Lost Without Brothers

 

If it weren't for collateral lines, I'm convinced far more of our forebears would bear the label "brick wall ancestors." As I'm exploring the descendants of my fifth great-grandfather John Carter to confirm some DNA matches, tracing the generations of some of his daughters has become challenging. Frankly, I'd be lost on the trail of one of John Carter's great-granddaughters, if it weren't for her brothers—and I'm still having a hard time finding my way.

Women can be hard to trace, especially in earlier centuries when they sometimes were invisible, other than those brief mentions in wedding documents and wills. The research hazard of tracking each change of surname as a woman marries—then becomes widowed, then marries again—makes me realize what a stroke of luck it is to find a widowed woman living in the household of her brother. In some cases, I'd be lost in the genealogical maze if it weren't for brothers.

Take my research project for today—which is stretching into a two-day search. Still checking all my Carter DNA matches via Ancestry's ThruLines tool, I've moved on to John Carter's daughter Sarah. According to the 1912 genealogy by Joseph Lyon Miller which I've been using, this Sarah married a man of Caroline County, Virginia, named William Sutton. Miller also continued in his book with one of the Sutton children, John Carter Sutton, listing this John's children by his second wife, Elizabeth Page Pendleton.

This was fortunate for me. While I realize that any genealogy, no matter whether published online or in a hundred-year-old book, needs to have the details confirmed by documentation, it helps to have a roadmap to get started. Even better, I discovered that this Sutton line into which Sarah had married also had a genealogy published in 1941. Thus, I picked up the same line of Sarah Carter and her husband William Sutton in that book, as well.

As it turns out, I have four DNA matches at Ancestry who descend from Sarah Carter and William Sutton. The highest ranked match follows that same line I just mentioned, from Sarah to her son John Carter Sutton and his second wife, Elizabeth Page Pendleton. And from there, the line turns to a daughter—a hard to trace daughter—Sarah Jane Sutton.

Sarah Jane appears to have married in Caroline County, Virginia, one William Wright. After their 1841 wedding, they remained in her home county, where the 1850 census showed their household growing to include three daughters: Bettie, Margaret, and Sallie. However, by 1860, their growing family—now having added two more daughters—had removed to Mississippi County, Arkansas. If we use that same census as our guide, the Wrights' trail to Arkansas led through Tennessee, where daughter Ida had been born about 1853.

But from there, the line of Sarah Jane seemed to disappear. With a married name as common as Wright added to the popularity of a given name like Sarah, any discovery of where the family moved next could be not much more than a guess. That's when I discovered the helpfulness of knowing who an ancestor's brothers were.

In the 1870 census—though back in Tennessee, not Arkansas—I found a possible Sarah Wright, but no William. There in her household were the familiar names of some of her daughters. However, that household was not actually hers, but the home of a fifty four year old man whose scrawled name looked like E. P. "Sulten." 

There is something to be said for immersing one's self in the full set of ancestral details in any given family. Though the surname may have stumped me, there was something about those initials, E. P. Sure enough, looking back over notes in the Miller book, Sarah Jane's mother's name had been Elizabeth Pendleton—making her initials E. P. And Elizabeth was the only daughter of a man named Edmund Pendleton, again rendering the same two initials. Better yet—and this is why I love tracing those brothers—Sarah Jane had an older brother named after their maternal grandfather. He, too, had moved to Tennessee—the Wrights' stopping place on their way to Arkansas—and set up his home in Haywood County. And in 1870, that's where Sarah Jane and her daughters showed up in the census.

Again in 1880, I found Sarah Jane living with a brother—a different one, and back in Mississippi County, Arkansas. Once again, the miserable handwriting mangled the census readout, but tracing the family history of her brothers helped identify his place in Sarah Jane's family constellation. As I move on to Sarah Jane's specific daughter whose line leads to my DNA match, I've found that same need to check for collateral lines, but in this case, I'm stumped: Sarah Jane had all daughters, whose names changed as they married.

Since confirming DNA matches on ThruLines means I am tracing a family line from an ancestor, while my match did work which began with the present generation and worked backwards, that hope of finding a happy mid-point is not always realized. That means more work ahead.

There are three other DNA matches in this same line of Sarah Carter, daughter of my fifth great-grandfather John Carter, so there are others yet to confirm as well. At this point, I'm just curious to see whether the paper trail can actually yield a verification to a DNA relationship of such distance as theirs.