Inventory of William Valentine of Charleston, November 1790 — Christopher Fitzsimons named Executor

An inventory and appraisement of the personal goods of William Valentine of Charleston, deceased, alongside a ‘Schedule of Bonds, Notes &c due the Estate of William Valentine deceased with Interest calculated to November 1st 1790.’ The opening line names Christopher Fitzsimons as Executor of Valentine’s last will. The personal-goods column lists clothing, an eleven-volume Williams’ Works, mathematical instruments, a ‘wash bottle and powder horn’, an eight-day clock, an old mahogany table, an enslaved person (described only as ‘A Negro’), communion silver, and a saddle, totalling £53.15.0. The bonds schedule itemises debts due to the estate from Nicholas Frederick Meyer, William Davis, Peter & Robin Buckram, Robert Brown, Charles Manure, George Whitfield Markway, Peter Henry, Elisabeth Smith, John Drysdale, and others; it includes Christopher Fitzsimons himself in the list as owing £332.13.4 to the estate. Total bonds value: £2,186.2.4¾. Witnesses to the appraisement: Charles Crosby, John Brownlee, William Hatt. The page also notes a sum in the possession of Mr. Robert Howard not yet given up to Christopher Fitzsimons.

Christopher FitzSimons the emigrant — the album’s founder ancestor, b. Dundalk, Co. Louth, 27 December 1762, arrived Charleston 1783, m. Catharine Pritchard 3 August 1788, d. 28 July 1825 — appears here in his twenty-seventh month as a married man, about seven years after his arrival from Ireland, acting as executor of William Valentine’s estate. (The dates given here for the emigrant rest on the family memorandum transcribed at book-001/p023 — Motte Alston Read’s notes from the Croggan churchyard inscription and the family Bible — and would reward independent documentary corroboration from Charleston probate, the Charleston Mercury obituary of 6 August 1825 at book-004/010, or the Dundalk parish register; the 18 May 1762 date that has appeared in some earlier transcriptions has no anchoring source.) William Valentine had himself been named an executor of the 1782 will of Christopher FitzSimons the bachelor uncle (document 2) — placing the two men in the same Charleston probate circle a generation earlier. The bonds schedule is itself notable: Christopher Fitzsimons appears in it not only as executor at the foot but as a debtor near the middle, owing £332.13.4 (Bond & Interest) to the Valentine estate — a substantial sum for the time, suggesting an ongoing commercial relationship between the two men. The November 1790 inventory date is consistent with what was already established about the emigrant’s Charleston presence (his marriage to Catharine Pritchard had taken place in Charleston on 3 August 1788, and his service as an executor of Paul Pritchard’s 1791 will is recorded a year later — see document 6); it does not push his Charleston residence back further in time. The page also contains, in the right-hand column below the Valentine entry, an unrelated inventory of Joseph Harvey taken 23 October 1790 by Isaac Bradwell, Thomas Harvey, John McCammery, and an inventory of Robert Smith of Charleston. The left-hand column carries inventories of Nathaniel Wallihan, James Burges, James Mackie, and Isaac Mall (Charleston, 11 August 1790) — none related to the FitzSimons line.