Simmonds,

It is not possible to determine if “David Simons” and “Simmonds,” who appear in the Mason family manuscript account book on folios 13 and 61, respectively, were the same or different people. Multiple men with similar names lived in Virginia between 1774 and 1810.  

In May 1774, a David Simons embarked from England aboard the Tayloe, arriving in Virginia in July. Simons’s status aboard the ship was likely that of a bonded passenger. While many English men, women, and children came to America during the eighteenth century as indentured servants, thousands of others came as convicts transported across the Atlantic in lieu of imprisonment or corporal punishment. The offenses of transported convicts ranged from the many crimes that would have been punished by hanging in eighteenth-century Britain to much less serious offenses, such as petty larceny or shoplifting. David Simons appears to have been convicted of an unspecified crime and to have chosen transportation to the colonies as his punishment.  

Revolutionary War records from June 1777 to August 1778 contain citations for a David Simmons, which may or may not have been the same person as the passenger who came to Virginia aboard the Tayloe. Simmons served as a member of Colonel William Grayson’s Additional Continental Regiment, a unit that served for two years and three months in the Continental Army. Unlike state regiments, Grayson’s unit was directly under the control of General George Washington. Recruits came from Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. As part of this regiment, Simmons could have seen action at both the Battle of Brandywine in 1777 and the Battle of Monmouth in 1778.  

After the war, records indicate that there were either two men with similar names—Simons and Simmon—or one man who lived in multiple places in northern Virginia between 1787 and 1810. Evidence of three land transactions exist for a David Simons and his spouse, Catherine, in Spotsylvania County between 1787 and 1791. A David Simmon appears in the 1810 U.S. census. He was a resident of Pughtown—now Gainesboro—in Frederick County, Virginia. There were three members of his household: a male and a female aged 16 to 25, and one male child under 10.  

By Dianne Tomasek