Family:William Buckner and Lucy? Thornton (1)

This family is fairly well known from the will of William Buckner written in St. Asaph's Parish in Caroline County, VA in 1783 (prob. 1788). The four eldest children (this family) were by a wife who was a sister of Reuben Thornton, who named Francis as a nephew in his will. Two theories have been proposed about her first name. W.B. McGroarty thought it was Eliza, while R.T. Head argued that it was probably Lucy (Robert Thornton Head, "Notes and Queries: Thornton-Buckner Notes," The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Jan., 1936), pp. 57-58 - http://www.jstor.org/stable/4244696). I'm more convinced by the argument that it was Lucy Thornton. William's second wife was named Mary Madison.

There's an additional complication, which is that this William Buckner's cousin William Buckner, who married Judith Hawes, also lived in Caroline County and also had two sons named Richard and Francis, who were apparently a little older than this William's sons, but not by much. This caused a great deal of understandable confusion in Crozier's Buckners of Virginia, but it can be resolved by gathering a great number of wills and court records together and carefully analyzing them. The upshot is that the other Richard lived in Westmoreland Co. and died around 1793 (leaving a very informative will), while the other Francis probably lived in Spotsylvania Co. and, based on tax lists and his brother's will, died around 1791.