The Sims Family

William Sims Sr. & Mary Susanna Piggott

The Sims line reaches back to Revolutionary-era Virginia: William Sims Sr., born about 1763 in Hampshire County, died 1842 on Hackers Creek in Lewis County. About 1780, at Cheat River in Randolph County, he married Mary Susanna Piggott (1765–1823), and from the two of them descends the entire Lewis County line that follows. When his estate was finally settled in 1853, the paperwork did what estate paperwork quietly does best — it named the whole next generation in one stroke: Edward, Sarah, John, Catherine, William, Henry, Mary Belt, Elijah, Susan Lewis, Gilmore, and Julian. Eleven children, eleven threads into the county's history.

The family's own historian

Like the Halls and the Stalnakers, the Sims family kept its own record before this archive existed. A typed report in the family's papers — the writer's name now lost, the work not: “This report culminates about 25 years of research about the Sims family” — works through the line generation by generation, checking the published Sims Family History by Mazie Sims Cochran against census pages and death reports, and correcting it where the records disagree. Cochran's book made Elijah “Buck” Sims (b. 1806) a son of John W. Sims; the report's author ran the 1830–1850 censuses and Elijah's own death report and concluded his parents were “Wm and Susan Sims” — making Buck a brother of John Wesley, not a son. Twenty-five years of patient checking, done a generation before this project began, by the same instinct that drives it now.

The report also follows the brothers who left: Francis “Frank” Sims, “an early merchant of Pee Wee, Wirt Co.”, and — on a page that survives only as text bleeding through a photograph — Martin W. Sims, who took his family to the Reedy country of Roane County in 1845, bought nine hundred to a thousand acres, and “hired 10-15 neighbors to clear and till the land while Martin built and established a store.”

John Wesley Sims to George Washington Sims

The line continues through William's son John Wesley Sims (1787–1856), who married Mary Margaret Curtice on 9 May 1811 and raised seven children with her before remarrying, to Elizabeth Romine, about 1842. Two of those seven sons anchor the next generation — and in a detail that says something about the size of the community, both married Reeder women. Leonard D. Sims (1811–1879) wed Hannah Reeder in Harrison County on 6 October 1832; his brother Thomas Matthews Sims (1813–1874) wed Phebe Reeder (1807–1868) in Lewis County the following summer, on 23 July 1833.

Thomas and Phebe's son William Sims (b. 1839) married Joanna Samantha Curtis (b. 1847) in Lewis County on 10 October 1867 — and their son, George Washington Sims, opens the family's modern chapter further down this page. Leonard and Hannah's son Alfred took a different road entirely; his war is the next chapter.

Alfred D. Sims, C.S.A.

Leonard and Hannah's son Alfred D. Sims (b. 1839) enlisted in 1863 in Company C of the 31st Virginia Infantry — the Confederate regiment that had fought under Stonewall Jackson in the Valley and marched in Lee's army. His Compiled Military Service Record survives in the National Archives, filed under the spelling “Simms.” The family's typed report preserves what the muster rolls don't: “He was wounded in the side and spent some time in the hospital in Lexington, Virginia.”

Alfred came home, married Minerva Hinzman on 4 April 1867, and raised eight children whose full dates the family report sets down one by one — William L., Mary L., Alonza V., James W., Ivy B., the twins Rosa and Eva (born the same August day in 1879), and Albert Lawson Sims, whose 1915 marriage record to Lela Ethel Whetzel closes the report's account. Even Alfred's death is a small monument to the family's honesty: the report says 30 May 1891, FamilySearch says June 1901, and until a record settles it, the archive keeps both.

Newton Gilbert Sims, U.S.A.

On the other side of the same family stood Newton Gilbert Sims (1845–1919), John Wesley's son by his second marriage — a twin, born with his sister Mary Elizabeth. He enlisted in Company B of the 9th West Virginia Infantry (his enlistment hid from researchers for years under the spelling “Simms”), mustered out at Harpers Ferry on 5 October 1864 marked “Veteran,” and re-entered service with Company I of the 1st West Virginia Veteran Infantry. His Civil War pension index card — found in 2026 — finally gave the family his exact death: 30 November 1919, at Orma in Calhoun County, an invalid pension under the 1907 old-age act still arriving to the end.

So an uncle's son wore gray and was carried wounded to Lexington; a half-uncle wore blue and mustered out at Harpers Ferry — and they were not alone. Two more Lewis County Sims men rode with West Virginia Union cavalry regiments. One county, one surname, both armies: the border-state war, compressed into a single family.