Was William Witt’s Wife Mildred Daux?

His wife has variously been claimed to be a woman named Mary, Elizabeth Daux, and Mildred Daux. The fact is that we have not one single record of her – her name appears in no records, and therefore any name we assign to her is pure speculation.

It is extremely unlikely that she was a Daux. We know that Walter Daux had only two children, the daughters Anne and Susannah – one of whom was William Witt’s mother. He had no sons and there is no sign of anyone else named Daux in the area.

Her Gravestone – per Virginia Soldiers of 1776

Virginia Soldiers of 1776 contains the following entry on page 883 of Volume II:

Note. The original Register of the church of the French refugees was sold to Mr. Henry Huntington of San Gabriel, California, a collector of rare manuscript and it is said that he has decided to will it to the public library at Pasadena. Should you visit St. Ann’s [sic] Parish, where is located the old church of Rev. Robert Ross [sic], you may be fortunate enough to find the tombstone of William Witt’s wife, and read the very interesting inscription thereon. The old Witt homestead at Roselands in Nelson County remained in the possession of some representative of the family for about two hundred years. It passed from the family only a few years ago.[1]

This is very confusing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the first three sentences in this paragraph seem to be unrelated to one another. Let’s examine the facts:

1.     St. Anne’s Parish and Albemarle County were both established in 1745. Robert Rose moved from Essex County in 1747 to the part of Albemarle County that later became Nelson County and ministered to St. Anne’s Parish until his death in 1751.[2] At that time there were only two churches in Albemarle County, one of them the Ballenger’s Creek Church near Howardsville on the James River[3] and the other the Forge Church on the Hardware River. But by 1820 both buildings were in ruins, one of them burned to the ground and the other site occupied by a private residence.[4] Neither church could have been visited in 1927, and neither has an old cemetery.

2.     Earlier in the same article it is stated that William Witt died in 1741 [sic] and that his wife died before him. Of course we know William lived until 1754. We also know that no wife relinquished dower in his deed of gift to his son John in 1741, suggesting that she was deceased by then. (And obviously that she couldn’t be buried at a church of Robert Rose.) Unfortunately there are enough deeds of Goochland lacking relinquishments that a death by 1741 is best left as a plausible hypothesis.

3.     The “old Witt homestead at Roselands in Nelson County” couldn’t possibly refer to William Witt of John Witt I. Nor could it have been in the family for more than 200 years as of 1927. I don’t know what to make of this statement. There weren’t any Witt land acquisitions in what became Nelson County until well after William Witt died.