William Sloan - Kershaw County

William Sloan, died 1906 in Itawamba County

It seems pretty certain that my Sloan family of ancestors came from the area of what is now Kershaw County, South Carolina.  Kershaw County was formed out of Kershaw District, and in earlier times this area also known as Craven County, St. Mark's Parish or Camden District.  During a visit to Columbia, South Carolina last week, I was able to make a quick afternoon run over to the town of Camden, the county seat of Kershaw County.    The Camden Archives is a wonderful facility and has a great collection of books and reference materials for the genealogist.  My mother and I were here just a couple of years ago, and I knew it would be worth a trip over from Columbia.

Two years ago, Momma and I were in a grab and run session at the courthouse in Kershaw County.  We grabbed the index books, found deed books with the surnames we were looking for - Sloan, Irvin and Lowery, and started copying records.  It wasn't until we got to our hotel room, several hours away and later that night, that we settled in and started going through our mountain of copies. Lo and behold, my mother found a deed from Samuel and Mary Sloan where they were conveying land that had been previously deeded to Mary, as daughter of Peter Rush.  Voila.... we just learned Mary's maiden name and her father's name!  Unfortunately, we were across the state and couldn't go back to research the Rush family.

This time, I didn't have enough time to go to both the archives and the courthouse.  At the archives, I revisited some of the same files and information as I did before and also looked at new sources.  One of the things I found was an abstracted record dated 1752 in which William Sloan - probably the namesake of the William Sloan pictured above - petitioned the the colonial government of South Carolina for land.   The petition indicated that William "came lately from Virginia" with his "wife and five children."    Wonderful information - now I just need to figure out where in Virginia that William lived before moving to South Carolina.  I've got a few leads though.

Back to Mary Rush Sloan's father, Peter.  I've discovered that Peter Rush moved from Philadelphia to Charleston, South Carolina shortly after his marriage to Catherine Plains.   Peter was said to have been loyal to the Crown during the Revolutionary War.  A 1799 record shows that he bought 150 acres of land on a branch of the Wateree River in Kershaw County.  The deed indicated that Peter was a ropemaker.  In 1803, Peter received a grant of 200 acres on the same branch, and in 1805 Peter deeded 50 acres of his land to his daughter, Mary Rush.   It was this tract that Mary and her husband, Samuel Sloan, sold in 1819.

Peter was of German ancestry.  The Rush surname was likely Anglicized from Rausch, Rusch, Risch or some other variation.  So far, there's been no identification of his parents.