Davis and Cropley Heritage with the Life of William T. Cropley, AKA Wilmer Lee Davis

About the Book

This is a history of a Davis family that came to Massachusetts in the 1600's where they made their home. In 1670 William Davis was deputized to meet with King Phillip and the Indians to make peace. When William Penn opened land in Pennsylvania we find the Davis's traveling that way. They eventually settled in Fayette County, Pennsylvania being the merchants of the hamlet of Davistown. Generations later a child was born by the name of Wilmer Lee Davis and given away to the Cropley family who named him William Thornton Cropley. The Cropley family came to America on the William Penn in 1819 and settled in Georgetown, Washington DC. They were the merchants of Georgetown making and selling whiskey and catching and selling fish, when they got involved with the Union and Confederate Armies over fishing equipment on the Potomac River. One of their homes was called Normanstone and was the homestead of Sophia Cropley and Robert Barnard and is now occupied by the British Embassy. William Cropley grew up in a home where his life was hard but he managed to make his way to Bible College after high school. He was drafted in the army during Korea and ended up in the desert of Arizona. After many occupations, one of which he loved was long haul trucking, he retired from IBM where he installed the first ATM machine and set up the Exchange Corporation, retiring and spending his winters in Mexico. He had always heard that when he was taken from his mother, you could hear her screams, "They took my baby! They took my baby!" In 1984 he set off to find her, which was a happy as well as a rocky journey. In 1986 she came to visit for Mother's Day and held her great grandson who was three months old for family pictures. That was William's age when she cried, "They took my baby!" His life journeys were numerous traveling to Spain, the Amazon jungle, Jamaica, Egypt, Turkey, volunteering in the Israeli army and motorcycling in Mexico.

About the Author

Marilyn Cropley has accomplished many things in her life and wrote her first genealogical history book on the life of her parents before the invention of computers. She winters in Mexico on the beach of the Sea of Cortez where she writes, and teaches genealogy and English.