Who was Thomas Nathaniel Edwards?

Many Edwards genealogists digging into the colonial period have come across the name "Thomas Nathaniel Edwards." He is usually said to have born in Wales on October 14, 1690 and died in an unknown location in February or November 1781. Some entries call him "Sir" and say he was from a wealthy family that owned an estate called "Edwards Hall" in Wales. He is said to have been a merchant nobleman (or clergyman) who immigrated to the colonies in the mid 18th century with his wife and children and lived everywhere from New York to Georgia.

Descendants claimed he was a loyalist during the Revolution and that his son, Robert Edwards, leased out land in June 1778 that was illegitimately sold to Trinity Episcopal Church in New York City, a lease for which the family was owed money. The resulting "Edwards Fortune" case even ended up in court several times and was dismissed every time. Though these claims were largely debunked, the legend of Thomas Nathaniel Edwards survived into the internet age, and his realness has been driven home by a weird little digital sketch of him you can find on Findagrave or his Wikitree page. The sketches of he and his wife seem to be reproductions of this grainy portrait of unknown origin.

With 2,600 Ancestry tree profiles, 1,300 Google hits, nearly 400 hits for Rootsweb.com family trees, profiles on Findagrave, Wikitree, Familysearch, as well as numerous references on Genealogy.com and Ancestry.com forums, Thomas Nathaniel Edwards may be one of the most popular ancestors in internet genealogy.

There's just one problem: there seems to be no evidence this man ever existed. While the Edwards Fortune has long since been put to rest, this likely fictitious genealogy has managed to survive and proliferate, doing incalculable damage to Edwards research. This seems to be because so many genealogists do not understand where it came from, so we're going to explore its dubious origins and scrutinize the largely uncontested claims of the Edwards heirs fact by fact.

The name and identity of Thomas Nathaniel Edwards evidently first appeared in the newsletter of the Association of Edwards Heirs in 1925. This organization existed to support the genealogical claims to the supposed Robert Edwards estate of New York City, and members paid an annual membership fee to be a part of the association, hoping for the day when that big payout would come around. Genealogies were submitted by members of the association and published freely without supporting evidence. Minnie Mogan Egan (born 1870), who claimed to be a 3rd great granddaughter of TNE, may have been the source of his name but it is difficult to know for sure since several genealogists submitted near identical information.

Egan wrote in 1925 that "Thomas Nathaniel Edwards was born October 14, 1690 in Wales. Was married to Isabell Downing March 12, 1714. Their children: Robert, born February 14. 1716. Joshua, born March 12. 1718. William, born April 9, 1720. Thomas, born July 7, 1723. Leonard, born May, 1725. John, born February 10, 1727. These children were all born in Wales." Other genealogists in the letter added two more children, Jacob, born 1729 and Martha, born 1731. All were said to have been born in Wales and immigrated to America in the mid-18th century.

Despite more than a century of dedicated research funded by millions of dollars worth of membership fees in the Association of Edwards Heirs, not a single genealogist has found a record proving the existence of Thomas Nathaniel Edwards, his wife Isabelle Downing, or any of their supposed children.

The place usually given for TNE's birth, Edwards Hall, does not seem to exist except in the minds of Edwards heirs; local historians noted "the very existence of an Edwards Hall near Cardiff has yet to be established." The county of Glamorganshire, where TNE was supposedly born, does have a massive Edwards population and the parish registers contain thousands of Edwards births in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. There are no corresponding entries for the names and dates given in the pages of Edwards Heirs. Even accounting for possible errors, no entries are even close to what is claimed. If this family did indeed descend from Welsh nobility it is astonishing that they all managed to escape the pen of their local parish priest, even though baptisms were mandatory at the time.

Though the earliest genealogies in the newsletters simply say Isabelle Downing Edwards was from Wales, most internet genealogies now claim she was the daughter of Sir George Downing (d.1711), though neither Burke's Peerage nor the Complete Baronteage of England mention any daughters for Downing. The Downings were English, not Welsh, so it remains a mystery how a noble Englishwoman managed to marry a Welsh nobleman and later immigrate with their children to America while leaving no trace in the records of three countries.

The supposed "bible of the Edwards Heirs," Arthur Edwards and His Descendants, by Anthony J. Christensen claims "it appears that he may have entered the port of New York then moved westward into the Welsh Tract in southeastern Pennsylvania, then southwesterly along the well trodden migration route into northern Maryland... Our Edwards family in America was first identified in the meager records of the colony of Maryland. From Maryland, several of the sons of Thomas and Isabella Edwards moved south along the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, the common migration route just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains." No specific records in Maryland are identified. Christensen himself acknowledges in the book that the family history of TNE was based on "tradition" and "can neither be verified, proven, nor documented."

Some Edwards heirs claim the death of Isabelle Downing Edwards in 1742 is noted in a book "from medical history of strange disease of Georgia First Settlers," but have never provided a source; others claim TNE had a will probated in Culpeper County, Virginia, though none exists in the will books there; still others claim he died in Swansea, Maryland, which doesn't seem to exist, or alternately, St. Mary's County, Maryland, which likewise has no will, probate or other record of his existence.

With his family having traveled so extensively, you'd think there would be a wealth of records for this nobleman-merchant's existence--jury lists, deeds, wills, orders, chancery papers, parish registers, vestry books and so many more possibilities. But despite nearly forty years worth of adventures around the colonies, living everywhere from New York City and Pennsylvania to Maryland, Virginia and Georgia, there seems to be no independent record of Thomas Nathaniel Edwards.

This is not because TNE lived a quiet life; on the contrary, descendants assert that he was deeply involved in major global events, and Edwards Heirs makes a number of claims about his life that are as wild as they are baseless. For example, they say TNE "purchased land on Manhattan Island lying along the Hudson River in the State of New York and in payment for services rendered the English Government during the French and Indian Wars the Crown of England acknowledged the claim and made to Thomas Edwards absolute title," or that during the revolution, TNE was "active in supporting the English government and became personally responsible for goods bought in New York for the British Army."

Most brazen of all is the claim that TNE's son, Robert Edwards, was granted land by the Crown and leased 77 acres of it to John and George Cruger, later sold to Trinity Church in what is now lower Manhattan for 99 years, and that a record of this lease was "taken from history and from the Hall of Records in the City of New York. N. Y."

Probably modeled on the Springer Hoax of the 1850s, this is the central claim of the Edwards Heirs Association scam--that they are owed rents by Trinity Church for land their ancestors leased over a period of 99 years. There is no record of this lease in the deed or order books of New York, nor any in England, only two type-written copies that clearly date from the 20th century and don't even contain the same information. You can see these in scans of the Edwards Heirs newsletter available at the Familysearch library. One of the pages is included here. Note that it says it was copied from "Liber 43 page 139." I checked New York City conveyances and that liber and page belongs to an indenture between Abraham Keteltass and Robert Livingston from 1761, recorded in 1785.

 

Edwards descendants tried to claim this billion-dollar fortune from at least 1870 to as late as 1999, and spent an entire century looking for proof in both American and British records, only to find they had been duped by their own lawyers into giving up millions of dollars in legal and membership fees in what may have been genealogy's greatest scam. The original scam in 1870 claimed the lease dated to the 1760s and had just recently expired; as later iterations of the scam appeared in the 1890s, the date of the mythical lease was moved forward to 1778.

 The Daily Phoenix, South Carolina. Sep. 6, 1870.

Though the Edwards Estate scam was crushed by two courts and the New York state legislature, a good story doesn't die easily. Internet genealogists and leaf clickers at Ancestry.com have resurrected the legend of Thomas Nathaniel Edwards and assured his survival in the digital age. Most simply copy GEDCOMs and trees from Rootsweb and Ancestry as they find them; others add erroneous DNA connections to other Edwards cousins who have the same cut-and-pasted data. People love a good mystery, and like the 200-year-long dig for buried treasure on Oak Island that has left the entire place in shambles, they'll keep digging up this fake genealogy, leaving a mess for others to clean up.

For the last century or so, an alarming number of Edwards genealogists have appropriated certain "gateway ancestors"--real human beings named Edwards whose origins are unknown or disputed-- and tacked them onto the fictitious Edwards Heirs lineage. These genealogists always assert their relation to TNE with no sources or argument proving these relationships. You have to admire their confidence, but the reality, as I will show below, is that there is indeed proof that many of these gateway ancestors have actual, documented parents and other relatives.

I'll give a few gateway examples here:

Ambrose Edwards (d.1810) of King William Co., VA

Long before there was ever mention of a Thomas Nathaniel Edwards, the Edwards Fortune scam was rooted in the family of Ambrose Edwards. As far back as June 1891, the Philadelphia Times reported "the Edwards Family of King William County have sent lawyers to New York to institute a suit to recover the estate of Robert Edwards, valued at $205,000,000. Robert Edwards was a brother of Ambrose Edwards, founder of the King William family. Before the Revolution he bought sixty acres of land from the Dutch in New York and leased it in three parcels. The leases have just expired."

This is one of the earliest iterations of the Edwards Fortune claim, which makes Ambrose one of the oldest "gateway ancestors." He was a real person, named in the records of King William County as far back as 1756, when he was a witness in court for James Edwards (c.1720-1788) of King William and Spotsylvania, and his father, James the Elder (bef.1682-aft.1756), of whom Ambrose was likely a son.

The book Old King William Homes and Families, by Peyton Neale Clarke, Louisville, Ky. noted in 1897 that Ambrose was the son of an unnamed Welsh clergyman who had immigrated with his sons Robert, John and Ambrose in 1745. It's no coincidence that TNE is sometimes called a clergyman. Seeing the need to widen the scope of their genealogy to pull in more "heirs" and turn a bigger profit, the scammers evidently built on this legend and created the TNE tree, linking every random Edwards ancestor they could find.

Thomas Edwards Sr. (d.1787) of Orangeburg Dist., SC

For several decades, genealogists have tried to connect real-life people named Thomas Edwards to the Thomas Nathaniel Edwards Jr. named in Edwards Heirs. Edwards heirs wrote in 1925: "One Thomas Edwards lived in North Carolina and married Elizabeth Nickols [also called Nicholas]. their children were: (1) Robert Edwards, born 1743. (2) William Edwards, born 1745. (3) Thomas Edwards, born 1747. (4) Sarah (Sallie) 1750. (5) Andrew in 1752."

Nothing else is known about this ancestor, but in 2003 some Edwards genealogists discovered the grave of a "Thomas Edwards Sr." (d.1787) in Orangeburg County, South Carolina with a wife named Margaret and promptly renamed her "Margaret Elizabeth Nicholas" with no evidence ever offered besides Ancestry Family Trees and GEDCOMs. The date of death given on her grave stone in Orangeburg (Feb. 1786) does not match with that given for the wife of Thomas Nathaniel Edwards Jr. (May 1757). The fact that they found a Thomas Edwards who died somewhere in the 18th-century South was enough for Edwards heirs, and they created a Findagrave account erroneously identifying this man as "Thomas Nathaniel Edwards Jr." which has since been corrected.

Thomas Edwards (d.1812) of Washington Co., KY

Edwards Heirs genealogists have also identified a Thomas Edwards whose will was probated in Washington County, Kentucky in December 1812 as "Thomas Nathaniel Edwards Jr." who was supposedly born July 7, 1723 in Wales. However, his youngest daughter from his last marriage, Rhoda Stiles, reported in the 1880 census of Nelson Co., Kentucky, that her father was born in Virginia, not Wales.

Andrew Edwards (1752-1819) of Cumberland Co., VA

From the days of the earliest Edwards Heirs letters, genealogists have tacked Andrew Edwards, who married Phoebe Meador in Cumberland County, Virginia in 1778, onto the TNE tree, despite the fact that he is named in the will of the senior Andrew Edwards of Cumberland County in February 1775 as "my son, Andrew Edwards." Most of the TNE trees erroneously list him as the son of Thomas Nathaniel Edwards Jr.

John Edwards (c.1727-1801) of Greenville Co., SC

Contemporary genealogists have identified the John Edwards, b. Feb. 10, 1727 from Edwards Heirs as the John Edwards from Prince William/Fauquier County, Virginia who died in Greenville County, South Carolina in 1800 or 1801, despite the fact that this John Edwards was called "an orphan boy" in a court order of April 1744 (Prince William Co., Virginia Orders), which isn't possible if his father lived until 1781.

John Edwards appears in the 1759 tithables list of Fauquier County a few households from Gerrard Edwards and appears with him in a number of deeds and wills. John also had two tithables in his household named James and Samuel Edwards (born between 1739 and 1743) who are too old to be his sons. Given the evident relations, these men are all likely brothers, and may be from Richmond County.

John Edwards (c.1720-1762) of Lancaster Co., VA

The Edwards Heirs Association newsletter also identified the above John Edwards as a man that died in 1762 in Lancaster County, Virginia. As they stated in 1926:

"John Edwards, born 1727, the brother of Robert, married Hannah Yerby. He was born in Wales and died in Lancaster County, Virginia. His will was probated in 1762. He had-the following children; William, Thomas, John, Charley, Sallie and Millie."

There was indeed a John Edwards (d.1762) who married Hannah Yerby before 1756 in Lancaster County, Virginia, as proven by the will of her father, Thomas Yerby. This John Edwards was however a son of William Edwards, whose will was probated on April 8, 1737 and names John as a son, as well as Thomas Yerby as executor.

Thomas Edwards (1762-1832) of Greenville Co., SC

Judge Thomas Edwards of Greenville County's obituary states that he was "about age 70" at his death in August 1832. This is consistent with data from the 1830 census, which places his age between 60 and 70 years. Even his family bible states his birth date as Jan. 25, 1762. Edwards heirs have hijacked this ancestor as well, giving him a birth date of 1747 so that they can associate him with a namesake grandson of Thomas Nathaniel Edwards named in the Edwards Heirs newsletter. Better evidence suggests he is from the Westmoreland Edwards clan, and was almost certainly a son of Thomas Edwards (d.1774) of Westmoreland County, Virginia, who named a son Thomas in his will. The will also names his sister, Franky (d.1822), wife of Isaac Wickliffe (d.1797) who also settled in Greenville County and owned land adjoining his son.

William Edwards (c.1687-aft.1746) of Westmoreland Co., VA

Edwards Heirs names him as a son of "William Edward and Ann Harrison," which I have already debunked in a previous post. William Sr. is in turn named a son of "William Edwards of Wales" whose sons were supposedly "John, Thomas, Robert and William." This seems to make him a brother of Thomas Nathaniel Edwards Sr., though he is more likely the William Edwards named in the will of his father Meredith Edwards of Westmoreland County, Virginia in 1712.

Uriah Edwards (1714-1781) of Spotsylvania County, VA

In a news article of August 1, 1901, Robert Edwards was actually swapped out as the originator of the Edwards Fortune for Uriah Edwards. Since I have already gone into this in some depth, I won't duplicate my work here, but you can read more in my previous post. Importantly, the earliest versions of the Edwards scam genealogy make no mention of any Thomas Nathaniel Edwards; as far back as 1897 genealogies named Robert, John and Ambrose as sons of an unnamed clergyman; by 1901, Robert had morphed into "Uriah Edwards the shipbuilder" to support some other claimant. TNE and his children apparently didn't make an appearance until the 1920s.

Fortune for Denver Man! Denver Post, Aug. 1, 1901.

Spencer Edwards (1794-1848) of Claiborne County, TN

 

Edwards heirs claim this man is a son of William Harrison Edwards (1720-1808) and have given him a birth date of 1780, even though he is named as an heir of Laban Edwards (d.1802) in the deed books of Claiborne County, and his second wife gave his birth date as 1794 in her War of 1812 widow's pension application in 1855. You can see the proof here. 

 

There are many more problems, too many to list here. The Edwards Heirs mess should be required reading for genealogists--its almost a master class in how not to do genealogy. My goal here is only to show why no one should believe in the Edwards Heirs lineage, where things went wrong with certain "gateway" ancestors grafted onto this lineage, and to expose some of the bad techniques that multiplied these errors--for example, when finding a given name in an actual record that is inconsistent with what they read in the Edwards Heirs mythologies, they will simply add the name as a new middle name, regardless of the fact that middle names were relatively rare in the 18th century.

The bottom line is that Thomas Nathaniel Edwards was almost certainly invented to promote a multi-million dollar inheritance scam. The only sources for his existence came from the scammers' own newsletters, and genealogists have offered no supporting evidence outside those newsletters that confirms his existence.

While I have spent countless hours trying to correct this mess on Findagrave and Wikitree so that people don't pass it on to future generations, I can't get at private trees and many genealogists still can't resist the allure of the Edwards mythology. So I will leave this post as a guide for serious genealogists trying to figure out who their Edwards ancestors are. Best of luck and be careful to document everything.

Research and documentation by Jason M. Farrell