Margaret Wanless

Mother of Ralph Wanless of Pocahontas County. As “Margaret Carlile of Augusta County … being at present far advanced in years” she made her will on 16 Dec 1806. She left her granddaughter Elizabeth Black “as much money as will purchase her a good black gown,” and the rest of her estate to be “equally divided between my four children Ralph Wandless, Stephen Wandless, Margaret Clayton, wife of John Clayton, and Mary Armstrong, wife of Abel Armstrong,” each accounting for what they had already had: “Ralph Wandless is to account for twenty dollars that he received from me” (source). Chalkley’s abstracts of the Augusta records call her “a widow Wanless when she married John Carlisle” (source).

Her maiden name is uncertain. “All family records give her maiden name as Adams, a sister of Thomas Adams, except one branch which gives it as Wiley,” Craig wrote; the tree has her as Margaret Wiley Adams, born 1720 at Newcastle. Craig’s account of her, taken from her letters, which have not been seen here, is family tradition. Educated in England, she married there a widower named Ralph Wandless and lived near Newcastle upon Tyne. He died after a long illness just as they were to sail for America, and her children were bound out to “Masters” until Thomas Adams’s agent helped her get them back. She worked her passage looking after other families’ children (“They were worse than my own!”) and in 1772 settled with her four at Deerfield, on Thomas Adams’s land: “I have my children alone to myself at last!” In 1784 she wrote, “I called all within traveling distance to come last week to talk about books, and the writers of them.” She later married John Carlile, who died in 1796, and spent her last years with her daughter Margaret’s family, the Claytons. A descendant called her “The Perfect Mother” (source).

Research: research/hatten/Hatten_Philbrick_Marvin.md.

Open questions

• Her maiden name (Adams, or Wiley, perhaps as a widow) and her first husband’s name.