James Downing
James Downing was a Virginia frontiersman from the country along the Ohio River above Wheeling, in what was then Brooke County and is now the northern panhandle of West Virginia. He held land there into the 1820s. In the Indian war of the early 1790s he served as a scout, one of the men who walked the trails west of the river looking for war parties before they reached the settlements.
Like many of the scouts, he went back after the war to the country he had watched. In 1805 he came across into Ohio with his son-in-law Isaac Van Meter, his wife and their child. They made their clearing in the valley of the Big Sandy, in what became Sandy Township of Stark County. He went back to Virginia for the rest of his family and returned in 1806 with his children James, Hugh, Adam and Sarah. A later Stark County history adds that he brought out his brother-in-law James Laughlin and two more sons-in-law, Isaac Miller and Benjamin Cuppy. The Stark County histories call him the first recorded settler of the township. The first preaching there, by the Presbyterian Joshua Beer, was held at Downing's house.
He took up a quarter section on what became the road between Waynesburg and Magnolia. The village of Magnolia was first platted as Downingville. By his death he held three quarter sections in two townships of the Sandy valley and still owned the tract in Brooke County.
He died before the winter of 1822 without a will that the deeds mention. On 2 December 1822 his children divided his land among themselves by deed, and that deed is the record that names them all: Drucilla, wife of Isaac Miller; Margaret, wife of Benjamin Cuppy; Susanna, wife of Isaac Vanmetre; James, Hugh and Adam Downing and their wives Nancy, Mary and Sarah; and Sarah, wife of Robert Thompson. The three sons took the Ohio land, a quarter section each. The Virginia tract was to be sold, each of the four daughters to have two hundred dollars from it first, and the rest to be shared equally among all seven. He is buried in the old Downing family burying ground near Waynesburg. His wife's name is in none of the papers, and she does not sign, so she was very probably dead by 1822.
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If James Downing is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "James Downing", https://heirology.com/ancestors/james-downing-f2b817.