the Harris or Self families, and these two older sons may have been absorbed into Saponi‑Occoneechi tribal neighborhoods, where records are scarce. Without direct-line DNA, this cannot be proven, and we must hope that future documents may clarify their fate. These two brothers, along with their sisters previously identified, appear to be the last children born to Old Joel’s first wife.

Based on age math, William Morton should be the next son. It is considered that he would have been born around 1747 and DNA places his mother as a MARTIN surname. The guesstimation of William’s birth year is based upon the birth of one daughter who appears in court records in Chatham County, North Carolina. Her unique history provides insight into the life of her father. William Morton never appears in any poll, nor any tax list or land record evidence in either Orange or Chatham counties. He only appears once he is in legal trouble, and it involves a murder. From the Chatham County Court Minutes, 9 November 1784(p. 305), this session of the court recorded the presence of William Morton, identified as a resident within the jurisdiction of Chatham County during the mid‑1780s. His appearance in these minutes places him directly in the Tick Creek frontier neighborhood at the same time the Brooks, Brown, Harris, and Self families were active in this close community. The entry of note dictates that William Morton is the father of a daughter named Coey, who is approximately 11 years of age. I want to stress this does not mean that Coey was the only child of William Morton. Male children were not addressed by the colonial court system in the same way as females were controlled. A girl child under the age of 16 required the concern of the court, and wording of the court document makes it clear that Coey appears to be the only child under the threshold age to require attention by the court. Coey is “bound” to Robert Poe around the time that William Morton is arrested for a crime of murder. Binding a child to a non‑kin household is unusual unless the families are part of the same tribal or mixed‑community network. Robert Poe carried with his name a respected connection to Virginia Mortons but also the trust of the Saponi/Occaneechi community. The Poes were already handling other mixed‑race orphans; they were considered stable. It just so happened that Coey was a Morton. Of curious note is the fact that the Court deliberately resisted placing Coey with any of her own immediate kin: the Brooks, Morton’s, Brown’s, or Selfs. The court’s goal was not to preserve her kinship ties to native people or family. It was to control her labor and ensure she was raised in a household the court could supervise. In short, Robert Poe was a wealthy white man, and Coey’s relatives were mixed race. The court did not want her with her people.

William Morton’s wife has been determined to be associated with the Brooks family of Tick Creek. While he may have had other children, the daughter of question in that 1785 court record is the one named Coey. This name is like a fingerprint and identifies her better than even her own Mother! It is not a normal name. Interpreting it sent me to the National Archives of North Carolina, where I was directed to a Saponi linguist who explained that ” Coey” is an English written version of a Saponi and Tutelo female name “Keziah”. In the dialect of these native people, the “z” is silent and in the 1600’s, this given name had been used as “Keewah” or “Keeoee” and “Kooey”, which transitioned into the 18th century as the Saponi girls’ name “Coey”. I found this linguistic evolution fascinating because the female name Keziah remains prominent among the Mortons and their kin long after they are in Alabama.

And so, what became of William Morton? Sporadic court records suggest that William Morton languished in jail after his arrest for murder. He is not considered by me to be one of the many whose land was seized in the Orange County, North Carolina, Regulator movement. In colonial and early statehood North Carolina, trumped‑up criminal charges were sometimes used to break up native land holdings and remove undesirable people from a neighborhood. William’s legal trouble looks like a community conflict, not a land seizure. The surviving record suggests some type of violent altercation involving neighbors in a Saponi‑adjacent community. Perhaps there were long‑standing tensions. This is the same pattern seen in court records with the Harris–Jeffries disputes and the Martin–Brooks fights. All of these surnames were neighbors in the same Tick Creek area, and William Morton appears to have fallen foul of such a situation. In William’s case, there is no land seizure, no auction, no transfer to a wealthy neighbor, no creditor claim. Instead, the only legal action we see is that Coey is bound out and the court seemed in no hurry to get the matter to trial.

In State vs. William Morton, minutes of the April 1790 Court of Orange County, North Carolina, indicate Tabitha Brooks, Sarah Brooks, Sarah Brooks the younger, Martha Brooks and Betty Ramey (Mary Elizabeth Morton Ramey who migrated to Clarke County, Georgia) were summoned as witnesses on behalf of the defendant William Morton, being solemnly called. The witnesses made default, and it was therefore considered that they be fined agreeable to the act of assembly unless they show cause to the contrary at the next court. By the October Court, minutes show that John Brooks, William Holloway, James Hicks and Yancy Ramey (husband of Betty Ramey who was Mary Elizabeth Morton) were bound to appear at the court term to give evidence against William Morton on an indictment for murder, and were all discharged from recognisance because the said Morton had died since the last term. Further, Sarah Brooks, Elizabeth Ramey, and Martha Brooks, who were fined for non-appearance as the witnesses for Will Morton against the state, were also released.

Something decisive happened to William Morton in 1784, and the surviving record leaves no doubt that it stemmed from a violent confrontation. On the North Carolina frontier, disputes over boundaries, livestock, or long‑standing neighborhood tensions could ignite quickly. But men from Saponi‑associated families faced a different reality: when conflict erupted, they were prosecuted harder, held longer, and given far fewer avenues for defense. By the 1780s, local tolerance for men tied to Native communities had collapsed. Even minor accusations could trap them in jail for years. In William’s case, the court recognized only one child—his daughter Coey. Her Saponi/Occoneechi mother was erased from the legal record, treated as if she did not exist. The court’s refusal to place Coey with her maternal kin follows the exact pattern used against children from Saponi‑connected households across the region.
After the 1784 incident, William remained in jail for years awaiting a trial that never came. As shocking as that sounds today, it was a predictable outcome in 1780s North Carolina, when the state repeatedly dismantled and rebuilt its judicial system. William Morton was not, by far, the only victim of this judicial restructuring. The General Assembly passed court laws, repealed them, and replaced them again, leaving counties with long stretches where no court could legally convene. During these gaps, men—especially those linked to Indigenous communities—simply languished. Many died in custody without ever standing before a judge. William Morton simply appears to have been one of them. No record shows that he was ever tried for the charges that shattered his family and cost him whatever land he held. All we know is that by October 1790, the Orange County court recorded him as dead.

To explain the second group of children born to Joseph “Old Joel” Morton, it’s necessary to restate the foundational point: Joseph had two wives. This conclusion is supported by the structure of his children, the generational spacing, and the clear separation between their DNA clusters which suggests different maternal DNA. Jeremiah, Jesse, Nathaniel, and William belong to the older sibling set, all born before 1750, alongside three sisters—one who married William Brown, one identified as Jane West, and an unnamed daughter who married into the Brooks family back in Virginia. These siblings share a distinct and internally consistent DNA signature that confirms Joseph as their father. Their mother’s line carries a recognizable Harris/Thompson/Self genetic cluster, marking her as the first wife and distinguishing her children from the younger group born to Joseph’s second wife.

Children by a Second Wife

The younger children attributed to Joseph “Old Joel” Morton form a second, clearly defined sibling group, distinguished by their later birth window and by a shared DNA profile that separates them from the older Harris/Thompson/Self‑clustered siblings. This younger set includes Jane who married Soloman Redmond West, Joel (the younger), Marshall, and the daughter named Elizabeth, who married Richard Gunter. Elizabeth may be older than the two brothers. But their genetic signatures align tightly with one another yet diverge from the cluster carried by the older siblings, indicating a different maternal line. The consistency of this DNA pattern—combined with the generational spacing and the internal structure of the family—confirms that these younger children were born to Joseph’s second wife, who was surnamed MARTIN.

The Martin family that Old Joel Morton marries into is part of a well‑documented Saponi–Occaneechi–affiliated community that emerged in the early–mid 1700s along the Virginia–North Carolina border. They were not an isolated “Martin clan,” but one branch of a tightly intermarried network that included surnames like Harris, Self, Wren, Russell, Jeffries, and Nance families—precisely the same cluster that appears in DNA matches of my brother’s autosomal DNA matches. Their homeland was the Saponi corridor stretching from Brunswick County, Virginia, down through Granville, Bute, and Warren Counties, North Carolina, especially around Fishing Creek, Shocco Creek, and the Tar River headwaters under the influence of Col. William Eaton. Many of these families had earlier ties to the Fort Christanna era (1714–1718), when the Saponi and related Eastern Siouan groups were gathered under Virginia’s protection in Brunswick Virginia. The Mortons actively knew these people for generations, but by the time Old Joel married into this frontier family they were already a mobile, mixed‑Native, free‑people community living on small landholdings, working as laborers, hunters, and tenant farmers. So, while the Martin line he married into was not directly a Fort Christanna household in the narrow sense, they were descendants and close kin of the Saponi/Occoneechi groups who had been consolidated there, and their migration pattern matches the classic post‑Christanna dispersal.

I will begin with the daughter named Elizabeth Morton, whose identity is confirmed through both documentary evidence and DNA. Elizabeth may well be the firstborn in this second family. She married Richard Gunter in Orange County, North Carolina. Understanding Richard’s background helps illuminate her life: he was the son of John Gunter of Halifax County, Virginia, a family already familiar with the Mortons through long‑standing neighborhood and migration ties. Richard himself was born 17 November 1749 in Brunswick County, Virginia, placing him squarely within the same regional network as the Old Joel Morton. Richard Gunter helped to transport criminals with Joseph Morton, and would have known Elizabeth. After their marriage, Elizabeth and Richard Gunter moved to Jones County, North Carolina, settling on land that had formerly been Tuscarora territory but was fully under colonial control by the time they arrived. In Jones County, their descendants form a recognizable Morton‑connected DNA cluster, represented by at least the following children: John Edward Gunter, Lazarus Gunter, John Gunter, Thomas Gunter, William Gunter, David Gunter, James Isham Gunter, Mary Gunter, Agustus Gunter, Wiley Gunter, and Samuel Gunter.
It is noteworthy that only one daughter appears among these children—Mary Gunter. Her name aligns with the working hypothesis that the mother of Elizabeth Morton, and of her brothers Joel and Marshall, may have been Mary Martin, whose name appears to echo through the next generation.

The estate records of Richard Gunter explicitly identify Elizabeth as his wife, confirming her placement in this family. Moreover, the Gunter family belonged to the same Saponi‑connected neighborhood cluster as the Mortons. DNA triangulation between Gunter descendants and the lines of Joel and Marshall Morton reinforces the conclusion that Elizabeth was a daughter of Joseph Morton (“Old Joel”), born to his second wife possibly named Mary Martin. Once in Blount County, Alabama, descendants of Elizabeth and Richard can be located near Marshall Morton. They are often confused with the John Gunter line who founded Guntersville in Marshall County, Alabama, but genetically those around Marshall Morton are related to the Saponi-Occaneechi Indians and not the Cherokee.

Joel Morton, the younger, was born no later than 1755. The 1778 Orange County Poll Tax list places Joel Morton as the primary entry, with his brother Marshall Morton listed directly beneath him. Because only taxable adult males aged twenty‑one or older appeared on that list, Marshall’s presence there confirms that he had reached legal adulthood by 1778. Even when brothers lived on the same land, the law required each adult males to be listed separately on the poll tax. A son was never named under his father’s poll. Because Marshall appears as his own taxable entry directly beneath Joel in 1778, the record confirms that he was Joel’s brother, not his son. This single document anchors both brothers firmly in the younger sibling group of Joseph ‘Old Joel’ Morton and his second wife, and it provides one of the earliest chronological markers tying Joel, Marshall, and their sister Elizabeth (who married Richard Gunter) into the same maternal line.
Although Joel Morton the younger appears less frequently in the records than his brothers, he left behind one of the most decisive documents proving his relationship to Joseph “Old Joel” Morton. On 10 September 1778, a land entry was filed in Orange North Carolina stating: “Joel Moton enters claim to 640 acres, including the improvement where Samuel Thompson, John Thompson (son of Samuel), and Joel Moulton now lives.” A warrant followed on 12 May 1779. This single sentence establishes two distinct men named Joel.
The claimant is identified as Joel Moton, while a Joel Moulton is listed as one of the residents already living on the land. Land entry clerks did not refer to the same man twice in two different roles, nor did they describe a claimant as a third‑party occupant. If the claimant had been living on the land, the clerk would have written “where he now lives” or “including his improvement.” Instead, the entry clearly separates the claimant from the resident, demonstrating that the younger Joel (the claimant) and the older Joel (the resident) were two different individuals. This record is therefore one of the clearest pieces of evidence distinguishing Joel Morton the younger from his father, Joseph “Old Joel” Morton. It also establishes a very connected familial group, which includes the Thompsons and Mortons sharing land. Was there a marriage that bound these families? I believe that there is. And will point it out further down.

The combined evidence of geography, court appearances, and DNA triangulation firmly situates Joel deeply within the Saponi‑adjacent branch of the Morton family that later migrated into Georgia and Alabama. His life represents the transitional generation—born in colonial Orange County, pushed into the Carolina backcountry during the 1770s and 1780s after he and Littleberry Roach lost their land, and ultimately part of the migration stream that carried the younger Morton line into the Deep South.
Joel appears clearly in the surviving Orange County court records. In 1787, he was paid as a witness who had been summoned to return and testify in multiple cases. We know by the time of that court session he had bought land in Anson North Carolina, so he became a paid witness by Henry O’Daniel. Another of these involved Henry O’Daniel, with Samuel Thompson also appearing in the same court session. This is significant because the Morton and Thompson families lived in close proximity: the land of Joel Morton the younger lay adjacent to that of Samuel Thompson along the Haw River, a neighborhood documented in both deeds and survey records. While Joel’s wife is known from later records to have been named Susannah, some might want to speculate that she may have been a daughter of Samuel Thompson. However, the available evidence does not confirm this at all and I will explain it further. There is no Thompson DNA in the descendants of the younger Joel Morton.

This brother of Marshall Morton had an ability to secure land in Orange which coincides with skills from his father. Militia records indicate he was a private in Captain Daniel Murphree’s Company. Murphree himself is well documented in multiple Longhunter rosters, and the migration patterns of the Murphree, Morton, Thompson, and Durham families show these men moving together before, during, and after the war. This shared frontier network provides strong contextual support for identifying the soldier in Murphree’s Company as the same Joel Morton found in the Orange–Chatham–Anson corridor. Descendants of Daniel Murphree filled Blount County, Alabama.
These entries document his service in the local militia during the Revolutionary War period variously spelled as Martin, Moton and Marton. A further notation dated August 1778 records his death, discharge, or desertion, stating that he was from North Carolina and had left Valley Forge. Since we know later that year he was buying land, Joel had not died nor had he deserted, as he had credible land warrants.

Why was he discharged after Valley Forge? Paperwork indicates a July 1778 discharge—just weeks after the army broke camp at Valley Forge. This is actually one of the most typical discharge windows of the entire Revolutionary War. Valley Forge ended on June 19, 1778, and what followed was a massive administrative cleanup. Washington had to reorganize regiments, release men whose terms had expired, and remove soldiers who were no longer fit for the new, more disciplined army shaped by von Steuben’s training. Joel falls exactly in line with this, discharged in July and soon after he is buying land. Was he sick from the suffering at Valley Forge? Had his term of service expired? These are questions yet to be answered.
Another document of interest is that Joel Morton, John Jennings, and Littleberry Roach posted bail for a man spelled as Thomas Leakey, whom I have discovered by descendants was Thomas LACY. He was charged with petit larceny in Anson County and failed to appear in court. These three men became legally responsible for the bail debt once Lacy disappeared. They petitioned the North Carolina General Assembly to be released from that debt. The Assembly rejected the petition. Evidence that Joel, John Jennings and Littleberry Roach were all of the Saponi-Occoneechi neighborhood no doubt lent some prejudice to the proceeding. This is a direct, primary-source record placing Joel Morton in Anson County in 1788, interacting with two known neighbors: John Jennings and Littleberry Roach. There is additional evidence that Joel stated he attempted to track Thomas Lacy into Georgia, and no doubt other locations, without ever finding him.

There is clear evidence Joel Morton had “dabbled” in the Regulator movement. He signed at least one petition. However, it is understood by both Roach descendants and Morton descendants that Joel lost his land in Orange, North Carolina. Understanding his path requires a clear timeline of how the counties in this region were carved and re‑carved. What appears at first glance to be migration is often nothing more than the shifting of county boundaries and the collapse of land titles in the former Granville District. Individuals could appear in records for both Orange and Caswell Counties without ever leaving their farms. Joel Morton is a perfect example of this. In 1778, Joel was first polled in Orange County, where he was polled with his brother Marshall Morton. Yet in December of the same year, he appears to have purchased land in a deed recorded in Caswell County. This is not evidence of a sudden relocation; Caswell had only recently been created from northern Orange, and Joel’s new deed simply reflects the administrative reshuffling of the region.

Marshall remained on the original Orange County land, while Joel acquired new acreage just across the line, scarcely more than a road away. Joel’s first known purchase there was a tract on Tom’s Creek in December 1773, straddling Hart’s Road and adjoining Widow Berry, William Brown, Bazel Davis, and Richard Carland. Davis and Carland were early Caswell settlers with no prior connection to the Mortons, but the other neighbors were deeply significant. Joel’s sister had married William Brown, and Widow Berry was almost certainly a relation from the Morton–Berry network of Brunswick County, Virginia. In other words, Joseph “Old Joel” and Joel the younger were still embedded within the extended kin‑community, even as the county lines shifted around them. The Tom’s Creek tract also placed these men within reach of the Tick Creek settlement zone, where many of the same families lived.

At some point, Old Joel and younger Joel made the decision to acquire land in Anson, North Carolina, away from the political strife that gripped the people of Orange, North Carolina. Samuel Thompson may have been the driving force behind this. He bought land in Anson in 1756, but it was some 30 miles away from where Old Joel and Young Joel bought their land in Anson, North Carolina. No doubt they also looked at land in Jones County, North Carolina, where Elizabeth and Richard Gunter settled. Their move to Anson precedes Marshall Morton and aligns with the rising hostility, land disputes, and political fallout that followed the Regulator movement and War years. There is evidence that Joel signed with Littleberry Roach as a Regulator, and the loss of title to his Orange County land—part of the widespread Granville District collapse—pushed many families from the area. Joel’s own neighborhood was unraveling: his half‑brother William Morton was languishing in jail, his half‑brother Jeremiah Morton had either died or disappeared, and his father had already migrated to Anson to escape the political climate. It is clear that Marshall Morton, the youngest son of Old Joel, remained in Orange, North Carolina, while Old Joel and Young Joel established a homestead in Anson, North Carolina.

Who is Young Joel’s Wife?

A compiled narrative on the John William Thomas family, “The Life Story of John Thomas from Chatham County NC to Anson County NC,” reports that Joel Morton’s 1787 Anson County land purchase was witnessed by Isaac Brumbelow. The same narrative places the Brumbelow family repeatedly within the exact frontier network occupied by the Mortons, and Thomases—appearing as chain carriers on surveys, holding adjacent tracts along Mill Creek and Richardson’s Creek, and serving as recurring witnesses in land transactions. Their presence across these records demonstrates that the Brumbelows were not incidental neighbors but long‑standing associates who migrated along the same Chatham/Orange‑to‑Anson corridor as the Morton family.

By March 1789, Joel Morton sold part of his land on the southwest side of the Pee Dee River, on Lanes Creek, to Vinson Self, a member of the Tick Creek Self family whose lands bordered those of William Brown. In this deed, Susanna Morton, Joel’s wife, appears for the first time in the surviving record, providing her mark. Her appearance in this transaction is significant because the Self family belongs to the same Saponi‑Occoneechi frontier community that repeatedly intersects with the Morton, Martin, Jeffries, and Harris families. Joel Morton’s wife carried Saponi-Occoneechi heritage.

The 1790 Newberry, South Carolina census entry shows that Joel had left Anson, North Carolina and was in his life cycle and what his household looked like. The census categories indicate 6 free white females — his wife, daughters, and possibly an older female relative. 1 free white male 16+ — this is Joel himself, age about 40. Then 3 free white males under 16 — three sons born roughly between 1774 and 1790. He is enumerated not far from Marshall Morton.

DNA evidence reinforces this historical pattern. Descendants of Joel and Susanna Morton are not all known. There is DNA cluster evidence that Joel was married once to a woman of Saponi-Occoneechi DNA. The Harris surname emerges as the strongest and most diagnostic signal. The triangulated segments on Chromosome 3 and Chromosome 22 match the same Saponi‑core families who lived beside the Mortons in both Orange/Chatham and Anson County.

A William Morton appears in the 1800 census of Anson North Carolina, adjacent to the very same Isaac Brumbelow who witnessed Joel buying land in 1787. It is therefore concluded that William Morton is the son of Joel. The census of 1800 does indicate children in his home, specifically nine in total. However, William Morton died and left a will dated 2 December 1807. None of the children are named, only his beloved wife Mary. She is the executor with Cornelius Sykes and the will is witnessed by one of his sons, Sherrod Sykes as well as a Susannah Stevens. There are descendants of the James Morton and Jane Peden Irish immigrant line to South Carolina who want to claim this William Morton as a descendant of their marriage. Additionally, there are descendants of William Carr Morton who want to claim this line. However, the adjacency to Isaac Brumbelow and his link to Joel Morton contradict both relationships. His widow, Mary is skipped in the 1810 census but this was not unusual for widows to be skipped in a census if she was living with a child and counted in that household. By 1820, Mary is surrounded by Thomas’ men all associated with John Thomas who migrated from Chatham to Anson, North Carolina.

The William Morton who appears beside Isaac Brumbelow in the 1800 Anson County census is further claimed by an assortment of different families. But he is best understood as a son of Joel Morton, the brother of Marshall. His age bracket, the size and structure of his household, and his placement within Joel’s long‑standing neighborhood cluster all align him as a son of Joel rather than with the unrelated Montgomery–Stanly “Carr Morton” line. This conclusion is reinforced by William’s 1807 Anson County will, which names Cornelius Sikes as executor and is witnessed by members of the Sikes–Brown–Stevens families—precisely the same micro‑community that appears repeatedly in Joel Morton’s deeds and associations. Modern Y‑DNA and autosomal evidence further confirm that the Anson Mortons descended from Joseph Morton the Elder and his sons Jesse, Joel, and Marshall form a distinct genetic cluster that does not match the Stanly County descendants of William Carr Morton. Taken together, the documentary, geographic, social, and genetic evidence all point to the 1800 Anson County William Morton as a son of Joel Morton and a member of the Henrico‑to‑Granville‑to‑Anson Morton line.

Additionally, enumerated with William Morton’s Anson neighorhood are John Evans Sr. and his sons John Evans Jr and Jacob Evans. These Evans descend from the Fort Christanna, Brunswick VA line of Captain John Livingston “Trader John” Evans. Descendants of his brother, Charles Evans, also follow the same migration path. Captain John “Trader John” Evans was born around 1671 in Charles city County in Virginia. He married Sarah Martha Batte. Jerry Bartlett Jones was a historian of the Batte line and taught how the Battles of Alabama descended from the father of Sarah Martha Batte, Thomas Batte. A descendant, William Noel Battle who wintered at Valley Forge, also brought a very large family to north Alabama. Jerry Jones shared that Trader John Evans operated an Indian trading system from Fort Christanna region of Brunswick, Virginia. The Saponi, Occaneechi, Tutelo and related Siouan groups were a crucial part of this system. As the professional geneticist explained to me last year, the Evans belong to one of the most identifiable, well‑documented Native‑adjacent frontier families in the Virginia–Carolina corridor. And yes—they trace back to Captain John “Trader John” Evans of Fort Christanna, a man deeply embedded in the Saponi/Catawba trading world with Joseph Morton Sr.

Joel’s sons and grandsons moved into South Carolina’s Ninety‑Six District, the Catawba Nation, and the upper Yadkin–Pee Dee corridor.
This is exactly the migration corridor that later overlaps with the Mortons, and Martins. The Harris line is closely tied to these Evans genetically and Evans descendants intermarried with the same Terry family as was associated with Joseph Morton Sr and his son Joseph Morton Jr. Most of the Evans line from Anson, North Carolina becomes connected to the Catawba Indian Nation with perpetual ties, both physically and genetically, with Chatham, North Carolina. As late as 1852 the Mortons were still associated with the Evans descendants when Manilla Morton married John Evans in Blount County, Alabama. Trader John Evans operated an Indian trading system from Fort Christanna region of Brunswick, Virginia. The Saponi, Occaneechi, Tutelo and related Siouan groups were a crucial part of this system. As the professional geneticist explained to me the Evans belong to one of the most identifiable, well‑documented Native‑adjacent frontier families in the Virginia–Carolina corridor. And yes—they trace back to Captain John “Trader John” Evans of Fort Christanna, a man deeply embedded in the Saponi/Catawba trading world with Joseph Morton Sr.

It is understandable how genealogists believe they can “claim” an ancestor here or there. Some may disagree with my assessment of William Morton as a son of Joel. However, he fits seamlessly into the household and community of Joel Morton, the older brother of Marshall, and every independent line of evidence points to him as Joel’s son. His earliest records place him in the same tight cluster of families known to associate with Joel—Brumbelow, Sikes, Evans, Harris, Martin, Brown, and Stevens. These surnames surrounded Joel for decades, and William’s 1800 census entry appears directly beside Isaac Brumbelow, one of Joel’s closest neighbors. His 1807 will continues this pattern, naming Cornelius Sikes and other men from Joel’s immediate social circle as executors and witnesses. Modern DNA simply reinforces the documentary trail: descendants of William match the same Anson County Morton cluster and the same Saponi‑Martin maternal network that defines Joel’s children, while showing no connection to the separate Stanly/Montgomery County Morton lines or the Morton/Peden lines. No alternative parent fits the geography, chronology, neighborhood, or genetic evidence. Taken together, these strands form a single, coherent conclusion: William Morton of Anson County was a son of Joel Morton and a nephew of Marshall Morton, firmly rooted in the same land, kinship network, and community that shaped the early Morton family in the Carolina backcountry.

I make mention that also in 1800 Anson, North Carolina, there is also an Ezekiel Morton enumerated. I have been assured by a professional geneticist that his line is not the same Morton cluster as descendants from Brunswick, Virginia to Orange, North Carolina, to Anson, North Carolina. He is not related to William Morton, who clearly died in 1807 with children too young to be entered in his estate.

While we know Joel was married more than once, and one of his wives was most like related to the Harris family, we are best able to use DNA evidence to confirm that Susanna, wife of Joel Morton, was a member of the Self family. Louie Brice Morton—descendant of Marshall Morton through his son James S. Morton—carries a large, intact Self DNA segment on chromosome 16 that triangulates with two independent Self descendants, W.C. Self and ASelf. All three individuals share the same inherited segment, proving they descend from a common Self ancestor. This Self segment does not appear in descendants of Joel’s older children by his first wife, but it appears consistently in descendants of Susanna known child, Mary, demonstrating that Susanna herself was the source of the Self DNA in the Morton line.

Who was Mary Morton whose mother was Susanna Self? Mary Morton—often appears as Mary Polly—was one of the younger children of Joel Morton and his wife Susanna Self, born after the family settled along Tom’s Creek in Orange County, North Carolina. Her maternal identity is confirmed through triangulated DNA: descendants of Mary carry the same distinctive Self‑family segment found in descendants of Susanna’s other children, a segment absent in the lines of Joel’s older children by his first wife. Mary Polly married Edward Garrett Nelson. The 1850 Blount County census lists Mary Polly as Mary Nelson, age ~55, born in South Carolina, living with her children: Lindsey Nelson, Dennis Nelson, Elizabeth Nelson, Daniel Nelson, and John Nelson. Using triangulation and recombination analysis, the descendants of Mary Polly Morton match the same Self‑family DNA cluster carried by Louie Brice Morton and other proven descendants of Joel and Susanna Self Morton. This shared segment pattern confirms that Mary Polly inherited her maternal DNA from Susanna Self, establishing her place among Joel and Susanna’s younger children. While I have seen this Mary Morton suggested as a daughter of Irish Mortons to South Carolina, the contribution of Louie Brice Morton’s DNA scientifically connected this Morton/Self family group.

Marshall Morton, my 4th great grandfather

For as long as anyone in my family can remember, the birth year of Marshall R. Morton was never in doubt. My grandfather, James Brown Morton, repeatedly affirmed that the old family Bible—originally belonging to his grandfather, Jenothan Joel Morton—recorded Marshall’s birth as 1755. That Bible later passed into the hands of William Nelson (Nathaniel) Morton and Amanda Camella Crump, and remained in their possession until their deaths.
My own father personally handled that Bible as a young man. He recalled the entry clearly: “1755,” written in ink long since browned with age. He never wavered in that memory. In the 1940s, he showed the Bible to my mother Ollie Irvin Morton, who likewise saw the same date. My father also grew up with the Bible that belonged to William Nelson (Nathaniel) Morton. Although that volume did not include Marshall’s entry, both Bibles were kept together behind the fireplace in a closet in the sitting room of my grandparents’ home in Sardis, Alabama. Even in my own childhood, I was allowed to hold them—carefully, and always under my mother’s watchful eye.
This was the family’s understanding long before the internet, long before modern genealogical confusion, and long before any competing dates appeared. But in the 1990s, I encountered someone who said they had a Bible record from a different branch of the family that claimed Marshall was born in 1763. That date contradicted everything my father and grandfather had preserved. Because of this discrepancy, I undertook a thorough review of the historical record. The result is clear: the older family tradition is the more accurate one, and the 1763 date cannot be reconciled with the documentary evidence.
One of the strongest confirmations that Marshall Morton was born in 1755-1757 comes from the North Carolina poll tax laws and the years in which he appears as a taxable male. These laws establish a minimum age for taxation, and Marshall’s appearance in the 1778 poll cannot be reconciled with a 1763 birth year. Under the 1715 North Carolina law, all free males 16 years or older were taxable. After the legislative revisions of 1777, most counties adopted the Virginia practice: the head of household and all free males aged 21 or older were taxed. The State Archives of North Carolina has confirmed that this was the general method used in 1778.
Equally important is the way households were enumerated. A father did not list his minor sons as separate taxable males, but he did list an adult brother or other adult male living in the household. Thus, when a name appears indented under another man in the 1778 poll, it signifies an adult male, not a child. In the 1778 Orange County North Carolina poll, Marshall Morton appears indented under Joel Morton. This placement identifies him as an adult taxable male living in Joel’s household—not as a minor son, but as a brother.
Even allowing for minor variations in enforcement, the law leaves no room for a 1763 birth year. But even if we assume the most lenient possible interpretation, Marshall would still need to be at least 19 to be listed as an adult male before age 21. A man born in 1763 would have been only 15 in 1778—far too young to appear as a taxable adult under any reasonable reading of the law.
This single fact eliminates the 1763 birth year.
The poll tax records, therefore, align perfectly with the date preserved in my family’s Bible: 1755. The legal framework, the structure of the poll lists, and Marshall’s documented appearance in 1778 all point to the same conclusion: Marshall Morton was born well before 1763. The 1755 date recorded in the old Bible is the only one consistent with the historical record.
A further confirmation came unexpectedly when I consulted the multi‑volume American Genealogical–Biographical Index at the Godfrey Memorial Library in Middletown, Connecticut. Published between 1942 and 1952—decades before online trees muddied the waters—the index lists Marshall Morton’s birth year as 1755 (Volume 121, page 367). This independent, mid‑20th‑century source corroborates exactly what my grandfather had always said.

One must recognize that not all families had a family Bible until the years ahead of the Civil War. Then, after the war, Bibles had to be replaced because the old ones were destroyed. Sometimes the dates were entered the second time based on guess and random memory rather than written exactly as they occurred. It is possible in the South to have conflicting dates in Bible Records in any family. But a Poll Tax followed legally binding criteria.
As for Marshall’s birthplace, multiple sons and descendants stated he was born in Virginia, a detail my grandfather also repeated. One family story repeated to my brother as well as my Daddy, told that Marshall’s first journey into North Carolina was walking across frozen creeks in the dead of winter. There is one late census, supplied by an unknown informant for his youngest daughter, which gives Tennessee as his birthplace. But for Marshall to have been born in Tennessee by 1757, he would have had to be born in one of only a handful of frontier forts—or in territory then disputed between Virginia and North Carolina. The Virginia birthplace is far more consistent with both family testimony and historical geography.
Respectfully, based on the records of my family, I offer the birth year of at the very least, 1757 for Marshall R. Morton and rule out any that have been suggested after that date. I can do this elimination because of the years that Marshall Morton appears in the Poll Tax records of North Carolina.
To further answer the assertion by my Grandfather I must look at the modern science of YDNA. My family agreed to be among the earliest DNA donors to help form the Sorenson Genealogical Database in the 1990s. Later on, once a public purchase of YDNA testing could be made, my brother’s YDNA produced the exact conclusion my mother had been told in the 1940’s by James Brown Morton.

Marshall Morton was a great grandson of the immigrant John Morton of Henrico, Virginia, who lived near a place called Chickahominy Swamp. The science of the YDNA test rules out any confusion trying to connect Marshall Morton to a group of Protestant Mortons who settled in South Carolina from Ireland. It equally rules out any Morton/Peden connection published by some well-meaning researchers before the advent of YDNA.
I will not attempt to recite every published history of the Morton family of Virginia, but I do encourage the reader to locate them all and read them all. Each family historian saw something worth adding to the conversation. One of my personal favorites is “The Morton’s of Southside Virginia” by Michael E. Pollock. In his effort, Mister Pollock recognized the parallels of names and places and incomplete histories of several lines. To clear up one more of those confusions in my own line, I must confront one “elephant in the room” regarding the Morton’s of Alabama. In the 1950’s a “Mr. Gaylor” and Sons of the American Revolution in Alabama were joined by DAR members and erroneously placed a Revolutionary War veteran’s monument at Antioch Methodist Church on Straight Mountain in Blount County. This monument was for a man named James Morton and was placed there without any research or having authority from descendants to confirm that such a man was buried at that church. It is important to state that the only James Morton who ever went to Blount County, Alabama, was a son of Marshall Morton in the 1800’s and there was never a James Morton buried at Antioch.
Jerry Barlett Jones, President of the Northeast Alabama Genealogical Society, and Tax Assessor for Etowah County led a petition of signatures to Governor Wallace to put forth that the efforts by Mr. Gaylor had led to confusion and were falsely connecting ancestors to the American Revolution without any relationship to anyone in a given cemetery. In my one of my many interviews with Jerry Jones, he stated the monument altered history and had to be called out, no matter how well any original intentions. He was not a Morton descendant but was very aware of errors made statewide. While the Governor did order all organizations to cease placing monuments unless requested by families, the misplaced stone marker in Blount County for a James Morton was never paid to be removed. This mistake has caused many Morton descendants to be misled with their research. There was never a Revolutionary War Soldier named James Morton who came to Alabama and was buried at Antioch.

Marshall R. Morton died in Blount County, Alabama in 1839. We know the exact year because of a purchase in an estate sale and his absence in the 1840 census. His wife can be found enumerated in the census of 1840 with their youngest daughter and her husband. Ollie Irvin Morton stated that the Bible record she saw (in possession of James Brown Morton) listed Virginia as the place of his birth. James Allen Morton, as well as Marvin Gilliland, independently told my mother that they had seen the grave which they were told belonged to Marshall Morton Sr. It was at a cemetery near the creek in Aurora, in Etowah county Alabama, near where the old Brister’s Creek Baptist Church stood. That old church was active until 1900. A fire and flooding had caused the church to be moved. James Allen Morton stated they went by wagon to this old church for his mother to put flowers on the grave. He knew that Marshall Morton was the name and the man buried there was why they lived in Alabama. He said there were other Mortons who always put flowers on the grave as well because he saw other flowers left there. The area of this cemetery was examined by my Mother as well as my brother, Perry Gilbert Morton, in the 1960’s. They could only go in the winter. Evidence of rock headstones were still scattered but as a whole my brother stated in 1978 that the land had gone wild and he doubted anyone remembered a cemetery was ever there. He said that land was still marshy in the spring.

In 1981, I located a record in the Marshall County, Alabama courthouse showing that Marshall Morton appeared in the estate sale of Thomas Beauchamp, dated April 1839. In that sale, he purchased a mule, and his name was recorded as “Marshall R. Morton.” This is the only known instance in which a middle initial is ever associated with him nor is there ever any male named in the family with a name beginning with “R”. I was told by the Clerk of the court in the 1980’s that he may not have actually had a middle name with an “R”. Clerks in Marshall county had been found to be liberal with personal methods to identify one man versus another. It was a “filler” method so the clerk could identify the right person and easier than using Sr and Jr, which oddly were considered difficult to write in cursive. Therefore, it is doubtful Marshall really had a middle name with an “R”. Additionally, the buyer of that mule cannot have been his son, Marshall Morton Jr., because the son continued signing documents as “Junior” for at least two more years.
Marshall does not appear in the 1840 census—not in Alabama, nor anywhere else in the United States—and he is absent from all later records. A family legend claims that he intended to go to Oklahoma, but this is almost certainly untrue. By 1839 he was elderly and declining. His youngest daughter, Sarah Morton, and her husband William Nelson had been forcibly removed to Indian Territory during the Trail of Tears but later returned to Alabama. By the time they came back, Sarah’s father had already died, and she took her mother into her household.
The evidence points to a straightforward conclusion: Marshall Morton died sometime between April 1839 and the spring of 1840, before the census was taken.

A variety of evidence in South Carolina can be located for Marshall Morton. From Deed Book IJ, page 226, 9 Jan 1808 Anderson County, SC, Abner Brown sold to Jesse Langston one red no-horned cow and calf, two feather beds and various furniture, a black sow etc. The sale was witnessed by Marshall Morton and Jepthah Brown. Marshall Morton made oath before William Jameson, JP on 19 Feb 1808, recorded 4 July 1808. Later, in an affidavit he made in Randolph County Alabama, and copied into his land claim file in Alabama, Abner B. Brown stated that he settled adjacent to the “RESERVATION” of Marshall Morton in Anderson County, South Carolina. Many researchers will misunderstand this reference and so I explain that in the Anderson District context, a “reservation” typically referred to land reserved to someone by prior right or special arrangement—such as a previously surveyed tract, an improvement right, or land held back from sale—rather than an Indian reservation as the term is used today. Abner’s wording that he settled “adjacent” to Marshall Morton’s reservation indicates that Morton’s tract was a recognized, fixed reference point for the whole community, significant enough that Abner could use it legally in Alabama to describe where he had lived in South Carolina.
Evidence of Marshall owning land can be found in Deed Bk. A-1, Page 183 Pendleton Dist., S.C.: In the deed, Ferdinand Hopkins of Chester Dist., S.C., for the sum of $52 paid by John Moore of Pendleton Dist., S.C., having sold 106 acres being part of 2782 originally granted to Fern Hopkins, said land in Pendleton Dist., bound by land of Jesse Langston, Eppes Majors, Philemon Pertain and Marshall Morton, waters of Rice Creek. Dated 25 Dec 1811.
In Greenville SC Deed Book F, entry no. 1871: Aug 29, 1801 Jacob Sight (Sitz) Sr (Pendleton Dist. Sc) to Jacob Sight Jr; for $50 sold 136 acres on the Saluda R. in Greenville Dist; granted June 5 1797 by Gov. Charles Pinckney to Jacob Sight Sr (signed) Jacob Sight’s mark “X”. Witness: Marshell Morton & Buckner Smith; proved Oct 19, 1801 by Buckner Smith before John Burnes JP, recorded Nov 21 1801 book F page 329. Jacob Sight Sr. had an estate 1825 in Fairfield SC but it should be mentioned that Peter Morton of Onslow North Carolina also interacted with this Seitz family and a marriage occured in his family.
Perhaps the most disturbing record in Pendleton South Carolina is one which says “In a Sheriff’s Sale, by virtue of Sundry writs of Fieri Facias, to me directed, will be sold, before the Court House in Pendleton, on the first Monday in May next, within the legal hours, the following property: the plantation whereon Marshal Morton now lives, as his property, at the suit of Ferdinand Hopkins, vs said Moreton…(Pendleton, SC) This was located in Miller’s Weekly Messenger, 14 April 1810, p1, col 2. Ferdinand Hopkins was an esteemed son of Colonial landholders and slave owners from Hanover, Virginia. Some were also surveyors, as the Hopkins speculated on land the way Joseph Morton had, even in Orange, North Carolina. Some Hopkins were involved with the Regulator Herman Husband at one point. However, since the date of this sale is in the spring of 1810, we can conclude that an absence through the winter months suggests Marshall Morton was into Alabama or further west, and was seen as someone defaulting on his property. Oddly then, in 1815 , Deed Book M , p. 500 of Newberry District South Carolina Frederick HOPKINS sold to Marshall MORTON 385 acres for $ 192.50, and the deed was recorded in 1818. Was this Ferdinand Hopkins? No, Frederick Hopkins is ever located in South Carolina. I think they are the same man and it may be considered that he had taken Marshall’s “plantation” in 1810 but by 1815, Marshall and he were still on good terms with Marshall having come back from frontier Mississippi Territory. Marshall was located the last time in South Carolina in the 1820 census and he appears to have a very full house. We find:
1820 Census Pendleton, Greenville Dist., S.C.
11 white males b/ 1784-1794 1 white female b/ 1800-1810
2 white males b/ 1800-1810 1 white female b/ before 1763
1 white male b/ before 1763
This census indicates a gathering of family members in preparation for the move to Alabama. This 1820 census also confirms the birthyear of Marshall Morton as BEFORE 1763.

Albert Burton Moore, Alabama historian born 1887 and died in 1967, published that based on his knowledge: “Immediately after his marriage, Marshall Morton explored into the wilds of northern Alabama, probably accompanied by his wife,” and at least one of the sons born to him in the 1780’s was born in Alabama and not South Carolina. Albert Burton Moore suspected that son born in Alabama was Marshall Morton Jr who is always considered also born in Orange, North Carolina. My Mother respectfully listened to him state this and did not disagree. Moore expanded in his published history to say that Marshall Morton resided approximately 12 miles south of the modern-day “village” of Boaz, in Marshall County. He stated further that when Marshall Morton settled in Alabama, his home was built by Indian slave labor. I have never located proof of any slave ownership by Marshall Morton, nor have any children of Marshall Morton ever given their birth as being in Alabama in the 1700’s, but there must be some basis for Moore’s facts as it was published in 1927 in the History of Alabama and her People and spoken by him publicly in many speeches regarding the earliest pioneers in North Alabama. He knew their association with the Longhunter Joseph “Old Joel” Morton. When I consider the affidavit of Abner Brown of Randolph County Alabama, combined with a census record of many in the home in 1820, I realize that Marshall Morton was a protector for numerous Saponi-Occaneechi families who migrated to Alabama with him. It led the way for several of his children to marry into the Indian tribes one step ahead of removal.
James Brown Morton recited that George Washington went hunting with Joel and Marshall Morton while they lived in South Carolina. With this fragment of information, I went to the library at Jacksonville State University, and I also talked to the head of the History Department. I needed to locate if George Washington was EVER documented in South Carolina when Marshall was there. Sure enough, in 1791 Washington made a southern tour. At one point, he detoured to Charleston and was told that he should hurry back north because it wasn’t safe to be that far into an area where there were still English sympathizers and Spanish influence from the south. Instead, the record provides that he went to the “up country” of South Carolina to Pickens County and he went there to go hunting! No names were given as to who went along on the hunt, but that was info enough for me!

Some mention must be made about the nature of mixed Native frontier people with whom Marshall associated. Ollie Irvin Morton was among the earliest researchers to trace the intertwined histories of the Morton, Seitz/Sitz, and Brown families. In her work, she recorded a tradition that William Brown of Henrico, Virginia, married Elizabeth Buckner. He was well acquainted with the Mortons and traded along the western frontier and into western North Carolina with Ambrose Joshua Smith and “Old” Joel Morton. William and Elizabeth Brown were the parents of Drury (William Drury) Brown, ancestors of the Brown line that later produced Chief John Brown of Creek Path in Marshall County, Alabama. My mother further documented that Chief Brown’s granddaughter, Nancy Hannah Brown, married Elijah Sides/Seitz in 1843, and that their descendants settled in Walker and Jefferson Counties, where they intermingled with the Jones family studied by Jerry Bartlet Jones. Elijah Sides was himself the son of John Henry Sides/Seitz and Sarah Susannah Ashcraft, and the grandson of Johann Heinrich Seitz, born 1734 in Meisenheim, Germany, who married Mary Elizabeth Ashcraft in North Carolina. Johann Heinrich was the brother of my own maternal fifth great‑grandfather, Andrew Seitz, who married Magdalena Bost. These overlapping lines created a situation where my mother first recognized the deep interconnections among mixed Native family groups. This overlapping allowed her to travel to Fayette County Alabama and interview both Ashcraft descendants and those Mortons who came to South Carolina who were part of an Irish Morton/Peden/Morrow group who in no way share genetic links with the line of Mortons from Henrico VA.

There is no autosomal DNA evidence proving that a Morton married an Ashcraft. That conclusion is supported by every modern DNA study. Creating a Morton/Ashcraft marriage only became popular after the creation of the Internet. Autosomal DNA does not show a Morton–Ashcraft direct line with triangulation across at least three lines: Morton descendants; Ashcraft descendants; Brown descendants, Seitz/Sides descendants or Saponi‑cluster descendants. If a Morton married an Ashcraft we would expect to find multiple Morton testers matching multiple Ashcraft testers on the same identifiable segment. While there are indeed family trees on Ancestry and other DNA sites to suggest a Morton/Ashcraft marriage I have sought the authority of a top geneticist to confirm those are all trees without documentation for proof and none such DNA clusters exist. It was simply stated to me: “No Morton or Ashcraft share a common ancestor”. Before DNA testing and before digitized records, researchers relied on repeated adjacency in tax lists, proximity, naming patterns, and oral traditions. It is true the Ashcrafts knew the Mortons; there is just simply never any direct sharing of DNA between the two groups of post-1730-born individuals.

Wives of Marshall Morton

Most descendants of the Mortons do not realize that Marshall Morton had more than one wife. I attempted once to discuss this with an author of Native Americans in North Georgia, and while he published my information, I was never mentioned as his source. So this information has remained quietly held until I publish this website. However, if you find a family tree for Marshall online, you probably see him with the WRONG parentage and with only one wife.

The identities of Marshall Morton’s wives could not be confirmed until enough DNA evidence became available. Stories about multiple wives were passed down to both Jerry Bartlett Jones and my mother, but for decades, these accounts rested only on the memories of the oldest family members from the 1940s and 1950s. Without documentation, nothing could be verified….DNA changed that.
By analyzing the descendants of Nelly Morton, Marshall’s oldest known child, it became clear that at least three different women had children with Marshall. His paternal DNA appears consistently in all lines, but each group of children carries a distinct maternal DNA signature, proving THREE separate wives.
The first marriage likely occurred by 1778, when he was polled in Orange County, North Carolina, with his brother Joel. Marshall would have been at the very least 21 years old by then in order to be polled with his brother. This first wife was the mother of Nelly Morton, who later married the Cherokee Samuel Martin. His parents were the white man Captain John “Jack” Martin and Mary Buffington ” Fawling” Emory of the Longhair Clan. Nelly attempted to remove with Samuel during the Trail of Tears, but was denied that right. Chapman, on the Siler Roll quoted that Lewis Blackburn insisted Nelly was a “Morton” and had never formally married Samuel Martin but she had a large household of Cherokee Children. Some claimed she was a “white woman,” and others only recognized Samuel’s other known Cherokee wives. Nelly died in Hall County, Georgia, but her younger brothers always visited her, checked on her, and protected her welfare in the family.

Nelly’s maternal DNA is unmistakable: it carries the Self/Martin genetic signatures associated with the Saponi–Occaneechi community that once lived in and around Orange County, North Carolina. The Siler Roll agents were not genealogists — they were gatekeepers charged with enforcing Cherokee Nation definitions of citizenship, and Nelly simply did not qualify. She was not Cherokee, and her mixed ancestry came from a community that historically did not integrate into the Cherokee Nation. While a few Saponi families were absorbed, most aligned with the Catawba and later with the Lumbee after the Saponi–Occaneechi tribal structure collapsed. Today, Nelly’s descendants match multiple Self families, strongly suggesting that her mother was a Self/Martin/Saponi‑related woman. Their DNA consistently shows two distinct Martin clusters — one from Samuel Martin’s Cherokee family and another from the Saponi‑Martin line — along with a strong Self cluster. Importantly, Marshall Morton’s maternal DNA also reflects Saponi‑Martin ancestry, but his pattern is not identical to Samuel’s. This distinction confirms that Nelly’s mother did not come from Marshall’s maternal line, but rather from a Self woman whose mother was a Martin associated with the Saponi people.

The 1790 census, as well as DNA evidence, shows that Marshall Morton had a second daughter born after Nelly, and that this child also inherited the Self/Saponi‑Martin maternal signature. We know this because descendants of the Nance family carry a unique combination of Marshall Morton’s paternal DNA and the Self/Saponi‑Martin maternal markers, proving that one of Marshall’s daughters from his first wife married into the Nance line—almost certainly at a young age. Today, descendants of this unknown daughter appear in autosomal DNA clusters that consistently show Marshall Morton + Saponi/Martin/Self ancestry. These clusters are found among Nance families in Calhoun/Etowah County, St. Clair County, Talladega County, and Shelby County, Alabama, matching the migration path of both the Morton and Nance lines. This cluster is distinctive and was first recognized by a professional geneticist who assisted in analyzing the Morton–Saponi connections. The pattern is now one of the strongest indicators that Marshall’s first wife had at least two daughters, and that Nelly’s sister became the maternal ancestor of the Nance families who later settled across central Alabama. I share this information in the hope that Nance researchers can one day identify her.

This same 1790 census identifies 4 male children under the age of 16. If you look at the birth years as known of these sons based on Bible records of each family, they are John M. Morton (born 1783 to the second wife), Jenothan Joel Morton( born 1786 to the second wife) William Morton (born 1787 to the second wife)and then we see there is a missing son with no commonly recognized name. Jerry Bartlett Jones as well as my Mother and Virginia Morton, all believed this was a son whose name they were each independently told to be Jesse Morton, and he did not live to adulthood. When my mother asked my Grandfather if he ever heard about Jesse, he told her that he had, and Joseph too, but added “None of the Joseph’s ever seemed to live long, not even my brother Jodie. Women stopped using it for a name.”. This is the only evidence I have that there were other Joseph’s born in other Morton lines who died as children. On a separate occasion my mother pointed out that in the Bible of his father, Reuben Ellis Morton, his brother was listed as “Joel B” who died at the age of two, not as named Joseph, and my Grandfather said, “That is because they wouldn’t write his name, Joseph. The Joseph babies always died”. By checking family records, we can indeed determine that of those in Bible records written as named Joseph or Joel, had died, so use of the name “Joseph” was not used as much by middle 1800’s. However, Marshall did probably have a son named Joseph, as my Grandfather knew that both a son named Jesse and one named Joseph died as infants.

Across all tested descendants, every child born to Marshall Morton between 1782 and 1793 shares a distinct and consistent autosomal DNA cluster that does not appear in the children of his first wife or in the children of his last wife. This middle‑children cluster aligns strongly with the Thompson family of Orange County, North Carolina, whose roots trace back through Brunswick, Halifax, and ultimately Henrico County, Virginia. This is the same family group of Samuel Thompson whose land was adjacent to Joel Morton’s on the Haw river, but Marshall’s wife is not specifically a daughter of Samuel Thompson. She was likely his niece. The same cluster includes the Russell and Harris families—long‑established kin and neighbors of the Thompsons in both Virginia and North Carolina. This pattern is not theoretical. It is visible across multiple independent testers and does not appear in any other Morton sibling group.
Long before DNA testing existed, Jerry Bartlett Jones told me—once in the 1980s and again shortly before his death—that Marshall’s “middle wife” was remembered in Blount County, Alabama as “Winnie Thompson.” At the time, I mentioned suggests she was an Ashcraft and he insisted she was not. She was a Thompson. I did not yet know Marshall had more than one wife. DNA has now confirmed what oral history preserved: there were two different women named Winnie/Winnea, and only one of them belonged to the Thompson family.

The genetic evidence is decisive. It links Marshall’s middle wife to three separate Thompson men.

The strongest DNA evidence for his wife comes from matches to descendants of William Thompson (b. 1727) of Orange County, North Carolina, and to the line of Robert Samuel Thompson, who died in Henrico County, Virginia, in 1697, the likely patriarch of the broader family. These matches occur on different chromosomes, demonstrating that they are independent inherited segments from the same extended Thompson lineage rather than a single random match. The match to William Thompson also carries Self‑family DNA, which aligns perfectly with the Thompson–Self–Russell–Harris kin‑network that migrated from Brunswick and Halifax, Virginia, into Orange and Chatham Counties, North Carolina. Even so, genetic analysis shows that Marshall’s wife measures only as a niece‑level relative to William Thompson, not a daughter.

There is more to say about Henry Thompson, and he turns out to be one of the most important figures for understanding the Thompson family that Marshall married into. Henry is documented in the 1750s–1770s in the same Tom’s Creek / New Hope / Haw River corridor where Marshall and Joel lived. Several descendants of Henry Thompson carry Self‑family DNA. However, the DNA evidence does not show a parent‑child level match to Henry either. Although I will mention that John M. Morton’s oldest son was supposed to have been named Henry.

Additionally, it is important to establish who this middle wife of Marshall cannot be. She was not a daughter of Samuel Thompson of Orange County, because Samuel’s son Joshua Thompson married Mary Ann Morton, one of the middle children of Marshall and his Thompson wife. If Mary Ann’s mother had been Samuel’s daughter, Mary Ann and Joshua would have been first cousins, and their descendants would show double Samuel Thompson DNA—which they do not. Instead, the DNA consistently points to a parallel branch of the Thompson family, closely related to Henry and William Thompson, and ultimately descending from Robert Samuel Thompson of Henrico County.
Taken together—documentary evidence, oral tradition, and multiple independent DNA segments—the conclusion is clear: Marshall Morton’s second wife was a white woman from the Thompson family network that moved from Brunswick to Orange County. She was not an Ashcraft, and she was not Winnea Brown, who was Marshall’s third wife.

One final clue reinforces this: the name Jonathan appears repeatedly in the Thompson families of both Virginia and North Carolina, and in Marshall Morton’s family only appears among the middle children of Marshall Morton—not in the children of his first or last wives. Naming patterns, DNA, and historical context all point in the same direction. More work remains to identify her exact parents, but the evidence now firmly establishes her as a Thompson woman from the Brunswick‑to‑Orange County line, and not from any other family

There is a gap of years noted in most of the Family Trees of Marshall Morton descendants, and that gap takes place between 1793-1800. It is believed that during that gap, Marshall’s second wife died, either in childbirth or of some other cause.

The identity of Marshall Morton’s final wife has long been debated, largely because of the name she gave one of her sons. Some researchers have claimed that Winnea (Winnie) Morton was a daughter of John Ashcraft, based solely on the fact that Marshall and Winnea named a son Drury Ashcraft Morton. This assumption collapses under scrutiny. There is no documentary evidence, and there are no autosomal DNA connections, linking the Morton line to the Ashcraft family. Although some testers insist she was an Ashcraft and try to force the DNA to fit that conclusion by putting forward her name with a family tree, genetic genealogists have repeatedly shown that no descendant of Marshall Morton carries a true Ashcraft genetic signature. None of the Morton kits display Ashcraft DNA clusters from Virginia, North Carolina, or England. The Ashcraft surname simply does not appear in the Morton genetic network.

Documentary evidence also contradicts the claim. John Ashcraft’s estate records are complete and fully legible, and they do not list a daughter named Winnie, Winnea, or Winney. No Morton appears in his probate, guardianship, or land transactions. My mother personally copied the Ashcraft family Bible records preserved in Fayette County, Alabama, from the 1950s through the 1970s, and none of those Bibles connect the Ashcrafts to the Mortons. In fact, one elderly Ashcraft descendant stated emphatically that there was never a family relationship between the two families. He explained that Drury Ashcraft was simply a respected hunter, and many men in Alabama sought the chance to hunt with him. At least one researcher in the 1950’s circulated a story that Marshall Morton once hunted with Drury in Kentucky, but even that tradition has never been documented.
The only claim that Marshall Morton married an Ashcraft comes from modern online trees repeating one another, not from any documented historical source. When the full body of evidence is considered—documentary, genetic, and historical—the conclusion is straightforward: Marshall’s last wife was not an Ashcraft. The confusion arises from a later assumption that Mary, wife of John Ashcraft, was a daughter of John and Lucy Brown of Virginia, but no primary record supports that statement either. The Ashcrafts and Browns lived in the same frontier network, which explains the proximity, but Winnea belonged to a different Brown branch of that community, not the Ashcrafts.

Winnie’s DNA aligns with the Brown family of Orange and Chatham Counties, and this includes distant matches to descendants of Abner Brown and Jepthah Brown as well as members of the Reynolds family, who were closely intermarried with the Browns for generations. Although some modern accounts claim that Abner’s father came from Galway, Ireland, neither the historical record nor the genetic evidence supports that story. Instead, Abner’s descendants share the same autosomal Brown and Reynolds segments found throughout the long‑established Piedmont Brown network, indicating that Abner himself was related to the William Brown family of Tick Creek rather than to a separate Irish line. The segment sizes in Winnie’s matches show a collateral, distant relationship, not a close one, but they consistently place her within this Brown–Reynolds kin‑group. Together, these findings confirm that Winnie was part of the local Brown community, distantly related to both the Abner Brown line and the Reynolds family cluster. This Brown family appears in some of the earliest surviving records of colonial Virginia. Although they prospered in Brunswick their roots extend back into Henrico County—placing them in the same early frontier neighborhood as John Morton, the Immigrant. As the colony expanded south and west, the Browns moved with the same migration stream as other well‑documented frontier families, including the Scarborough, Lloyd, Roach, Harris, Thompson, and Russell lines. Some of these had intermarriages among themselves, and among the mixed Saponi people who had developed outside the perimeter of the Landed Gentry yet carried some of the same surnames. These families consistently appear together in road orders, tax lists, land transactions, and militia rolls, forming a recognizable Southside Virginia kin‑network that later continued into Granville, Orange, and Chatham Counties in North Carolina.
Unlike the unsupported Ashcraft hypothesis, Brown DNA relationships appear repeatedly associated to descendants of both Joel and Marshall Morton. These Brown matches trace to the same extended Brown families of Southside Virginia—some of whom intermarried with frontier families connected to Dragging Canoe’s Chickamauga Cherokee descendants. This is a consistent, multi‑tester pattern, not an isolated coincidence. In contrast, no Morton male descendant carries a verifid John Ashcraft DNA signature, and no Ashcraft‑related cluster appears in any Morton kit. The Ashcraft claim survives only in modern online trees, without documentary or genetic support.
Taken together—documentary evidence, DNA clustering, and the historical context of the Southside Virginia frontier—the most reasonable conclusion is that Marshall’s last wife was Winnea Brown, not an Ashcraft. She was related distantly to the brother in law, William Brown, of Joel and Marshall as well as Abner and Jepthah Brown.

It is suggested by the geneticist I used that Winnea’s Brown‘s father was possibly even a brother to William Brown and may have been named John since we know William Brown had a brother named John. However, Winnea Brown Morton does not carry the same level of Saponi–Occaneechi ancestry that appears in the descendants of William Brown. This indicates that Winnea’s mother was a white woman without Native ties, even though she was related to Brown’s, who carried Native American DNA.

The broader Brown connections become even clearer when we look beyond Abner and Jepthah and turn to the South Carolina court records published by Silas Emmett Lucas Jr. in Some South Carolina County Records, Vol. 2. In 1802, William Brown of Sumter District appears acting as “attorney‑in‑fact in right of his wife” for Marshall Morton—a legal phrase used only when a man represents his wife’s inherited or marital interest. This is the strongest surviving documentary indication that William Brown’s wife was a sister of Joel and Marshall Morton, independent of DNA evidence. Marshall specifically needed William Brown to act on behalf of his sister, which means the legal matter involved her interest, not William’s. William was not an attorney by profession; he was functioning in a legal capacity because his wife held a claim Marshall needed to settle, most likely connected to inherited property following the death of Joseph “Old Joel” Morton.
This record also fits naturally within the Mortons’ long‑established pattern of carrying furs and frontier goods into the Santee–Sumter trade region, where William Brown was a respected small landholder and active participant in the movement of hides, pelts, and produce. He operated within the same commercial network as the Maverick family, major figures in the upcountry‑to‑lowcountry trade. Marshall’s reliance on his brother‑in‑law in this transaction shows a recognized family tie, not a casual association.
Taken together, the documentary evidence, the South Carolina legal record, and the genetic matches all place Winnie Brown within the correct Brown family of Orange County, North Carolina—the same kin‑network that produced William Brown of Orange and Sumter District. Her identity aligns genetically with this Brown line out of Brunswick Virginia and has no documentary or genetic connection to the Ashcraft family or to any daughter of John Ashcraft.

THE CHILDREN OF MARSHALL MORTON

Children by his first wife:

Nelly Morton (never located as Eleanor) who married Samuel Martin, the Cherokee. Most of her children and descendants are recognized as Native American.

An unknown-name daughter who married a Nance-surname male.

A male son who was called “Jesse” by descendants, but died before the age of 5.

Children by the Thompson wife:

Mary Ann Morton who married Joshua Thompson and Jones Evatt.

According to Thompson descendants of DeKalb County, Alabama, and a Bible which once belonged to Jane Morton Pridmore, Mary Ann Morton was born in the spring of 1782 in Orange, North Carolina. Because we know that the father of all her children was Joshua Thompson, son of Samuel Thompson of Orange, North Carolina by Mary Payne, as was listed in an addendum to Samuel Thompson’s will years after it was written, we know that descendants of Mary Ann and Joshua Thompson carry extra amounts of Thompson DNA, bringing forth the fact that Joshua Thompson was probably a cousin to Mary Ann Morton when they married. From Road crews and Tax Lists, as well as court records, we know that Samuel Thompson not only knew the Mortons but had land which bordered their property and because he owned an ordinary, as well as a ferry and property, he was dependent upon his sons and family to help operate his holdings. Mary Ann Morton would have grown up familiar with Joshua Thompson. However, it must be stated that Joshua Thompson had a wife before Mary Ann. I have seen attempts by researchers to “claim” this woman but in more than 80 years of combined research, the only knowledge I bring forth about the first wife is that she was Saponi-Occoneechi. When I requested a Genetic Genealogist to consider the Thompson DNA in DeKalb County, there is clearly Thompson/Morton DNA present but there is also Thompson with another mix that is not Morton, it is not Roden, it is Saponi-Occoneechi traceable to suggest the first wife of Joshua Thompson was of the neighborhoood in Orange North Carolina where we find the Saponi-Occoneechi people who carried the surnames Smith, Powell and West. More DNA study is needed of the three children born to this first wife of Joshua Thompson, and they are Elizabeth Thompson (William M. Morton) Joshua Thompson Jr. (Nancy Roden) and John Thompson (Martha Elizabeth Watt).

Mary Ann Morton’s life with Joshua Thompson was one of stability. Joshua owned land, was older and established when she married him. At one point, Joshua did require the South Carolina court system to resolve a debt between him and his father-in-law, Marshall Morton. But this was a business decision. The first child born to Mary Ann Morton and Joshua Thompson did not take place until 1800 and 8 more followed, who are known to descendants. The 1800 census is the least reliable genealogically of all Federal Censuses, and from it, we know it indicates Joshua and Mary Ann enumerated next door to Marshall Morton. But children from the previous marriage are not counted, likely because they were not in the home of the newlyweds in August when the census was taken. However, we do know from descendants of Joshua Thompson Jr. that Mary Ann was a wonderful stepmother and he cared for her long after his father died, even though she was his stepmother.

Possibly the greatest trauma Mary Ann Morton faced was in 1829. Descendants of Joshua Thompson Jr. confirmed to Jerry Bartlett Jones and my mother that Joshua Thompson Sr. was killed in an attack by Chickasaw Indians when Joshua and his son John Thompson had come to look at land in Alabama. The estate of Joshua Thompson was begun 10-5-1829 and is found in Pickens County, South Carolina Box 1 # 1- Listing a widow and 10 children (which means there is a child we do not know about). Son Elijah, a minor over 1,4 received $15.27. Adm. by James Thompson, Daniel Durham and Joel Morton. Buyers : Mary Thompson, Sarah Thompson, Geo. Miller, Absalom Ried, James Thompson, Daniel Durham, Isaac Murphee, Wilson Vermillion, Reuban Baker, And Joel Durham. Clearly, Joshua Thompson was believed killed in this attack. Later, William Morton is enlisted in the guardianship of Mary Ann’s children by Joshua Thompson. However, Joshua reappears (possibly after a long recovery) and is alive and able to give an affidavit with Samuel Maverick, as well as Buckner Smith, and Jesse Smith that he paid $250 for a substitute in 1779. The date of the affidavit is May 1835. Where had Joshua gone for a length of time, which caused the family to file his estate? Actually, the Indian attack is very well documented, and evidence occurs in the book “Passports of the Southeastern Pioneers” by Linda Cheek. Joshua must have been severely wounded, and it took him time to heal before he could make a long journey home. His son John Thompson left a widow named Martha Elizabeth Watt and a son also named John Watt Thompson. John was apprenticed to John M. Morton, Mary Ann’s most immediate brother, and is believed to have gone to Texas with John M. Morton when his family went.

It should be mentioned that the marriage of Mary Ann Morton to Jones Evatt took place when she was considered a wealthy widow, and perhaps she wanted to go to Alabama to be with the rest of her family, who had migrated. Women did not undertake such a journey alone, and perhaps there was some kind of arrangement made with Evatt. We do not know, except that the marriage was a horrible mistake. All evidence points to the fact that Jones was considerably younger than Mary when she married him, had a temper, and the likelihood is that the protection of her children’s inheritance by William Morton is found in court records. Jones Evatt appears to have been a man of questionable character. Mary Ann Morton did not live with him as his wife after coming to Alabama.

Jerry Bartlett Jones acquired access to the minutes of Mt. Pleasant Primative Baptist Church in Dekalb County, Alabama and therein was recorded on the 9th Nov 1844 that Jones Evett was received by letter. This is of some important as Mary, his wife, is not presenting a letter with him. Recorded on 11th April 1845 is the statement that the case of Jones Evett was discussed for consideration. The next month, on May 8 reads: “We have layed over the case of Brother Jones Evett accusation for striking a man with an unlawful weapon until the next conference in Oct. 1845.” In October, there is only one matter discussed in the minutes, that of Jones Evett. It reads: “In conference to exclude Jones Evett from our fellowship for fighting, done by order of the church.” This is the strongest discipline a Primitive Baptist church could impose. Yet it must have been resolved, because in August 1846 Jones Evett was elected, along with Jeremiah Roden, A.S. Chaney, and Hirum Graves to attend the association. This is a full restoration in the church, not partial. Clearly, they wanted to believe in the repentance of Jones Evett. But just two months later, in the Nov. 7, 1846 minutes is reads: “..the church agrees to sight Sister Evett and Brother Evett to the church with gospel evidence.” This is the first time Mary appears in any minutes. It is also the first time the church recognizes there is something gravely wrong with the marriage. Entered into the record is the sentence: ” We appoint Brother Jeremiah Roden to site Sister Evett and Brother Hiram Graves to site Brother Jones Evett to the next conferance meeting.” They sent different men to each spouse. This was intentional. A man would not be sent alone to a married woman’s home unless he was trusted, kin, or a close neighbor. However, it is very likely that Mary was not in the home at all, but at her daughter’s house. While the specifics are not laid out at this point, during the Dec 1846 minutes, Brothers M. Hendricks, A.J. Chaney, Hiram Graves and Jeremiah Roden were appointed to “labor with Brother Jones Evett and
Sister Evett and to report to the conference.” On Jan 9 1847 the minutes read: “Took up the accusation against Brother Jones Evett and Sister Evett for not living together as man and wife.” Therefore, it must be concluded that by this time period, Mary was living with daughter Louisa and son-in-law Hiram Nations. She at some point made a statement that she would not live with Jones Evett again as man and wife. Mary Ann may have gone through a very stressful time, as it appears by 1850 Jones Evett is recorded with a woman named Lurany Crain in his household and a baby not a year old. The census taker was careful to write her full name rather than suggest she was a wife to Jones Evett. On August 18, 1854, the minutes of Mt. Pleasant Primative Baptist Church indicate ” Received by letter also, came forward Sister Mary A. Evett and was restored.” This means that Mary was accepted into the church alone. She was accepted no matter what she had gone through and compassionate understanding for her situation indicated by the church record. No mention of Jones Evett was ever made again in the records. Mary does not appear in any 1860 census. Descendants stated that Mary Ann Morton Thompson married Jones Evett to have a man help get her to Alabama where she would live near her children, and for lack of a better description, he was not faithful.

Children born to Mary Ann Morton and Joshua Thompson:

James Terrell Thompson (Sarah Ann Durham), Jane Thompson (Jonathan M. Gregory), Winney Elizabeth Thompson (Rev. Samuel D. Smith), Charlotte Thompson (Willis Isiah Lee), Elijah W. Thompson (Charlotte Phillips), Mary Thompson (Living when signed guardianship receipt March 26, 1841. Unknown death or spouse), Ethalinda Thompson (Jeremiah Roden son of John B. Roden), Louisa Thompson (Hiram Nations), William Thompson (Martha J. Naylor).

Before moving on, I mention Ethalinda Thompson for two reasons. In the 1850 census, her name is spelled “Malinda” with her husband Jeremiah Roden, whom we know is the son of John B. Roden. Among other Thompson descendants, it is told that Ethelinda suffered from a handicap attributed to her birth. We know that she never bore any children. Highly respected genealogist Leslie R. Waltman, of Enterprise, Alabama, and author of “RODEN ROOTS,” stated to me that he was told by the great-granddaughter of Jeremiah Roden that his last wife, Sarah Jane , murdered “Aunt Lindy”. This was confirmed to him by other Roden descendants, all stating to him that Jerry Roden knew Sarah was going to murder his wife, and allowed it to happen, so that they could be together. The given name “Ethalinda” has been wondered about for decades until I learned at the North Carolina archives that this name is strongly associated with the Saponi‑connected kin networks of the Virginia–North Carolina frontier, where it appears in multiple intermarried families of Self, Martin, Harris, Richardson, and Evans.

John M. Morton, who married Nancy Brown, is the second born child to the middle wife of Marshall Morton. Some have tried to make his wife Nancy a Scarborough because a woman named Margret Scarborough was in their home in the 1850 Nacadoches, Texas census. However, the truth as told by his grandson Marshall Hamby in the 1950’s, after John M. Morton developed Parkinson’s disease, is that a widow was “taken in” to help care for John M. Morton. She was perhaps an older cousin to Nancy, or possibly no relation at all. After years of trying to convince others that my mother had correspondence from John’s grandson asserting that Nancy was NOT a Scarborough, I located in 2011 a Texas Agriculture Schedule dated 1860 Nacogdoches Beat 4 E 1, which records the land that John M. Morton had settled was now in the name of the name of Nancy Brown Morton. Recorded just before her is her grandson, James Goodwin Morton. John Morton is on the roster of San Jacinto in 1836, when he first went to Texas. He brought his family there very soon after he was asked to prove the race of his children in Blount County, Alabama, so that they could attend School in Browns Valley. This record existed in the courthouse in Blountsville for decades, seen by three different researchers, including Jerry Bartlett Jones, who provided a notarized statement verifying what he saw. However, in the mid-1960’s that page was taken out of the record book and never seen again, a fact that the staff was repeatedly asked about by numerous descendants. It was believed by Jones, as well as my Mother, that an individual ignorantly removed that document because the suggestion John “prove race” of his children could mean the children were not “white” and in the segregated south of the 1960’s, a family member may have maliciously removed that document thinking they were hiding a heritage. However, their action shows pure ignorance because the only school in Browns Valley during the 1830’s was the Cherokee Mission School, and by destroying that record, someone destroyed historical proof of Native American connections. Professor at Jacksonville State University and former U.S. Congressman for the Alabama 3rd District, Dr. Glen Browder, received complaints about the lost document even during his term and replied that it was a terrible loss for the history of the family. However, he also pointed out that Indian schools did not request proof of race from a father who was Native American. This was only done when the mother of those children was Native American. When the mother was believed to be Cherokee, Saponi, Catawba or any other race, the Indian Mission School in Brown’s Valley required the father to prove that the mother was legally Indian enough for the children to qualify. Therefore, we know that Nancy Brown Morton was seen as far more Indian than her husband.

Children born to them were: Henry Morton, Unknown daughter, Unknown daughter, Mary Elizabeth Morton ( William King David Ferguson), Jesse Morton (Priscilla Killian), Delilah Morton (William Killian), Jane Morton (William Newton Huddleston), Winnie Morton (Elijah Butler Reneau) Levi Morton (Unknown if he married before death), Martha Morton (Unknown spouse or death).

Jenothan Joel Morton is the next child of Marshall Morton by his second wife. He is my 4th great grandfather. The only way his name is ever found spelled is “Jenothan” rather than Jonathan Joel. But it is clearly evident this is a Thompson reference to the name Jonathan and it is repeated generously among descendants of Marshall Morton by his second wife. Jenothan Joel married Lucy Durham, the daughter of Reverend Charles Anderson Durham by his first wife, Mary Smith, the daughter of Christopher Barnett “Kit” Smith and Mary Mauldin. Lucy’s name has never been found spelled as Lucille as some have tried to suggest. All Bibles record her simply as Lucy Durham.

Predominantly my third great grandfather went by the name “Joel Morton” and at times he used both a “Jr.” and “Sr.” There was a time in South Carolina when his Uncle, Joel Morton Sr., also lived in the Greenville area and appeared in documents so that he went as Joel Morton Jr. Later, when he had a son by the same name in Alabama, he used the name Joel Morton Sr.

Jenothan Joel Morton and Lucy Durham married Jan 2, 1807 in Pendleton South Carolina and we know from War of 1812 Pension that his brother Marshall Morton Jr. and his wife Elizabeth Durham were present for the marriage. They were among the last of the Morton’s to migrate to Alabama, primarily because of the care Lucy needed to give for her father. Charles Anderson Durham was a beloved minister. Later in his ministry he deeded land for a meeting house that was built on Wolfe Creek in Pickens Co. South Carolina, which was later named the Bethlehem Methodist Church and organized in 1802 as published by THE ELLIS COUSINS in 1979 fall issue. There have existed family statements that Charles Durham was “run out of Virginia” for his persistence in performing marriage ceremonies for Saponi-Occoneechi and mixed-race people. Records do exist that confirm his activity in both Warren and Chatham North Carolina, with those of mixed Saponi as well as free people of color. From DNA we know that the Durham–Morton–Tarpley–Hightower cluster appears in genealogies tied to Saponi and mixed-heritage communities, especially in the Haw River and High Plains areas of North Carolina. Joel and Lucy took it upon themselves to care for Lucy’s father until he died. My family carries family traditions that Charles Durham went blind in his old age, and was hard of hearing, both normal afflictions of age during that time period. His estate was filed Jan 13, 1834 and by 1835 we know that Joel and Lucy moved their family to Alabama, settling in an area we know of today as Walnut Grove in Etowah County, Alabama.

Children of Jenothan Joel Morton and Lucy Durham:

Reverand Marshall James Morton (Margarite Vianna Blackburn and Mahala Adeline Childers), Jane Morton (Henry Avery), Elizabeth Rebecca Morton (Jordan Daniel Thomas), Joel L. Morton Jr (Mary Yielding), Martha M. Morton (Alfred Battles), Sarah Morton (William Featherstone Bain).

Enslavement Record of Jenothan Joel Morton in Greenville, South Carolina

In the late eighteenth century, Virginia confronted a legal contradiction that had persisted for generations. For decades, people of Native American ancestry—especially those descended from the Saponi, Occaneechi, Tutelo, and Monacan communities—had been held in bondage under a patchwork of colonial laws. Some families were legally free, others were enslaved, and many lived in a gray zone where their status depended more on local prejudice than on statute. They could easily be free one day and kidnapped the next, and sold into slavery somewhere far away, like South Carolina, the single state which held the most Indian slaves in all the 13 colonies.
By 1795, Virginia attempted to resolve this injustice. The General Assembly passed a landmark law declaring that all Indians and all persons claiming Indian descent were to be presumed free unless proven otherwise. Guidelines were provided for deputies to follow in determing a free Indian slave. For the first time, the burden of proof shifted to the enslaver. Children of Indian women were no longer automatically considered slaves. In legal terms, Indian slavery in Virginia effectively ended.
But the law did not end the practice.
Families who had been enslaved for generations did not suddenly become free in the eyes of their enslavers. Slaveholders resisted the new statute, courts applied it unevenly, and neighboring states—especially South Carolina—refused to recognize Virginia’s change at all. As Indian-descended families moved across borders for work, marriage, or safety, they found themselves sometimes reclassified because of their appearance, kidnapped, or forced back into bondage. Some could pass as white, others looked too “Indian”. The years between 1795 and 1805 became a period of intense legal conflict, with free families fighting to prove what the law already said: they were not slaves.

South Carolina did not adopt Virginia’s 1795 protections. Instead, it continued to treat Indian-descended people as enslaveable unless they could prove freedom through documentation—an impossible standard for most families whose ancestors had been displaced, dispossessed, or forced into frontier labor. This created a dangerous situation for Indian-descended families living along the border. A person who was legally free in Virginia could be seized as a slave in South Carolina. Children born free under Virginia law could be sold southward as property. Entire kinship networks lived under the threat of re‑enslavement.
It was in this environment that my third great-grandfather, Jenothan Joel Morton, a man whose Grandmother had been of Saponi/Occoneechi heritage, took a stand. I attribute some of his courage to his father-in-law, Reverend Charles Anderson Durham, who had been run out of Virginia for performing the holy rite of marriage among those Saponi/Occoneechi slaves, had no doubt been a Christian example of care for all enslaved peoples.

Joel Morton had long lived among families who were targeted for prejudice and illegal enslavement—people whose ancestry, appearance, and community ties made them vulnerable in the eyes of slave patrols and local courts. He was also educated and well-read. He knew the law had changed in Virginia. He knew these families were free by right. And he knew that South Carolina’s refusal to honor the Virginia laws placed the Saponi/Occoneechi and Catawba in constant danger. He could have left it alone, but his conscience would not allow it.
Joel helped people escape from those who claimed to own them. He sheltered families who were legally free but hunted as fugitives. He intervened when neighbors were seized or threatened. His actions were not random; they were part of a broader pattern of resistance among Indian-descended communities who refused to accept the theft of their freedom.
South Carolina authorities responded with force.

In 1803, Joel Morton was charged in the Greenville District of South Carolina. The court sentenced him to:

• imprisonment,
• public punishment in the pillory, and
• continued confinement until he paid the costs of prosecution.

The pillory was reserved for offenses the state considered serious—fraud, perjury, aiding fugitives, or interfering with slave patrols. Joel’s crime was clear: he had helped people escape who were considered slaves under South Carolina law, even though Virginia law recognized them as free.
The governor of South Carolina, James B. Richardson, issued a pardon that released Joel from the pillory and from further imprisonment. The pardon did not erase the conviction; it simply spared him the physical punishment. The state still considered him guilty.

Two years later, in 1805, Joel appeared again in Pendleton District court. This time, the judge openly acknowledged the legal confusion surrounding “Indian slaves” and their descendants. The court recognized that the people Joel had assisted were not enslaved by right, and that the laws of Virginia had already declared them free. The judge fined Joel for contempt because he had fled the state rather than be pilloried and imprisoned. But then the judge forgave all penalties with a depth of compassion. It was a rare moment when the legal system admitted what Joel had known all along: the people he helped were not property.

Joel Morton’s actions were not those of a criminal. They were the actions of a man who understood the law better than the courts that prosecuted him. He stood between his community and a system that refused to recognize Indian freedom. He risked imprisonment, public humiliation, and financial ruin to protect families whose legal status had been erased by state borders and racial prejudice.
His story is part of a larger history of Native-descended families in the Southeast—families who navigated shifting laws, crossed state lines for safety, and relied on one another when the courts failed them.
Joel’s resistance was not an isolated act. It was a continuation of a long struggle for recognition, dignity, and freedom—one that shaped the lives of his descendants and the communities they built across the South.

Where did Joel hide during the two years he was absent from South Carolina to avoid imprisonment? Evidence shows that he was in Ashe County, North Carolina, living among people who were both friends and kin. Ashe County at the turn of the nineteenth century was a rugged, secluded mountain region made up of small, interrelated families—many descended from the Saponi and Tutelo who had moved into the mountains after the fall of Fort Christanna in Brunswick County. With almost no plantation agriculture, Ashe had very few enslaved people, fewer slave patrols, and far less incentive to police racial boundaries. It was one of the few places in the South where mixed‑Native families could live with relative safety.
Joel’s father, Marshall Morton, and his uncle Joel Morton Sr almost certainly knew of these connections through the older Brunswick‑to‑Carolina network shaped by Joseph Morton (“Old Joel”) and his years of frontier tracking. Records from this period show that the Tatum and Calloway families—both part of the same mixed‑frontier community and longhunters—were closely involved with Joel during his time in Ashe County. I examined the DNA clusters for Morton families in Ashe and found no Morton cluster present, confirming that Joel was relying on allied families rather than direct kin.
In the decade before he left for Alabama, Joel returned one final time to Ashe County. There, he assisted Buckner Tatum, the legally troubled son of James P. Tatum. James P. Tatum had roots in Brunswick and knew Joel’s grandfather and family. Buckner was in trouble, accused of stealing cattle more due to his appearance as a Native American than any guilt. Joel helped Buckner and his family leave Ashe County and relocate to the mountains of north Georgia, where many Indian‑descended families had already established new communities.
In the end, Joel’s unwavering defense of his Native relatives and the Indian families of South Carolina—people whose names are now sought by genealogists and historians—led his father, Marshall Morton, to make a decisive choice. Marshall placed his full confidence in Joel and deeded all of his South Carolina land and property to him, publicly recognizing the son who had risked everything to protect their Indian kin.

William M. Morton and Elizabeth Ann Thompson:

William M. Morton came very early into the area that would be known as Alabama. The Mississippi Territorial Census of 1815 indicates William M. Morton is recorded near Daniel Nelson with 2 males over 20, 1 female over 20, 3 white females UNDER 20, and 9 total slaves are recorded. My mother was told by descendants that William brought with him Native American men to help build cabins, so this would be accurate for the 9 slaves reported. They were not counted as free. The daughter, Rebecca, always gave her place of birth as Alabama BEFORE Alabama was a state, and this indicates they were indeed in that part of St. Clair and Blount county, Alabama before it was a state. Because the children are so young, I believe that one of the two white males over 20 is one of his brothers. John Mortin is a few spaces later in the Territorial Census with 3 white males over 20, 2 white males under 20. 1 white female over 20 and 1 white female under 20. Clearly there are two older males listed with John who are probably also brothers. If all these males, plus those who were slaves, were building cabins or houses for the Mortons, then Albert Burton Moore, historian, was right when he stated that the home of Marshall Morton was built by Indian Slave labor.

William M. Morton married Elizabeth Thompson, the oldest child born to Joshua Thompson by his first wife. She and William are married in Greenville, South Carolina, by the time their first son is born in 1807. We know from the settlement of his estate in January 1851 that one of the documents states “he leaves no widow,” so Elizabeth must have died between the Dec 13, 1850, the date of the U.S. Census for Marshall County, and William’s death in January 1851. There is a Mortality Schedule entry of the 1850 census of St. Clair County, Alabama, which records the death of a man named William Morton, aged 63 and born in South Carolina, died in March of 1850 from Typhoid Fever. However, we must go back to the fact that the Marshall County census for 1850 was taken on December 13, 1850, and records William and Elizabeth Thompson as both alive with children recorded in their home by name. Therefore, the St Clair County mortality schedule entry has always been deemed by me to be a different man with a similar name who died at least 9 or 10 months before. Additionally, the settlement of William’s estate was quite large, well recorded, and located in Marshall County, Alabama, and not St. Clair County. Both William and Elizabeth are buried in Forest Home Cemetery, Marshall County, Alabama.

Children of William M. and Elizabeth Thompson Morton:

Marshall Morton (Mary Sarah Carleton), Jeremiah Jesse Morton (Nancy Winney Easley), William M. Morton Jr. (Frances Ann Samuels), Winney Morton (Francis Samuels Jr.) Rebecca Morton (Thomas Williamson Hill), Mary Ann Morton (Stephen B. Hallmark) Elizabeth Morton (Calvin Ireland Hallmark), Jemimah Jane Morton (John McNeal), Martha Morton (George Washington Hallmark), Delilah Evaline Morton (Rev. William Harkey Love).

Marshall Morton Jr. and Elizabeth Durham

Marshall Morton Jr. was born 29 Sept 1792 in Newberry, South Carolina. We know this date thanks to Virginia Morgan, an early Morton researcher of the 1950s who lived in Alabama City, Etowah County, Alabama. She had the old Bible, which entered that date and the birthdate of his wife, Elizabeth Durham, as 16 Feb 1797 in Pendleton, South Carolina. Their marriage date was recorded as 11 July 1813. Elizabeth Durham was the half-sister of Lucy Durham, who married Marshall’s brother, Jenothan Joel Morton. Her father was Charles Anderson Durham. Her mother was Mary Fortune, second wife of Charles Anderson Durham. He married her on 10 March 1794 in Warren County, North Carolina, where he had been active performing marriages for mixed-race Indians and Free people of color. The Fortune family was out of Pittsylvania County, Virginia, with roots back to Ireland. Descendants, including Virginia Morgan, state that Mary never went by that name; she was called “Birdie”. Elizabeth was her first child to survive childbirth.

When reading the War of 1812 records of Marshall Morton Jr and Jenothan Joel Morton, you get some idea of how close these two brothers were and the closeness of their wives who were sisters. The record of Lucy Morton’s widow’s pension application contains a statement by Marshall that he enlisted in the War of 1812 with his brother Joel, states he was present at the marriage of Joel and Lucy and that he was at the bedside when Joel Morton died. Clearly, their relationship was very close. The entry for the death date of Marshall Morton Jr was recorded in the Bible as 18 Oct 1884. The death date for Elizabeth was entered by someone with different handwriting and recorded as 10 October 1884. Both are buried at Forest Home Cemetery in Marshall County, Alabama.

Children of Marshall and Elizabeth Durham Morton:

Jonathan Morton (Elizabeth Reed), Allen Morton (Louisa Yielding, Mary Thurza Ulmer, Sarah Parrish), Martha Patsy Morton (James Cummings Hallmark), Joshua Nathaniel Morton (Minerva Jane Jeffers), William Marshall Morton (Martha Nancy Bynum), Sarah Morton (James Murphree Hallmark), Mary “Polly” Morton (mentally handicapped from birth, never married, cannot be found after 1880) Winnea Ann Morton (William Allen Gregory), James W. Morton (Martha Jane McCleskey), Rev. Joel D. Morton (Louisa Angeline McCleskey, Mostella Ann Glassco Sizemore).

James S. Morton and his wife Mary Ann

(This record contributed by Teresa Morton Owens). James S. Morton was born 17 May 1790, in Pendleton, South Carolina. He is the next son of Marshall Morton Senior. James was trained early on in the field of surveying by his father and by Samuel Maverick. Maverick, a wealthy son of the Boston shipbuilding Maverick Family, sought to capitalize on westward expansion by buying up fertile lands to the west to resell to eager pioneers. The Mortons had a long history of land speculation. It was a skill handed down from one generation to the next. Thousands of acres of land went through Maverick’s coffers by hiring land agents in the open frontier. Marshall Morton Senior, apparently known by reputation, was sought out. His young son, James, who must have tagged along with his father on surveying jobs, was hired as a land agent for Maverick once he reached adulthood and land opened up in Alabama. James became Maverick’s main agent, buying up massive sections of open land in both his name and Maverick’s. By James Morton’s quoted land holdings, it is assured he retained a large portion of those land purchases. James purchased lands in and around the state of Alabama, mostly out of the Huntsville Land Office. This area was made up of present-day Morgan, Marshall, Blount, Cullman, and Etowah Counties. Originally, these counties were all encompassed in Blount County prior to 1840. It is assumed by this researcher that, in some cases, Maverick’s interest was built on capitalizing on the lands being purchased for the incoming railroad systems. He and Marshall purchased lands on either side of now US HWY 278 in Walnut Grove (Etowah County, Alabama). Concurrently, James purchased the land in which the town of Walnut Grove (Etowah County, Alabama) was located. Their calculation missed Walnut Grove by a few miles when the Railroad came through the town of Altoona, Alabama, instead of Walnut Grove. When Samuel Maverick passed away in 1852, James Morton was part of the estate, reimbursed for his wages and fees. James Morton filed as Executor of Samuel Maverick’s will that was probated in Marshall County, Alabama. In this will, the holdings were sold to the highest bidder. This purchaser was George Martin. It is not known if George Martin was related in any way.
Recorded on the census regarding the ability to read and write, it was always checked negatively that neither James nor Mary Ann had those skills. But, James, was apparently very astute with money figures, charging those who borrowed from him up to eight percent interest.
James served in the War of 1812 in Captain Cannon’s Company, in some capacity, alongside his brothers. However, in the earlier days of research in 1980, a document was discovered that stated James had hired a substitute. His surveying capabilities were probably utilized in the War of 1812, either for the Government or privately.
James, John and William, along with their father, were present in Alabama during the territorial period, well before statehood in 1818. It didn’t take long for the Morton family to move, lock, stock, and barrel to the new lands that had been surveyed by the group. In their entirety, they called Bristol (Brister’s) Cove in present-day Marshall County, home. It was referred to, in many publications, as Marshall Morton’s plantation. Through their agricultural censuses, it is known they raised a few cattle, swine, sheep and chickens. Tobacco, wheat, and Indian corn were their crop staples. Morton men have always been quite athletic and good at hunting, so it is likely that they ate venison mostly to feed their families.
As James purchased more lands, he and his family settled with the Jacob Robbins family in Blount County, near the present town of Snead. Jacob Robbins married James and Mary Ann’s first daughter, Nellie. Jacob was the first pastor of Pleasant Grove Methodist Church (which is still standing) and is located on County Hwy 21 near McClarty, in Blount County, Alabama. James passed away in 1871, and is buried in the Pleasant Grove Cemetery, within the wrought iron fence. Mary passed the following year. Though their graves are now unmarked, they are the only graves inside the iron fence there by the large cedar tree. Nellie and Jacob Robbins passed away in 1882 an 1880, respectively. Their graves are located right beside the iron fence on the north side. Their graves were stacked fieldstone rocks with the names scratched in. Only a few of the stones remain; sadly, the ones with their names scratched are no longer there. James and Mary were Methodists and attended Pleasant Grove Methodist Church with the Robbins’.
It is known that many in the family were very musical. In the early 1930’s, James’ grandsons had a band which was known as the Blount County Entertainers. They played all around North Central Alabama. Two of the boys, apparently, were playing at a function and their behavior was noticed by the people of their church, which resulted in the two being turned out of church for “dancing a jig”.
James and Mary Ann passed within a few months of each other, in 1871 and 1872, respectively. Thus, Mary Ann did not apply for a Widow’s Pension. Had we had possession of a Widow’s Pension application, more would have been revealed regarding our many remaining questions.
Children of James Morton and Mary Ann:
Elinor “Nellie” Morton (Jacob Robbins), William Eppes Morton (Susannah Carlton, Nancy Ann Louisiana Hopper, Martha Jane Gaither), Mary Jane “Jincy” Morton (Andrew Allred), Jesse Morton (Winnifred Durham), Elizabeth “Betsy” Morton (Stephen Durham), Sarah Virginia Morton (Hazael Holly), John Hinkle Morton (Nancy Serena Hallmark), Joel S. Morton (Sarah Rhoda Bynum), Mary Morton (Isaac Jasper Brooks) James Drury A. Morton (Mary Ann Hallmark), Winnifred F. Morton (Franklin Allred), Harper Morton (Matilda Allred).

I will only add to Teresa’s excellent history of James and Mary that it was believed for decades Mary Ann was a Durham. My Mother was told that she was a cousin to Lucy and Elizabeth Durham who married brothers to James. Through modern DNA we have learned from a professional geneticist that Mary Ann was actually related to the mother of Nellie Morton, Marshall Morton’s very first wife. That DNA is related to the Self and Martin families, making the fact that George Martin bought all that land from James in Marshall County an even more curious part of the puzzle.

Drury Ashcraft Morton and Eleanor Holly

Drury was the first child born to Marshall Morton by his last wife, Winnea (Winnie) Brown. His name has caused more confusion than any other in the Morton family, especially once genealogy moved onto the early internet and genealogical “bulletin boards”. Some researchers assume that because Marshall and Winnea named a son Drury Ashcraft Morton, Winnea must have been an Ashcraft—an idea that spread widely but was never supported by records or DNA. To this date there is no autosomal DNA evidence of any Ashcraft relationship, just people duplicating in a tree what they read on the internet.
Part of the confusion traces back to a woman I knew personally, Mrs. Eubin Morton, who was in her eighties when we corresponded. I met her through the old PRODIGY internet bulletin board system, where she was learning to use a computer so she could share her family history. She had no technical experience, and the system automatically inserted her name into her posts. When she tried to type information about Marshall Morton, the formatting made it appear as though she was being listed as his wife. Many of the Marshall Morton descendants recognize that the mistake could be perpetuated, and I have tried for decades to correct it wherever I see it. I reach out to anyone who suggests a Mrs. Eubin Morton was the wife of Marshall Morton and mother of Drury Ashcraft Morton.
Back when it first occurred on PRODIGY, I reached out to her by phone and spoke with her many times—she lived on a ranch, and I can still remember hearing her screen door slam as she fixed lunch for her son while we talked. She was kind, sharp, and eager to correct the mistake, but she simply couldn’t figure out technology or how to edit or delete the erroneous entry on Prodigy. She passed away before she could fix it. Because of that, anyone who lists “Mrs. Eubin Morton” as the wife of Marshall Morton is off by roughly 150 years. I knew the woman personally, and she was a modern descendant—not a wife of Marshall, and certainly not part of his generation.

Mrs. Thomas Ashcraft of Fayette, Alabama, answered a letter my mother sent “General Delivery” to the Postmaster in Fayette County, Alabama, asking about kinship between Marshall Morton of Blount County and the Ashcrafts of Fayette. She answered by saying there was NOT a connection between the Ashcrafts and Mortons and that she asked in the family, but they didn’t know any Mortons were ever in the family. My mother also spoke with Walton Ashcraft of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His grandfather was Joel Ashcraft, a grandson of Thomas Ashcraft, who “married an Indian woman” as Mr. Ashcraft called her. Today, we know this was Thomas Ashcraft who married Ohalabama Hightower. He suggested the Ashcrafts could have known the Mortons in Virginia and in North Carolina, but none of them ever married. He suspected they were from the same community at one point, maybe in North Carolina. One of the last attempts my Mother made to reach out to the Ashcrafts was a woman named Martha “Mattie” Ashcraft Fulmer. She was referred to my mother by Myra Vanderpool Gormley, the well-loved genealogical publisher who knew the Ashcrafts in Chilton County, Alabama. My mother talked to her on the phone. Mrs. Fulmer, according to my Mother’s notes, knew that her great-great-grandfather was a son of John Hartwell Ashcraft, who married Mary Brown. Mrs. Fulmer knew that the Browns in her family were mixed with Indians, but it wasn’t talked about openly. She had never heard of the names Marshall Morton or Joel Morton. She said there were no Mortons in her history of the family and agreed to do some asking and for my Mother to call again. My mother did call again and Mrs Fulmer confirmed none of her kin ever knew any Morton’s to marry into the family, wasn’t in any of the Bibles and neither was there ever anyone named “Winnie”. Her oldest cousin volunteered that there was a man named Drury Ashcraft, who his “Pa” said was a big hunter and lived over in St. Clair County one time. He heard that men always wanted to hunt with him. Maybe that was how Drury Ashcraft Morton got his name. My mother had already heard this suggested to her by people in Blount County and so that satisfied her.

Drury Ashcraft Morton also has one rather interesting bit of history in that he was ordered to appear as a juror in court in Blount County in September of 1828 and he failed to appear. Non-appearance for court was a grievous and the court could impose a penalty unless the one who committed the offense could give just reason for failing to appear. No doubt September of 1828 was harvest time and Drury was clearly a landowner at that point or he would not have been called. Therefore at the March court, Drury was ordered to be brought in by the Sheriff and fined $20.00. However, once Drury appeared at court to plead his cause, the judge set aside the fine and determined it was a good reason not to appear. I have searched newspaper archives, weather archives, and Blount County collections in an attempt to determine if there was remarkable weather that could have prevented his attendance, but nothing was reported in September 1828 to keep Drury from court. Therefore, it must be determined one of two reasons kept him from performing his duty: harvest of crops, or illness.

Drury Ashcraft Morton met Ellender Holly on one of the occasions he was sent to Georgia to check on his half-sister Nellie, and her family. It is probable after meeting Ellender in Hall County, Georgia that he rode on to Pendleton South Carolina and stayed a time with Jenothan Joel Morton and Lucy. But upon returning to Hall County, Drury married Emma Ellender Holly on 4 October 1829 in Hall County and then brought her to his farm in Blount County. It is important here to mention that Ellender only bore two children who lived, and one of them I did not know about until I talked to Mrs. Eubin Morton of Texas. The firstborn child was named Drury Jr and he was born in 1830 in Georgia, she stated, while Drury built a better cabin on his land in Alabama. The second child born was named Manilla, and she married John Evans in Blount County on Nov 7, 1852. In the 1840 census, only Manilla is enumerated in the home as a child, suggesting that Drury Jr. had died before 1840. By 1860 the only change in the census is that Manilla is still at home but now has a son named Albert M. Evans, aged five. The census that year was performed on the 6 day of June and we know that war had not broken out yet, but John Evans is not present to be counted. Most Morton researchers suggest he died in the Civil War, but it is not known where he was during the census. In 1862 Drury was taxed, so we know that he was alive at that point

My brother married the great-granddaughter of James W. Morton and Rosa Lee Saye of Altoona. James W. Morton descended from Nellie Morton and Samuel Martin. Her grandmother, Connie Odell Morton Guined, was more than willing to talk to my mother about the family history once she realized the family connection. My brother and his wife, Frankie Ann Smith, were third cousins 2 times removed. Connie’s knowledge about Drury Ashcraft Morton and his family included that they were sickly, and she remembered her father saying they had a bad well.

The fate of Drury Ashcraft Morton’s family was something my mother felt compelled to understand, especially after an elderly Roden descendant told her that the Rodens and Averys had known Drury’s people well—and that “he had wet land.” In the 1960s, my brother drove her to see the place the courthouse clerks pointed them to: a stretch of ground between Altoona and Snead, on the west side of Highway 278, tucked into the Hamby Branch watershed. Even decades later, you could see how the land behaved. In spring, it held water—runoff pooling in the low places, the kind of ground that never quite dries before the next rain finds it again.
Because my mother was a Roden descendant, she had the standing to knock on doors and sit with the old ones who still remembered the stories. What they told her was stark. When the war came and times turned hard, “Ol’ Drury’s family did poorly.” They couldn’t work the land, and everyone in the neighborhood knew the same whispered explanation for why the Drury’s family died: their well had “turned.”
The elders said it plainly. The family one day used a well that was gone bad—water gone foul in a wet spring—and it killed them. That was the end of Drury Morton’s household, remembered not through records but through the voices of neighbors who had watched it happen and never forgot. A tainted well was the deepest fear of early generations, because a single shift in the water could threaten the health and survival of an entire household.

I did some research to determine what it meant in the 1860’s if a well “turned” and learned that this was a phrase used back then when an inner wall of the well collapsed, often due to heavy run off, which my mother and brother identified the property as prone to holding water. Many wells back then were only partially lined with stone or logs. Heavy rains saturated the soil and caused an inward partial collapse. My Daddy explained from what he knew that when a well turned, it included a collapsed space that took on water from another source, and the new water could be foul and dangerous. It carried bacteria and caused a form of dysentery and a cholera-like illness.

At some point after that 1862 tax entry, Drury Morton, his wife, and his daughter died due to their bad well. Mrs. Eubin Morton was a descendant. She knew that Albert stayed with the Mortons in Alabama until he left for Texas. She also knew that there were Morton kin in Fisher County, Texas with whom Albert had traveled. She stated that he had married two times before he died. She knew that his name was Albert Marshall Evans and that his first wife was named Louisa Gore but she didn’t think his family had anything to do with the Morton’s after Albert arrived in Texas.

Albert Marshall Morton was the only descendant of Drury and Eleanor Holly Morton to leave descendants. Those more recent descendants actually suggest his middle name was not Marshall, but McNeil. Having corresponded with a great great grandaughter, she was fascinated to learn her history.

Jeremiah Morton
For many years, family tradition held that Marshall Morton had a son named Jeremiah. This belief was shared across several branches of the family. My mother, Jerry Jones, and Virginia Morton all grew up hearing about him, and when I first compared research with Teresa Morton Owens, she also recognized Jeremiah as part of the long‑standing story. In that tradition, Jeremiah was said to have been born after Drury Ashcraft and may have lived for a time in the same community.
Despite the strength of this memory, no confirmed record has yet been found that places a son named Jeremiah in Marshall Morton’s documented household. If he did live, he did not leave offspring who would contribute to the DNA puzzle. A man named Jeremiah Morton does appear in the 1850 census of Chambers County, Alabama, living near Samuel Morton, who married Louisa Zachary in 1831 in Newton County, Georgia. For many years, this Chambers County Jeremiah was considered to be a possible source for the family’s oral history.
Modern evidence tells a different story. DNA testing has shown no genetic connection between the Chambers County Mortons and the descendants of Marshall Morton or his brother Joel Morton. Their naming patterns, migration routes, and community associations also differ sharply from the well‑documented Morton line that moved from Virginia to North Carolina, South Carolina, and finally to Blount and St. Clair Counties, Alabama. While connections in Hall County Georgia remained strong for generations, no such relationship ever existed with Chambers County and the Mortons.
At this time, the Jeremiah Morton of Chambers County cannot be placed within the Marshall–Joel family, and the traditional Jeremiah remains unconfirmed in the historical record. Research continues, but current evidence indicates that the Chambers County Mortons represent a separate and unrelated Morton family.

Sarah B. Morton married William Greenberry Nelson

Sarah was born in 1804 and she was sometimes known as “Sally.” One descendant told my mother that her middle name was “Brown.” Until July 2020, I believed she had died in Arkansas, based on information another researcher had given me. But during the COVID months of July 2020, I went back through my mother’s old notes and discovered her note that “Sheriff Nelson” was actually Sheriff Marcus L. Nelson, and he had married Victoria “Sarepta” Gray.
Following that lead changed everything. When I searched for Marcus Nelson under his full name, I found him living in Morgan County, Alabama, and his mother—Sarah B. Nelson—was living in the household with Marcus and his wife. In that census she appears as Sarah B. Nelson, age 64, born in Virginia, with a father born in Tennessee and a mother born in Virginia. Those facts didn’t bother me because you never knew who gave information for the census, but it did list her daughter, Amanda “Mandy” also in the home and listed as Marcus’s sister.
The reason we were never able to locate Sheriff Nelson before is because the census taker recorded him as Marcus Lee L. Nelson—the name of his own son, Marcus Lee Lafayette Nelson. He was effectively listed under his son’s name, which explains why he had been so difficult to find. It is my understanding that Sarah died 13 September 1870 in Morgan County, Alabama.

Sarah had a very hard life experience and it is understandable that her son would want her last years to be comfortable. She was the second wife of William Greenberry Nelson, born in 1794 in South Carolina. William Nelson’s father was Edward Nelson and his service record shows he entered service in 1780 and served in the Continental Line under Gen. Ugee and Major Hamilton. He was recorded as a remarkable heighth of 6ft. 11 3/4 inches tall and weighed 250 lbs. However, a note was made on his record that he was the second-tallest man to serve. Governor Richard Dobbs Spaight being seven feet. One son of Edward Nelson lists his place of birth as Virginia. In William’s Indian application, he list that his father was born in SC.

Edward was married at least three times. My mother was told that his first wife was Elizabeth Manley whose mother came out of the Self and Ware family group of Tennessee. I have not proved this. In fact, it isn’t true at all based on DNA. In Probate Record Book 1830-1834 of Blount county, AL, “Edward and Polly Nelson sold to John Morton June 16, 1832 79 acres and 74 hundredths of one acre. Easter half of WE quarter of section 30, Twnship 10, range 1, east in District.” Therefore from this we know that Edward’s last wife was named Mary, or Polly. Furthermore, Nancy A. Morton, his granddaughter, made application for Indian Claim # 115838 in 1907, saying that her Grandfather on her Father’s side was Edward Nelson, born in South Carolina and that her father was 1/2 Indian, but not on a roll.

My mother had notes that Edward Nelson was born 1750 and was the son of William Nelson and Elizabeth Burnell or Burnett, who went by the name “Ladoaka”. She wrote that William Nelson Sr was a white man and fathered children with Ladoaka in Virginia before going to Craven, North Carolina. She also entered that William Nelson Sr was related to the Berry family. Edward Nelson died in Blount County 11 July 1839 according to the surname file entry on him in the Alabama State Archives. He was buried at Mt Moriah (Murphree Valley location). Winnifred Johnston Nelson married Edward Nelson in Craven County North Carolina on 15 August 1788. She never appears to have followed Edward to South Carolina. She also only bore a few children to Edward. As found in the surname file in the Alabama archives, those children born to Winnifred were named Charles, Jannet, Permelia and Edward Nelson JR. Sarah Morton’s husband William Greenberry Nelson is not listed as a child born to her at all. And while it may be shocking today, it was not unusual for a Native American man to have more than one wife. At least eight children are believed born to Edward Nelson by the wife Mary/Polly and according to a note my Mother made under the Elizabeth Manley suggestion she wrote that it was more likely this wife was a descendant of the Indian Self and Ware’s of Rhea County, Tennessee. Children born to this woman were: William Greenberry, Edward Garrett, James E., Mary “Nan-yi”, and Elisabeth “Ladoska” which may be the proper spelling of the Indian name of Edward Nelson’s mother. According to descendants, Elizabeth Ladoska was born in 1798 in Pickens SC. She married a John Whitworth in May 1823 in Blount County, Alabama.

Edward Nelson is located as counted in Chatham NC with William Brown and only 2 enumerations between them, those are John Nelson and Uriah Hatley in the 1810 census of Chatham NC. This suggests to me that William Greenberry Nelson very likely knew the Browns and the Mortons before he took Sarah as his second wife when his first wife as died. I can mention all that we know of her is from descendants who stated her name was Mary.

On a trip to Oklahoma to research William and Sarah Nelson after they followed the Trail of Tears in removal, they were located by my husband and I as living in the Goingsnake District of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. The record was extremely hard to read and it wasn’t until I located a descendant some 20 years later that I could compile a more accurate record of the children born to Sarah. They were: Elisha Edward Nelson (Mary “Polly” Morton said to be his cousin), Elizabeth Brown Nelsen (William Wesley Self), Mary Winnea Nelson (James Wesley Rickles), David Nelson (Elizabeth M. Walker), Matthew Noah Nelson (Louisa F. Simpson), Bethany Nelson (listed dead 1837 Goingsnake District Oklahoma), Amanda C. Nelson (unknown if she married), Manley Nelson (Sarah Elizabeth Moody), Feaby Nelson (born 1836 Goingsnake District, Oklahoma), Nancy Ann Nelson (William M. Cottongame), Sheriff Marcus Lee Lafayette Nelson (Victoria Sarepta Laretta Gray), Sarah M. Nelson (Francis M. Corvin), Letty Nelson (Listed in the Dawes Application of Nancy Ann Nelson), William W. Nelson (Mary Jane Nicholas), Marshall Nelson (Mary Satirah Morris).

William Nelson and Sarah Morton were required to remove to Oklahoma. He was a wealthy man and was able to book passage part of the way by steamer. According to Morgan County descendants, they left from Guntersville, Alabama, and went by water as far as they could go, then going the rest of the journey by wagon. During the years they were in Oklahoma, it is believed that both Bethany and Feaby Nelson died. These names were seen in Oklahoma, but I did not know about Letty Nelson at the time, and failed to ever see her in records. Conditions in Oklahoma were deplorable, and while I do not know how he did it, William Nelson returned his family to Alabama upon the death of his father and they never returned to Goingsnake District.

It is important to remember when researching William that there were TWO William Nelson’s born in the 1790’s in South Carolina. OURS is the son of Edward Nelson whose Revolutionary War Pension was rejected because he was part Indian. The other William Nelson is located in enlistment records for the War of 1812 as being from “Newberry SC”, born 1791, with hazel eyes, brown hair and a red complexion when he enlisted in 1815. He enlisted in Georgetown and the name “Susan Simons” is listed at his enlistment. I do not know why, but records show he only served around Columbia SC in a militia. That specific William Nelson stayed around the state of South Carolina that whole time. Whereas our William Nelson and his brothers can be found in the Mississippi Territorial papers during those same exact years. A record I found in Goingsnake indicates William listed his father as “E. Nelson” and he was half Cherokee. William Nelson died Dec 6, 1866, in Blount County. A state census was done in Blount County in 1866 and indicates William and Sarah were living alone at that time. Thereafter she is in the home of her son in Morgan County.

Joshua A. Morton married Edie Bynum and Nancy Ann Lawson

Joshua is the lastborn child of Marshall Morton by his wife Winnea Brown. Based on the work of Jerry Bartlett Jones, Joshua operated grist mills to help subsidize his family, and oversaw the building of grist mills across central Alabama. He built one in Calhoun County as well as one in Tuscaloosa County. Others were built in and around Etowah County and Blount County. Joshua’s marriage record to Edie Bynum records his name with the middle initial “A”. It has been said by Bynum descendants that his middle name was Allen, but the name does not repeat in his descendants although his older brother Marshall Jr. did use the Allen name with one of his own sons. The Bynum family could be correct.

Most of the documentation on Joshua involves decades of guardianship for his children after Edie died. Blount County has numerous records of Joshua giving these accounts for his own children. Guardianship was about property back then, not custody. In early Alabama law, a father automatically had physical custody of his children. But he did not automatically have the right to manage property that legally belonged to the children—including Dower-related property that reverted to the children after the mother’s death. If the children inherited anything from their mother or her family, the father had to be appointed guardian of the estate, even though he was already guardian of their persons.
This triggered annual or periodic court reporting, sometimes for decades. Edie Bynum was the daughter of Asa Bynum and Rebecca Murphree, among the early pioneers into the area and his children absolutely inherited from them but are also part of the estate of their grandfather Solomon Murphree who died in Calhoun County Alabama.

Children born to Joshua A. Morton and Edie Bynum were Serena Adeline Morton (Levi M. Byum), Daniel C. Morton (Julia Cowdon), Elijah Joshua Morton (Pheriba Bynum and Rebecca Dearman).

The second wife of Joshua Morton was Nancy A. Faust Lawson who was born in Tennessee. It is believed Nancy was the daughter of William Samuel Faust (Foust) by his first wife. On the marriage certificate for Nancy and Joshua, Samuel testified that Nancy A was of age. It could have been that Nancy A was the daughter of Samuel’s brother, but it is evident Samuel gave permission for the married and that Nancy A Lawson was a married name, with her maiden name being Faust. No marriage record for a Faust/Lawson marriage has been located either in Tennessee or Alabama. The Lawson family group as a whole were out of Orange County, North Carolina and into Tennessee. All descendants of John Lawson the Longhunter are by his wife Anne Lightfoot the daughter of John Lightfoot and Shawnee Jennie Deerhoof KAHOKA. From my paternal Grandmother I know that John Tishomingo Lawson married Elizabeth Washburn the daughter of Reuben Washburn, and not all of their children are known by descendants but all migrated into Blount County through Tennessee. It is entirely possible Nancy Faust’s first husband was one of these unknown descendants.

Children of Joshua A. Morton and Nancy Ann Lawson were: Winney Manila Morton (William Thomas Putnam, however, if this is true she married him as an Alldredge), Sarah L. H. Morton, William Polk Morton, John Brown Morton (Elizabeth McClendon), Eliza Jane Morton (Levi Byrd Phillips), Rhoda E. Morton (was 61 and a helper in the home of Landrum Phillips in Walnut Grove, Etowah county in 1910 census).

My Specific Morton Family

My line descends from William Nelson Nathaniel Morton and his wife Amanda Camella Crump. Their children were:

John Wesley Morton born 22 May 1853. He died on 10 Feb 1913 in Merit, Collin County,TX. He married Nancy Elvira CAMPBELL, daughter of
George Lafayette CAMPBELL and Susannah KISER, on 09 Nov 1876 in Etowah, Alabama, USA. She was born on 07 Nov 1857 in Tennessee, United States. She died on 27 Jul 1942 in Merit, TX

Joel B. Morton born 5 Sept 1855 died May 1856

Reuben Ellis MORTON (my great grandfather) was born on 17 Nov 1856 in St Clair, Alabama as it was designated at the time. He died on 20 May 1915 in Gallant, Etowah, Alabama, USA. He married Mary Adeline Madison CAMPBELL, daughter of George Lafayette CAMPBELL and Susannah KISER, on 14 Sep 1876 in Etowah, Alabama, USA. She was born on 02 Dec 1856 in Greene County, Tennessee, USA. She died on 11 May 1929 in DeKalb, Alabama, USA.

James Ray MORTON was born on 18 Dec 1858 in St Clair, Alabama, USA. He died on 11 Apr 1923 in San Bernardino, California, USA (Buried Bellvue Memorial Park). He married (1) Savannah Josephine FERGUSON, daughter of Riley Hamilton FERGUSON and Josephine
DUCKETT, on 27 Nov 1879 in Gallant, Etowah Co AL. She was born on 10 Mar 1863 in St Clair, Alabama, USA. She died on 22 Feb 1891 in Etowah, Alabama, USA. He married (2) Barbara Louisa CAMPBELL, daughter of George Lafayette CAMPBELL and Susannah KISER, on They Never Married. She was born on 10 Oct 1855 in Greene County, Tennessee, USA. She died on 08 Jan 1940 in DeKalb County, Alabama, USA. He married (3) Emma Lenora GORDON, daughter of Thomas M. GORDON and Mary F. STEPHENS, on 23 Jul 1891 in St Clair County Alabama. She was born on 09 Nov 1869 in Heard County, Georgia, USA. She died on 20 Jan 1935 in San Bernardino, California, USA

Andrew Jackson MORTON was born on 22 May 1865 in St Clair, Alabama, USA. He died on 10 Nov 1938 in San Bernardino, California, USA (Age: 72). He married (1) Minnie D. BROTHERS, daughter of Isaiah Marion BROTHERS and Ellendon “Ellen” Jane PHILLIPS, in 1901 in Gallant, Etowah, Alabama, USA. She was born on 01 Sep 1876 in Gallant, Etowah, Alabama, USA. She died on 27 Feb 1922 in Marshall Co AL. He married (2) Rosalee ASHLEY on 02 Mar 1890 in Etowah, Alabama, USA. She was born in Blount, Alabama, USA. She died in Erath TX.

Elijah Joseph MORTON was born in 1867 in Gallant, Etowah County, Alabama, USA. According to Amanda Morton Galloway, he died the same day he was born, in Gallant, Etowah County, Alabama, USA.

Mary Elizabeth MORTON was born on 26 Mar 1868 in Alabama. She died on 19 Jun 1943 in Littlefield, Lamb, Texas, USA (Age: 75). She married John William DUKE, son of John Smith DUKE and Sarah Rachel COX, on 24 Dec 1882 in Etowah, Alabama, USA. He was born in 1864 in GA. He died in 1880 in Etowah, Alabama, United States.

Lucy Isabell MORTON was born on 14 Jul 1870 in Gallant, Etowah, Alabama, USA. She died on 10 Dec 1932 in Gallant, Etowah, Alabama, United States. She married William Edwin ‘Willie’ Moore, son of James Thomas ‘Jim’ Moore and Sarah Elizabeth ‘Sallie’ Potter, on 06 Jan 1887 in Etowah, Alabama, USA. He was born in Nov 1866 in Alabama, United States. He died on 06 Jul 1949 .

Charles Robert MORTON was born on 07 May 1876 in Gallant, Etowah, Alabama, USA. He died on 13 Aug 1898 in Greasy Cove,Etowah,AL. He married Mary S GRIFFIN, daughter of Sargent Jasper GRIFFIN and Louisa Jane HAGLER, on 04 Nov 1895 in Etowah, Alabama, USA. She was born in May 1881 in Gallant, Etowah, Alabama, USA. She died in 1946. He had planned to become a Minister. Died suddenly after helping can summer vegetables.

Aunt Mandy Galloway, older sister to my grandfather, stated that there were a set of twins born to her grandparents that did not survive, and she did not remember their names. They were not entered in the Bible because they came “too early” and never took breath.

My father was Perry Humphries Morton, the third child of James Brown Morton and Fannie Mamie Humphries of Gallant, Etowah County, Alabama. James Brown Morton was the son of Reuben Ellis Morton and Mary Adeline Madison Campbell. My father was born at Needmore, outside Boaz, Alabama, and reared in the Harmony community situated 4 miles from Whiton and about ten miles from Rainsville, DeKalb County, Alabama. My grandfather worked for the state of Alabama, helping survey roads and highways so that the family lived where it was most convenient for his work. Eventually, he built at the Sardis community, near Boaz and never moved again. James Brown Morton was the eleventh child of Reuben Ellis Morton and his wife, Mary Adeline Madison Campbell of Walnut Grove, near Gallant in Etowah County, Alabama. Reub Morton was the third son of William Nelson Nathaniel Morton and his wife, Amanda Camella Crump. William was known as “Billy” or “Uncle Billy” by everyone who knew him. He was a county commissioner and very well respected. All documents were always signed as William N. Morton, and most of the early researchers, including my Mother, believed he was William Nathaniel Morton, until the Bible record of Andrew Jackson Morton was located in possession of Dorothy Bussey Hofer of Ontario California. That Bible was different from others closer to home, and recorded him simply as William Nelson Morton, born on Jan 3, 1830. William Nelson Nathaniel Morton was the ninth child of Jenothan Joel Morton and Lucy Durham. To prevent any confusion, I have always recorded him as William Nelson Nathaniel Morton because of that one Bible record being different.

CONTACT INFORMATION

This is by no means all of the information I hold on the expansive Morton family. My mother began gathering their history from the time she married. I have worked on the family tree for more than 45 years. If you suspect your family tree connects to this rare branch of Mortons who trace through the Saponi-Occoneechi nation, I can be contacted at: Keenergapkin@gmail.com

Additionally, there is an active Facebook group created by Teresa Morton Owens to be found at: (1) Marshall Morton Descendants | Facebook

I grew up on Lookout Mountain in North Alabama and completed all my schooling here in the state that shaped my earliest desire to be a history major. My professional life began in public service as a National Employee of the Boy Scouts of America—and later as a librarian for the State of Utah, where I renewed my deep appreciation for archives, records, and the stories they preserve.
For the past twenty‑five years, I have devoted myself to earning a certificate in Genealogical Study, formalizing my effort to keep learning. I’ve spent the last ten years helping others discover and document their own family histories. My work includes teaching genealogy classes throughout the Southeast, assisting individuals in building accurate, evidence‑based family trees, and contributing to the preservation of regional and Indigenous histories. I became interested in the science of genetics after I was notified by Family Tree DNA there was a desire to document my Native American roots. They required a more detailed family tree for my mitochondrial DNA, using my mother’s maternal lines but also the maternal lines of my paternal grandfather, Fannie Mamie Humphries. Thus my DNA was able to become foundational for mixed Native American settlers in Alabama. I was told that primarily, my DNA was Chippewa/Ojibway. This information drove me further into family history. I have served for almost ten years as Coordinator for a Family Search Center and privately serve as a beta tester for Family Search software. I am still very active in the AlaBenton Genealogical Society and credit Judy Phillips of Tullahoma Tennessee, Jan Earnest, Deanna Slappey, Robert S. Davis former director of Wallace State Genealogical Department, Leslie R. Waltman, Tom Mullins of the Anniston Public Library Alabama Room, and my sister, Lorna Morton, for encouraging me not to stop. A combination of people and lifelong curiosity, professional training, and community engagement continues to guide my research today.

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