Re-Start With What you Know

 

If one of the guiding principles of genealogy is to start with what you know, then when we find ourselves stuck, perhaps the corollary should be to re-start with what we know. This month, in puzzling over my brick wall second great-grandfather, that is exactly how I need to get started.

I'll give you an example right off the bat. I had always thought this man's name was William Alexander Boothe. Why? Because years ago, when I first started working on my maternal grandfather's roots, I had found information on a man named Alexander Boothe. Not much, mind you, but at least the bare essentials.

Back then, there was no access to FamilySearch.org, let alone all the powerhouse research resources we have now—but there was an active community of researchers reaching out to each other via email, "listservs" and, eventually, online forums. From such resources, I discovered there was a man who not only was actively pursuing this same second great-grandfather, but online, he was prolific in his sharing of what he had found about the man. I connected with him by email, then eventually by telephone, and learned quite a bit about what he had discovered about our mutual ancestor.

There was, however, one problem: this researcher insisted the ancestor's name was not simply Alexander Boothe, but William Alexander Boothe. His influence was apparently quite widespread. Now, I can find many trees mentioning that given name in combination with the Alexander I saw—without supporting documentation.

Now that I look back over every document I've found to support what I know about this second great-grandfather, I'm realizing one glaring omission. You guessed it: no mention of the given name William in any of those records. Could chasing William have been the rabbit trail which caused that left turn I missed in Albuquerque? 

Take, for example, this run of census records. In 1880, shown with his wife Rachel and eight of their children (including my great-grandmother Cassie), the head of the Boothe household was listed by the name Alexander. Same goes for the 1870 census. You might get a sense of something happening here by the time we check the 1860 census, and feel more of a certainty about the man's name when we press back, even before his marriage to Rachel Riley in 1854, to the 1850 census, where Alexander was enumerated along with his two eldest sons, Quinton and David, still in Washington County, Tennessee.

In each of those enumerations, Alexander was listed—consistently—as having been born in Virginia, not Tennessee. Checking—just in case I could find something—there was someone named Alexander Boothe in the 1840 census in the now-nonexistent Nansemond County, Virginia, being of the approximate age indicated in subsequent enumerations, along with a wife and child under five years of age. Our Alexander? Hard to tell, but the ages and scenario seem to fit.

What's missing in each of those records was any sign of a given name William. Perhaps, as we start off this month looking for my brick wall second great-grandfather, we should agree to stick with a search for Alexander, and set aside any notion of a man named William Boothe. After all, with a surname as common as that, following the wrong given name might lead us far from the person we're seeking.