William Eesley

William Eesley was baptized 4 July 1731 at St Mary’s, Banbury, Oxfordshire — the parish register enters him as “William, Son of Thom[as] Easley.” He is the earliest Eesley yet documented in the line that reaches Chuck, and his baptism fixes the family at Banbury a full century before they left north Oxfordshire for America.

A page from the 18th-century parish baptism register consulted in the Eesley-line research, spanning the years around William’s 1731 baptism. (Oxfordshire / Warwickshire Church of England registers, 1538–1812.)

He married Mary Simkins at Banbury on 12 December 1758. Among their children was Joseph Eesley (baptized at the same St Mary’s, Banbury, in December 1764) — the “William Eesley, Lab[ourer], & Mary his Wife” of Joseph’s own baptism entry. William was a laborer; the milling trade that would define the later Eesleys, and carry them to Canada, Michigan, and Ohio, still lay two generations ahead.

He died in 1777, at about forty-six. His parents were Thomas Eesley (1700–1750) and Sarah; Thomas’s own father, per the family tree, was Hugh Easley (b. 1675) — carrying the documented Eesley name back into the seventeenth century. (The tree also carries a separate, earlier marriage under this record whose dates cannot fit a 1731 birth; it is most likely a conflation with an older William Eesley and is set aside here in favor of the well-dated 1758 marriage to Mary Simkins.)

Source: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — William Eesley (G95K-HFK); St Mary’s, Banbury parish baptism register (Oxfordshire Church of England Baptisms, 1538–1812).