The story
In 1662 — the year the Act of Uniformity purged England's church of everyone who would not conform — William Temple, lord of the little manor of Bishopstrow on the River Wylye in Wiltshire, was cited along with his wife for refusing to attend services. That citation is the family's founding act, and it sets the pattern: these were people who kept ending up on the wrong side of orthodoxy and kept surviving it.
His younger son Joseph left the land for trade and set up in Bristol as a mercer — a dealer in fine cloth. In the spring of 1699 he wrote his will, describing himself as being “in perfect health.” He sickened and died in May, and his wife Hannah was pregnant. The will provides, with extraordinary care, for “such Male Child as my said wife is now enseint or goeth with” — a man arranging the future of a child he would never see. That boy, Col. Joseph Temple (1699–1749), grew up fatherless in Bristol and crossed to Virginia around 1722. Both wills — the father's and the grandfather's — have been read in the original seventeenth-century hand at the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. This is not family tradition; it is a document.
In Virginia, Col. Joseph married Ann Arnold at Presquile, a plantation in a bend where the Mattaponi River nearly makes an island. Ann's grandfather was Anthony Arnold, hanged in 1677 for rising with Bacon's Rebellion — Virginia's first revolt against its own government, a century before the Revolution. His land was forfeit and his name was ruined. And then it came back: Arnold's Ferry became Temple's Ferry, and the rebel's ground passed through his granddaughter to the posthumous son from Bristol.
The other stream comes out of Nérac, in Gascony — the old Protestant heartland of France. In 1685 Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, and Protestant France had to convert, hide or run. Lewis Latané was thirteen; he was smuggled out, educated at Oxford, and arrived in Essex County, Virginia in 1701 as rector of South Farnham Parish. His line supplied Rappahannock parsons for generations. When Mary Latané of Langlee married John Temple, the two streams became one, and the name Latané has been handed down ever since. The family kept its own record twice over: an 1802 Philadelphia Bible whose register pages carry the Latané births and deaths in the family's hand, and an 1812 Essex chancery decree that still names “Mary Temple, widow of John Temple … Mary Latané.”
Behind the Essex marriages stand the Warings and the Hills, and both rest on records read on the original register images. Francis Waring's will of 1771 names his daughter Ann among his seven children and names his own father in his own words — “my Father Colo. Thomas Waring” — two generations locked by one court-recorded sentence. The estate inventory of Capt. Thomas Gouldman Waring in the same will book runs to some fifty enslaved people, listed by name: the ledger of what a tidewater estate actually was. It belongs in this room as much as the wills do.
Down the generations: Rev. Henry Waring Latané Temple kept the Essex parsonage world; his son Thomas Lewis Latané Temple left Virginia for Texarkana and built the East Texas timber life; and the name is still attached to the piney woods around Diboll. Quieter streams feed in through St. Louis — the Fowlkeses out of Wales by way of Nottoway County, the Derricks out of Germany by way of Philadelphia, and behind them the Basses of Dale Parish, whose two family Bibles survive, one opening “JOHN BASS, his book, he was born Nov. 27, 1738.” Through the Basses comes Martha Clay, a great-aunt of the statesman Henry Clay.