Sixth Generation

60. Dunnan PRESSLEY Sr was born in 1783/84 in Lancaster County, South Carolina.¹⁰¹
I have seen various birth dates given, most commonly 1780, but no documentation as to how any dates were determined.
He served in the military in 1812.¹⁰²
Name: Dunning Pressley
Alias: Dunnin Presley
Birth year: abt 1784
Birthplace: South Carolina, United States
Enlistment Date: 19 Sep 1812
Enlistment Age: 28 He was described as 5 ft ? with brown hair, gray eyes, and sallow complexion on 19 Sep 1812 in Mecklenburg, South Carolina.¹⁰¹ He owned 160 acres - per War of 1812 land bounty - on 27 Jan 1820 in South Carolina.¹⁰³
He died between 1851 and 1859 in McMinn County, Tennessee.
He was married twice, his first wife being named Catherine, whom he married in Lancaster County. He moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Buncombe County, North Carolina before 1820. By 1830 his wife had presumably died and he had remarried in Buncombe County to his second wife, Mary. By 1840 Dunnan was living in Monroe County, Tennessee (he probably had lived there earlier) and in 1850 he was in Polk County, Tennessee, a 70 year old farmer, living with his 58 year old wife Mary. In 1860 he was in McMinn County, Tennessee, and he died between 1860 and 1870. The census records suggest that Dunnan probably had two sons and two daughters by his first wife, and perhaps three sons by his second wife. Three of his sons have been identified as Andrew, George, and Dunnan Presley Jr (the son that Elvis Presley is decended from).

Dunnan PRESSLEY Sr and Catherine were married before 1804 in Lancaster, South Carolina.

61. Catherine died about 1875. Children were:

30	i.	Andrew Peter PRESSLEY.
	ii.	John PRESSLEY.
	iii.	Dunnan PRESSLEY Jr was born about 1827. He died on 10 Mar 1900 in Missouri. I have seen various dates given for the birth, marriage, and death of Dunnan Jr but no documentation to substantiate. From Goldman's biography, "Elvis": "...In 1861, Dunnan Pressley, Junior, married Martha Jane Wesson at Fulton, Mississippi, the seat of Itawamba County. This district in the northeast corner of the state had been opened to settlement in 1832 by a treaty with the Indians, the Chickasaw Cession. Dunnan was drawn to the region, most likely, as were many other veterans of the Mexican war, by the search for cheap land. In those days, the going price for an acre of richly timbered soil was twenty-five cents. To a poor settler, children were another vital resource. Dunnan produced two children with his new wife in quick succession: Rosalinda and Rosella. The latter, born in 1862, was Elvis Presley's great-grandmother. Just a couple of months before Gettysburg, in 1863, Dunnan returned to the wars, enlisting in Ham's Regiment of Mississippi Cavalry. No longer the naive young Tennessee volunteer he had been in the Mexican War, Dunnan was intent this time on fraud. Obtaining the rank of corporal and a $300.00 bounty for his horse, he no sooner joined his unit than he was listed on its rolls as a deserter. Then, a couple of months later, he joined and deserted Davenport's Battalion in precisely the same manner, taking the bounty and then taking French leave. Now, having twice deserted the cause for which he had sworn to fight, he rounded off the job of shucking his responsibilities by abandoning his wife and infant daughters. The manner of Dunnan's departure was preserved for over a century in the memories of his descendants. His granddaughter, Mrs. Robie Stacy, recalled in 1977: My mother told me that when she and her sister were just little babies, their grandparents had taken them to church one Sunday and when they came back, their father, Dunnan, was gone. He went back to his other wife and child. Dunnan drifted west in his declining years through Arkansas to Missouri, where he died in 1900, petitioning to the end for an increase of his soldier's pension because of incapacitation owing to: irsepulas and rheamtism weak eyes and dafness in the right ear and gravil or disease of the kidness..."
	iv.	George PRESSLEY was born about 1829 in Tennessee. He appeared in the census in 1850 in McMinn County, Tennessee.104