The Duke Family History Papers
"Given to Adam Christmas of Duke family. Written by Lewis Y. Christmas while his mother was still alive."History of the Duke Family.
[This a copy, verbatim, written by George Wortham, a lawyer of Granville County, North Carolina and a Colonel in the late war of the Confederacy.
This history he obtained from the late Lewis Y. Christmas, of Warren County, North Carolina, who was a retired gentleman of high veracity and integrity, who devoted himself to collections of family genealogy, and also from letters and other information abstained by said Wortham, and is in the main a correct history.
This is the testimony of Dr. L. Green Ward, of Texas, a native of Warren County, where he spent the greater part of his life.November1877.]
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This history is copied from the MS of the later Hon. Daniel R. Goodloe by his niece Annie Goodloe ... Edgecomb Co., NC
Feb. 13, 1911 for Mrs. W. P. Mercer.
1709 William Duke was a younger son of Raleigh Duke, Esq. of Hays Farm, Dovershire, (Devonshire) England and was born at that place in the year 1709. Hays Farm is still owned by the descendants of his older brother. It was the birth place of Sir. Walter Raleigh, and a picture of it can be seen in the first volume of Hawk's History of North Carolina.
Whether there was any relationship between the Dukes and Ralieghs I do not know. [but Mr. Raleigh Daniel, of Virginia, a descendant of Sir Walter Raleigh] says that he always understood that Hays Farm ascended the Duke family by intermarriage with the Raleighs. His impression is that his father was so informed by them. Some favor is lent to this supposed marriage by the fact that William Fever's father was named Raleigh Duke.
His parents dying when he was a small lad, and the estate passed, according to English law and custom, to his oldest brother, William Duke was left poor and brought to Virginia by his relative Col. William Byrd, of Westover on James River who reared him and gave him the rudiments of a good business education and better than all taught him to work. {NOTE: It is said that William Raleigh Duke was a grown man and well educated when he came to Virginia with Col. Byrd and had an interest in the Virginia estate.}
1727 In 1727 Col. Byrd was appointed one of the Commissioners to run the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina, and as we learned from his published account of the survey, he was so pleased with the soil of what is now Warren and Granville, that he called it the "Land of Eden", and pronounced it a great country for a young man a short time afterward, William Duke, probably through Col. Byrd's influence, moved to North Carolina, and in 1735, married Mary a daughter of Thomas Edward Green, who lived in what is now Warren County then a part of Edgecomb. William Duke settled on "Purchase Patent", and had many children.