Fingering Every Single Strand

When there's not that much that a researcher knows about a family line, every little detail can receive an inordinate amount of attention. Desperation leads us to squeeze every fact as tightly as we can, hoping for just one drop of a clue.

My second great grandmother, Rachel Teresa Riley Boothe, was thankfully not yet married when the 1850 census was taken. Otherwise, I wouldn't have had that last itemized snapshot of family life while she was still single.

Details from her death certificate told me her parents were named William Riley and Cassie Fincher. Since Rachel wasn't married until 1854, it was fairly easy to locate her family in the 1850 census. While her marriage was in Washington County, Tennessee, Rachel's family was in nearby Sullivan County, a sliver of a county pressed up against the Virginia border, just north of Washington County.

In the 1850 census, the Riley household consisted of the head, William, his wife Cassie, and four additional people. Of course, the 1850 census did not include any indication of relationships within households, but a guess is that at least three of those four were children of William and Cassie. Those would include twenty five year old Mary, twenty year old William F., and sixteen year old Rachel.

There was a fourth child listed in the household who puzzles me. Her name was Caroline, but her age—three years in 1850—would make it highly unlikely that she was a daughter of Cassie, who by then was listed as being sixty years of age. Of course, there is always the possibility that the younger William and Mary were husband and wife and that this could be their daughter, but even that would be pushing the matter, considering the younger William's age at the time.

It would have been helpful if, in locating the Riley household in the next census, some of the same occupants were still in the home. If I found the right William Riley, though, this was not to be. Now in Washington County—possibly to move closer to their daughter Rachel—the Rileys' 1860 census entry included only William and "Casandra."

In those earlier census records, there wasn't that much to glean about the family's identifying details. The 1850 census showed me that William was a shoemaker—interestingly, living next door to another North Carolina family whose head was a shoemaker, as well. The presence of three year old Caroline in the Riley household, having been born in North Carolina, provided the clue that the family had arrived in Tennessee only recently.

In addition, after the Rileys' move to Washington County, William declared no real property, but gave a modest sum for the value of his personal property. Whether, after his passing—whenever that turned out to be—it was an amount warranting completion of a will is yet to be seen.

With that small amount of information on Rachel's parents and siblings, I don't have much to go on. I was unable to find a census entry for 1840—although, considering Rachel's own birth was alternately listed as having occurred in North Carolina or South Carolina, it would be quite a challenge to find a Riley household upon which we could fix, with certainty, her parents' identity. I haven't been able to locate any burial markers for her parents.

I've found that, if I can't locate enough information to help push me back through the years in a search, it is sometimes helpful to do an end run around the target individuals and see what can be found on any of the other members of a family. Barring discovery of anything further on William or Cassandra, themselves, the next step, then, is to locate any of the other members of the Riley family, once they left home before the 1860 census.

Above: Winter landscape with tobogganing children; oil on canvas by German artist Fritz Beinke (1842-1907); courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.