The Warwicks
BEFORE AMERICA
The Warwick English Roots
The First Families of Virginia: English Origins
The families that became Marguerite Warwick's ancestry did not come to Virginia for religious reasons. They came for land, opportunity, and in some cases to escape political danger after the English Civil War. Virginia under the Crown was an Anglican society governed by county courts and parish vestries. Unlike New England, where land was distributed relatively broadly, Virginia quickly developed a system of enormous grants concentrated in a few hands.
The Virginia side of this family tree connects to six of the founding families of English colonial Virginia. The Warwicks were in Virginia by the 1650s, holding land on the Rappahannock in what was then Lancaster County, the area that would become Middlesex County in 1673. The Byrds arrived around 1669, when William Byrd I came at the invitation of his uncle Thomas Stegge Jr., his Cheshire ancestry mirroring the Davenport family's medieval origins in that same English county. The Randolphs, from Moreton Morrell in Warwickshire, the same county where Rev. John Davenport was born at Coventry, arrived around 1673. The Carters arrived around 1649; from that immigrant line came Robert "King" Carter, born in Virginia in 1663, who rose to become Acting Governor, Speaker of the House of Burgesses, and Treasurer of the colony. The Beverleys arrived around 1670, and Robert Beverley's son wrote the first history of Virginia by a native Virginian, published in 1705. The Blands arrived in the early 1650s as part of the Royalist diaspora that followed the execution of Charles I.
THE WARWICK LINE
Eight generations
to Louise Marguerite Warwick
GENERATION I
Thomas Warwick & Penelope (Paine?)
unknown – bef. 1678 · Middlesex Co., Virginia
The Warwick name reaches Virginia in the mid-seventeenth century. By 1656 a Thomas Warwick had been assigned a tract of two hundred acres at the head of Parratt's Creek, on the Rappahannock in what was then Lancaster County, the patent renewed in his name in 1664. He witnessed deeds in Lancaster in the 1650s, and when Christ Church Parish was organized he was among its first church wardens, appointed in May 1671 and relieved that November. He died before October 1678, when administration of his estate was granted to William Cheney, his sons still too young to serve. He is remembered as the emigrant ancestor and the father of the Thomas Warwick through whom this line descends, though gaps in the surviving Lancaster and Middlesex records leave that link less than certain.
His wife was Penelope. What the records settle beyond doubt is her first name and her place in the family: she was the widow of Thomas Warwick, and a court order of 1687 names William Cheney as the man who married that widow. After Thomas's death she married Cheney and lived out her life as Penelope Cheney, a name sometimes written Chainey, and when she made her will in 1719 she still remembered her Warwick granddaughters. She is usually identified as Penelope Paine, a daughter of Thomas Paine of the same county, on the strength of a 1656 Lancaster deed recording a gift to "Penelope Payne, daughter of Thomas Payne." That identification is likely correct, but it rests on matching names across a few separate records rather than on any one document that names her outright, so it is best taken as a strong likelihood rather than settled fact.
GENERATION II
Thomas Warwick & Mary (Lee) Jones
1673–1717 · Middlesex Co., Virginia
This Thomas Warwick lived his life in Christ Church Parish, Middlesex County, where the county order books and the parish register record him in detail. He married twice. His first wife was Elizabeth Goodrich, a widow, married on 23 July 1704; she was the mother of his daughters Penelope (born September 1705) and Elizabeth (born March 1707) and died around 1710. On 4 August 1711 he married Mary, the widow of William Jones of Middlesex, and she was the mother of his sons John, Thomas, and Philip. She appears in some records as Mary Jones and in others as Mary Lee; these are not two different women but one, the surnames belonging to her first husband and to a later third marriage, while her own maiden name has not survived in the records. The blending of two families with children on both sides produced its share of friction in the county records, including a probate of William Jones's will contested by Anne Jones and a chancery suit over the guardianship of his stepdaughter Mary Goodrich. Thomas Warwick died in 1718; his widow Mary qualified as administrator of his estate that August, and its inventory was recorded that September. The line descends through John, eldest of the children of his second marriage.
GENERATION III
John Warwick & Agatha Buford
1711–1744 · Middlesex Co., Virginia
John Warwick was born in Christ Church Parish, Middlesex County, in March 1711, the son of Thomas Warwick and Mary Jones. On 8 March 1735 he married Agatha Buford, daughter of Thomas Buford of Middlesex and already the widow of George Twyman of Spotsylvania. Their marriage was brief: John Warwick died on 4 April 1744, and that June his widow Agatha qualified to administer his estate. Agatha would marry a third time, to John Lee, outlive him as well, and reach the age of eighty. The line continues through John and Agatha's son Abraham, who as a young man would carry the family west out of the Tidewater.
GENERATION IV
Pvt. Abraham Warwick & Amy Campbell
1738–1808 · Middlesex → Amherst Co., Virginia
Born in Christ Church Parish, Middlesex County, on 19 May 1738, Abraham Warwick lost his father while still, as the family record put it, "an infant." In 1760, the year after he sold the last of his Middlesex land, he bought a tract on Hickory Creek in Amherst County and moved his family west to the foot of the Blue Ridge. He kept a tavern at the Gap, and after it burned he purchased the property known as Mount Jury. He was esteemed in the county as a man of education and property, and during the Revolution he furnished supplies to the army and served as a private in the Virginia militia, recognized today by the Daughters of the American Revolution under Patriot number A121744. He was remembered for a wry remark, "I thank God that no man can call me brother," taken to mean he was an only son. He made his will on 12 April 1808 and died that same year. His wife, Amy Campbell, born 21 March 1743, was famously sturdy and independent, kept house for herself to the very end, and reached the age of about one hundred.
GENERATION V
Maj. William Sidney Warwick & Sarah Barksdale
1765–1832 · Amherst Co. → Lynchburg, Virginia
William Sidney Warwick was born in Amherst County on 26 April 1765. As a young man he served in the Virginia state artillery during the Revolution, recognized today by the Daughters of the American Revolution under Patriot number A121758. He became a prominent citizen of Lynchburg, where he was known as Major Warwick and worked as a banker and businessman. He is variously remembered as one of Lynchburg's early mayors, a director of the Exchange Bank at its founding in 1814, and High Sheriff in 1820. He married three times. His first wife, married 21 January 1784, was Sarah Barksdale, the mother of the son who carries this line forward; she died on 15 September 1801. He dropped the middle name Sidney in later life and was generally known simply as William Warwick. He died on 12 August 1832.
GENERATION VI
Corbin Warwick & Margaret Elizabeth Bradfute
1792–1877 · Richmond, Virginia
Corbin Warwick was born in Amherst County on 1 May 1792, a son of William Sidney Warwick and his first wife Sarah Barksdale. He came to Richmond as a young man, around the age of nineteen, and gave more than fifty years to the city's tobacco trade, in which he was long a recognized leader. On 20 December 1838 he married Margaret Elizabeth Bradfute of Lynchburg, twenty-eight years his junior, in a ceremony performed by the Reverend Thomas Atkinson. Margaret was a daughter of David Bradfute and Maria (Byrd) Bradfute, and a granddaughter of Otway and Ann Byrd of Westover and Lynchburg, a connection that carries the Byrd line into this branch of the family. The family lived at 511 East Grace Street in Richmond and raised seven children. The Civil War undid much of what Corbin had built: a large fortune was nearly all swept away, and in those same years he lost his two oldest sons, Bradfute and Barksdale, both killed in Confederate service. He died on 23 January 1877, in his eighty-fifth year, and was remembered in his obituary as "a kind hearted, generous, and true old Virginia gentleman, the very model of an upright and courteous business man."
GENERATION VII
Byrd Warwick & Ida Louise Burrows
1848–1894 · Richmond, Virginia
Byrd Warwick was born in Richmond in 1848, the fifth child of Corbin Warwick and Margaret Elizabeth Bradfute. He spent virtually his entire life in the city and was a central figure in its social world. He followed his father into the tobacco trade, working under the firm names Warwick & Bridges and later Warwick Brothers, and was also president of the Standard Spike Company and a director of the First National Bank. When his father died in 1877, Byrd took up the role of head of the family, and for a time his widowed mother and two of his brothers lived with him and his young family at 212 Franklin Street. The surviving family letters show a man who cared deeply for his relatives. On 9 February 1878 he married Ida Louise Burrows of Albion, New York, born in 1857, whose New England-rooted family brought the Burrows line, with its Avery and Griswold connections of Groton, Connecticut, into the family. Byrd Warwick died suddenly of heart failure on 24 June 1894, at the family home at 608 West Franklin Street, having driven in that morning from their summer place in Chesterfield County to consult his physician. He is buried in the family plot at Hollywood Cemetery, where John and Marguerite also rest. Ida, who had been educated at the Ogontz School near Philadelphia and at Wells College and was a communicant of Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Church for over half a century, survived him by fifty-two years, dying in 1946.
GENERATION VIII
Louise Marguerite Warwick & John Sidney Davenport, Jr.
1880–1968 · Richmond, Virginia
Louise Marguerite Warwick, known throughout her life as Marguerite, was born in Richmond on 1 January 1880, the daughter of Byrd Warwick and Ida Louise Burrows. She grew up in the city her ancestor William Byrd II had founded, the inheritor of the Warwick, Byrd, Carter, and Randolph connections that reached back into the oldest layers of Virginia society. On 3 February 1904, at Grace and Holy Trinity Church, she married John Sidney Davenport Jr., a young actuary who had come to Richmond from New York for his work and who would rise to become a vice president of the Life Insurance Company of Virginia before retiring in 1941. The wedding was one of the largest the church had ever seen, followed by a reception at her mother's home on West Franklin Street. With that marriage the long New England line of the Davenports and the Virginia line of the Warwicks were joined. She and Sidney settled in Richmond and raised five sons, and the names they chose carried both families forward. She outlived her husband by twenty-two years, remaining at the heart of the family at Davenport Hollow, and died in Richmond on 9 January 1968, at the age of eighty-eight. She is buried at Hollywood Cemetery.