When we're staring down brick wall ancestors, in negotiating the impasse, sometimes it helps to consider possible alternatives. That's what I'm ready to explore this week, since I can't find any records revealing much more about my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe's early years in Virginia.
Last week, when we explored tax records for Nansemond County, the Virginia location where Alexander supposedly originated, there was one entry that had caught my eye. The tax list for 1836 contained a litany of names of men in the county who were considered "persons chargeable" with tax, being white males above sixteen years of age. Among the names listed was an entry for someone named Nathaniel Boothe.
Directly below Nathaniel's entry in this tax roll was a note: "Do for Boothe, Alexander." Was that "Do" an abbreviation for "ditto"? No other entry on the page had such an introductory statement—just each man's name in the format of surname followed by given name.
Could this have implied that Alexander was a young man coming of age in Nathaniel's household? Since I hadn't been able to locate Alexander in census records before 1840—when he would have been about twenty four years of age—I thought Nathaniel might be a reasonable starting point for my experiment with all the Boothe men resident in Nansemond County to determine Alexander's likely father.
I've already identified six Boothe men resident in Nansemond County: besides Nathaniel, there were Robert, Henry, Andrew, Edmond, and Kinchea. For no other reason than the hunch flowing from that unusual entry in the tax ledger, I decided to pursue Nathaniel's records first, in hopes of finding a possible place for a younger Alexander at home with Nathaniel.
With that, I did a survey of all the census years I could access online for Nathaniel, beginning with the 1830 census and moving through to the 1860 census, the last one in which I could find his name. Whether Nathaniel was kin to Alexander, I can't yet tell, but this exercise helped draw a picture about the man's own life.
Here's what the numbers looked like. In 1830, Nathaniel's household contained only two free persons: one male between the ages of ten and fourteen, and another male between thirty and thirty nine. My guess: Nathaniel has lost his wife, the mother of the boy in the household.
By 1840, that scenario was rectified. Nathaniel's household now shows him ten years older, a tick mark in the category of male, ages forty through forty nine. Along with him is a woman in that same age bracket, indicating that Nathaniel has remarried. But there are surprises. There is, for instance, another woman about twenty years older than that, in the sixty to sixty-nine age bracket—the woman's widowed mother? And now there is a boy between the ages of five and nine.
Gone by then was any possibility of our Alexander being part of this household, for we've already located him in his one cameo appearance in Nansemond County before his migration to Tennessee. By 1840, Alexander was listed as a male between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine in his own household, along with a woman of that same age range, and a boy under the age of five, a clear indication that whatever household he might previously been a part of, this was the demarcation line.
But what about moving forward? After all, by the time of the 1850 census, we move into the arena of names listed for each member of the household. I had to take a peek at what Nathaniel's household looked like following that change in documentation.
It will come as no surprise to see that Nathaniel was then listed as sixty years of age, having been born in Virginia. His wife now had a name—Mary—and was said to be fifty five years of age. The elder woman was, by 1850, no longer in their household, but the boy who had been under nine years of age in the last census now showed up as eighteen year old Joseph, having been born about 1832. Nathaniel's household was listed next to another Boothe household—that of a man named Andrew Boothe.
Moving one more decade, Nathaniel was still in Nansemond County for the 1860 census. This time, his age was listed as sixty nine, and he was still listed as born in Virginia. Mary, however, was no longer in the household, presumably having died before reaching the age of sixty five in that census year. Joseph was still in the household, though, as well as that former neighboring Boothe man by the name of Andrew—someone I had also spotted earlier in old tax records. Perhaps this is the beginning of seeing the family constellation take shape.
Could Alexander have fit into this family scenario? Possibly, if his wife Rachel's report of his year of birth as 1816 was correct—which it likely was, given the fact that he appeared in the 1836 tax record when he would have been twenty. If, however, Alexander was that fourteen year old boy in the 1830 census in Nathaniel's home, he would have been a child who had lost his mother at an early age, not the son of Mary.
Eventually, I'll repeat this exercise for the other Boothe men found in Nansemond County. As we've already seen with the appearance of Andrew in Nathaniel's household, this exercise may help provide more detail about the extended Boothe family in Nansemond County.
First, though, I'm tempted to start using the Full Text search at FamilySearch Labs to see if I can find any further information on Nathaniel Boothe, himself. A will, for instance, would make my day.
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