Not Sure What to Believe

 

Sometimes, in pursuing information on our brick wall ancestor, we can end up with too much information. That may be the case with my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe. I've pulled up so many records that I've hit the spot where I'm not sure which document to believe.

Last week, it seemed a fortunate moment to locate the widow's application for pension filled out by Alexander's wife, Rachel Riley Boothe. From the several pages of that application, I saw she claimed Alexander's date of birth was February 14 of 1816. That date seemed to fit reasonably well with other records where I had found Alex mentioned.

This week, however, tells a different story. And I'm not sure which one to believe. On the one hand, last week's discovery came supposedly from the mouth of Alexander's own wife. This week I've found his own appeal for disability benefits as a soldier serving in the Civil War—which, incidentally, was rejected. Guess what: the man gave his own date of birth as a quite different answer: July of 1828.

Now, wait a minute here. We already know from previously-found documents that Alexander had a son who was born about 1838. Of course, there can be mistakes on headstones, too, my main source of his year of birth. But if Alexander were really born in 1828, then his oldest child wouldn't have been born ten years later.

That also colors the other details I've found on Alexander a suspected shade of gray. It's almost as if the statements he made were not believable. How do you search for someone like that?

On the other hand, thinking of him as an unreliable witness to his own life story doesn't serve us well, for when we review some of the many tax records I've found for someone by that same name in Nansemond County, Virginia, by 1839, he was claiming to have been over sixteen years of age. Even embedded in his own pension application was a statement vouching for Alexander's reliability and good standing in his community, signed by several of his Tennessee neighbors, including a mayor, a former mayor, and a bank president.

One other detail gleaned from Alexander's pension application was his statement that he had lived in Tennessee for fifty two years. Since the application was drawn up in October of 1893, that would yield us an arrival date in that state around 1841. We already have spotted the household of one Alexander Boothe in Nansemond County, Virginia, in the 1840 census. Possibly he left his home town shortly after that point and headed for Tennessee. In that case, it makes more credible his second son David's claim that he was born in Tennessee, not Virginia.

While reading Alexander's statements in his pension application was an interesting—though conflicting—exercise, it didn't point me in any solid direction. (It did, however, yield me a possible sample of his signature.) It's time to head back to Virginia and experiment with the names of all the other Boothe residents of that county, to see whether any of them would be of an age to claim a son of Alexander's generation.