Lt. Francis Thornton of Rolling Hill (October 22, 1747 – November 18, 1808) was a planter and soldier during the American Revolutionary War.
[5] His parents were first cousins and benefited greatly not just the primogeniture status that settle a comfortable size estate upon William Thornton but also from an estate passed matrilineal from Peter Sterling, a seventeenth century surgeon with landholdings in Gloucester County, Virginia and Baltimore, Maryland.
[6] By 1753, Thornton's family removed to Brunswick County, Virginia where is father gained significant economic and political control.
Thornton married and set up his own household by 1769 obtaining land settled upon him in what is today Charlotte County, Virginia.
[7] The majority of his period of service in the Continental ranks was training and foraging, his troop was involved in the retaliatory skirmish known as the "Battle of Edgar's Lane" on September 30, 1778 near Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
[11] Thornton's great-granddaughter Lola Jane Carr Bates wrote a brief family history in 1913 in which she recorded his first wife as a "Miss Lacy" and his second as Lucy Ligon.
[15] Additionally, legal transactions and notations by Thornton's grandchildren indicate that his wife was the granddaughter of Richard Wyatt and Sarah Overstreet.