Welcome to the Daniel Paine Family Website

In 2022, I started researching my Payne family lineage. After several years of research, including trips to the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia to access court records, I can confidently conclude that my ninth great-grandfather is Daniel Paine, who died in Northampton County, Virginia, in 1677.

Once I confirmed my relationship with Daniel Paine, I started researching his descendants and collected many stories about our Payne family. Thanks to the late Charles Dale Payne, who wrote the book Daniel Payne of Accomack and some of his descendants 1660-2008, I discovered the Paynes who moved from Maryland to Kentucky, Indiana, and Louisiana in the 18th century. If you’d like to see the family tree I’ve created on Ancestry.com, click on the Ancestry Family Tree button to the right. You’ll need to create an account with Ancestry to access the tree. You can access my tree using a free account, so there is no need to subscribe.

Luckily, several of Daniels’s male descendants from various lines have taken Y-DNA tests to help confirm my and Charles Payne’s research. The Y-DNA results may also help identify Daniel Paine’s parents. To learn more about how Y-DNA assists with these genealogy efforts, click the Y-DNA button to the right.

While Daniel’s last name was spelled several ways in court documents, “Paine” was the most common. Several generations later, you start to see Payne replace Paine. I’ve decided to use the surname spellings I saw most often for individual family members.

I’m using Northampton County since that is what the county was named when Daniel appeared in court documents. The county was initially named Accowmacke on March 14, 1634, when Virginia was divided into eight shires. In 1642, the colonists changed the name to Northampton County in honor of the English homeplace of Colonel Obedience Robins. In 1662, Northampton County was split into the two counties we have today—Accomack and Northampton. Daniel appears in tax lists and court documents in Northampton County after the split, so I’ve concluded that he probably lived in the southern part of the original county.

To learn more about Daniel, please click the Daniel Paine button to the right. Over time, I hope to create a webpage with my research conclusions and stories for other members of Daniel’s family. Each account will include footnotes with sources. To see these stories, click on the link to Stories in the upper right of this page. If you’d like to be notified when I post new accounts, please sign up for email notification using the form at the end of this page. I promise I won’t send out more than one email per month. It can take some time to write each account since I need to verify the sources.

If you’d like to share your genealogy research or have questions about the research I’ve done, you can find my contact information by clicking on the link in the upper right of this web page.