June 28, 2010

No person’s history is complete without mentioning their spouse. In most cases, colonial men married more than once.
John Ward’s first wife was Ann Chiles. The daughter of Henry Chiles and Anne Harrelson Chiles. She was the mother of his children. All the documents I have read do not tell me what caused her death.
According to some reports she was very beautiful. In the book Campbell Chronicles and Family Sketches by Ruth Hairston Early, Ms. Early says that he married the beautiful Anne Chiles. Where she found her information about her beauty, I do not know. But let’s believe it to be true. So she was beautiful, but she was also from a family that had been in Virginia for quite a while. Below I have listed links to different sources about the chiles family. Her great great great grandfather Walter Chiles II had come over to Jamestown in the ship Blessing in the year 1637. He was the assistant to the purser.


According to Record of Examination No. 301 July 24,1637, he listed his occupation as clothworker which may have been his job before he set sail from Falmouth on the Blessing at the young age of 29. He stayed in Jamestown for 14 days and then returned to England.
Just six months later, he returned to Jamestown by March 1, 1638 with his own ship which tells me that he must have made quite a bit of money in his endeavors. When he returned he was not alone. He brought his wife Elizabeth and two sons, William and Walter. He also brought Henry Fulton, John Govey, John Shaw and Sarah Cole. He received 50 acres of land for each person that he brought over which also included him. I have not found a record of the name of this ship, but he owned another in 1652 which was “The Fame of Virginia” and another which was called the Leopoklas. There is another story behind this which I will cover later.
Walter also owned the Kemp house which was the first brick house in America. It was sold to him by Governor Berkely for the sum of 26,000 pounds of tobacco.
So Walter and Elizabeth are now living in Jamestown with their two sons Walter and William.
This will be continued tomorrow

http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~janiceksmith/chiles/henry%20chiles/b241.htm#P241
Genealogies of Virginia Families from the William and Mary College Quarterly. Vol. I. Adams-Clopton page 738 through page 748.
http://genealogy.suite101.com/article.cfm/genealogical-resources-for-researching-chiles-family-of-virginia