I represent David Gillies. I was an inhabitant of Mobile during the British period, and apparently a Loyalist refugee. My July 1776 petition for a land grant says I was “obliged to flee from genteel living” in North Carolina because of the American rebellion. I was given a grant of 500 acres on the Pearl River, but my “distressed situation” since arriving in West Florida, where he had no means and no friends, meant he had to sell the land for income. I petitioned for another grant of land, this one on the Tickfaw River in the western part of the colony. I must have been a man of the cloth as Governor Peter Chester, in March 1777, suggested me to replace the Rev. Nathaniel Cotton as minister in the area. Rev. Cotton had died in 1771 – this is how bad the clergy situation was in West Florida!
Sources: 3, 7, 80