Some Miscellaneous Mizell Topics

(For supporting citations, see Mizell Chronology)

 

Was Elizabeth Mizell the wife of James Bynum?

 

There’s not a shred of proof.  This theory was originally put forth, I believe, based on the abstracted records of Surry County  – in other words, on an incomplete set of facts.  There are only four records that associate any Bynum with any of the Mizells – all within a 12-year period – and all are explainable if we look at them closely.  My guess is that one or more early researchers looked at the abstracted records and decided that there was a close association between the Mizells and Bynums that could be only be explained by a marriage.  So a marriage was theorized between James Bynum and Elizabeth Mizell.  As with many theories, repeating it often enough turned it into a “fact.”

However, if we look closely at the records, there is actually a complete lack of any evidence of a connection:

 

·      There is no association at all between any Bynums and Mizells prior to 1691.  They lived in different parts of the county, were enumerated in different tax districts, and their paths never crossed in any record. 

·      The first association between the families is a purchase of land adjoining Luke Mizell Jr. by James Bynum in 1691.  Elizabeth Bynum’s witness of Luke Mizell’s will two years later, and James Bynum’s appointment as an appraiser of the estate can be explained by the fact that they were next-door neighbors.  We don’t need to theorize a marriage to explain those records.  (After all, note that the other witnesses and appraisers were also neighbors.)  This means that James Bynum lived next door to Luke Mizell Jr. for less than three years.

·      In fact, those two associations with the Luke Mizell Jr. estate argue against a relationship.  When the court appointed neighbors ot appraise an estate, it avoided appointing relatives.  Appraisers were supposed to be disinterested and unrelated parties.  

·      The only other association between the two families is James Bynum’s purchase in 1703 of land from Luke Mizell III.  Since he was buying land adjoining land he already owned, that makes perfect sense.  Again, we don’t need to theorize a connection to explain that purchase.

 

In summary, there is no evidence to suppose any connection at all other than that they were neighbors.  I would note also that Luke Mizell II was roughly the same age as James Bynum, and already had an unmarried daughter named Elizabeth at his death.  Therefore, if James Bynum’s wife was a Mizell she would have to have been a sister of Luke Mizell II, not a daughter. (I believe early researchers didn’t realize that Luke Mizell II was only about 33 or so when he died.)  There is absolutely no evidence that Luke Mizell I had a daughter.  Even if he did, there is no evidence that the Bynums and Mizells even knew one another until twenty years after the death of Luke Bynum I.

 

Was Elizabeth Marriott the wife of Luke Mizell II?

 

It seems likely that Luke Mizell II was married to Elizabeth Marriott.  Although we can’t be certain of the timing, Luke Mizell II probably married sometime in the mid to late 1680s, at a time when he was still living on his father's patent within a mile of Mathias Marriot.  We know for certain he was married to someone named Elizabeth by January 1691 when she released her dower interest in several deeds, and that he was still married to her when he died in 1693.  During his administration, sometime between 28 September 1693 and 3 January 1694, Elizabeth remarried to Robert Hill, also a neighbor of the Mizells and Marriotts.  She was still alive and living in Surry well beyond the time that Matthias Marriott made his will.  

 

On 12 June 1707, Mathias Marriott made a will which mentions three children, including a daughter named Elizabeth Hill.  By elimination, she seems most likely to have been the same person who was married to Luke Mizell and then to Robert Hill.  The only other possibility is the wife of Sion Hill Jr., Robert Hill’s nephew – but he was probably too young to have married any daughter of Mathias Marriott.  Sion Hill Jr. does not appear in the tithables until 1697, thus was not born until late 1680 or early 1681.  We know that Mathias Marriot was married to Alice Warren (born c1645 according to her deposition) sometime before 1670.  It seems most plausible that Alice’s three children would have been born in the first 10-12 years of her marriage and before she reached her late 30s.  In the case of the second daughter named in that will, Margaret Flake, that is clearly so.  She had married Robert Flake Jr., who was a year or two older than Luke Mizell, sometime around 1690 and seems likely to have been born around 1670. 

 

How do the North Carolina Mizells fit in?

 

Although I’m flying in the face of tradition here, the evidence is overwhelming that they were children of Lawrence Mizell. 

 

I think family researchers have been misled by the abstracted version of the 1703 deed - which gives the impression that Luke Mizell III was selling the land of Luke Mizell II.  When we read the deed itself, and compare it to earlier deeds for the same land, we can see clearly that he was selling the land of Lawrence Mizell.  [The abstracted version includes a reference to the sale of the land by Robert Warren to Luke Mizell, but omits the subsequent sale from Luke to his brother Lawrence.  The 1703 deed was quite clearly a nearly word-for-word copy of the 1691 deed of the same land to Lawrence Mizell.]

 

The abstracted version of the 1693 will of Luke Mizell II is also somewhat deceptive in that it fails to clearly state that the will left all his land and property to two unmarried daughters, Elizabeth and Sarah, with reversion to one another.  That is very strong evidence that he had only the two children.  

 

At the same time, Lawrence Mizell obtained headrights for importing himself, his wife, and two children (Luke and Ellinor) into North Carolina sometime before July 1694 when William Charlton used those headrights as Lawrence Mizell's assignee.  William and Mary Mizell were probably two more children, used as North Carolina headrights in 1697 for a patent adjoining William Charlton. Since Lawrence Mizell disappeared from Surry by April 1691, it seems probable that he actually earned the headrights in 1691.  As with Virginia patents, our first record of the headrights is not when they were earned, but rather when they were used.

 

We can link Luke Mizell III (the husband of Susannah Charlton) directly to Lawrence Mizell by that 1703 deed.  We know that Lawrence died intestate, so that his eldest son would have inherited the land he still owned in Surry.  Shortly after turning 21, Luke Mizell III sold that land.  If we didn’t have any preconceptions, that would be proof enough that he was Lawrence’s eldest son.  Combined with the will of Luke II, indicating only two children, and the headrights of Lawrence Mizell, we can safely conclude that all the early Mizells in North Carolina belong to Lawrence.

 

To that I would add the additional point of timing.  Since Luke Mizell III must have been born circa 1682, it appears that Lawrence and Bethinia had more than a decade to have additional children.  Luke Mizell II, on the other hand, didn't turn 21 until late 1681, when his wife (even if she were the eldest child of Matthias Marriot) had probably not yet entered her teens.  They probably didn’t marry until she was in her mid-teens, in the late 1680s, and thus probably had no more than the two children named in his will.

 

A note on the name “Mizell” and its origins:

 

It is impossible to know for certain what this name actually was.  The original immigrant, Luke Mizell, could not write his own name, nor could his elder son Lawrence Mizell.  The spelling of the name in the early Virginia records is therefore whatever seemed most appropriate to the clerk recording each particular record. Thus the name appears in a variety of  forms.  For the first several decades it was recorded predominantly as Mizle and variants (Misle, Mizell).  By the end of the century the “i” was beginning to be replaced by “ea”  to get Meazle and variants (Meazle, Measle, Measell), though the Mizle version also continued to be used.  [The uses of  “s” versus “z” are probably not significant.  Those two lower-case letters are so similar to one another in old script that they are very difficult to differentiate and often it’s just a guess as to which was intended.]

 

Luke Mizell, Jr. evidently learned to write his own name as a result of his apprenticeship to a cooper named John King.  Since his own parents didn’t know how to spell the name, he used a spelling that John King (or whoever taught him to write) favored.  He signed his name a total of eight times, all as Meazle.

 

The Mizell version doesn’t seem to have become the preferred spelling until a generation or two later.  The early North Carolina Mizells were in the same boat as Luke Jr. – learning to spell their names from persons outside the family.  The “original” name, whether  Mizle or Measle, is impossible to determine for certain.  However, it was obviously English – both mizle and measle were common English words.

 

In the late 19^th century, two and a half centuries after Luke Mizell’s immigration, a descendant wrote of a family legend that three Huguenot brothers from France (perhaps using the name Moselle) immigrated to North Carolina.  This probably seemed plausible at the time, but it ignores the first hundred years of the family in America.  With the advantage having seen the Virginia records, we now know that nothing in this legend can be true.  The name was certainly not any variation of “Moselle”.  There were no brothers, only the original Luke.  And he could not possibly have been a French Huguenot.  Luke Mizell’s immigration by 1635 predates by more than a generation the earliest known Huguenot migration to America.  And we know that Luke had to have been English to buy land, serve on juries, and enjoy other privileges reserved for English citizens in 17^th century Virginia.  Citizenship at the time was conferred on residents only by an act of the Council, and there is no entry in those acts for any name resembling Luke Mizell.  His settlement literally next door to an Anglican church, and the relationship with the local minister, argues against any other religion.  In short, there is absolutely no evidence that he was other than a typical  English Anglican.