I am a direct descendant of a soldier who fought at Brandywine Battlefield on Sept. 11, 1777. His name was Daniel Holyfield, but his last name is spelled on his Feb.1777 pay record as mine is now, which is Holifield. I don’t believe he knew how to write, so the spelling of his last name was at the discretion of the writer of the record. He was a private and was paid about 16 dollars a year. The average wage for a farmer, which he was, was 18 dollars a year at the time. He enlisted in Loudoun County,Virginia in Feb. 1776 in Capt. Charles West’s Rifle company, which was the 3rd Company of the 3rd Virginia Regiment of the Continental Line and seemed to live at his Grandfather’s Valentine Holyfield’s farm in Goose Creek. He was born in either 1753 or 1757 which would make him either 24 or 20 years old when he fought there at Brandywine Creek. He survied the battle and the Revolutionary War and apparently finnished a 2 year enlistment which would have ended in Feb. 1778 at Valley Forge. The previous battles of the 3rd Virginia Regiment were,”Harlem Heights-Sept.16,1776;Trenton-Dec.25-26,1776″. He married in 1778 to a woman by the name of Mary Pye and had some 8 children. He went on to acquire land grants as a benefit of the U.S. government for his service. The Land grants were in North Carolina,Georgia & Alabama and totaled over 800 acres. He last settled in a new county called Sumter,Alabama established in 1832 in a town called Belmont. The land he last acquired in a land grant there in Belmont,Alabama still has the log cabin that he lived in with his daughter Jemima & her husband Caldwell Estes. Today it is privately owned and rented out for hunting and used on weekends by family & friends of the present owner’s. He last attended and is buried at Old Belmont Church, which was then a Methodist Church. It is still used today and the town is still very small with only one stop sign, two families mainly and one telephone number listed in the directory for Belmont. He died on Oct.11,1834 there in the log cabin he lived in just 2 years after moving there. His headstone reads in part “Daniel Holyfield, Aged about 78 years which would put his birth at about 1756. I am the 6th generation descended from Daniel Holyfield/Holifield through his son,Willis, then Wiley H. Holifield, then Wiley Henry Holifield, then Herbert Joseph Holifield, then James Edward Holifield and my name is James Alan Holifield.
SUBMITTER INFO:
James A. Holifield
Pensacola, Florida
Light_n_me@juno.com
we now know that this is not our Daniel Holefield. there were 4 Daniel Holifields at that time frame.
I am the person who submitted that information on Daniel Holyfield being at the battle of Brandywine. Unfortunately I have discovered since posting that information a number of years ago, that there was more than one Daniel Holyfield living at the time; there were at least 4 Daniel Holyfields and the one in my branch whom I posted about IS NOT the same Daniel Holyfield as the one from Loudoun County,VA who died Feb. 15, 1777 and thus could not have been at Brandywine. So to correct this post, the Daniel Holifield who enlisted from Loudoun Co.,VA in Feb. 1776 was born in 1740 in Virginia. This Daniel Holifield was a Rifleman in Capt. Charles West’s Rifle Company,which was the 3rd Company of the 3rd Virginia Regiment of the Continental Line. The 3rd Virginia Regiment was at Brandywine, but the Daniel Holifield who I mention here died before the battle of Brandywine as I said in Feb. 15, 1777; some 7 months before that battle. I would not have guessed that there were 4 Daniel Holyfield/Holifield’s all living at the same time. My sincere apologies for my error of the time. Please remove my previous post.