Last Best Guesses

 

It can sometimes be hard to close the book on an unfinished research project. Still, a month is a month, and I promised myself that each of my yearly Twelve Most Wanted ancestors would receive only a month of my attention before I move on to wrestle with the next research puzzle. That said, today I'd like to lay down my last best guesses before closing the book on this chapter.

My goal this month was to find the parents of my second great-grandfather. When I began the month—indeed, when I laid out my research plans for Ancestor #3 back in December of 2024—I had thought I'd be searching for someone born in 1812 by the name William Alexander Boothe. That was what a prodigious researcher had told me years ago, but after only a few days of digging into the records, lack of any documents with the name William persuaded me to discard that report. Further searching pointed to a birth year of 1816 rather than 1812, and I again altered my trajectory.

Just as I had for the previous month's research challenge, I looked to results from DNA testing to bolster my exploration. However, unlike February's ancestor, who brought me well over one hundred DNA matches, any DNA Boothe connections beyond Alexander's own descendants were quite slim. Those few others pointed to a presumed ancestor—at least by Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool—named Daniel Booth. Daniel's birth in New York and subsequent lifetime spent mostly in Ohio dissuaded me from giving that suggestion any more credence, despite the fact that two of his children were born in Virginia (albeit many miles from Alexander's birthplace).

My main approach from that point was to zero in on Nansemond County in Virginia, the very county in which I had found Alexander's household in the 1840 census, and from which I had extracted his name in tax records. Since there were four other Boothe households in that county that year, my research tactic was to follow what documentation I could find on each of those other Boothe men, in hopes of identifying a possible father for Alexander.

Those four Boothe men in Nansemond County were named Robert, Kinchen, Nathaniel, and Andrew. Robert, who appeared to be the oldest of the four, had one son in his household who would have been the right age to be Alexander. This could have been promising, except for one detail: that male child under ten years of age in the 1820 census turned out to be his son named Daniel, not Alexander. Granted, one of Daniel's descendants was named William Horace Boothe, the very name my Alexander gave to one of his own sons, but other than that tempting detail, there was no way to make Alexander fit in the census age brackets that would fit his own specifics.

Kinchen, likewise, was old enough to have been father to Alexander, but given the use of age brackets for census records before 1850, plus the inaccuracies of age estimations in those earlier years, the wiggle room left too much uncertainty. Yes, if Kinchen's son Abram, said to be born about 1820, was actually one year younger, it might have been possible to squeeze my Alexander into that age slot, and count Abram in the next, younger, age category along with his brother Henry. But that "if" would be my conjecture, not supported by any documentation. I'll need to search further for records on that family which might include the missing information I'm seeking—a task for another year.

As for Andrew Boothe, apparently the youngest of the Nansemond County Boothe men, his age alone would disqualify him from being Alexander's father. I could not even find a listing for Andrew in the 1820 census, where Alexander would have shown up as a son in the "under ten" age category. Even the 1830 census showed a household of a young married couple with only children under the age of five.

If any of the Nansemond County Boothe men were to be my suspected direct line ancestor, it would have to be Nathaniel Boothe. Though his death—and any possible will—occurred just before an unfortunate courthouse fire, obliterating any hope of finding handy documentation, the son administering his (apparently considerable) estate—Joseph—was a child born of what appeared to be a second marriage, and one long post-dating Alexander's own birth. Indeed, Nathaniel's 1830 census suggested a household comprised solely of one adult male and one male child between the ages of ten and fourteen, precisely where Alexander would have fit in. Alexander's entry just one line below Nathaniel's in a personal property tax register for 1836—just when Alexander would have turned twenty—seemed also to indicate a connection. And the fact that the next decade's enumeration for Nathaniel indicated the arrival of a new wife and baby a few years after that previous census might well have been Alexander's signal to leave home (and step-mother) and start afresh with his own family for that 1840 census.

While I can point to no records which would positively assure me that that guess was spot on, I wonder, given Nathaniel's successful business reputation, whether he might have had a son from a previous marriage who would have been knowledgeable about horsemanship to the extent that Alexander seemed to exhibit. Even in his later years, Alexander was simultaneously claiming extreme poverty and a reputation for owning—possibly selling—stallions. Two different newspapers ran announcements of the passing of "Uncle" Alex Boothe. The Comet of Johnson City, Tennessee, where Alexander died in 1895, noted on August 8  that he was "well known in this and adjoining counties" for traveling through the area "with famous stallions" in past years. News of his death was also carried by the Knoxville Journal two days later, mentioning also that he died at the home of his eldest daughter, Laura Caroline, wife of William F. Brooks.

There will be another year for returning to this puzzle. Hopefully, more records will become available online, aiding research for those not at liberty to fly across country to personally dig through locally archived documents. But even as we discovered this month, old published genealogies, while containing errors, may provide helpful pointers, and thorough searches through collateral lines may turn up answers where we least expect them. Next chance I get to revisit Alexander's past, it will be time to explore as much of the extended Boothe kin in Nansemond County as I can find. The answer may well be hidden in records that didn't burn down in courthouse fires. It's just a matter of patience and turning lots of dusty pages.

Image above: Insertion on page four of the August 8, 1895, Johnson City, Tennessee, newspaper, The Comet, regarding the death of Alexander Boothe; image courtesy of GenealogyBank.