The Inheritor

The roots of John Ferdinand Webber's inheritance reach back to the old country — to England, and then to New England — through a family tree that is, in places, genuinely remarkable for how far it can be traced.

Among the documented names: Rolfe, Fowler, Wood, Hobbs, Kimball. These are real ancestors, confirmed in the family's own genealogical record, not invented for this account.

Hobbs sits closest to John directly. His great-grandfather, William Hobbs Webber (1711–1790), carried the name forward as his own middle name, inherited from a Hobbs line that runs back through Thomas Hill Hobbes (1617–1691) to Henry Hobbs, born in 1586 — at least four documented generations of a Hobbs family feeding into the Webber line before John was born.

Rolfe appears on at least two branches. One Mary Ann J. Rolfe is recorded as the mother of Mary Ann Rolf Bailey (1730–1815), herself the mother of Abner W. Morrill (1709–1766), John's great-great-grandfather on his mother's side. A separate, earlier Rolfe line runs from Ezra Rolfe (1610–1689) forward through several more generations. The Rolfe family traces to Johannes Eustace John Rolfe of Heacham, Norfolk, England (1562–1594), whose son Roberte Roffe was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire in 1576 and died in Salem, Essex, Massachusetts in 1654 — the Atlantic crossing documented in the Kilpatrick family history.

Wood appears through the same Bailey ancestry — Thomas Lee Wood (1632–1687) and his son John Hopkinson Wood (1656–1735). Kimball sits one generation closer: Lucy Wells Kimball (1734–1789) married John K. Webber (1741–1823), John Ferdinand's grandfather.

What the documented record does not give us is what any of these people believed, what trades they practiced, or how they experienced the upheavals of seventeenth-century England. What survives is narrower and, in its own way, just as remarkable: a family that can be traced, by name, back to 1586, crossing an ocean at some point in the seventeenth century to begin again in New England.

In New England, the documented strands of John's ancestry continue, and here the record grows somewhat fuller — not in what these people believed, but in who they were to one another.

On his mother's side, the line runs through Hannah K. Morrill (1774–1839) to her parents, Jeremiah G. Morrill Sr. (1751–1838) and Lydia S. Greeley (1710–1798), and further back to James F. Kittredge III (1727–1773) and Hannah B. Kittredge (1755–1834). The Kittredge name is confirmed in the family tree at this generation. Whether any specific Kittredge ancestor practiced medicine remains a claim worth investigating rather than asserting.

On his father's side, the line runs through John Webster Webber Jr. (1770–1825) and back to William Hobbs Webber, with marriages into families recorded as Webster, Emerson, and Eastman.

Also now documented in the New England Webber line: Thomas Webber, who married Mary Parker in 1655. He was a fisherman and planter — not a sea captain — who took the Oath of Fidelity to the Plymouth government in 1654 and lived on the southwest side of the Kennebec near Arrowsic Island. The Pejepscot Proprietor Records, Book 3, Folio 23, confirm his land ownership through a deed executed May 29, 1660. His wife Mary Parker Webber petitioned Governor Andros in February 1687, and Widow Mary Webber testified at the witchcraft trial of Reverend George Burroughs at Salem on August 2, 1692. Both are confirmed primary sources.

Vermont, where John Ferdinand Webber was born, prohibited adult slavery in its 1777 constitution — a fact about the place that shaped the world he grew up in, whatever his specific ancestors believed.

By the time he was a young man, he carried a long, real, and only partially known family history into a world that was about to ask far more specific moral questions of him than it had ever asked of his ancestors.

When John Ferdinand Webber crossed into Mexican Texas in the 1820s, he entered one of the most politically unstable and morally contested regions in North America.

On the Colorado River, he met Silvia Hector — born in 1807 in Spanish West Florida. As a child she had been held as property, possibly from birth, by members of the extended Cryer family. On March 10, 1819, twelve-year-old Silvia was sold to Morgan Cryer Sr. of Clark County, Arkansas, by his son-in-law Silas McDaniel of Clark County, Missouri, for $550 — the bill of sale recorded in Clark County, Arkansas Deed Book A, pages 24–25. She came to Texas as the enslaved property of John Cryer, Morgan's son, and met John Ferdinand Webber between 1826 and 1829.

Their first child, Alcy — later known also as Elsie or Clemencia, the same person confirmed under different name spellings by the Texas State Historical Association — was born in October 1829. By 1834, Silvia had given birth to two sons, Henry and John, while still enslaved.

The emancipation bond of June 11, 1834, signed before Alcalde R. M. Williamson, records that John Cryer performed the act of manumission, freeing Silvia and her three children. According to witness accounts reported in multiple secondary sources, Cryer was "cognizant of the situation" and "took advantage of it to drive a sharp bargain." In exchange, John Webber bound himself and his property to a debt: half his league of land pledged as security, and two enslaved children — a girl of approximately three years to Polly Odum, and a boy of approximately two years to John Cryer — to be delivered by the final day of October 1834.

The Briscoe Center for American History, which holds the original bond, states that the Webbers never fulfilled those terms. The two enslaved children were never delivered. The land pledged as collateral was consequently forfeited to Cryer, who used it to pay his own debts. The departure from Webber's Prairie was therefore not only a response to mounting social hostility — it was the direct legal and material consequence of the bond's default. The family had lost the ground itself.

The freedom this act secured for Silvia and her three children was real, and worth marking as real. It did not come without a cost paid by others, and it did not come without a cost paid by the Webbers themselves over the years that followed. This account holds both truths.

After her emancipation, Silvia and John lived as husband and wife. Family oral histories, confirmed by both the Texas State Historical Association and the African American Registry, state that they were married by Father Michael Muldoon, the Catholic priest for Austin's Colony — a documented historical figure in Texas. Although interracial marriage was legal under Mexican law in 1834, the Texas Republic's 1836 constitution would outlaw it. The family continued regardless.

They had eleven documented children, all born in Travis County except the youngest, Jeremiah, who was born in South Texas: Alcy, Henry, John, Leonard, Sarah Jane, James M. (also called Santiago), Nelson, Sabrina, Andrew, Rachel Amanda, and Jeremiah.

Silvia was described by contemporary settlers as intelligent, kind, and welcoming — known among her neighbors by a diminishing nickname recorded in Noah Smithwick's memoir, which this archive names as an act of diminishment but does not reproduce. Multiple sources record that her house was "always open to anyone, and no human being ever went away from its doors hungry."

At Webber's Prairie, they built not merely a homestead but a contested social space. Noah Smithwick's memoir, verified word-for-word against the original 1900 text, records that John took his family home and acknowledged them before the world, and that Smithwick himself eventually counseled John to leave for Mexico, where there was no distinction of color.

In 1851, the family was pushed out of Travis County — the Texas State Historical Association's language, consistent with the Briscoe Center's account of the land forfeiture. The town's name changed to Webberville in 1853 after the family's departure. In 1853, they purchased 8,856 acres in the Porción Agostadero del Gato, six miles east of Hidalgo, near the U.S.-Mexican border, and established another successful ranch near San Juan, slightly south of Donna.

Chapter One: The Rio Grande World

In South Texas, John and Silvia rebuilt their lives on land that neighbored the ranch of Matilda and Nathaniel Jackson, another interracial couple known for helping fugitive enslaved people and asylum seekers. They built a ferry landing and licensed a ferry stop on the Rio Grande — a formal, documented business operation — that led directly from their home to Mexican waters. The licensed ferry served their trading business and, according to family descendants and South Texas tradition, facilitated the passage of people seeking freedom in Mexico.

Family descendants and South Texas oral history record that Silvia played a central role in helping many people escaping enslavement find refuge at the Webber ranch, and that the household served as a stop on what is described as a rumored Underground Railroad leading south into Mexico. The Texas State Historical Association presents this as "family lore" and notes the family "may have" helped asylum seekers and fugitives. This archive presents it on the same terms: descendant tradition and regional oral history, not yet confirmed by primary documentation, but consistent with everything known about the family's position, values, and location.

The Rio Grande was not simply a boundary between nations. It marked a transition between incompatible legal systems — one recognizing slavery and the other rejecting it. For enslaved people in Texas, freedom did not always lie toward Canada. Sometimes it lay only a river away.

Chapter Two: War and Exile

When the Civil War began in 1861, the Webbers' Union loyalty placed them in immediate danger. Confederate troops occupied Hidalgo County. The family was persecuted as Union sympathizers.

Confederate action against the Webber family during the June 1864 Rio Grande campaign is documented in the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Civil War Trail. According to that source, Confederate forces under Colonel John S. "Rip" Ford and Santos Benavides drove federal troops back toward Brownsville. At the ranch, Confederate soldiers arrested Webber's sons as Union sympathizers. One son escaped and rode to Brownsville, telling the federal commander that Ford had only about sixty men. Union troops were dispatched but Ford struck first, scattering the federal force. The Texas State Historical Association confirms one son was arrested and charged as a "Unionist" and another escaped to Brownsville. Which son escaped and which remained in custody has not been confirmed by primary documentation. Descendant traditions associate Henry, John, and Leonard Webber with the incident.

Silvia, her husband, and some of their children took refuge in Mexico during the war years. They returned afterward — the 1870 census records the family once more in Hidalgo County — and John Webber died on the ranch in 1882. Silvia continued to live on that ranch until her death in 1892. The archive's death date is September 13, 1892 (African American Registry); an earlier April 13, 1892 reading appears in some prior family sources but is superseded by the documentary record.

The burial location remains genuinely disputed. The Texas State Historical Association, the African American Registry, and UTRGV all place burial at the Webber Cemetery in Hidalgo County. A separate handwritten family document places Silvia's burial at Webberville in Travis County. My Name Is Webber states Webberville by deliberate authorial choice based on the family document; that piece's decision stands. The discrepancy remains open in the archive.

Every family inherits something. Some inherit land. Some inherit names carefully preserved in Bibles and courthouse ledgers. Others inherit little that can be measured at all.

John inherited a long, real, and only partially documented family history — names like Rolfe and Hobbs and Kimball reaching back to the 1580s in England, generations whose specific convictions this archive cannot yet claim to know. What he did with whatever he actually carried forward was his own choice, made and remade across a lifetime.

Silvia's inheritance was forged in entirely different circumstances. Born in 1807 in Spanish West Florida, possibly held as property from birth by the extended Cryer family, sold at twelve years old for $550, carried westward across territory after territory — her origins, once nearly silent, have yielded names this archive did not always have: Sarah, her mother; Hector, a name the record sets beside hers without naming the bond between them; and now, through the Texas State Historical Association and the African American Registry, a fuller picture of her life, her children, and the world she built from the ground the law once denied her.

When these two inheritances met, something entirely new emerged. It survived changing governments, shifting borders, racial hostility, civil war, exile, and the forfeiture of land that should have been theirs.

Whenever forced to choose between property and people, they chose people — even when, as the 1834 bond shows, that choice still moved through a system that asked them to weigh one person's bondage against another's freedom. The land they pledged was eventually lost. The family was not.

The rivers that carried their lives tell the story. The Mississippi recalls Silvia's childhood. The Colorado recalls the building of a home where freedom was secured at extraordinary cost and later forfeited through a debt that was never paid. The Rio Grande recalls a border where two legal systems met, a licensed ferry carried people toward liberty, and a family discovered that conscience could become sanctuary.

As descendants, we inherit both privilege and responsibility. The privilege is to know that our lives were made possible by people whose courage often went unrecorded. The responsibility is to remember them honestly.

John Ferdinand Webber and Silvia Hector Webber did not leave behind monuments of marble. They left a family. They left an example. They left the quiet but persistent conviction that conscience, joined to love and sustained through sacrifice, can outlive laws, outlast governments, and cross every river history places before us.

That is the inheritance they entrusted to those who came after them.

May we prove worthy of carrying it forward.

Ancestry genealogical chart (DEOrtega-Ortega Family Tree) · Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas Online, "Webber, Silvia Hector" · African American Registry (aaregistry.org), Silvia Hector Webber and John F. Webber entries · Briscoe Center for American History, emancipation bond of June 11, 1834, and published statement on bond outcome · 1816 probate inventory and will of Dr. Samuel Flowers (Enslaved.org LSD-EVE-INV-26047) · 1819 bill of sale, Silas McDaniel to Morgan Cryer Sr. (Clark County, Arkansas Deed Book A, pp. 24–25) · Pejepscot Proprietor Records, Book 3 Folio 23 (1660/1678) · Nettie Gove Nicholson, Tenth Generation Yankee From Maine · The Kilpatrick family history (pages 174–176) · Noah Smithwick, The Evolution of a State (1900), Chapter XVII · Texas General Land Office Records · University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Civil War Trail, Hidalgo County, Webber Ranch entry · War of 1812 pension case file (NARA, S.O. 25794 / S.C. 20941 / W.O. 43261 / W.C. 33717) · 1850, 1870, 1880 federal censuses.