When Research Hopes go up in Flames

 

There were six men who shared the surname Boothe with my second great-grandfather in the 1840 census in Nansemond County, Virginia. One by one, I'll be looking at each man's household in earlier records in the hope that I'll discover the most likely one to have been Alexander Boothe's father. Because of what may have been an anomaly in county record keeping, I decided to start with one of the six by the name of Nathaniel Boothe.

Finding Nathaniel in other records started out easily enough. A death notice in The Norfolk Virginian on Friday, January 19, 1866, carried the story of his passing.

Mr. Nathaniel Boothe, one of the oldest and wealthiest men in the county of Nansemond, died a few days since. In his death the neighborhood in which he lived and the Christian church of which he was an exemplary member, sustains a severe loss. He was seventy-six years of age.

That article gave me a few helpful signs: that he died in the earliest days of 1866, and that he was of sufficient standing and worth to have left a will. It was that will that, more than any other document, I was keenly interested in viewing, in hopes that it would name all his surviving children. Whether my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe was mentioned in that document or not, finding the record would direct the next steps in my search.

Sure enough, going to FamilySearch.org Labs Full Text search, I located documents pertaining to this Nathaniel Boothe. They weren't, however, what I had hoped to see. 

One entry in the records showed Joseph Boothe appearing in court to signify under oath that he had entered into a bond in the amount of thirty thousand dollars and thus was to be issued letters of administration for his deceased father's estate. Sure enough, double checking on the Nansemond County Fiduciary Bond Book, there was the entry for Joseph Boothe, administrator of the estate of Nathaniel Boothe.

Oh oh. No will. So much for my first hope.

Curious to see the date of this court procedure, I flipped back a page in the record to find the beginning of the entry. Apparently, Joseph Boothe's entry was part of the monthly court session dated the twelfth of February in 1866. First order of business for that day's entries: a report from the clerk of the court that on the night of February 7, a fire in his office had destroyed the court records. The court appointed several men to investigate exactly what had been lost and how complete the damage had been—and I sped over to the FamilySearch wiki for Nansemond County to see the verdict. Yep: that was indeed the case. 

I had wondered why someone of such obvious financial success as Nathaniel Boothe would have neglected the business of recording his own final wishes. Could this have simply been the case of the document, having been drawn up, subsequently being destroyed by fire? But no, witnesses to such a will would have surely had a copy or known where to obtain one, once the testator had actually passed.

I thought, too, of how some people preferred to deed their possessions to family members ahead of time, but again, perhaps hampered by that same courthouse fire, I've found no record of such transactions. I'll still look further for any records of estate sales and distribution of the estate to family members when the case is closed. For now, though, while it looked possible, through the initial census records we viewed yesterday, that Alexander could have been that boy in Nathaniel's household in earlier years, unless we find more records, it would be impossible to say.

Image above from The Norfolk Virginian, January 19, 1866, page one, column three; courtesy GenealogyBank.