Friends, Associates, and Matchmakers

 

What better way to determine an ancestor's origin than to discover where he met his future spouse? If puzzling over just how Job Tyson first met the good friends who witnessed his will didn't provide us any guidance, there are others in the Tyson "F.A.N. Club"—friends, associates, and neighbors—who could still help point the way for us. Perhaps they even played the role of matchmakers.

One of those other F.A.N. Club possibilities was a man named West Sheffield, father of Sidnah Sheffield, who eventually became Job Tyson's wife. Fortunately for us in this exploration, unlike Sidnah who, like most women of the early 1800s, was virtually invisible, her father West Sheffield left a paper trail of useful documents.

Since West Sheffield served in the American Revolution, there are some records concerning key points of his life. He was, for instance, recipient of both land grants for his service in the war, as well as headrights for land in Camden County, Georgia as early as 1812. While Camden County was near Job Tyson's Georgia residence in Glynn County, Job's marriage to West Sheffield's daughter about 1790 may have indicated that the two families met elsewhere, as so far, I have found no records of residence in Georgia before that early 1800s date.

Job Tyson's wife outlived him by over twenty years. Fortunately for us, Sidnah lived until 1855, leaving us a trace of her reported earlier whereabouts through her entry in the 1850 census. To find that, though, means learning that after Job's death, Sidnah quickly remarried. Thus in 1850, by then twice-widowed, Sidnah, now surnamed Peck, was living in her own household next door to her son John Tison. She reported for herself her birthplace in—wait for it—North Carolina.

The question, of course, would be whether Sidnah met her intended, Job Tyson, back in her native state, or somewhere else. Keeping in mind that her father West Sheffield was a Patriot, I checked for his record through the D.A.R. website. There, his record stated that while he served from Georgia, he was born in North Carolina in 1747. Indeed, looking at a published biographical sketch of West Sheffield, obtained from volume 3 of Folks Huxford's Pioneers of Wiregrass Georgia, the writer gave Sidnah's year of birth as 1776. Was the Sheffield family living in North Carolina then, if her father served in Georgia?

By the time of Sidnah's wedding, it's unclear where her family was located. I have so far been unable to locate a marriage record. Still, if we fast-forward to the 1850 census for each of her oldest three daughters, they were reported to have been born in the earliest years of the 1800s in Georgia, not in North Carolina.

With that possibility exhausted of finding any link to tie Job Tyson back to his parents' home in any location other than Georgia, there is one more lead to explore for this examination of the Tyson F.A.N. Club. When I reviewed West Sheffield's own will, I noticed a familiar name pop up among the witnesses: McClellan. That, as I had mentioned yesterday, was a surname appearing twice in Job Tyson's own will—first for witness Charles McClellan, and then another entry for someone listed originally as "J. H." McClellan, and then spelled out as Joseph H. McClellan.

Looking now at West Sheffield's own will from 1830, someone listed as "J. A." McClellan, then signed as Joseph McClellan, once again made an appearance. Could this Joseph be the same as the witness in the Tyson will? If so, we need to see what we can find about the origin of those McClellans. 

With a Little Help From his Friends

 

If we can't pinpoint the origin of a distant ancestor through the information usually provided in more modern times, perhaps we can get a little help from his friends in determining the family's history. When it comes to my fourth great-grandfather Job Tison—a.k.a. Job Tyson—I've heard stories, but I haven't been able to verify them as facts. It's time to reach out to examine a second point of view: the clues we can find through the friends, associates, and neighbors of our mystery ancestor.

In Job Tison's case, it seems he spent most of his adult life in Glynn County, Georgia. Certainly by 1820, his name appeared—as Job "Tyson"—in the Glynn County census, but that was only a few years before he drew up his will.

His will, as it turns out, provided us with two names of trusted associates: Charles McClellan and J. H. McClellan, whose name later in the document was rendered as Joseph H. McClellan. These two McClellan men became the witnesses of Job Tyson's will, with Joseph appearing in court on September 21, 1824, to testify concerning the decedent's last testament.

Conveniently for us as we research the extended family of Job Tyson, at least Charles McClellan figures in the future history of Job's descendants. Charles, it turns out, was father of George McClellan, who a few years later became husband of Job's daughter Sidnah. 

Charles McClellan, it turns out, lived one county to the south of Job Tyson's wayside inn in Glynn County.  By 1817, his name appeared in headright and bounty documents in Camden County, a Georgia county which at that time formed the southernmost international border between the United States and the Spanish claim to a territory which eventually became the state of Florida. No surprise, then, to see Charles and his family eventually migrate farther south, once that Florida territory became the possession of the United States.

How Charles McClellan became a close enough associate with Job Tyson to be asked to witness his will, I can't say. For our purposes today, though, I was curious to determine just where Charles McClellan might have originated, in case he and Job were associates from a time before their residence in Georgia.

Constructing a family tree for Charles' children—mainly to advance their story to records of a later date to reveal their own places of birth—it was easy to spot the change in the family's location. For the five McClellan children born before Charles received the 1817 authorization to survey his newly-acquired property in Georgia, each child was said to have been born in South Carolina. Even the child born after that point—son Charles in 1819—was a South Carolina native. Only with the birth in 1822 of his next son, Samuel, did the census listings of births switch to Georgia.

Granted, from that 1822 date until Job Tyson's will was drawn up in early 1824 was not much time to develop a new friendship, or even a working relationship. That might suggest that Job Tyson and Charles McClellan knew each other prior to their respective relocations to Georgia. But South Carolina? I've seen people state that Job Tyson's family came from North Carolina. This didn't seem to confirm such a F.A.N. Club notion.

There was, however, another person to turn to in seeking Job's origin. The one pointing the way might have been Job Tyson's own father-in-law, West Sheffield, a Revolutionary War Patriot we'll consider tomorrow.

With a "y" or an "i"

 

Those of us who have been researching our family's history for any time have realized how casually spelling has been treated over the centuries. While today's generations may be quite particular about whether everyone spells their given name with a "y" or an "i," clerks in past centuries spelled a surname as they saw fit, not necessarily as the subject of the document preferred.

Thus, when I first began researching my fourth great-grandfather, I discovered that the Georgia record keepers in Glynn County chose to spell his surname as Tyson. That was in 1820, but even the time-faded page made clear that Job's surname was Tyson.

Since then, compiling the few documents I could find on that ancestor revealed that his name might also be spelled Tison, as was shown in records of the long and drawn out settlement of Job's estate. By that point, though, I had already posted articles about my research of this family using the keyword prompted by my first discovery—spelling the surname as Tyson—so that set my path on the blog. But for research? Every step became a double approach, looking for each of two spellings—or inserting the handy wildcard symbol when using search engines which offered that option.

Once having set my mind to being open to such spelling variations, perhaps I chose a more liberal path than I should have followed, for when I finally found a record tying my Job Tison to his supposed roots in Pitt County, North Carolina, I just figured the record for "Joab" Tyson in the 1790 census would simply be one more example of my spelling predicament. I assumed this was someone's best attempt at phonetic spelling of a less common given name.

Having thought this over, once I decided to work on Job's puzzle for this month's Twelve Most Wanted, I realized a possible error. While people today might assume that Joab could be an alternate and phonetic variation on the name Job, its biblical source shows us that those were two different names with different pronunciations. Job, the name of the long-suffering ancient man of the Old Testament, was a name pronounced with a long "o" sound, not a short "o" for the word referring to one's work or career. The name Joab, another biblical name, was actually pronounced with two syllables, Jo - ab.

Yes, I already knew that. I just got caught up in the spelling conundrum and made an assumption. Of course the biblical characters Job and Joab were two separate individuals with different names. But that was then, and now I was working on records from the eighteenth century.

That realization now had me left with not one document at all which could connect Job Tison to North Carolina. Perhaps, I thought, a detour down a different document trail might lead me to a more helpful vantage point for finding Job's origin, whether it was in North Carolina or elsewhere. I decided to take a second look at the friends, associates, and neighbors for my Tison family in Glynn County, Georgia, to see whether any clues could be found to point the way backwards in time for this Tison family.

What Got it all Started

 

When, at the beginning of each year, I outline my research plan for breaking through ancestral brick walls, I usually take a look at where, in my family tree, I'm currently stuck. No matter how much research I tackle, there's always some place where I'm stumped about ancestors. At the end of each year, twelve of those sticking points become my research plan's Twelve Most Wanted for the subsequent year.

That wasn't exactly how it worked for February's plan this year. My goal to research Job Tison of Glynn County, Georgia, came rather from a spark of inspiration. I shared that story, back in December when I was outlining my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026.

To give you a quick recap, last fall during a local genealogical society meeting, I had asked all our members, friends, and visitors to pull out their phones and launch the "Relatives Around Me" function from the FamilySearch.org app. Just taking a few minutes to do that in the midst of such a meeting is an instant guarantee of launching multiple sets of attendees abuzz in conversation. 

One new member at the meeting came up to me, surprised that we were listed as seventh cousins, twice removed. Only a genealogist would even understand what that response meant.

Curious, I inquired which family line connected us. It was the family which included my fourth great-grandfather, Job Tison. When that happened last October, I already knew that Job Tison had been one of my brick wall ancestors. I had seen that other people stated his roots were back in Pitt County, North Carolina, but I couldn't find any documentation to tie Job Tison to both locations.

Since that day, my new-found cousin and I—and our two laptop computers—got together at a local coffee shop for a jam session on locating Tison records. That prompted her to exclaim how much she enjoyed the collaborative effort, and how she wished our group could do something like that more often.

That exchange with my fellow genealogical society member last October not only inspired me to schedule Job Tison as one of my research projects for this year, but to devise a way to gather together with others to collectively research our brick wall ancestors. That became the inspiration for a class series I and a co-instructor will facilitate later this month at a local community college.

In the meantime, the most encouraging outcome of that exchange was that my friend confirmed her family's connection back east to—yep, you guessed it—Pitt County, North Carolina. Her family didn't move on to Georgia, as my Job Tison had, but remained in North Carolina for generations after that. 

While such discoveries through "Relatives Around Me" should include a cautionary tale regarding verifying connections through documentation, the discovery of a possible nexus centered in Pitt County has encouraged me to pick up the search once again. There is definitely something to be said for the generating encouragement of collaborative effort. Sometimes, we need that encouragement to pick back up and keep going.

. . . but Where Did he Come From?

 

There are some ancestors we trace for whom we can find all sorts of data about their adult life: their family, friends, business associates, neighbors. When it comes to the early years of that ancestor's life, though, there may be a blank slate. Nothing. For ancestors like that, though I'm pleased with the ample details that can be found about their later life, I'm still left with a vacuum that begs for an answer. Yeah, I know all sorts of details about his later life—but where did that ancestor come from?

That's the question I'll be grappling with during February, when it comes to researching one of my fourth great-grandfathers, a man named Job Tison. I can find plenty about his later life, that he moved to Glynn County, Georgia, and opened up a wayside inn on a major route of travel and business. I can find that Job Tison died in 1824, but it took over thirty more years to completely settle his estate. I can find details and documents about almost all of his children, and even his wife, despite her life spanning an era in which women were virtually invisible. But to connect Job Tison back to his supposed home in Pitt County, North Carolina, I'm lacking in signs of a reliable paper trail.

I had tackled this question about Job Tison as one of my Twelve Most Wanted, back in 2022—unfortunately during the same month as I got hit with a miserable case of Covid. Despite being stuck flat on my back for over two weeks then, I managed to write my customary wrap up post, complete with suggestions for what to do the next time I tackled this ancestor's story, and an addendum to remind me that I might have not one but two different Tison lines to trace in my family's history.

For this month, we'll reach out to several resources to trace the life of Job Tison backwards from his death in Glynn County, Georgia, in 1824 towards the earliest years of his life in the 1770s in what was then colonial North Carolina. Hopefully, the technology advances we've gained since I last tackled these questions about Job Tison in 2022 will augment this year's effort. 

There is one more spark that inspired me to return to the question about Job Tison's roots, a story I've enjoyed sharing since its occurrence last fall, one which I will share with you tomorrow.

The Stated Goal — And Then Some

 

Work on last month's research plan got me thinking it was a productive month. Now that it's time for my biweekly count, we'll get to see just how busy that month actually was.

Truth be told, I wasn't solely working on my stated goal for the first of my Twelve Most Wanted in January; I had some side projects also clamoring for attention. Thanks to some open-ended questions from last year when I muddled over my father's Polish ancestry, I've still been working on all my Zegarski connections from Czarnylas in Pomerania. That is mostly due to a collaboration with a distant DNA cousin who is also pursuing those Zegarski roots.

Another side project has been thanks to a recent phone call from my husband's niece, who had several questions about specific family lines. A long talk—and an invitation sent for her to view my in-laws' family tree for herself—prompting me to revisit that work, myself. I just couldn't help myself; I ended up adding a few more details to that tree, resulting in an increased count for my in-laws' tree, despite that project not being scheduled until this spring.

The main focus in January, though, has been in building out the family line of my fifth great-grandfather, John Carter of Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Granted, as I build out those lines to the present time, some branches extend towards sixth and seventh great-grandchildren for those families whose generations aren't quite so long as my own branch has tended to be.

While that is a work still in progress—and will be for a long time to come—the numbers are encouraging. The Carter branch stretched to take in 274 additional descendants of John Carter and his (likely) three wives. My tree now has a total of 41,311 documented individuals included.

On the other side of the equation, my in-laws' tree—which should have stayed stock still until April—gained an additional fifteen people, just from that one unexpected conversation with a niece. That tree now contains documentation for 41,752 family members.

Yet to come will be the impact from another joyful announcement, this time from my own niece, who just texted me the news that her application for membership to the Mayflower Society has been accepted. Time to get busy and put in an application on my own behalf—which, of course, will find me adding more collateral lines for that branch of the family, as well.

The main focus for this new month, however, will be to stick with my plan for the second of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026. This month's research direction came through a delightful in-person discovery at our own local society meeting last fall, leading to some conversations which inspired my decision to do more in-person classes and events for our local genealogy scene. We'll talk about that tomorrow, as I introduce my brick wall ancestor from colonial North Carolina, Job Tison. 

End of Another Messy Month

 

The month is out, but not the messy project I had planned for January. Perhaps it's a rule: in genealogy, we always bite off more than we can chew, but we don't always realize that predicament at the first bite. Choosing to outline the descendancy of John Carter's two, possibly three, wives couldn't possibly be a project that would fit into thirty one days.

As this often happens for those Twelve Most Wanted projects, at the end of the month I still have far more work to do on the Carters of Virginia. At this stopping point, as usual, I'll outline what still needs to be done for the next time I pick up this research question.

The overarching goal was to seek out those lines of descent which would follow the matriline leading back to John Carter's two documented wives, Sarah Kenyon and Hannah Chew. That would mean charting the daughters of the daughters of those two Carter wives. The goal—in case this project could ever become a viable reality—would be to find eligible descendants willing to take a mitochondrial DNA test to help trace back to the specific Carter wives. I am far from done with that work, meaning that this will be a task to continue behind the scenes.

As I went through this process during January, I noticed one detail. Just as genealogist George Harrison Sanford King had observed in researching the line of descent from first Carter wife Sarah Kenyon—that the Kenyon surname kept appearing as a family name in subsequent Carter generations—I saw the same repetition for the Carter wife for whom marriage records have been elusive. That wife was said to have been named Elizabeth Armistead, and for her likely descendants, that Armistead name seems to appear quite frequently over the generations. Completing the matrilineal line of descent for the supposed Armistead offspring may help clarify that question—though it will also call for examination of the family names which may have been inherited from the other, non-Carter, side of their family.

In the future, the mainstay of this continued research will be a thorough examination of court records for generations to come, in some cases the only way to find mention of the names in each Carter child's own family. This, too, will be a process requiring much time—although the help of technology through such conveniences as FamilySearch's Full Text Search will help expedite this exercise. It will also be a project which requires us to trace some family members as they moved away from their childhood home in Virginia to settle in other states.

For now, we'll close the books on John Carter's family and our exploration of what can be found of his colonial Virginia home and neighborhood in Spotsylvania County. It's time to step into a new month, and the second of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026.