Maybe you can sort this out Bill

http://awt.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=carolbowman75&id=I1449

Elizabeth Eve Steele was the daughter of Christopher Steele and Catherine Wine (b. 1742, dau. of George Wine and Margaret Horn). After Christopher died in 1782, his widow, Catherine, married Jacob Bowman, Sr. (father of Jacob, Jr., md. Susannah Milhouse).

This is the documentation I found with Rebecca Bowman on ancestry.com. I know John Mead’s father was a William and he married a Rebecca from Tennessee. This was the only Rebecca marrying a William Mead from this time frame that I could find.

This was supposedly taken from the Bowman family Bible. If you go to ancestry.com and type in William Mead b 1790 Bedford, VA all you get is Rebecca’s. Somehow this Mead family doesn’t quite have any backup from this point on. They obviously weren’t the Maryland Mead(e) family. Would there be death certificates in the mid 1800’s that I could use?

Thanks,

Chad

Bedford county was originally pretty large including the city of Lynchburg wasn’t it?

Bedford county was made out of Lunenburg and then Bedford county was broken up the counties around it.

Bedford County is located in southwestern part of the state of Virginia, between the cities of Roanoke, to the West, and Lynchburg, to the East. It is bounded on the North by the Blue Ridge Mountains with the majestic Peaks of Otter, and on the South by Smith Mountain Lake, and on the East by the James River.

Long before the coming of European explorers, native American Indians lived here, at least as far back in time as several thousand years B.C. The initial explorers in the 1600’s reported finding tribes of Saponi, Tutelo, and Monacan.

The English colony of Virginia was divided into eight shires in 1634. The shires were subsequently subdivided into large counties, and then smaller counties. Bedford County was formed from Lunenburg County by an act passed Dec 13, 1753, to take effect on 10 May 1754, with the seat of government to be the community of New London.

The County was named Bedford, in honor of John Russell, the fourth Duke of Bedford, who was Secretary of State of Great Britain at the time.

Settlers came to Bedford to farm and to exploit the natural resources of timber and fertile lands, well watered by springs, creeks and streams fed by rains coming off the mountains.

Lula Jeter Parker, in _Parker’s History of Bedford County_, records that “Campbell County was taken from Bedford County in 1782. Again, in 1786, Bedford gave of her territory for the formation of still another county, Franklin, to which Henry County also contributed”. See description at History from Hamilton’s & Viemeister – Books on-line gives description of Parker’s book.

The county seat was moved in 1782 from New London, then near the Bedford-Campbell border, to a more central location, with a new log courthouse, on land donated to be the new Town of Liberty.

In 1786 John Lynch obtained charter to start a new town on the James River, which later became the City of Lynchburg.