Thomas Harris - @Thomas Harris

It does help, I was flying blind. Will do the next iteration over the next few days. I wish I could use Boddie!

Boddie was well aware of this Thomas Harris d1677 but ignorred him as he couldn't place him into his scheme of all Harrises in Isle of Wight being descended from him, so he chose the unrelated Thomas Harris d1672 with a widow Alice to be the progenitor of the long line of Harris in IOW, which he wasn't. Boddie had an interest in this line because his direct ancestor William Boddie had married 2nd or 3rd to the widow Mary Hunt Edwards, mother of the Judith Edwards who married Thomas Harris d1712, son of the Thomas Harris d1672. Boddie then ascribed the 1658 Patent in IOW of 1000 acres to Thomas Harris d1672 and wondered what happened to this land as no deed or the 1672 Will showed any mention of this land. Had he done the research, Boddie would have found that although Thomas Harris
had renewed the patent in 1662, he had abandoned it by 1668 when it was patented again to Joseph Bridger. This speculated land was abandoned by Thomas Harris d1677 because he had purchased the Westover Hundred plantation from the widow of his deceased brother in 1663. So this Thomas Harris d1677 never lived in IOW, which fulfills part of the ancient Harris family legend that this family was not in Isle of Wight until after the death of their father. I had spent the first 35 years of research trying to document the claims of the 1954 Boddie book on "Historical Southern Families" and had long suspected that much of what he had claimed was not true, most of which he had not documented at all. The 1995 book on "The Five Thomas Harrises of Isle of Wight County Virginia" by the eminent professional genealogist John A Brayton finally but the nail in Boddie's coffin for me. And by 2010 we had amassed a large group of direct male Harris descendants of Edward Harris d1677 and his brother Thomas Harris d1688 proving that they were not related to some of the other Harris lines that Boddie had grouped into our DNA profile. I gave my library all of my Boddie books since I had spent much time, money and effort in trying to document his claims, only to find that most of them were false, so they were completely worthless to me. I know I still have most of them on CD's around here someplace, but I never even look for them.

Well, with your help, I hope, we'll try to get it right on Geni! Please feel free to work directly with the profiles and then let me know when done, and I'll lock them up. Meanwhile I'll struggle along trying to get the tree in order.