Chapter 1: Born into the Tidewater – Chickhominy River Beginnings

The Chickhominy River ran slow and brown through the tidewater lands of Virginia, its waters thick with the memory of all who had passed before. Along its banks, in the humid summer of 1684, a boy was born. His parents, Thomas Goolsby and Elizabeth Frances Sharpe, named him William Thomas James Goolsby—a name carrying both English pride and colonial ambition.

They could not have known, as they cradled him near the hearth fire of their timbered home, how this child would grow to stake his life farther west, beyond the settled river counties, into the red clay heart of Virginia. They only knew the river gave life—and took it.

The Virginia into which Thomas James Goolsby was born was a brutal, beautiful, precarious place. Less than eighty years had passed since the English first dug their fragile hold into the swamps of Jamestown. Since then, the Chickhominy lands had been carved by force into plantations, fed by tobacco and sweat. The Powhatan people who once lived here had been pushed aside by war and disease. In their place rose the wide tobacco fields, their sweet, acrid smell hanging heavy in the humid air.

Life along the Chickhominy was marked by seasons of abundance and seasons of fear. Tobacco brought wealth, but it also brought dependence—on the land, on weather, on human bodies. Some planters used indentured servants; increasingly, they turned to enslaved Africans, whose presence became more common with each passing ship from the English ports.

The Goolsbys were not among the grandest families, but they were landholders, and that mattered. In Virginia, land was more than property—it was survival, it was stature, it was legacy. It was proof that you had made something of yourself in this unforgiving world.

We do not know the exact shape of Thomas Goolsby’s home, but we can imagine it: a modest timber frame, a packed dirt floor, a wide hearth that served for cooking and heating. Outside, a kitchen garden of beans and squash, perhaps a stand of corn. Further beyond, the fields—the lifeblood of the family—where tobacco plants unfurled their wide, sticky leaves under the blistering sun.

As a child, young Thomas James would have learned early the rhythms of planting and harvest, of river tides and seasons. He would have watched as his father surveyed the fields, perhaps muttering about soil exhaustion or pests. He would have seen his mother spinning flax or stirring cornmeal mush in a heavy iron pot. His first memories may have been of the feel of warm river mud between his toes, or the sound of cicadas droning in the sultry Virginia afternoons.

But danger was always near. Insects brought disease. A bad storm could wash away the year’s crop. In 1684, Virginia’s mortality rate was still brutally high; few families escaped the scourges of dysentery, malaria, or typhoid. A child’s life was never guaranteed. If Thomas James survived infancy—and records suggest he did—he was already among the lucky.

The social world into which he grew was hierarchical and unforgiving. English gentry ruled the colony’s political and social life, but small planters like the Goolsbys carved out a respectable niche. Hard work, careful marriages, and land acquisition were the measures of success. Thomas James would have been raised with the understanding that his path in life was set before him: work the land, marry well, raise strong sons, and expand the family’s holdings if he could.

Faith, too, was central. The Goolsbys, like most settlers, were likely Anglican in faith, attending sparse but dignified services at the nearest parish church, perhaps miles away by horse or boat. Church attendance was not just a matter of piety but a civil obligation, part of the thin web of order that kept the colony from descending into chaos.

As the years turned, the boy grew into a youth, and Virginia itself was changing. New counties opened to settlement. Families who had once clung to the tidewater now looked westward with hungry eyes, seeking fresh land unspoiled by tobacco’s ruin. Among these families, the Goolsbys would one day make their move.

But for now, Thomas James Goolsby lived by the river. His blood and breath were shaped by its mist and its silt. Before he learned to read, before he learned to write (if he ever did), he learned the secrets of the tide and the cycle of the seasons. He learned that the land could be friend or foe. He learned that survival was not promised—it had to be wrestled from the earth, day by day, year by year.

It was a hard inheritance. But it was his.

And someday, when he had sons of his own, he would pass it on.

Chapter 2: A Young Man in the Tobacco Era – Early Adulthood and Marriage

By the early 1700s, the fields along the Chickhominy River had grown tired, much like the men who worked them. Tobacco, the golden leaf that had built Virginia’s wealth, was also its great undoing—robbing the soil of its strength, tying the colony’s fortunes to a single fickle crop.
It was into this fraught inheritance that William Thomas James Goolsby came of age.

He grew from boy to man with calloused hands and a pragmatic mind, schooled not by books but by the rhythms of the seasons, the mercurial moods of the river, and the stark mathematics of survival. Land was still plentiful westward, but here, on the coast, fortunes rose and fell as quickly as the tide. Families that once held grand aspirations now counted each barrel of tobacco with cautious hope.

It was during these years—years heavy with the expectation that he would marry and plant his own fields—that Thomas James first saw Tabitha Turentine.
She was said to be strong-willed, capable, with dark hair and quick hands. Her family, the Turentines, were of good English stock, neither rich nor poor, but respectable—worthy neighbors who understood the hard bargain of colonial life. Their bloodlines, like the Goolsbys', stretched back to the early days of the colony, intertwined with the stubborn will to survive.

Marriage in Virginia was less courtship than covenant. It was not only a joining of hearts but an alliance of labor, land, and lineage. And so, in the spring of 1707, Thomas James and Tabitha Turentine were wed.

We can imagine the ceremony:
Perhaps held under the pitched roof of a small Anglican church, its whitewashed walls ringing faintly with the tones of the old Book of Common Prayer. Tabitha in a simple dress, the best she had, and Thomas James in a rough wool coat, both solemn-faced yet shining with a quiet pride.
No grand feast followed—perhaps a stew, cornbread, a pie sweetened with sorghum if fortune had been kind. But there was joy nonetheless, in the way their families gathered, in the way Tabitha’s mother wept quietly, knowing that her daughter’s future was now stitched to another’s hands.

Together, they began the painstaking work of building a household.
Their first home may have been no more than a cabin of hewn logs, chinked with clay and moss to keep out the chill. A single room served for eating, sleeping, and praying. A stone hearth warmed them through the biting winters.
Tabitha tended a kitchen garden—squash, beans, collards—while Thomas James fought the stubborn ground to raise his first small crop of tobacco.

Children followed, as they always did.
By 1716, their son James Goolsby was born, his arrival marking a new chapter in their young family’s life. He would grow to become a man of faith—a reverend in later records—but in those first years, he was simply another fragile life to protect against the roughness of the world.
And he was not alone. Over time, Tabitha bore many children—at least a dozen by some accounts—each one a testament to her strength, each one a labor of love and peril, for childbirth remained a dangerous business in colonial Virginia.

As their family grew, so too did their dreams.
The land along the Chickhominy was aging, tired under centuries of tobacco farming. Westward, there were whispers of rich, untouched soils beyond the Blue Ridge—lands where a man might stake a new claim, a new life.
Men spoke of Albemarle County, carved from the western wilds, where rivers still ran fresh and forests stood thick and waiting.

Thomas James would have heard these stories while resting from his work, perhaps while patching tools by firelight or tending a creaking fence line.
He would have weighed them silently—land was everything. Without it, a man was little better than a beggar.
And he had sons now. Sons who would need their own fields, their own futures.

The seeds of westward yearning were planted deep.

They would bear fruit in time.

Chapter 3: Land, Family, and Albemarle County Expansion

By the 1720s, the tidewater was no longer the future.
The soil along the rivers that once promised endless prosperity had soured under the unrelenting harvests of tobacco.
Men who dreamed for their sons—and their sons' sons—looked westward, toward the rolling foothills and deep forests that whispered of new beginnings.

Thomas James Goolsby was among them.

The move was not undertaken lightly. Leaving behind the known, even if worn and weary, was a dangerous prospect. The backcountry was harder, wilder. The further west one went, the thinner the presence of formal law, the greater the risks of raids, isolation, and hardship. Yet the promise of fresh land was too great to resist.

At some point between the late 1720s and early 1740s, Thomas James and Tabitha packed what they could and set out toward the frontier that would soon be known as Albemarle County.

We can imagine the scene:
A simple wagon, its wheels groaning under the weight of a few precious possessions—iron pots, seed corn, worn Bibles, axes sharp enough to claim a future from the wilderness. Tabitha cradling their youngest child, the older ones walking alongside, their faces smudged with dust and resolve.
The forests were dense, the rivers wide, the paths little more than widened deer trails.
Every mile westward was a mile into uncertainty.
But it was also a mile toward hope.

When they arrived, they would have found a land both breathtaking and brutal. The red clay hills rolled like waves, covered in oak and hickory. Streams cut silver lines through the dense greenery. The soil, untouched by tobacco, was rich and loamy—ready to give if treated wisely.

The Goolsbys set to work immediately.
Land had to be cleared by hand—trees felled, stumps burned, fields readied for the first plantings. A second home was built, sturdier than the first—a two-room structure if fortune allowed, with a loft for the children.
Fences had to be raised to keep out wandering cattle and wolves alike.
Neighbors were few and precious.
The bonds between settler families were built not only by proximity but by necessity—bartering, barn-raisings, helping hands at harvest and at childbirth.

In this landscape, every man’s reputation mattered, and every claim to land had to be solid and defensible.
Thomas James understood this well.
We find him in the Albemarle County court records of July 1745, finalizing a land deed: selling a portion of his holdings to Samuel Shelton. His wife, Tabitha, formally relinquished her dower rights—a necessary step to clear any claim she might have to the property.

Deed from Thomas Goolsby to Samuel Shelton ordered to be recorded. Tabitha, wife of sd. Goolsby, relinquishes dower. (Albemarle County Court Orders, 1745)

It was a small but profound act: a signal that the Goolsbys were landowners of standing, trusted enough to appear before the justices—Joshua Fry, Peter Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson’s father), and others—and have their transactions entered into the permanent record.
It also shows a family beginning to manage not just survival, but legacy. Thomas was likely arranging his affairs to provide land or resources to his many children, securing their futures before death should overtake him—as it overtook so many others.

Daily life remained harsh.
Tabitha bore the endless labor of the home: spinning, cooking, tending gardens, raising children. Thomas and the older sons worked the fields from dawn to dusk, raising tobacco, corn, and perhaps a few hogs for meat and trade.

But there was pride too—pride in each cleared field, each successful harvest, each marriage made, each grandchild born.

The Goolsbys were no longer merely surviving.
They were establishing roots that would last generations.

And all the while, the world around them crept toward change.
In the distance, beyond the mountains they could barely see, new forces stirred—talk of rebellion, of rights, of Englishness questioned.

Thomas James Goolsby would not live to see that revolution.
But he laid the foundations for those who would.

His legacy was built of red clay and sweat, tobacco leaves and timber beams, courthouse records and whispered prayers.
He had crossed the river, moved beyond the exhausted lands, and staked a claim in a new world.

It would not be forgotten.

Chapter 4: Final Years – Legal Affairs, Legacy, and Death

By the early 1740s, the clay-stained hands that had carved a home from the Virginia wilderness had begun to tremble.
Thomas James Goolsby was aging.
The rigors of frontier life—the plowing, the planting, the unrelenting battles against the soil and sickness—had left their marks deep in his bones.

He was not alone in this slow surrender.
In colonial Virginia, the average lifespan for men was barely fifty years. Few reached old age without bearing the scars of toil or the lingering breath of fever. Even the wealthiest planter could not purchase immunity from the common killers of the time: dysentery, pneumonia, malaria, wounds left to fester.

By the summer of 1745, Thomas James Goolsby had taken careful steps to secure his affairs.
The deed filed that July—selling land to Samuel Shelton, with Tabitha formally relinquishing her dower rights—was more than a transaction. It was an act of preparation. He knew, as all prudent men knew, that death could come swift and unbidden.
Better to leave matters ordered than risk his wife and children trapped in disputes or poverty.

His holdings, though modest compared to Virginia's grand planters, represented a lifetime's labor and ambition.
Every cleared acre, every harvested crop, every building raised from the forest's bones spoke of years that could not be replaced.

By late 1746, Thomas’s health likely declined sharply.
Perhaps it was the slow wasting sickness—the "consumption" that hollowed men from the inside—or an autumn fever carried by a mosquito’s bite.
Perhaps it was simply the accumulated wear of a hard-lived life, the slow dimming of a flame that had burned steadily for more than six decades.

One can imagine the scene at his bedside:
The cabin dim, the smell of woodsmoke and damp earth heavy in the air.
Tabitha, her hands worn but steady, dabbing his forehead with a damp cloth.
Children and grandchildren gathered nearby, the younger ones hushed and wide-eyed, sensing without understanding that a pillar of their world was crumbling.

We do not know what words passed between Thomas and Tabitha in those final days.
But surely, they spoke of land, of children, of duty.
Surely, they prayed—the sturdy, unornamented prayers of Anglican settlers who believed in a God both just and near.

On March 10, 1747, William Thomas James Goolsby drew his last breath in Albemarle County, Virginia.

He was sixty-three years old—a long life by the measures of his time.

There was no marble tomb to mark his passing, no grand obituary in the colonial papers.
But in the small circle of family and neighbors who gathered to bury him, there was solemnity, and there was remembrance.

His body was likely interred on the family land, in a small plot marked perhaps by a fieldstone or a rough-hewn wooden cross.
The Anglican burial rite would have been said—the same words that had consecrated births, marriages, and deaths since England first sent settlers to these shores:

"Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life…"

The soil of Albemarle closed over him, but his story did not end there.

He left behind a living legacy—Tabitha, who would survive him; sons who would carry the Goolsby name into the generations beyond; daughters who would bind other families to his through marriage and blood.

And he left behind the land:
Land wrestled from the wild, land that fed children, that sustained hope, that bore witness to the unyielding spirit of those who dared to carve a future from an untamed world.

The Chickhominy River was far behind him now.
The frontier, once distant and dangerous, was home.
And though his name might fade from the great histories, among his descendants and the red clay of Albemarle, he endured.

In every harvest reaped from the fields he once broke open.
In every prayer said beside a hearth he helped to build.

He had done what he set out to do.
He had endured.
He had provided.
He had passed on a future.