d Cicely Jordan, between whom there was a "supposed
contract of marriage," made "three or four days after her husband's
death." But the lively widow, it seems, afterward "contracted herself to
Will Ferrar before the governor and council, and disavowed the former
contract," and the case therefore became so complicated that the court
was "not able to decide so nice a difference." What Captain Isaac and
Mary Maddison knew about the matter the record does not tell us; but the
evidence is conclusive that if there was but one Isaac Maddison in
Virginia in 1623 he did not die in January of that year. Probably there
was but one, and he, as Rives assumes, was the Captain Madyson of whose
"achievement," as Rives calls it, there is a brief narrative in John
Smith's "General History of Virginia."

Besides the record in Sainsbury's Calendar of the rumor of the death of
this Isaac in Virginia, in January, 1623, his signature to a letter to
the king in February, and his appearance as a witness before the council
in the case of the widow Jordan, in June, it appears by Hotten's Lists
of colonists, taken from the Records in the English State Paper
Department, that Captain Isacke Maddeson and Mary Maddeson were living
in 1624 at West and Sherlow Hundred Island. The next year, at the same
place, he is on the list of dead; and there is given under the same date
"The muster of Mrs. Mary Maddison, widow, aged 30 years." Her family
consisted of "Katherin Layden, child, aged 7 years," and two servants.
Katherine, it may be assumed, was the daughter of the widow Mary and
Captain Isaac, and their only child. These "musters," it should be said,
appear always to have been made with great care, and there is therefore
hardly a possibility that a son, if there were one, was omitted in the
numeration of the widow's family, while the name and age of the little
girl, and the names and ages of the two servants, the date of their
arrival in Virginia, and the name of the ship that each came in, are all
carefully given. The conclusion is inevitable: Isaac Maddison left no
male descendants, and President Madison's earliest ancestor in Virginia,
if it was not his great-grandfather John, must be looked for somewhere
else.

Mr. Rives knew nothing of these Records. His first volume was published
before either Sainsbury's Calendar or Hotten's Lists; and the researches
on which he relied, "conducted by a distinguished member of the
Historical Society of Virginia"