Revisiting Delaney

 

No sooner had I packed away the to-do list for my unfinished pursuit of January's featured ancestor from this year's Twelve Most Wanted than I confronted the need to pull out a past year's to-do list for February's research goal. This month, we'll be focusing on my third great-grandmother Delaney Townsend. The problem is: the last time I worked on her story, I closed out the month without the answer I was seeking.

It was almost four years ago when I tried to find documentation confirming Delaney's parents and origin. While I learned a lot about this ancestor during that month's search, I still hadn't achieved my goal.

Part of the reason Delaney has been so hard to track is owing to the timeframe of her life. Born about 1816, possibly in South Carolina, as a single woman, she was inexplicably standing before an officiant in the Territory of Florida by 1841, about to be married to a local resident by the name of Andrew Jackson Charles in Madison County. If she was from South Carolina, what was a single woman doing, traveling to the then-frontier regions of the country, so far from her parents' home? There is obviously something missing in this story.

That is not the only detail which is missing in Delaney's story. After making a cameo appearance nine year later in the 1850 census with her husband and their three children, the couple disappeared by the time of the next enumeration. Strangely, their minor children were left behind, living with a relative, suggesting something ominous for Delaney and Andrew Charles. Yet again, no record of what might have happened.

The positive note in all this is that, making Delaney one of my Twelve Most Wanted in 2021 resulted in nearly thirty blog posts with links to the documents I was able to find on the family. That gives me a jump start on the process for this month's effort, thankfully. I already have found some strong hints of the identity of her parents and some siblings, too. What I don't yet have is any record specifically indicating the relationship between Delaney and those presumed parents and siblings. I want to see the records.

As happens so many times when we are stuck on what we call our "brick wall" ancestors, I foresee some days this month taking us on a detour to examine the records about Delaney's supposed siblings, all in the hope of finding some mention of the connection between family members. It may turn out that we learn a lot about a family which doesn't, in the end, relate to our Delaney. That is the risk we take when we explore documents pertaining to possible family members. If nothing else, we gain the satisfaction of attaining negative evidence—or perhaps merely the nagging feeling that we still need to look further.