About Robert — and His Sons

 

Running down the decennial census results in pre-1850 Nansemond County, Virginia, to assemble a list of Boothe households is my desperate attempt to figure out just who might be the father of Alexander Boothe. Alexander—or Alex, as he often was called after he moved to Tennessee—was my second great-grandfather, and the brick-wall end of the line for that part of my family tree.

If answers don't come easy, maybe the hard work will produce what I'm looking for. I've assembled the names of each of the Boothe heads of household listed in the 1840 census. The next step has been to see how far back I can go for each one of them, first with census records, then with tax and land records (and hopefully a will thrown in for good measure, though Nansemond County hasn't been helpful in the courthouse fire department).

In Robert Boothe's case, going through each decade's census has been informative. Granted, there are a lot of blanks to fill in and not much information to glean from the tick marks on those early census returns, but a possible story does emerge. Here's a brief tour of the findings.

Let's start with 1820, the earliest enumeration in which I could find Robert named. In that Boothe household, there was one man, aged between twenty six and forty four—I would presume that was Robert himself— plus two boys. One (presumed) son was aged between ten and fifteen, and a younger boy was under ten years of age. Rounding out the household was one girl under ten, and another young woman between sixteen and twenty five. The puzzling part was the addition of not one but two women over twenty five years of age, but below forty four—a wife and a sister, perhaps, but hard to tell without further guidance.

Moving ahead ten years, the household showed some predictable changes. The two boys had advanced by ten years for the 1830 census, with the younger one in his later teen years, the elder now a man in his twenties. There are some changes among the women from the last census: the youngest girl is now in her later teens, but in addition, there was only one other woman in her fifties. I suspect the other two girls were by now married, unless having lost their lives to the many diseases and dangers of the time. Robert himself was in the fifty to fifty nine age bracket, and extrapolating from his age bracket given in 1820, that would mean he was about fifty four or younger, possibly with a birth year on or before 1780.

By the 1840 census, this Boothe household had shrunken to three people: the younger son, now in his twenties, plus his parents, Robert and his wife.

The 1850 census provided the big reveal, at least for Robert's remaining son. Judging from Robert's given age, he was born in 1779. However, I am presuming his wife had, by this time, died, as the only woman remaining in the household, though of a right age, was named Honor Brasely. From this census, we also learn that Robert's son was named Daniel, born about 1814, making him the younger of the two male children from Robert's earlier census reports. And sure enough, finding Daniel's October 26, 1856, marriage record, we learn that his mother's given name was Christian, not Honor.

Seeing the big picture on the Robert Boothe family, I'm left wondering: who was Robert's older son, and what became of him? Perhaps that's where the next entry in the 1840 census comes in: the household of Henry Boothe.