John Dawson Castellaw of Bertie County, North Carolina

From Possibility to Proof

For a while, I thought I had made a remarkable discovery about the ancestry of my fourth great-grandfather, John Dawson Castellaw of Bertie County, North Carolina, and later Haywood County, Tennessee. Like many amatuer family historians, I had followed a trail that seemed to connect him to a prominent colonial Virginia and North Carolina family. In some online family trees, John Dawson Castellaw appears as the son of John Castellaw and Margaret Dawson, with Margaret said to be the daughter of John Dawson and Penelope Johnston. That identification, if true, would place this branch in the family of Rev. William Dawson of Williamsburg, the second president of the College of William and Mary, and would also connect it to North Carolina Gov. Gabriel Johnston through his daughter Penelope. ¹

But the more I looked, the more cautious I became.

Illustration of John Dawson enhance with AI. Original is from The North Carolina Portrait Index, 1700–1860 includes, on page 66, a portrait identified as “John Dawson” and attributed to an eighteenth-century British artist.

One of the strongest sources I have found is NCpedia’s biography of John Dawson, the son of Rev. William Dawson. That biography confirms that John Dawson married Penelope Johnston, daughter of Gov. Gabriel Johnston, and identifies their children as Mary, Penelope, William and Lucy. It does not list a daughter named Margaret. ² That omission does not absolutely disprove every online claim, but it does mean the lineage I had hoped to prove is not established by one of the better secondary sources on the family.

That is an important distinction. It means I cannot write that John Dawson Castellaw was definitively descended from Rev. William Dawson or from Gov. Gabriel Johnston. At least not yet. The problem is not that the Dawsons or Johnstons are imaginary figures. They are very real and well documented. The problem is that I have not found a primary record that bridges my line to theirs. ³

At present, what seems more accurate is this: John Dawson Castellaw was born about 1780 in Bertie County, North Carolina, married Zilphia Spruill in 1804 and died in Haywood County, Tennessee, in 1859. The use of Dawson as a middle name strongly suggests some kind of family connection, and the online trees may preserve a tradition worth investigating. But a middle name, family tradition and repeated unsourced trees are not enough to prove descent.

So for now, I am treating the Dawson connection not as a fact, but as a hypothesis. To move it from possibility to proof, I would need something stronger: a will, estate division, deed, marriage settlement, guardianship record, Bible entry or some other contemporary document that explicitly identifies Margaret Dawson as the wife of John Castellaw and the daughter of John Dawson and Penelope Johnston. Until that record turns up, the honest answer is that this line remains unresolved.

That may sound less dramatic than the story I hoped to tell, but in genealogy, being careful matters more than being impressive. Sometimes the best progress comes not from proving a cherished connection, but from learning exactly where the evidence stops.

For more of my genealogy research, visit rscottwilliams.info.

1. “Presidents of William & Mary,” William & Mary, accessed April 19, 2026, confirming that the Rev. William Dawson was the college’s second president. ↩︎
2. Mattie Erma E. Parker, “John Dawson,” NCpedia, stating that John Dawson, son of Rev. William Dawson, married Penelope Johnston and had children Mary, Penelope, William and Lucy. ↩︎
3. Compiled online family trees and family-history material concerning John Dawson Castellaw, John Castellaw, Margaret Dawson and Zilphia Spruill, used as research clues rather than conclusive proof. ↩︎