Land claim disputes by the Kempe family

Land claim from Elizabeth Kempe of Philadelphia and her sisters, Catherine, and Jane Kempe. Along with W. John Wetherhead, interested party also. The daughters of William Kempe, Attorney General in His Majesty's Service to the province of New York 1752 -1759, attempting to make a claim on land owned by their (loyalist) father but confiscated. Upon the death of his father in 1759, John Tabor Kempe was appointed Attorney General of New York, the last to receive a royal commission. In 1825, John Tabor Kempe's heirs obtained passage of a bill in the New York Legislature that restored to them his house, stables and grounds on the northeast of Greenwich Street in New York City. Their efforts to have the New Jersey estates restored to them led to litigation and the case eventually came before the Supreme Court of the United States in Kempe's Lessee v. Kennedy, 9 U.S. 173 (1809).[New York Historical Society]