A New Month, a New Challenge

Some months, my research candidate for my Twelve Most Wanted brings me lots of work—and, if I'm fortunate, plenty of new DNA cousins in the process. For March, however, we won't be chasing the 124 DNA matches I garnered for last month's Townsend project; for this month's project, I'll be lucky to add twenty five new matches.

Those serendipitous chases can certainly up my count on my very "bushy" family tree, full of collateral lines and all their descendants. In just the last two weeks, for instance, working on the Townsend problem added 491 new entries to my family tree. My tree is now hovering near the 40,000 mark: 39,971 individuals, to be exact.

This month? Don't count on such progress. The ancestor I'm seeking in March is my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe. Deciding whether his surname was really spelled Boothe, or the more common Booth—his descendants seemed to alternate between the two—is only a small part of the question. And a few researchers' insistence that his given name was William doesn't seem to have documentation to support it—so add that little detail to the task list for March. 

However, what I really need to know about the man is his early history. Sure, he showed up in Tennessee before 1850, a widower with two young sons in tow—but who was the wife he had buried? More to the point: who were his parents? That he came from Virginia can be clearly seen by his consistent reports in each of the decennial enumerations conducted while he lived in Tennessee. But I have yet to find the identity of his parents.

That is my goal for this month: find my second great-grandfather's Boothe forebears. Now that I've found so many other answers through FamilySearch.org Labs' Full Text search tool, I'm hoping that resource will lead me to some verifiable answers in this Boothe question. And there certainly is a need for verification. If I look to one publicly available universal family tree, there are assertions about his parents' names. Problem: if I look to Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool, there is a suggestion that his parents' names represent an entirely different couple. And where is the documentation? At this point, I'm wondering whether it will even be possible to determine which answer is correct—or if another set of parents would be the true identity.

Tomorrow, we'll start with what we already know about this Boothe second great-grandfather. This would also be a good time to evaluate a few assertions that have been made by other researchers about the man. Wrong assumptions can lead us down a very different research path, so we may as well start not only with what we know to be correct, but with what we can see might be incorrect, as well.