Ancestors

Isham Wheeler

Isham Wheeler lived on Big Brier Creek in Warren County, Georgia. His land adjoined that of John Adkins, Hugh Montgomery and Samuel Story. An Isham Wheeler appears in Warren County land records from the start of the century: a land record of 1800, a state grant of 1802, and deeds of 1809 and 1810 in which a David, either a Wheeler or an Evans, is also a party. Those are probably his. Their contents beyond the names are not known. His birth date and his parents are not known either.

His wife was Edy. They had at least six children who lived to be named in his will: two sons, John and David, and four daughters, Sarah, Elizabeth, Dilly and Mary. By 1839 John was settled on the east end of the land. Sarah had married David Evans and Elizabeth had married Hugh Evans. David, Dilly and Mary were still at home. Two of his sisters, Sarah and Elizabeth Wheeler, lived in a house on three acres of his land.

On 3 December 1839 he made his will. He could not write, and he signed it with his mark. He asked to be "decently buried in the burying ground on the premises on which I now live." The will is careful about fairness. Each child who had married had already received an advance on an inheritance: a share handed over in a parent's lifetime and counted against what the child would get at the parent's death. His son John had had "one hundred dollars in worth & one feather bed & furniture & the worth of two cows." David Evans had had the same, and Hugh Evans the same less ten dollars, which the will made up. His wife, his son David and the two unmarried daughters were to be paid the same hundred dollars, bed, furniture and cows before the married children received anything more. The rest of the personal property was to be sold and the money divided equally among his wife and children.

The land was divided with the same care. His executor was to survey a hundred acres for John on the east end, "adjoining land with John Adkins," taking in the place where John already lived. He had already given his son David a hundred acres beside the lands of Hugh Montgomery and Samuel Story, with Big Brier Creek as the south line, "known by the name of the David Wheeler place." Three acres and the house on them were kept for his sisters for their lifetimes. Everything else went to his wife for her life, and at her death to "my four daughters and their legal representatives namely Sarah Evans, the wife of David Evans, Elizabeth Evans the wife of Hugh Evans, Dilly Wheeler & Mary Wheeler to inherit & possess the same forever."

He named "my brother in law Jesse Evans" as executor. In the usage of the time a brother-in-law could be a sister's husband or a wife's brother, so either Jesse Evans had married a sister of his, or Edy was Jesse's sister. The will does not say which. Hugh Montgomery, Benjamin Brooks and James Montgomery witnessed it. They swore to it in open court on 6 January 1840, so he was dead by then. Patrick N. Maddux, the clerk, recorded it on 15 January 1840.

His daughter Sarah Evans, wife of David Evans, was very probably the Sarah Evans who lived in Fayette County, Georgia, from the 1820s to 1859. A Sarah Wheeler married a David Evans in Warren County on 14 December 1824. A Hugh Evans, born about 1807, lived beside that Fayette David Evans in 1840 and 1850, and two Evans husbands of two Wheeler sisters turning up side by side in Fayette are very probably the same pair. The will itself says nothing about where David and Sarah lived, and no record says outright that they were his.

If Isham Wheeler is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Isham Wheeler", https://heirology.com/ancestors/isham-wheeler-d5850d.