Major William Dunlap III (1779–1844) was born on February 8, 1779, in Virginia, the son of William Dunlap II (1744–1816) and Rebecca Robertson (1751–1849). He married Oneida Green and settled in Fayette County, Kentucky. He worked as a farmer and butcher and served one year as mayor of Lexington.
William III’s father, William Dunlap II, was born in Augusta County, Virginia and served in the Revolutionary War until the surrender of Lord Cornwallis. The musket he carried in that war remained in the family for generations; a letter from 1806 describes his boys borrowing it to shoot turkeys over Christmas. William II married Rebecca Robertson, aunt of Chief Justice George Robertson, and the family settled near the present site of Lexington, Kentucky. The Dunlap family traced its American roots to Prof. John Dunlap of the University of Glasgow, who sailed for Virginia in 1730, and was “one of the oldest and most distinguished of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian families of the South.”
William III and Oneida had many children, including Harriet (1811–1887), Alexander, Andrew, Frank, George, Green, James, John, Louisa, Martha, Mary, and Minerva. Among them was Mary Jane Dunlap (1814–1906), who married Joseph Hopper (1782–1860) in 1840. Through that marriage, the Dunlap Presbyterian heritage passed into the Hopper family.
William III’s siblings included Major Alexander Dunlap, who served in the War of 1812 and the Mexican War; Col. John Dunlap, who served in the Black Hawk War; and Rev. James Dunlap (1773–1866), a Baptist minister for over half a century who fathered thirteen children and left 209 descendants in four generations.
William Dunlap III died on January 2, 1844, in Fayette County, Kentucky.