Searching for False Positives

 

Family trees can do mysterious things to the identity of our ancestors. Perhaps an ancestor has acquired a false identity, as I'm beginning to wonder about my second great-grandfather, whom I had always known to be Alexander Boothe. According to some vocal—and experienced—researchers from my own earlier days as a neophyte genealogist, that ancestor's name was supposedly William Alexander Boothe.

I, on the other hand, was not able to locate any documents asserting that detail—but what did I know, having just started out on this family history adventure? Now, in retrospect, I feel it is time to go back and do some testing for false positives. In other words, can I replicate any sign that the man's name actually was William? Or, moving even further, can I find any signs that the Alexander I thought I found in Virginia actually remained in Virginia, while I assumed the man I found in Tennessee was one and the same as the Alexander found ten years prior in Virginia?

If I find any indication that there were others with that name in the same location, it would help to know—and to steer me clear of selecting the wrong person by the same name. Let's see what we can find, based on the assertions made by other researchers over the past few decades.

First of all, let's examine the claim that the man's name was William Alexander Boothe, and that in 1832, he married a woman named Mary Smith in Franklin County, Virginia. Can we find the couple in that same county eight years later in the 1840 census? If I've found the right couple, their household of nine individuals in 1840 included one man over forty years of age, along with an adult woman in the same age bracket, plus three boys and four girls (two of whom were fifteen or older). Granted, there is no way to determine from that information whether each of them was a child of that William, but I'm beginning to feel some doubt creep in that this was my second great-grandfather's first marriage. Unless some devastating disease wiped out all my Alexander's children except for his son Quinton—born in October of 1838—that census scenario doesn't seem likely.

Were there any other possible candidates for William Boothe in the 1840 census in Virginia? I took a look. There were multiple Booth and Boothe entries in that state in 1840, but none that looked promising.

What about fast-forwarding to 1850? I first looked for the William and Mary Booth whom we had found in the 1840 census in Franklin County. If that were my Booth ancestor, I'd expect the bereaved widower to not show up in Virginia, since by then I had traced him to Tennessee with his two sons. But here was William, still in Franklin County, with his wife Mary and three children of ages reasonable for a couple married in 1832. This obviously wasn't the "William" who left with his two sons for Tennessee.

Just in case there was another Alexander who also was left behind in Virginia, I tried looking for some indications that I had followed the wrong "ancestor." While I was fairly confident that the Alexander I found at the bottom of the census page in Nansemond County in 1840 was the right one, I looked for someone else by that same name in Virginia.

First, I checked the listing for all Booth heads of household in Nansemond County in 1840—there was none besides our Alexander. Then, I checked to see if, by some odd chance, there already was another Alexander Boothe in Washington County, Tennessee, back in 1840—no one. Back to Virginia I went, to assure myself that my Alexander hadn't remained there while I thought I had traced him to Tennessee. For the 1850 census in Virginia, there was one Alexander Booth of about the right age, but he was living with a younger woman named Louisa, and neither of his two sons were listed in that household.

At this point, I'm gaining confidence that my Alexander Boothe was just that—Alexander, not William Alexander. And while I only have documentation affirming that he was born in Virginia—not, specifically designating a location within that state—thanks to other records, we do have some reports about the possibility of his birth in Nansemond County. To find that, however, requires us to look not in the direction of his earliest years, but beyond the other side of his life, after Alexander Boothe's own death.