Will of Lewis Collins of Granville County, North Carolina, 1783

“In the name of God Amen I Lewis Collins of the State of North Carolina in the County of Granville being in Sound health & memory …”

He lends his wife Elizabeth, for her natural life, the tract of land and plantation where he lives, the enslaved people Cupid, Plimoth, Peg, Amey and Peter [?], and all his stock and household furniture. To his children he gives:

• his daughter Lovis [?] Galan: Violet, an enslaved woman, with a bed, horse, saddle, cows and calves, “already delivered”;
• his daughter Betsey Robinson “in Virginia”: Judy [?] and her youngest child, with cattle, bed and furniture, also already delivered;
• his son Edward Collins: an enslaved girl, Choice [?], with a horse, saddle, bed and cows;
• his son Lewis Collins: an enslaved boy, Jack, with the same;
• his son Wiley Collins: an enslaved girl, Phillis, with the same and fifteen pounds for schooling;
• his daughter Diannah Carter Collins: an enslaved boy, Isom [?], with a horse, saddle, bed, cows and a sealskin trunk.

After his wife’s death the estate is to be divided among “my five children Lovis, Edward, Lewis, Wiley & Diannah Carter,” except his land, which goes to a son [the eldest?]. His wife Elizabeth and his sons Edward and Lewis Collins are the executors. The will was signed in September 1783 (the day [?]) and witnessed by John Taylor and Mourning Matlock [?]. At the Granville May Court 1785 Elizabeth Collins qualified as executrix and Edward and Lewis Collins as executors, before Reuben Searcy, clerk.

Unrelated to the New River Collinses. This is the Lewis Collins of the Spotsylvania Collins family, an English-descended planter family, whom the FamilySearch tree once made Meredith Collins’s father. The will names no Meredith and no son of Meredith’s age. It is filed here because it shows that branch of the tree is wrong (meredith-collins-1760, alternatives).

Not the Lewis Collins of Molata. That Lewis, born in 1754 and recorded as a son of John Collins, was Meredith’s brother or close cousin. He enlisted with Meredith in 1776, escaped from the Patriots after Riddle’s Tory raid of 1780, fought at Eutaw Springs, and drew a pension in Grainger County, Tennessee, in 1834 (S21142). He was alive fifty years after this will was proved, so the two men can’t be one.