Lenoir County, NC - Susan Elizabeth (Sutton) Herring Daly ~~~~~~~~~~ Susan Elizabeth (Sutton) Herring Daly (b. 1790/91 - d. April 24, 1867) By Francis R. Hodges, III (her great-great-great grandson) (NOTE: The follows discussion attempts to establish the identity of Susan, the wife of Dennis John Daly (1787-1848), from whom many individuals still living in Lenoir and Wayne County are descended. Some of this information comes from the surviving documentation, which is admittedly sparse owing to the destruction of nearly all the Lenoir County records in courthouse fires. Much of the remainder was passed on to me by a few of Susan’s descendants, particularly Miss Hattie Daly (1885-1985), Dr. Leo Anderson, and Mr. George Wetherington. The conclusions, however, are derived largely from my own insights, deductions and educated guesswork; they are, of course, subject to revision should additional evidence be uncovered —FRH) My interest in learning the identity of Susan began many years ago during a visit to one of her descendants, Miss Hattie Daly. Hattie, who never married, died in 1985, only a few months before her 100th birthday. She was a double first cousin of my grandmother, Julia Daly Hodges (1871-1943), and since my grandmother was an only child, Hattie was the closest kin she had on her generation. She lived just west of Kinston, on land that had been in her mother’s family—the Kennedys— since before the American Revolution. Hattie knew a great deal of family history, but she always spoke more of her Kennedy than of her Daly ancestors. She did, however, know of the lengthy litigation in the Craven County courts over the estate of Captain John Daly (d, August 17, 1796), her great-great grandfather, and how Dennis John Daly, Captain John’s only son, had moved up the Neuse to the Bucklesberry region of Lenoir County with his mother, Ann Granby Daly, a few years after Captain John’s death. Hattie also knew that Dennis John’s wife, whom he appears to have met and married after this move, was named Susan, something I later confirmed by consulting the federal census of 1860, at which time she was living as a widow in the household of her son, Joshua Daly (1820-1903). However, when I asked Hattie if she knew the name of the family from which Susan came, she looked at me sharply and replied, "We don’t know—and we don’t want to know!," thereby declaring the matter closed. Naturally, that made me curious, since I assumed she knew something of Susan’s origins she did not wish to divulge. Years later, long after Hattie’s death, I received some e-mail from Leo Anderson, a medical doctor who practices in California but who grew up in LaGrange. He has in his possession several letters, papers, and Bible records that belonged to his great-grandmother, Annie Ivey (1860- 1931), who was the daughter of Joshua Daly, Susan’s son (see above). Written on one of these papers is the name "Susan Elizabeth (Sutton) Herring," along with the date of her death, April 24, 1867. This appears to be our Susan, and it explains why her name is found in the federal census of 1860, at which time she was sixty-nine years old, but does not appear in the census of 1870, since by that year she would have been dead. Susan’s husband, Dennis John Daly, is also mentioned in these papers, as is the date of his death, November 6, 1848, which similarly explains why his name appears in every federal census from 1810 to 1840, but in none thereafter. Two additional dates found in these papers are more suspect. The first, March 3, 1800, is given for the marriage of Susan and Dennis John Daly. However, it must surely be in error, since both Susan and Dennis John would have been children in that year. (A date about ten years later is more likely). The final date, April 1, 1810, is given for the death of Dennis John’s mother, Ann Granby Daly. This date may well be correct, though one may also question it since a Craven County document drawn-up in the following year still lists Ann as a litigant in the on- going suit over her husband’s estate. Susan’s parents have yet to be identified. However, from the above entry it appears very likely that her father was a Sutton, and that at the time of her marriage to Dennis John Daly she was either the widow of a Herring, or a daughter born out of wedlock to a Herring mother. There were many Suttons living in the Bucklesberry region of Lenoir County by the late eighteenth century; if Susan’s father came from this family, then he would likely have been one of the Sutton males listed as a head of household in the census of 1800, when Susan was approximately nine years old. The most likely candidate appears to be William Sutton (ca 1760-bef.1820), whose household in that year contained a female the right age to have been Susan (under ten) who cannot be otherwise identified. William also seems a likely candidate for Susan’s father because Susan’s oldest son was also named William, and "William" is a name that does not appear in the Daly family before this generation. Since his name did not come from his father’s family, it thus seems reasonable to assume that it came from his mother’s, and that William Daly was likely named for his maternal grandfather, William Sutton. It is interesting to note that on the very day William Daly was born— November 8, 1813—William Sutton gave a legal deposition stating that he had served with one Isaac Parker during the American Revolution, and that Parker had been wounded at the Battle of Rockfish (1781) and should thus be eligible for a pension from the state of North Carolina. This proves that William Sutton was a veteran of the American Revolution. William has been proved as a brother of Benjamin Sutton (d. 1832; see below), and is thus an uncle of that Benjamin’s children, one of whom was also named Benjamin. It was this younger Benjamin Sutton (1795- 1864) whose daughter Nancy married Susan’s son, George Daly (see below). Nancy and George Daly would thus have been second cousins, since their Sutton grandfathers, William and the older Benjamin, would have been brothers—something one should hardly find surprising, since marriage between second cousins occurred with great frequency in the nineteenth-century South, (First cousins sometimes married as well, but less often). William Sutton’s only proved wife is Sarah Arendell (ca 1770-bef. 1840)), the oldest of six daughters of William Arendell (1746-1822) whose land lay west of Kinston, along what are now U. S. Highways 70 and 258. Since Sarah is listed as a head of household in the federal census of 1820, William must have died sometime before that year but after 1813, the year in which he gave his deposition for Isaac Parker (see above). We also know that William and Sarah had three children, and that Susan was not one of them. The oldest, Mary (called Polly), was born about 1792, only a year or two after Susan’s birth. So if William were Susan’s father, and if she were born in wedlock, then he must have fathered her by an earlier wife, perhaps one who died while giving birth to her. William could have very shortly thereafter married Sarah, who appears to have been ten or fifteen years younger than he, as second wives often were. Since two of Susan’s sons, William and Robert Daly, later married daughters of Sarah’s sister Catherine (see below), the Dalys would likely have had a good bit of contact with the family of William Arendell, something which can readily be explained if Sarah’s husband were also Susan’s father. As stated above, one possible explanation for the way Susan’s name is listed in the papers belonging to Dr. Anderson is that Susan was the widow of a Herring when she married Dennis John Daly. If so, she must have been quite a young widow, since she was only in her early twenties when she gave birth to William Daly (b. 1813), her oldest child by Dennis John. Another—and perhaps more likely possibility--is that Susan was born out of wedlock to a Herring mother. That might explain why Hattie Daly chose not to speak of her. Or perhaps Hattie chose not to do so because of the illegitimacy that is found among some of Susan’s descendants (see below). At any rate, the precise identity of Susan’s mother has to date proved impossible to establish. As stated above, if Susan were born out of wedlock her mother was very likely a Herring, a family which, like the Suttons, had migrated from Bertie County to the Neuse valley before the American Revolution, and which by the end of the eighteenth century had already established many branches in Bucklesberry and the adjacent regions of Lenoir and Wayne. If she died about the time of Susan’s birth, and Susan was then taken to be reared in the household of her Sutton father, her name may never have been recorded or passed down. At present, the most reasonable speculation one can make is that she was perhaps closely related to the family of Simon Herring (d. 1842), whose lands bordered those of the Dalys, and whose numerous descendants intermarried with the descendants of Susan and Dennis John. Susan and Dennis John Daly had eight known children. They were as follows: William Daly (1813-1892) – William was married three times. His first wife, who died not long after their marriage, was Persis Brown (ca 1821-ca 1841). Very shortly thereafter he married Persis’s sister, Julia (1823-1865). Persis and Julia were the daughters of Travis Brown (ca 1780-bef. 1830) and Catherine Arendell (ca 1785-ca 1835), a younger sister of Sarah Arendell (see above). When she married Travis Brown, Catherine was the widow of Edward Hodges (d. 1815), with whom she had had five children. In his later years William married a third wife, Gatsy Grady (b. and d. unknown). William had four children, all by his second wife, Julia Brown. My great-grandfather, John Travis Daly (1843-1897), was their oldest child. The others were Hattie’s father, James W. Daly (1846-1922); Robert E. Daly (1848-1923); and Persis Susan Daly (1851-1933). All except Persis Susan (called Sue) have descendants living today, although as far as I know none of these descendants are in the male line, and thus do not bear the Daly name. My family still owns the land which William bought before the Civil War. It is located along Falling and Groundnut Creeks, about midway between LaGrange and Wheat Swamp, on either side of Paul’s Place, Willie Measley, and Hodges Farm Roads. A Free Will Baptist Church called Daly’s Chapel, for which William’s son John gave the land, is located on it. In the woods behind this church is an old graveyard in which William and Julia Brown Daly are buried. Elizabeth (Betsy) Daly (1813/14-July, 1869) – Depending on which census--1850 or 1860—one chooses to believe, Elizabeth was born either in 1810 or in 1815. However, the mortality schedule in the census of 1870 states that her death occurred in July, 1869, and that she was fifty-five years old at the time. Her husband, Malachi Fields (1791- 1851), was thus much older than she. She was his second wife; they had several children and have many descendants. One of her sons, John Fields (1846-1926), married William Daly’s daughter, Persis Susan (see above); they were thus first cousins, It is interesting to note that if Elizabeth were fifty-five years old at the time of her death, then she was very close to the age of her brother William, who was also fifty-five at that time (he turned fifty- six on November 8, 1869). This raises the likelihood that Elizabeth and William were twins, although I have never heard that William Daly, my great-great grandfather, had a twin sister. George Daly (1815-1903) –About 1837, George married Nancy Sutton (1820- 1889), the daughter of Benjamin and Mary Hines Sutton. (More on Benjamin Sutton later; he is not my ancestor, but I have some interesting information on him). George bought land in eastern Wayne County, to which he and Nancy moved before the Civil War; they had eight children (see The Heritage of Wayne County for the names and families of these children and for more information on George and Nancy Sutton Daly). Most of the Dalys living in Wayne and Lenoir County today are his descendants. Robert Daly (1817-1900) – Robert married first Mary Hodges (1813-ca 1873) who was the daughter of Edward Hodges and Catherine Arendell, and thus an older half-sister of his brother William’s first two wives, Persis and Julia Brown (see above). They were married later in life than was usual, since the census of 1850 shows Robert, not yet married at age thirty-three, heading a household that included his mother and several of his younger siblings, while Mary (called Polly), also unmarried, is at age thirty-seven living in the household of her brother, James A. Hodges (1808-1859). Their only child was Annie Elizabeth Daly (1854-1935), who married John Henry Dawson (1848-1925). They lived in Kinston where they reared a family of five daughters and two sons (see The Heritage of Lenoir County for more information on this family). After Mary Hodges Daly’s death, Robert married Eliza Jane Sasser (1849- 1912). He and his much younger wife then moved to Craven County and had several children, the youngest of whom was born when Robert was well into his sixties. Robert’s children of his second marriage were thus approximately the same age as the grandchildren of his first marriage, but his two families were never on friendly terms, especially after some of the children of his second marriage, who were less affluent than their Dawson relatives, grew up and had children out of wedlock. Annie Dawson was reluctant to acknowledge these younger half- siblings, insisting instead that she was her father’s only child. So when Robert Daly died at the age of eighty-two in February, 1900, his widow, Eliza Jane, put his body on the train in New Bern and shipped it to Kinston, with a note to Annie which read that since she insisted she was Robert’s ONLY child, then she was the ONLY one who should have to bear the expense of his funeral! Robert was buried next to his first wife, Mary Hodges, in the same country graveyard as his brother William (see above). However, while the graves of William and Julia Brown Daly are marked with small stones, those of Robert and Mary Hodges Daly are denoted only by wooden markers. (NOTE: Much of this information is from Mr. George Wetherington, a descendant of Robert and Eliza Jane Daly who lives in Craven County). Joshua Daly (1820-1903) - Joshua lived in the Bucklesberry region of Lenoir County, near La Grange, on land that had belonged to his parents. He never married, but he had a daughter, Annie (see above), by Allen Ann Sasser (b. 1828), the wife of a neighbor, James Herring, and the older half-sister of Eliza Jane Sasser who later married Joshua’s brother Robert (see above). Annie had a daughter named Anna (1877- 1951)), then later married Charles Ivey (1856-1913) and had children with him as well. Anna married Simon Foss (1873-1955) and has many descendants living in the LaGrange area. Joshua Daly’s will is posted on the Lenoir County Archives Site; in it, he names all of his brothers and sisters except Maria, who apparently had died with no heirs. He also mentions both Annie Ivey and Anna Foss, to whom he bequeathed most of his estate, though he does not specify his relationship to them. The inscription on his gravestone, which is no longer standing, read "Gone but not forgotten." Hattie Daly, Joshua’s great-niece, claimed he lived his life as a bachelor. She never mentioned his daughter Annie, though she must have known of her, since Annie was a first cousin of Hattie’s father. Susan Daly (1825-1904) – Susan is listed in the federal censuses of 1860 as living in the household of her unmarried brother, Joshua Daly, in which their mother was also living. In 1868, the year after her mother’s death, she married Captain John Ivey, a widower with several children, one of whom was Charles Ivey who later married Joshua Daly’s daughter Annie (see above). She had no children. Hattie Daly remembered her great-aunt Susan Ivey as a thin, elderly woman who used a tobacco stick as a walking staff. According to a notice in a Goldsboro newspaper, Susan fell and broke her hip of 1903, about the time her brother Joshua died. She died the following spring. The inscription on her gravestone, which like that of Joshua has disappeared, read "She hath done what she could." Maria Daly (b. 1826) – She may have married a Benton. Nothing else is known of her. Ann Daly (1831-1903) – Ann married Devereaux Creech (1830-1919), a prominent Goldsboro merchant in the town’s early years. She is buried next to her husband in Willowdale Cemetery in that city. They have many descendants. (See The Heritage of Wayne County for more information on this family). Notice the longevity of most of Susan and Dennis John Daly’s children. With the exception of Elizabeth, and possibly Maria, they all lived well into their seventies or eighties. This was something that was commented upon by those who knew them. Several of their descendants have also been unusually long-lived. ______________________________________________________________________ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.org/copyright.htm This file was contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by Francis R. Hodges - fhodges@flsouthern.edu ______________________________________________________________________