George C. Caplinger
George C. Caplinger was born on 3 February 1784, the date on his gravestone, in Pendleton County, Virginia, on the South Branch of the Potomac. One county history gives the year as 1781. The family was German, and the name had first been written Keplinger. His father was George Caplinger of Pendleton County, who made his will in August 1828 and named "my beloved & only sons George Caplinger & Adam Caplinger" as its executors. A history of Randolph County printed in 1916 carries the family two generations further back, to a George Caplinger who served in the French and Indian War and died in 1773, and to Samuel Caplinger, the first of the name in Pendleton, who died there in 1769. George had one brother, Adam, and at least one sister, who married Jacob Hammer of Pendleton County.
About 1800 he crossed into Randolph County, the first of the name to settle there. In 1806 he and Edward Wyatt bought 450 acres from William B. Wilson on the west side of the river between Beverly and the place where Elkins later grew, a tract known as the old Benjamin Wilson place. That land became the Caplinger settlement. His descendants still held it ninety years later. He kept buying: land from the sheriff of Randolph County in 1828, from Solomon Wyatt in 1833 and from Simon R. Kittle in 1838.
On 14 May 1804 he married Sarah Collett. She was born on 13 June 1782 and died on 29 July 1844, aged 62. The histories name their children as Thomas J., George W., Solomon Chenoweth (born 13 August 1811), Adam D. (born 1816), Margaret and Elizabeth, and say that "every one of these lived to be more than seventy-four years old." When Adam and Solomon married in 1860, their marriage records named their parents as George and Sarah Caplinger.
He had an older daughter, Mary Eleanor, born about 1803, before the marriage to Sarah Collett. The histories do not list her, and her mother is not known. Her marriage to Robert Little on 3 December 1822 names her father as George Caplinger. She named her son, born in 1825, George Caplinger Lytle.
His father died in the winter of 1828 to 1829, and George went back to Pendleton as one of the two executors. On 30 October 1829 he and his brother Adam, described as "George Caplinger of the county of Randolph and Adam Caplinger of the county of Pendleton", sold five tracts of their father's land on the South Branch, 203 and a half acres, to George Hammer for $1,615.
About 1845 he gave his daughter Margaret Stalnaker about fifteen acres on the west side of the Valley River. She and her husband Archibald Stalnaker sold it about 1846 to her brother Adam D. Caplinger, but the legal title stayed with their father. On 9 August 1870 George Caplinger signed a deed that finally passed it to Adam, for four hundred dollars.
He died four months later, on 7 December 1870, aged eighty six, and was buried in Beverly Cemetery. His daughter Mary was buried in the same ground two years later.
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Cite: Heirology, "George C. Caplinger (1784-1870)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/george-c-caplinger-1784-1870-e35cfe.