Robert King Carter's Correspondence and Diary

   A Collection Transcribed
        and Digitized
   by Edmund Berkeley, Jr.


List of Letters | About This Collection

Electronic Text Center , University of Virginia Library


Summary



Letter from Robert Carter to Thomas Edwards, Clerk of Lancaster County, July 28, 1730

     Robert Carter writes to Thomas Edwards, Clerk of Lancaster County, July 28, 1730, requesting that Edwards issue a marriage license for his daughter Lucy and Henry Fitzhugh.



Letter from Robert Carter to Thomas Edwards, Clerk of Lancaster County, July 28, 1730


-1 -

[Corotoman, Lancaster County, Virginia]

July 28th -- -- [173]0

To Mr
Thos Edwards Clerk of
Lancaster County
Sir

     This is to desire you to make out a Licence
to solemnize a Marriage between Mr. Henry Fitzhugh
junr. of Stafford County and my Daughter Lucy
it is with my Consent and I am ready to give you such
bond for the security as the Law requires this I suppose
Will do and that you will deliver out the Licence
to the bearer that he may carry it to majr Fleet [to]
sign and he is to Call at our Ministers to des [ire]
him not to be out of the Way at the time appoin
ted I am


              your humble Servt. -- --

                  ROBERT CARTER

NOTES



Source copy consulted: Lancaster County Marriage Bonds, 1701: 1715-1783, I, 55. Library of Virginia, Richmond. This is the recipient's copy signed by Carter as is noted by the use of bold italics. The address leaf reads: To | Mr. Thomas Edwards | Clk of | Lancaster -- -- . It is endorsed: Colo. Carters letr. for Colo. Fitzhughs | Marr Lisence | 1730.

The name of Carter's home, "Corotoman," the county, and colony have been added for clarity to this unheaded draft.

[1] "Thos. Edwards, a little petty Fogging Lawyer the Clark of our County that hath as much Mettle and more cunning for Contention then his predecessor had" Carter wrote to Landon Jones, July 22, 1723. His opinion of Edwards later changed for there are more appreciative mentions of him in Carter's diary. Edwards was clerk of the Lancaster County court from 1720-1746. ( Within the Court House at Lancaster. Lively, VA: Lively Printing Services, Lively, VA: Lively Printing Services, [1976]. p. 15. ; and "Thomas Edwards, Gentleman, Clerk of the Court" in Brown and Sorrells. People in Profile. pp. 94-103. )

[2] Henry Fitzhugh (1706-1742) of "Eagle's Nest," Stafford County, was educated at Oxford, and married Lucy Carter (1715-1763), Robert Carter's fourteenth child, in 1730. They had four children; after Fitzhugh's death, she married Nathaniel Harrison (1713-1791). He was a burgess and militia officer. (Carleton. A Genealogy. . . of Robert Carter. . . . p. 451 ; Robert A. Rutland, The Papers of George Mason, 1725-1792. [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970]. I:lii ; and extensive generalogical notes, "Fitzhugh Family," in volumes 7 and 8 of Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. )

[3] Henry Fleet (d. 1735) was the third member of a distinguished Lancaster County family to bear this name, and was justice, sheriff in 1729-1730, coroner, surveyor of roads, and militia officer. ("Rebecca Banton Mysterious Woman of Wealth" in Brown and Sorrells. People in Profile, pp. 129-30. )


This text, originally posted in 2005, was reviewed September 25, 2015.