William Read

Per Heinegg’s Reed entry: a mixed-race child born to a white servant woman in the Charles City County household of Robert Jones. Jones bequeathed him a cow, a gun, and his freedom from indenture at twenty-one. Jones’s executors refused, and William sued them in Charles City County court and won on 3 September 1694 (Charles City Orders 1687-95, p. 522). He was a taxable in James Ellis’s household, Southwarke Parish, Surry County, 1699-1703, called “Wm Read a Malatta” in 1699. In May 1708 he began a suit against William Edwards in Surry County and was awarded 1,285 pounds of tobacco on 21 September 1715. His mother is unrecorded.

He may be the William Read who, with his wife Mary, sold 100 acres on the north side of the Nottoway River and both sides of Sappony Creek in 1729 (Surry Deeds, Wills &c. 8:22; a Surry County record, the county of the land not stated). Sappony Creek is named for the Saponi, in the same Southside country as Fort Christanna. “Brunswick County” in older notes is not supported.

His place in this tree is unproven. Heinegg treats him as the founder of the free colored Reed family, but lists James and Stephen Reed of Ashe County only among the “other members of the Reed family in North Carolina” and does not trace their parents. The generations between William and Hugh Reed Sr. (about four, by the research’s estimate) are not traced, so no parent-child link connects him to Mary Reed’s family here. He is part of the Reed line page by its scope, as its possible root.

Open questions

• The generations between William and the Ashe County Reeds. A Y-DNA match between a male-line descendant of James Reed (JoEllen Reed’s brother, if he tests) and Reed men of the lines Heinegg traces to William would test the link.
• Is he the William Read of the 1729 Sappony Creek sale?
• Is the William Reed of the 1756 Granville grant on the Eno River (Gv139) one of this family? Untested.