The Ups and Downs of Unusual Names

 

Looking, as we have, for a given name as unusual as Kinchen might seem a positive for finding Kinchen Boothe's family history in Nansemond County. After all, when he lived there in the 1850s, the county's census record only counted twelve thousand residents. Surely there couldn't be that many Kinchens among that group.

Out of curiosity, I checked. Sure enough, there were only two men named Kinchen in the 1850 census for that county: Kinchen Boothe, and Kinchen Butler. That would seem to make my search through other records easier, just from the sheer rarity of that given name.

Think again. The difficulty with searching for what might seem like the gift of a rare name is that record keepers might not know what to do with something so novel as an unusual name. Over the records of the decades, for instance, I've seen Kinchen Boothe's name listed as "Kinchen," "Rinchen," and "Cinchen," complicating the search process with options I might otherwise never have guessed to use.

Still, emboldened by the rarity of that given name, I decided to try the FamilySearch Labs' Full Text search, in hopes of finding Kinchen Boothe's will. Remember, I'm still trying to find some indication of where, among all the Boothe families in Nansemond County, my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe might have fit in.

Did I find anything? You know I wouldn't be complaining if that search had been successful. There were very few hits for men named Kinchen—and most of them were for the Butler family, not the Boothe family. I did find a mention of Kinchen's son Abram in a Deed of Bargain and Sale, dated March 13, 1867. I had hoped that would be the indicator that Kinchen had passed, as his last appearance in a census record was in 1860. But there was no direct mention of Kinchen in the recording of the deed itself—which was to a man named James Henry Brinkley. Nor did I find Kinchen mentioned directly in the following entry on the same date, a Deed of Trust for the same sixty eight acres, this time from James Henry Brinkley to Joseph Boothe, who was listed as trustee for Abram Boothe. On second thought, perhaps this might not be Abram, son of Kinchen, after all. Hard to tell without finding more records.

Granted, searching for a more common name like Abram can have its down side, as well. However, researching the possible family trees of men named Abram Boothe in Nansemond County might help reveal reasons behind this exchange of property.

In the meantime, the trail has gone cold for Kinchen Boothe. Whether the configuration of his family in earlier census records actually indicated a spot for my Alexander, I can't say. The ages of the two sons we did find—Abram and Henry—clustered too closely to the edges of the age brackets given in those early census enumerations. There is, however, one more Boothe man we need to consider before we give up this effort to find Alexander Boothe's childhood family. We'll take a look at records for Andrew Boothe next week.