She was a daughter of Goldberry plantation in Essex County, Virginia. She married William Latané of Langlee in 1776, and she is my fifth-great-grandmother. For more than a century the printed genealogies could not agree on whose daughter she was — until two free documents settled it.
Ann Waring left no letters that I know of, no portrait, no gravestone I have found. Like most women of eighteenth-century Virginia, she enters the record only when property moves, and almost always in someone else’s document — her father’s will, her brother’s will, a line in a marriage index, a lawsuit over an estate. But out of those scraps you can assemble a life, and this summer, on two documents anyone can open for free, I watched a 150-year-old genealogical argument about her close.
Start at the courthouse in Tappahannock on Monday, the 21st of October, 1771. Two of her brothers stood before the Essex County court and presented the will of their father, Colonel Francis Waring of Goldberry — “wrote with my one hand,” as the old man put it. The clerk copied it into Will Book 12, and in the middle of it, dividing the residue of the estate, her father names her:
“equely devided betwen my seven Children her after named or the survivors of
them … Thomas Gouldman Waring, William Waring, Henry Waring, Elizth. Ball, Lucy
Robb, Ann Waring, & Susanna Waring”
Ann Waring. Unmarried, about twenty-four by the family’s reckoning, sixth of seven. In the same document her father reaches back a generation in his own words — ordering the sale of “my Land in King and Queen which was left me by my Father Colo. Thomas Waring.” One page of a county will book, and it carries three generations of the family in their own hand.
Five years later she married William Latané of Langlee, a justice of the Essex County court. The family genealogist, writing in 1911, records the date as the 5th of July, 1776 — which, if he is right, means Ann Waring was married the day after the Congress in Philadelphia declared independence, while the news itself was still somewhere on the road to Virginia. I would love that to be true. I should tell you plainly that the exact date rests on that one compiled genealogy; the county marriage index entry exists, and opening it is on my list.
Here is the strange part. When the Victorian genealogists got around to writing Ann down, a century after her wedding, they could not agree on who she was. Bishop Meade in 1857 — writing while her grandchildren were alive — says only that William LatanĂ© “married a Miss Ann Waring,” and names no father at all. The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography in 1897 made her a daughter of Colonel Thomas Waring — and its own editor bracketed a doubt into the page: “[quere Francis ?]”. The LatanĂ© pedigree of 1900 called her a sister of a Colonel Thomas Waring. The Jones genealogy of 1903 made her a daughter of Colonel Francis Waring. Three positions, one shrug, and a trap sitting under all of it: there were two Ann Warings — an aunt and a niece. The elder Colonel Thomas Waring’s will of 1748 names an unmarried “daughter Anna Waring,” and for one humbling week last summer my own research notes concluded from that abstract that our family tree was off by a whole generation.
What broke the deadlock was a lawsuit. The Library of Virginia has scanned its county chancery causes and put them online, free, no account required — and in an Essex County cause filed in 1817, Ann LatanĂ© et al. v. Thomas Waring’s Executor, there is a court-certified copy of the will of her brother Thomas Waring of Gouldsberry, written in 1803. It opens: “I give to my two sisters Ann Latane & Susanna Lewis all my estate real & personal during their natural lives…” and closes by appointing “my brother Wm Waring” executor. Thomas, William, Ann, Susanna — that set of siblings fits exactly one Waring household in Essex County: Francis’s. The aunt and the niece come apart, the 1897 editor’s bracketed doubt turns out to have been right all along, and within the same week the register image of Francis Waring’s own 1771 will — the one quoted above, with “Ann Waring” written plainly among the seven children — closed the question for good. Not by inference. By direct statement, in her father’s will, in her father’s words.
I owe you the rest of the ledger, because these are not only family records. Goldberry and Langlee were tobacco plantations, and the “estate real & personal” moving through every one of these documents was land and enslaved people. Her brother’s will passes “my negro woman Nanny & her children” in the same clause as a plantation. A kinsman’s estate inventory in the same will book runs nine pages and lists some fifty enslaved men, women, and children by name. And the very lawsuit that preserves Ann’s family so precisely exists because court commissioners were dividing thirty-one enslaved people between Ann and her sister Susanna — two lots, valued to the shilling at £1,012 10s. each. The record that proves my descent is also a ledger of human beings held as property. I can cite the one only by looking at the other.
Ann outlived nearly everyone in this story. Meade says she and William LatanĂ© left “a large number of sons and daughters.” She outlived her husband and her brother, and in 1812, in her sixties, she stood first among the plaintiffs in that chancery suit — it is her name the case is filed under. She died at Langlee in 1820, in her seventies.
How this line runs down to me
- Ann Waring (c. 1747–1820) married William Latané of Langlee, Essex County, 1776
- Their daughter Mary LatanĂ© (1785–1848) married John Temple (1771–1812) — and the 1812 court record catches her mid-story: “Mary Temple widow of John Temple, who was before her marriage with the said John Mary Latane”
- Their son Rev. Henry Waring LatanĂ© Temple (1812–1871) carried his grandmother’s maiden name his whole life
- His son Thomas Lewis Latané Temple (1859–1935) left Essex County for the Texas timber country — and was followed by two more Thomas Lewis Latané Temples in a row
- Four generations after the first of them, the line comes down to me. Ann Waring is my fifth-great-grandmother.
One question is still open, and I want it on the record: her mother. Our tree says Lucy Cocke, a daughter of Dr. William Cocke of Williamsburg, Secretary of the Colony — but that rests on a single compiled genealogy, four other printed sources marry Lucy Cocke to a different Waring, and Francis’s will names no wife at all. Here the record goes quiet. Somewhere in an Essex County deed book, or in a chancery bill nobody has opened yet, there is probably one line that names Ann’s mother. When I find it, I will write it down here.
More from this corner of the tree: How I Met My Great-Great-Great Grandparents, on Essex County itself, and the page for Henry Waring LatanĂ© Temple and Susan Jones. Ann Waring’s own page in the family wing holds the records behind this story: owentemple.com/family/people/i56.html. The full working tree is on Ancestry — Ann Waring’s profile there (sign-in required; Ancestry’s rule, not mine).
Sources
- Will of Francis Waring, written 31 Oct 1770, codicil 5 Oct 1771, proved 21 Oct 1771 — Essex County, Virginia, Will Book 12, pp. 431–433 (FamilySearch film 1929903, DGS 7645973, images 234–235; read on the register images)
- Will of Thomas Waring (1803) and decree of 18 Nov 1812 — Ann LatanĂ© et al. v. Thomas Waring’s Exec., Essex County chancery cause 1817-002, Library of Virginia Chancery Records Index (free online)
- Estate inventory of Capt. Thomas Waring, recorded 20 Jun 1763 — Essex County Will Book 12, pp. 53–61
- Will of Col. Thomas Waring (1748, proved 1754), as abstracted in VMHB 25 (1917) and 32 (1924)
- Bishop William Meade, Old Churches, Ministers and Families of Virginia (1857), vol. 2, p. 393
- VMHB 4 (1897), 5 (1897), 8 (1900), 11 (1903); L. H. Jones, Captain Roger Jones of London and Virginia (1911), pp. 135–136