TENTH GENERATION

952. John Moore⁽⁴²⁾ was born in 1658 in England. He died on Nov 25 1732 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. John Moore's ancestry is not known. The frequently given descent from the Moores of Fawley, Berkshire, has been shown to be false. Still, it is evident that he was well-educasted and well-connected. Further research is indicated to find which family he comes from. After passing the bar, he emigrated to South Carolina in 1680 where he was appointed Secretary of the Province of Carolina South and West of Cape Fear on June 21 1682 and Receiver General and Escheator General on September 29 1683. He served as Deputy to the Lord Proprietor and Count Palatine, Sir Peter Colleton, and thus was a member of the King's Grand Council.

A friend and protege of Robert Quarry, briefly governor of South Carolina, Moore moved at Quarry's behest to Philadelphia in 1695 or 1696 to help establish an Anglican Tory party there as a counterweight to the Quakers. He was a founder and vestryman of Christ Church the oldest Anglican church in Pennsylvania and is buried in the church.

He was appointed advocate for the court of vice-admiralty for the province in 1698 and in 1700 was appointed King's Attorney General for Pennsylvania. William Penn confirmed this appointment and also made him register-general for the province, He was disloyal to Penn, however, in the quarrel between Penn and Quarry, who had become judge of the vice-admiralty court and leader of the Tory party, and was removed from office.

In 1704 he was appointed collector of the port of Philadelphia--an office in the gift of the government in London--and served in that very lucrative post, and as deputy collector, until his death.

There is an article on John Moore in the Dictionary of American Biography. He was married to Rebecca Axtell in 1685 in Charleston, South Carolina.

953. Rebecca Axtell. Children were:

476 i. Colonel John Moore.
ii. Thomas Moore was born in 1689. He died in 1769.
iii. Rebecca Moore.
iv. Mary Moore was born in 1697. She died in 1735.
v. William Moore⁽⁴²⁾ was born on May 6 1699. He died in 1785. Shortly after his marriage, about 1722, to a relative of the Earl of Wemyss his father gave him a large tract of land in Chester County, not far from Valley Forge. He lived there for the rest of his life and the stone house he built there is still called Moore Hall.

He served in the Provincial Assembly from 1733 until 1740, as a justice of the peace from 1741 until his death, as the presiding judge of the Chester County court during most of the period 1750-1776, and as Colonel of the Chester County Militia during the French and Indian War.

When frontier settlements were under attack after Braddock's defeat, he petitioned the Assembly for security and protection for these areas. That made him "obnoxious to the Quaker majority" and they attacked his intregity as a judge. He replied, calling the conduct of the assembly "Virulent and slanderous." He was arrested Jan 6 1758 for libel and for violating the privileges of the Assembly and spent three months in the Philadelphia common jail, being released only when the Assembly (which had forbidden the issuance of a writ of habeus corpus) adjourned. The governor and council investigated the judicial charges brought against him and he was completely exonerated.

Although, like most of his family, he was a loyalist when the Revolution began, he extended his hospitality to officers of the Continental Army during the encampment at Valley Forge.

There is an article on him in the Dictionary of American Biography.
vi. Daniel Moore was born in 1701.
vii. Richard Moore.

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