The founding generation: Christopher FitzSimons and Catherine Pritchard

The earliest dated trace of the family in Charleston is not a deed or a will but a leather-dresser’s classified ad. On Saturday, 17 January 1761, Benjamin Lord placed a notice in The South-Carolina Gazette announcing his return to town and his shop “next door to Mr. Christopher Fitz-Simmons, chandler, in Tradd-Street” — see Book 4, p25. That single line carries an unstated implication: by January 1761 the chandler’s shop was a recognised Charleston landmark, the kind of place a neighbouring tradesman could use as a navigation reference. The man behind the counter was a bachelor: the elder Christopher, an Irish immigrant who would die in 1783 leaving his establishment to a nephew of the same name in Dundalk. A Marine Intelligence entry from the previous summer — “Scooner Sally, Thomas Fitz-Simons” arrived at Providence in the Bahamas, Book 4, p24 — names a sea-captain who may or may not have been kin; the relationship is unestablished, and the differing spellings (Fitz-Simmons in the 1761 ad, Fitz-Simons in the 1760 column) already suggest that the surname’s orthography was unsettled in colonial print.

The bachelor chandler made his will on 23 September 1782. It is preserved at Book 4, p1 and Book 4, p2, recovered from a partially destroyed entry in Charleston probate Will Book A, page 166. The testator described himself as “Tallow Chandler and Soap Boiler” and divided his estate into eighteen shares. Six went to “my Nephew Christopher Fitz Simons, Son of Cashel Fitz Simons late of Dundalk in the Kingdom of Ireland.” Two each went to the nephew’s sisters Mary and Ann; four were to be shared among the children of a brother-in-law, James Handlin; one to a niece Esther Dillon; and three among the three daughters of a deceased brother, William FitzSimons. A survivorship clause directed any lapsed share to the nephew Christopher. The will was proved before Charles Lining, O.C.T.D., on 10 July 1783, and on the same day Christopher Fitz Simons the nephew qualified as executor. Family memoranda elsewhere in the archive variously give 1781 or 1783 as the year of the emigrant’s arrival in Charleston; the probate record fixes the moment he stepped into a recognised role in the city’s mercantile life.

He was twenty when he qualified, born in Dundalk on 27 December 1762. Within a few years he had established himself in Charleston not only as the heir to a chandler’s shop but as a member of the city’s probate circle. By 1 November 1790 he was serving as executor of the estate of William Valentine of Charleston — see Book 4, p9. The Valentine connection is a quiet echo of the previous generation: William Valentine had been one of the men named as an executor in his uncle’s 1782 will. The same schedule lists Christopher Fitzsimons himself as a debtor to the Valentine estate for £332.13.4 — a substantial bond, suggesting a working commercial relationship rather than a fiduciary errand.

By that date he was also a married man. He had wed Catherine Pritchard in Charleston on 3 August 1788. Catherine, born in Charleston on 19 August 1772, was a daughter of Paul Pritchard, the shipbuilder whose yard on Hobcaw Creek in Christ Church Parish had been one of the chief facilities of the South Carolina navy during the Revolution. The Pritchard yard’s documentary history begins with a 26 June 1778 conveyance of 240 acres at Hobcaw from William Bogbie and Daniel Manson to Abraham Livingston and Paul Pritchard, and a quarter-share sale to the state navy board commissioners four months later — both events reconstructed in A. S. Salley’s 1909 genealogy at Book 4, p15. Paul Pritchard’s own will, dated 10 November 1791, occupies four pages of the archive at Book 4, p3, Book 4, p4, Book 4, p5, and Book 4, p6. It gave the Hobcaw shipyard with all its working complement — eighteen enslaved shipwrights, caulkers, blacksmiths, and carpenters named in the document — to his son William; it gave wharves and lands in Charleston to his son Paul Jr.; and it secured for “my Son in Law Christopher Fitzsimons a right and Privilege of landing and shipping all his own Goods Wares and Merchandizes at my Wharf in Charleston free of Charge or Expence.” Christopher was named one of four executors. The will was proved on 14 December 1791, and he qualified as executor the same day — placing him in Charleston, three years after his marriage, deep in his father-in-law’s commercial affairs.

A merchant in the State Legislature

Christopher prospered in the Charleston of the early national mercantile boom. His Mercury obituary of 6 August 1825 — a signed tribute by an unidentified correspondent who used only the initials W.G.R. and called him a paternal figure — is preserved at Book 4, p10. It is the richest portrait of his public life. He served in the South Carolina State Legislature, where, the writer recalls, “he evinced the strength of his judgment and clearness of his perceptions, by the manly and independent course he invariably pursued — always supporting a measure, more on account of its expediency and utility than its popularity or party considerations.” He was a warm advocate of the Bill for the Internal Improvement of the State — almost certainly the 1819 Internal Improvements Act, the founding statute of South Carolina’s canal and turnpike programme. During the War of 1812 he “cheerfully relinquished the pecuniary benefits resulting from a lucrative portion of his property, to aid the City in the erection of a suitable fortification of defence.” He died at the end of July 1825. The Mercury spelled the surname Fitzsimons, one word and lowercase s; his uncle’s will had used Fitz Simons in two words; the 1761 ad had used Fitz-Simmons with a double m. The spelling was actively in flux through this entire generation.

Catherine, the sixteen children, and the Hampton line

Catherine outlived her husband by sixteen years. She died on 14 December 1841 in Columbia, after a lingering illness. Two contemporary death notices — set independently from what appears to have been a single source copy and running in both Charleston papers on Tuesday, 21 December 1841 — are preserved side by side at Book 4, p16 (Charleston Daily Courier) and Book 4, p17 (Charleston Mercury). The two notices agree on the single hardest fact about Catherine’s domestic life: she “bore sixteen children” and was leaving behind her “but one.” The bound albums name only six of those sixteen by name; the remaining ten died too young to enter the family record. The one surviving child in late 1841 was almost certainly Col. Paul FitzSimons of Augusta — the only second-generation FitzSimons known to have lived past that year. The shorter-lived siblings had included Christopher 2nd (1802–1832), whose own short will of 11 April 1831 — at Book 4, p7 — vested his entire estate in his wife Elizabeth Porcher Stoney FitzSimons and asked her to consult “my beloved Mother and brother Paul” on all matters touching the welfare of their young children.

One of the daughters who did not survive Catherine left the line’s most consequential descendant. Ann Pritchard FitzSimons married Col. Wade Hampton II. Their son, the future Confederate general and governor Wade Hampton III, was born on 28 March 1818 in his grandparents’ house at No. 541 Hasell Street in Charleston — a fact recorded in Salley’s 1909 genealogy at Book 4, p15. Through Ann the Charleston FitzSimons line connected directly to the most prominent South Carolina political family of the nineteenth century; through Paul of Augusta it continued in the FitzSimons name itself. The chandler’s shop on Tradd Street that Benjamin Lord used as a landmark in 1761 had, in three generations, become the root of a Carolina line that ran into the governor’s mansion and beyond.