My #NotAtRootsTech Week

 

Well, it's been a week. Amend that: not only was it a week, but it was a week when I wasn't even a stay-at-home #NotAtRootsTech participant.

There are a few reasons for that. To start with, the past week has been rough. Along with a co-instructor, I've begun a new, four-part genealogy class in person—something I've long felt the need to do. Doing stuff in person takes time, effort, travel, and other logistics. No wonder people prefer the convenience of Zooming in—but I firmly believe we miss something in the bargain.

Add to that, with beautiful spring weather comes a long-awaited construction project for our home, held at bay during the rainy weather last month. Only problem: those convenient virtual meetings used to conduct genealogy society business during the week also find a way to share the hammering, sawing, and drilling occurring outside my now-demolished living room wall. If I knew this was going to be the week the demo actually happened, perhaps I would have made this my week to travel to RootsTech in person.

Not to worry; I can always go back and watch the recordings. Sure, I'll miss out on the great sales exploding out of the exhibit hall, even for those #NotAtRootsTech. But perhaps some time later in the year will be more peaceful—or at least conducive to watching reruns of RootsTech sessions.

Who am I kidding here? Truth be told, what I was doing in my "spare" time was hyper-fixating on my latest project: examining all those Rainey DNA matches to see who their matches might have been, and whether those shared matches might tie me in to the other branches of Thomas Firth Rainey's family tree.

And I think, after several iterations of that process—did I mention the word "tedious"?—I may have found one new connection. I'll keep at it next week, as well. But it's encouraging to find a match which may well lead me to other connections to my third great-grandfather in this Rainey line. I need some wiggle room to explore his possible extended family.

Not Looking for Names Alone

 

Whether names alone can provide a clue to guide me backwards in time as I research the roots of my third great-grandfather Thomas Firth Rainey, coupling that detail with DNA matches can give this search added insurance.

While behind the scenes, I've been scouring numerous court documents related to possible Rainey family members, I thought I'd pop over to check out how many DNA matches on Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool might reveal a connection.

One standout echoed what I was hoping for yesterday: a namesake who clearly was related to my Thomas Firth Rainey. No surprise with this discovery: the category with the most DNA matches in this family, according to ThruLines, belonged to the son who was named after his own father. 

The junior Thomas Firth Rainey gives me twenty out of twenty seven DNA matches linked to the Rainey surname. That far supersedes the number of DNA matches connected to my own direct line ancestor, Thomas senior's daughter with the impossibly long name, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey.

I suspect there may be more Rainey matches who have not yet been pointed out by Ancestry's ThruLines tool. One way to check will be to explore the ProTools' "Shared Matches" function to see whether I can spot any more results. After all, since Thomas and his wife had at least ten children, there should be more Rainey DNA matches out there to find. Right now, ThruLines only spotted descendants of four children—so far.

In hopes of discovering more DNA matches connected to this Rainey patriarch, I'll be adding that task to those behind-the-scenes explorations to do as this month unfolds.

There Was Another Clue

 

I wasn't kidding when I recently mentioned that reading court records can put you to sleep any time of day. I was on the hunt for a document which might combine my third great-grandfather Thomas Rainey's name with any other family member from his past. Apparently, there are several such possible records—it's just that they all seem to involve complicated situations.

Before I forget to mention one thing, though—trawling through piles of court records can also make you forget things—there may be another way to power our way through to an answer to this month's research question: who were the parents of Thomas F. Rainey?

Not that the Rainey family had a traditional naming pattern that they adhered to—if there was such a detail, I've failed to notice it—but there were some interesting details in the family's choice of names which could turn out to help us.

One example of these naming idiosyncrasies was that of their youngest daughter, my direct ancestor whose full name was Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey. Almost as if they already knew she would be their last child, her parents had made good on their intention to memorialize her older, now deceased, brother Warren Taliaferro Rainey.

Warren, in turn, had been named for his paternal grandfather, who had died some time before the baby's own birth. Who knows? Mary Elizabeth's older brother Charles and sister Sarah may well have been named for their mother's own brother and sister by those names. And, of course, her own next-older brother Thomas Firth Rainey was obviously named for their father.

While I don't yet know enough about the family to realize whether the other Rainey children were namesakes for aunts, uncles, or older relatives, I'll surely keep an eye out to see if the names of Mary Elizabeth's older sisters Martha and Mildred, plus older brothers Isham and Richard, may have been echoes of other ancestors. Perhaps these can provide clues about the Rainey family from which my third great-grandfather Thomas descended.   

Getting to Georgia

 

If the goal this month is to research a family which had originally lived in Virginia, how did they get to Georgia?

Though we are barely into the month of March and the third of my Twelve Most Wanted research topics—Thomas Firth Rainey—I can already see that while this third great-grandfather may have spent his adult life raising a family in Georgia, he claimed to have been born in Virginia. What made a young resident of one of the leading locations of the nascent United States decide to move elsewhere?

On the surface, the reason might seem to do with Thomas Rainey's choice of a bride, for he married a Georgia-born woman by the name of Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro. But even her maiden name told me that this, too, was a family name known for its roots in Virginia.

As it turns out, that connection between the Raineys and the Taliaferros may have revealed only a small part of a larger circle of Virginians who all decided to head south to Georgia. That migration may have reached back to the days of the American Revolutionary War, when support for colonial military action was weaker in Georgia than in the other American colonies. Some of the early recruits sent to serve in Georgia were actually from Virginia. The second Georgia regiment formed in 1776, for instance, was comprised of eight companies of men from Virginia.

Whether any men from the Rainey family were among those recruits, I can't yet say, though I do know that a Taliaferro relative of Thomas' future wife did serve in Georgia. After the war, though, a small group of Virginian Continental soldiers returned to Georgia, remembering that they liked what they had seen there. They petitioned the legislature for a grant of 200,000 acres, which was provided upon the condition that two hundred families would be brought into the settlement.

That group of settlers arrived and claimed land in the Broad River valley, a location which, before 1790, was part of Wilkes County. Beginning in 1790, Wilkes County was divided to form a number of smaller counties. Among those newer counties was Oglethorpe County, the same county where, in 1818, Thomas Rainey took Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro as his bride.

Was the Rainey family part of that migration of two hundred Virginia families to Georgia after the Revolution? I can't yet say, but I do know that Mary Elizabeth's extended Taliaferro family was among those Broad River settlers. It may be possible that that was the same reason that drew Thomas Rainey's family to the area as well. If I can find census records, land records, or even tax records for that area during that time period, it may help to locate any families there claiming that same Rainey surname.

When There Isn't Much to Go By

 

Beggars can't be choosers, as the saying goes. When there isn't much to go by, we must take what we can get. In the case of my fourth great-grandfather Thomas Rainey, he didn't leave much of a paper trail. That, however, is understandable; this pre-Civil War resident of Georgia may likely have been one of the many southern residents whose records subsequent to his death were destroyed by fire, flood, or even wartime casualties.

There are a few clues we can go by, however—weak leads, but possibilities, nonetheless. Keeping in mind my role as the Genealogy Guinea Pig, I'm willing to test any theory.

After searching hopelessly for more documentation—side note: reading court records can put you to sleep at any time of day—I decided to take a cue from some of the names in Thomas Rainey's own family.

First on my list was the patriarch, himself. Written in the records I found as "Thomas F. Rainey," I wondered what the "F." could mean. Though none of the documents I already located divulged the answer to that question, I did notice two clues. One was the fact that his namesake son was called Thomas Firth Rainey, as was that man's son after him. The other was that, apparently, other family members among Find a Grave volunteers had inserted that information on Thomas' own memorial on that website. Firth might be a clue worth keeping in mind.

If I couldn't find anything from that first clue, I could take a more indirect route and trace Thomas' wife. After all, the two of them would have met up somewhere. What was their connection? Finding the history of Thomas' wife Mary might give us a more well-rounded picture.

However, relying on the marriage record itself to guide us in finding Thomas' in-laws would not be a wise move. The minister, Nicholas Powers, had entered Mary's maiden name as "Talafero." Her real family name, as it turned out, was Taliaferro—as we have already seen from her baby daughter's impossibly long name, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey. Why the minister couldn't get Mary's maiden name right is beyond me; at about the same time as Reverend Powers performed the ceremony for the young Rainey couple, he himself married the new Mrs. Rainey's widowed mother, Mrs. Mary Taliaferro.

If that detail doesn't sound complicating enough, it is important to know that the young Rainey couple named their first son Warren Taliaferro Rainey, after Mary Taliaferro Rainey's father. And when that son died young in his twenties, the couple must have decided to name a subsequent child by that same name in order to honor Mrs. Rainey's deceased father. The only problem was that that next child turned out to be a daughter, not a son.

With all of that family detail—even if much of it was about the in-laws—we may have enough to search for the nexus between the two families. And that nexus might lie buried in the details of what convinced a number of colonial Virginia families to move the distance to the borderlands of Georgia. 

Beginning at the End

 

It is interesting to read family history assertions noted by other researchers who evidently had missed the details of one or more pertinent documents. Such may have been the case, yesterday, when I mentioned a July, 1988, query from a Rainey researcher who had provided a list of "all" Thomas Rainey's children. As it happened, there was at least one family name missing—that of my second great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey. 

Beginning our search at the end of Thomas Rainey's life helps to fill in the picture, for there in his will, he specifically records his youngest daughter's full—and unusually long—name. Drawn up in October of 1857, the document was not entered into the record in the county of his last residence—according to the 1850 census, that would have been Coweta County, Georgia—but in the now-extinct Campbell County.

The 1850 census itself wouldn't have provided the full picture of Thomas Rainey's family, for Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey had not yet been born. Not until her father's death could I find any confirmation of her birth—and that, only from inferences based on those two documents. Orphaned at a young age, then dying shortly after her own marriage, Mary Elizabeth was for a long time the missing link who kept me from connecting her to Thomas' Rainey family line.

Now, Thomas apparently has become the next pivot point in the Rainey generations. We can move from the point of his last testament filed in Campbell County, to his 1850 residence in Coweta County, and then jump to his possible residence, according to the 1820 census, in Oglethorpe County, the same Georgia location where he had married only two years earlier. But then what?

Pushing Thomas back to his origin in Virginia—his reported state of birth, according to the 1850 census—would be a different matter. No steady procession of documents could easily point the way to the late 1700s. There were, however, a few clues we could consider from what we already know. Those hints are certainly worth the try to follow.

Chasing Unanswered Questions

 

Back in July of 1988, someone from Texas posted a query in a genealogical publication called Rainey Times.

That researcher basically asked the same question I'm chasing after, nearly thirty eight years later: Who were the parents of Thomas F. Rainey? Perhaps that curious researcher back in Texas might have found the answer to that question by now, but I certainly haven't. This will be my month to see if I can.

I have some ideas about this third great-grandfather of mine, but so far, I've failed to produce satisfactory documentation linking him to his past. I did manage to discover that his middle initial—F.—likely stands for Firth. And I've also realized that the very child who is missing from that 1988 listing happened to be my own second great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey (yes, that was indeed her full name).

There has been a lot of time invested in learning more about this family over the years. Tracing back to those roots leading to the Rainey line has been information hard won. But I can't let that brick wall remain standing; I selected Thomas Firth Rainey as the third of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026 in hopes of pressing back at least one more generation to his past.

While I know that Thomas Firth Rainey spent most of his adult life in the state of Georgia—marrying in Oglethorpe County in 1818 and dying in Coweta County in 1858—there is a possibility that his origin was in Virginia. At least, that's what he reported for his entry in the 1850 U.S. Census. This month will hopefully tell more of that tale.

Image of query from Rainey Times above is courtesy of the actual insertion, as shown at Ancestry.com; the image of the publication's July 1988 cover is courtesy of FamilySearch.org where the entire Volume 8 is available to view.