John Hulvey Sr.
John Hulvey was born on 18 June 1800 in Rockingham County, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. He spent his life in the Brocks Gap country of the county, where the North Fork of the Shenandoah River cuts through Little North Mountain and the valleys of Fulks Run and Bergton run back into the Allegheny ridges on the West Virginia line.
He married Margaret Ritchie, a daughter of a Brocks Gap family, about 1830. In the census of 1850 John was 48 and Margaret 42, and nine children were at home: George, 18, Elizabeth, 14, Peter, 12, Mary I., 10, Ruhama, 8, Amanda, 6, Susan, 3, and Margaret, 2. An older daughter, Leannah, born in 1833, was not in the house that year, and Annie was born that June. Leannah married a Brady, Elizabeth, called Betsy, and Mary married Turners, and Amanda married a Dove.
On 4 August 1849 John bought a tract of seventy-one acres in Rockingham County from Isaac Weanig and his wife. The deed was recorded on 28 December 1849, and John held and farmed that land for the rest of his life.
Margaret died on 6 May 1857, at about fifty, of dropsy, the old word for the swelling now put down to heart or kidney failure. Their daughter Susan was ten and Annie six. That same spring, on 18 April 1857, George W. Custer died, leaving a widow, Melvina, a Ritchie by birth. John married Melvina, and their son, John Clinton Hulvey, was born in 1860. Melvina brought her own son, George Custer, into the house.
The Civil War came to the valley in his sixties. On 25 August 1864, two months before Union cavalry burned barns and mills across Rockingham County in the campaign the valley remembered as the Burning, his son Peter married Sarah Hottinger. The county clerk entered the groom's parents as Jno. and Margaret Hulvey.
John Hulvey died on 18 December 1872, without a will. He left Melvina and ten children. He is buried in the Hulvey family cemetery in Brocks Gap with Margaret, two of their daughters, Melvina's first husband, and a Ritchie sister and her husband, Christine and Valentine Bear. For more than a century the graves had no stone that named them. In November 2021 a granite marker listing them was set up, paid for by donations from the Brocks Gap Heritage Day.
The seventy-one acres did not settle quietly. That fight reached the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, and its story is told below.
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If John Hulvey Sr. is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "John Hulvey Sr. (1800-1872)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-hulvey-sr-1800-1872-02adda.