Don't Believe Everything You Read

 

It began with a hint from Ancestry.com for my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Nicholas Snider. Whether he actually spelled his surname that way—or Schneider, or Snyder, both of which I've also seen in records—I can't tell. But sometime during the year of his death, according to this hint, his heirs appeared in court to make a claim based on his Revolutionary War service.

Keeping in mind the Revolutionary War story I had already encountered from the biographical sketch of another descendant of Nicholas, I was all eyes to read the faded and blurry text of this handwritten court entry. Who wouldn't have appreciated a hint like that?!

Taking a first glance at the documents, I spotted some details which agreed with what I already knew about this ancestor: that by the 1855 date of that document, Nicholas was already deceased, as was his wife. Encouragingly, his wife's name on the court record was listed as Elizabeth—a detail which didn't initially disturb me, for the 1850 census had entered her name that same way, despite her full given name being Anna Elizabeth.

Even the son named as heir in this record, who was bringing his petition to court that day, was Jacob, same as our Nicholas Snider's eldest son. That, however, was where the similarities ended.

I've learned long ago that, despite the ease of genealogy websites' habit of providing the breadcrumbs of "hints" to guide us along our research path, one must always—repeat after me, "Always. Always. ALWAYS"—look at the document. With this instance, though, I'll provide an addendum: look at the entire document, not just the first few paragraphs. There are other families out there, believe it or not, who named their children the same names your own ancestors preferred.

I didn't need to read much further when I realized that having another son named Nicholas, while a likely choice for a father by that same name, was not in the records for our Nicholas. Yes, he had many sons—eight that I can find so far—but none of them became his father's namesake.

Furthermore, while our Nicholas did live in Pennsylvania at one point—the location where this petition was brought to court—he certainly didn't die there. As far as I can tell, of his sons who lived to adulthood, all traveled west with him to Perry County, Ohio.

So, the two sons of Nicholas and Elizabeth, who filed their complaint in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, on March 22, 1855? Though they claimed that their father was a soldier in the Revolutionary War, their father was certainly not our Nicholas Snider of Perry County, Ohio, even though he also once lived in Pennsylvania. 

How did that Ancestry hint find its way to my family tree? I suspect it's because several other Ancestry subscribers saw that same document and did the easy thing: click to add it to their tree without reading the thirty six pages of documentation appended to the case file inspecting the original pension claim.

Since I did take a look, I discovered a few interesting points. First discovery was that the Nicholas in question, who died in 1828, was neither of the Snyder Patriots listed in the DAR website. However, even in the packet of documents in the rejected pension file, it seemed that sometimes the applicant was confused with the DAR Patriot who died in 1786.

More to my current question was a letter in the pension packet written in 1916 to the Honorable Halvor Steenerson. At the time of the letter, Halvor Steenerson was a member of Congress representing Crookston in Polk County, Minnesota—the very place where Louis Edward Gossman of that 1897 biographical sketch which prompted this search also lived and worked. Apparently, at the time of the letter, Louis Gossman was then serving as judge.

The letter in response to the congressman's query on behalf of the judge confirmed the same details I had found by reading the entire pension packet: that the Nicholas whose rejected application was on file was a man who died in Pennsylvania in 1828. Apparently, by 1916 Judge Gossman had had second thoughts about that family tale as well, and was seeking some verification—long after, I might add, he had offered that family story for his published biographical sketch.

Just in case the Honorable Steenerson's status wasn't sufficient to round up some solid evidence, I did further reading on Revolutionary War pension applications and bounty land warrant records. A quick and easy index to applicants by state revealed no Nicholas Snyder mentioned from the state of Ohio—especially none from Perry County, home of our Nicholas Snider. But I suspect that even if the judge himself, a descendant of our Nicholas, came to seek verification of that family story in later years, perhaps it would serve us well to remember that old advice: don't believe everything you read—or hear. It may just be a family myth.

Plotting the Path to the Past

 

One way to connect our ancestors to their past is to literally trace the path they followed through life—but only on rewind. We need to plot that path backwards through time.

For my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Nicholas—whose surname in America eventually came to be spelled Snider—that means starting from the spot of his last days in Perry County, Ohio. We can see from the 1850 census—the last enumeration in which his name appeared—that he was a resident of Hopewell Township, one of the three northernmost townships in the county. He presumably had remained there ever since paying full price in 1820 for the southwest quarter of section twenty two of the land he and his son Jacob had acquired as tenants in common, thanks to the Harrison Land Act of 1800.

Before that, according to another one of those biographical sketches published over a century ago, Nicholas had arrived in Ohio from Pennsylvania, but apparently first by way of Maryland. This report I obtained from a book published in 1902, A Biographical Record of Fairfield and Perry Counties, Ohio. The sketch was actually concerning Nicholas' grandson, William Snider, who was 

a son of Peter and Eleanor (Dean) Snider. His father was born in Maryland in 1816 and was a son of Nicholas Snider, who about 1818 removed from Maryland to Ohio, entering land from the government one mile north of Somerset, in Reading township.

But was this really true? Right away, we can see a conflict in reports again, having just viewed the census record identifying Nicholas' home as having been situated in Hopewell Township. Perhaps by that time, Nicholas' age had warranted his releasing the land to his son Jacob—or perhaps he had simply sold one property to purchase another. Land records can help resolve that discrepancy, but the bigger question is: where did Nicholas and his family live before arriving in Ohio?

To answer that question, we'd need to reach back to the 1810 census. One possible candidate might be the "Nicholass Snyder" whose family resided in Adams County, Pennsylvania. There, his household was composed of two sons under ten years of age and another one between the ages of ten and fifteen, along with a daughter under ten. These could easily be our Nicholas' eldest son Jacob, born in 1799, and younger brothers Joseph and Lewis, plus his oldest daughter Catherine. The ages given for the two adults in the household also fit Nicholas and his wife, Anna Elizabeth.

Could there have been a stop in Maryland before moving onward to Ohio? Very likely: Adams County in Pennsylvania bordered the state line with Maryland. The family could have sold their land in Pennsylvania too close to the date of Peter's birth, and decided on an interim stop in Maryland before heading to their intended destination.

The discovery of that 1810 census does pinpoint a location for Nicholas' family in Pennsylvania. While that seems to be helpful, it also dropped a pin on the Pennsylvania map which caused some conflict with another record I found for a Nicholas Snyder—this one in Cumberland County, just one county to the north of Adams County. We'll need to take some time to evaluate whether that was our Nicholas or not. 

After Forty Eight Hours: Up the Ante?

It may feel like I've been wandering around in circles, trying to poke my way through a document brick wall hiding the story of Nicholas Schneider, but behind the scenes, I've been trying a different approach: DNA testing. Though my mother-in-law is no longer here to help verify the cousin matches descending from her second great-grandfather Nicholas, you can be sure her son did test—and I've been carefully sifting through those many DNA cousins' family trees since the start of this month.

One encouraging sign was to see the 268 DNA matches shared on this line of descent. I was also jazzed to read that, at least at Ancestry DNA, if I make updates to the family tree, Ancestry will generally update their list of matches within forty eight hours. Well, it's been forty eight hours (at least) since I began updating this Schneider/Snider/Snyder line on my mother-in-law's tree. Any increase in DNA matches?

Any time I update my tree based on information gleaned from DNA matches, it's a two-step process requiring not just the addition of DNA matches to my tree, but of documentation to support each additional person. Of course, what ends up happening is not just the addition of that one person, but of that one's spouse—and the names of the spouse's parents—and members of the next generation, too. Just in the past five days, I've probably added over fifty new names to my mother-in-law's tree, just by going through those DNA matches.

Surely the addition of fifty new family members to the tree should result in something, shouldn't it? After all, those fifty new names are just from the twenty four descendants of Nicholas' son Jacob that I've managed to complete. But after forty eight hours, not only did I gain absolutely zero new matches, but I actually lost one. How could that be?

From time to time, I've noticed the count on DNA matches has shrunk. This could be for a variety of reasons. I'm guessing one might be that some DNA customers could have gotten nervous about all the negative DNA news out there—right now, it's the backlash over news about 23andMe, but in the past, it's been about the Golden State Killer and other reactions to current events involving DNA—and withdrawn their participation in viewing matches. Another way could have been that the customer's tree was taken private and unsearchable. Or perhaps someone discovered that, whoops, that wasn't my parent's ancestor after all, and made a total change to that family tree.

For right now, though, that means there is one less DNA match linked to Nicholas' son Jacob—moving in exactly the opposite direction from what I had anticipated. Perhaps I need to up the ante and double down on adding descendants to Nicholas' tree to see what might happen in the next forty eight hour period. After all, Nicholas Schneider left a pretty robust family after all these generations. There are plenty more to add to this line.   

Looking for Answers

The good thing about finding a relative in one of those old genealogy books is that we can always double-check the book's assertions. We have the tools for that now, unlike the limitations authors faced in those previous centuries, when all they had was wood-burning genealogy websites. When we're looking for answers to questions about brick wall ancestors, there's no need to shy away from publications from a previous age of genealogical research. It's okay; we can do this.

Thus, when I spotted a hundred-twenty-plus entry for a cousin on my mother-in-law's Snider line, there was no need to reject it out of hand. First, I could look up each of the assertions in the report. After all, the article spoke of Nicholas Schneider, my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather and the focus of this month's Twelve Most Wanted—and I did want to know something more about this founding immigrant on the Snider/Snyder side of her family.

The entry in question was a biographical sketch concerning Louis Edward Gossman in the 1897 book, Progressive Men of Minnesota. In that entry, we can find the assertion that Mr. Gossman's great-grandfather—called Nicholas Snyder—had come to America with a company of German immigrants in 1778, when he was just fourteen year of age. According to that narrative, Nicholas joined "Washington's army" in Pennsylvania as a drummer boy, and served for the remainder of the war, after which he returned—though only briefly—to Germany.

Well? Could that be so? That's when I started looking for those answers. The National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution happen to host an online resource for looking up such details, so my first stop was to hop on over to their website. One sticking point about such a search was the variety of spellings used for this family's surname—I've seen Schneider, Snider, and Snyder—so I made sure to search using each of those versions.

Result? Schneider yielded nothing. Trying Snider generated a message directing me to use an alternate spelling, which the website handily suggested: Snyder. And for that third attempt, I was rewarded with two possibilities, both from Pennsylvania.

The only problem was that neither man was of the correct age. One was born in Lancaster County in Pennsylvania—rather than my Nicholas' birth somewhere in Germany—and the age was a bit older than the Progressive Men narrative had suggested. The other possibility was a man born in Germany, but my hopes were dashed when I saw the year of birth: 1732. That Nicholas' date of death in 1786 was sure to nix the possibility entirely.

So much for the tale of Revolutionary War service for my Nicholas, at least if we are relying on currently confirmed records of service. But what about the fact that Nicholas Snider eventually obtained land in Ohio, where he settled with his growing family? Could he have received Bounty Land? Checking for General Land Office records at the Bureau of Land Management, I noticed that Nicholas obtained his 160 acre parcel not by service in the war, but by the authority of the Harrison Land Act of 1800.

The ground-breaking virtue of that legislation was that it opened up settlement in "western" territorial locations by allowing people to purchase land with a credit feature: one-fourth down, with the remainder to be paid over a four year period. A subsequent change in that arrangement in 1804 reduced the minimum parcel size that could be purchased to 160 acres, which is what Nicholas and his son Jacob acquired as "tenants in common." Payment in full was made by March 27, 1820.

So was that drummer boy story a family myth? I wouldn't discount it entirely at this point. There may be more to the story, or it may have shreds of truth embedded within that more wobbly context of a fourteen year old marching to war. No matter what the eventual determination might be, as we proceed with this search for Nicholas' story in those early years, we need to be open to unexpected possibilities. After all, he didn't show up on American shores with a clearly marked itinerary for all to see. We likely will need to piece that story together through the shreds of documentation we can locate along the trail which brought him to Ohio from Germany.

Is That Really True?

 

As I've seen demonstrated so many times—even including last month's research project—it helps to check out every document that can be found on the siblings of a brick wall ancestor. After all, it's important to keep in mind that though we don't know specific details of our mystery ancestor, someone else might know. The key is to determine just how reliable that someone else's memory might have been.

As I work my way down the line of descendants of my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Nicholas Schneider, I've been looking for any such breakthrough—and I found one, thanks to information linked to a man who was her own father's first cousin. The details were in one of those ubiquitous local history books that were prevalent in the late 1880s through the early 1900s. This particular book, Progressive Men of Minnesota, was published in 1897, over one hundred years after Nicholas was born, but within a few decades of his death. Someone, surely, would remember him and his stories—but the real question I have when reading that published report is, "Is that really true?"

The biographical insert in question from the Progressive Men book was for a man named Louis Edward Gossman. Like my mother-in-law, he descended from Nicholas' son, Jacob Snider. Louis' mother and my mother-in-law's paternal grandmother were sisters. You'd think that would be a relationship close enough that the stories Louis heard from his mother would be about the same as what his cousin heard from his own mother. After all, those moms were sisters.

At first, the exciting realization was that Louis' biographical sketch included information on his grandfather Jacob and his great-grandfather Nicholas. The book, for instance, reported that Louis' maternal grandparents (this would be Jacob and his wife) were natives of Pennsylvania. Furthermore, the report stretched back another generation to affirm that Nicholas came to America about 1778, at the age of fourteen.

The story stretched even further from that. According to the report, Nicholas was "brought to America by other Germans who came over to assist in the cause of the Colonies." Arriving in Pennsylvania, according to this report, young Nicholas joined "Washington's army" as a drummer boy, serving until the end of the war. After that, Nicholas returned home to Germany, but came back to Pennsylvania after a few years.

The article included what seemed to be a helpful detail: Nicholas' residence in Germany. According to the book, he came from "Mayence, Germany." However, a cursory check of locations in current day Germany yielded no leads—although one can't help but realize that if you stretch your imagination just a bit, the pronunciation of Mainz, one city in Germany, sounds somewhat similar to "Mayence."

Well, is that all true? You know I couldn't just sit there and accept that story wholesale, but neither could I reject it out of hand. I had to put some effort into fact checking first.

Looking Forward to Reach Backwards

 

To research our ancestors, the presumption is that we start with ourselves, then step by step, we work backwards in time from generation to generation—until, that is, we run into a research brick wall. Stymied, we twist and turn every which way, trying to find a path around the records impasse. For probably as long as people have been curious about their roots, that path to the past could only be traveled in one direction: backwards through time.

Now, however, we have another option: looking forward. And we reverse course, so to speak, by looking at a very different type of record, not from the past, but forward from those great-greats who've given us the slip.

In the case of my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, Nicholas Schneider, I'll certainly keep searching for eighteenth century records to reveal his origin in Europe, but I have another treasure trove of information awaiting my attention: Nicholas Schneider's descendants, those DNA matches who, along with my husband as test proxy for my mother-in-law's line, share Nicholas as their most recent common ancestor.

When I started this month's research project for my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025, I began working my way through these DNA matches using the Ancestry.com ThruLines tool. According to that readout, my husband shares an ancestral connection to Nicholas Schneider with 268 other AncestryDNA customers. And I don't think it's owing to my active imagination that that number seems to be rapidly sprouting. According to Ancestry.com, when I make changes to my mother-in-law's tree—for instance, adding another generation of Schneider descendants I've just discovered—the company will update the program in about forty eight hours.

Considering this Schneider—and, later, Snider and Snyder—family has been the one line that pumps up my biweekly count the most, I'm not surprised that ThruLines connections to this ancestor keep zooming upward. Each generation of this large Catholic family brings multiple more members to my mother-in-law's tree—and, forty eight hours after adding these new cousins to the family tree, can link me to more ThruLines results.

Of those 268 Schneider DNA matches at Ancestry's ThruLines, I've gleaned the breakdown by the seven of Nicholas' children who are currently represented in the tool: six sons, one daughter, plus one additional name which I believe was actually a grandson. Of those, the child with the largest set of DNA matches, by far, is eldest son Jacob, who was also on my mother-in-law's direct line. As I make the connection between my husband's record and Jacob's eighty DNA descendants—so far—I'm being careful to also connect each DNA match entry to all available records, as well as add any of his descendants I might previously have missed. End result? You can be sure those additional entries to my mother-in-law's family tree will yield more future DNA matches.

It's a truly roundabout method to push farther into the family's past, but as I've found before in following collateral lines, you never know when a record for someone else in the family will produce an unexpected link with just the information needed that couldn't be found elsewhere.

No Longer Etched in Stone

 

We may take comfort in the apparent permanence of the names of our departed loved ones, etched in stone above their final resting place. We want to remember them for the cherished members of our family they were—and we want others to know we cared for them through such permanent memorials.

When it comes to ancestors like my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Nicholas Schneider, however, his name is no longer etched in stone—if it ever was. According to details posted by a Find A Grave volunteer, Nicholas died on March 4, 1856, and was buried in the cemetery of the Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Somerset, Ohio. That information was not obtained from his headstone, but from church records, according to the site's note.

Whether that need to check church records was owing to the weathering of an old headstone, I can't tell, but I have run across other websites for Perry County—immigrant Nicholas Snider's last home in Ohio—which included transcriptions for old cemeteries. One example from an old website included multiple Snider family members in its listings—but not Nicholas. Another, from a different Perry County cemetery, was a compilation of several sources, including some which were readings from cemetery visits in the 1970s, as well as gleanings from old church records. Some headstones were no longer legible; some were no longer located at the deceased's burial site but were simply stones found in a pile on the grounds.

No matter what happened to Nicholas Snider's headstone—or that of his wife, Anna Elizabeth Eckhardt—we can tell from the 1850 census that the couple and several of their family members had lived in Hopewell Township in Perry County. Indeed, following the census trail backwards in time, "Nicholass Snider" and his sizable family had arrived in Perry County before the 1820 census.

Before that point, his trail westward had led from Adams County, Pennsylvania, and possibly a stopping point in Maryland, before heading to Ohio. While I already have some documentation located which suggests that pathway, there is much more work yet to do. But the prime question revolves around the family's arrival from their likely origin somewhere in the lands which now make up the country of Germany. And the key is finding actual documentation of that information, not just reports published by other researchers.

I have yet to be successful on such a venture, though I tried to do so the last time I visited this research question three years ago. On the other hand, with each successive year, we see more and more resources added to genealogy collections online, which boost the possibility for future research success. Maybe this will be my breakthrough year. 

Nicholas: Patriarch of Many

 

With the beginning of a new month, we not only move on to researching another ancestor, but we shift from pursuing those ancestors from my mother's family to those from my mother-in-law's roots. For April, that selection is a man who was not only my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, but also her third great-grandfather.

If you are scratching your head over that seeming contradiction, let me explain. My mother-in-law's family came from central Ohio, where several branches of her family had lived since the earliest days of the 1800s. Over the generations in that relatively isolated community, the branches of her family intermarried until many in that county could say they were related to each other in several ways. So in my mother-in-law's instance, she could claim one patriarch, Nicholas Schneider, as her second great-grandfather through her paternal grandmother's line, while he was her third great-grandfather through her maternal grandmother's line.

That family name, though likely originating as Schneider from his native German homeland, was spelled as Snider for those who settled and stayed in central Ohio, but for those who moved on—first to Iowa, then in some cases beyond to Minnesota—the name was eventually spelled Snyder. Regardless of the spelling variations, I have traced many of these descendants, thanks to DNA testing, to confirm their relationship.

For this fourth selection of this year's Twelve Most Wanted, I would like to push back another generation—or at least find records from wherever he emigrated in the earliest years of the 1800s. That search will be my main challenge, but I have another goal: update work on the 268 DNA matches reported by Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool as descendants of Nicholas to ensure those matches are all connected to my mother-in-law's family tree—a mammoth task, indeed.

For this patriarch of so many, we'll begin tomorrow with a brief overview of what I know already about him and the young family he brought with him from somewhere in Germany. Following that, I'll spotlight the two branches of Nicholas' family from whom my mother-in-law descends. Eventually, we'll discuss each of the other siblings I'm currently aware of, then begin the study of where that DNA leads us in the subsequent generations. Bottom line, though, is to seek out any further records that can point us to his passage to America, and the place he left behind on his trip to this fledgling country. 

Last Best Guesses

 

It can sometimes be hard to close the book on an unfinished research project. Still, a month is a month, and I promised myself that each of my yearly Twelve Most Wanted ancestors would receive only a month of my attention before I move on to wrestle with the next research puzzle. That said, today I'd like to lay down my last best guesses before closing the book on this chapter.

My goal this month was to find the parents of my second great-grandfather. When I began the month—indeed, when I laid out my research plans for Ancestor #3 back in December of 2024—I had thought I'd be searching for someone born in 1812 by the name William Alexander Boothe. That was what a prodigious researcher had told me years ago, but after only a few days of digging into the records, lack of any documents with the name William persuaded me to discard that report. Further searching pointed to a birth year of 1816 rather than 1812, and I again altered my trajectory.

Just as I had for the previous month's research challenge, I looked to results from DNA testing to bolster my exploration. However, unlike February's ancestor, who brought me well over one hundred DNA matches, any DNA Boothe connections beyond Alexander's own descendants were quite slim. Those few others pointed to a presumed ancestor—at least by Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool—named Daniel Booth. Daniel's birth in New York and subsequent lifetime spent mostly in Ohio dissuaded me from giving that suggestion any more credence, despite the fact that two of his children were born in Virginia (albeit many miles from Alexander's birthplace).

My main approach from that point was to zero in on Nansemond County in Virginia, the very county in which I had found Alexander's household in the 1840 census, and from which I had extracted his name in tax records. Since there were four other Boothe households in that county that year, my research tactic was to follow what documentation I could find on each of those other Boothe men, in hopes of identifying a possible father for Alexander.

Those four Boothe men in Nansemond County were named Robert, Kinchen, Nathaniel, and Andrew. Robert, who appeared to be the oldest of the four, had one son in his household who would have been the right age to be Alexander. This could have been promising, except for one detail: that male child under ten years of age in the 1820 census turned out to be his son named Daniel, not Alexander. Granted, one of Daniel's descendants was named William Horace Boothe, the very name my Alexander gave to one of his own sons, but other than that tempting detail, there was no way to make Alexander fit in the census age brackets that would fit his own specifics.

Kinchen, likewise, was old enough to have been father to Alexander, but given the use of age brackets for census records before 1850, plus the inaccuracies of age estimations in those earlier years, the wiggle room left too much uncertainty. Yes, if Kinchen's son Abram, said to be born about 1820, was actually one year younger, it might have been possible to squeeze my Alexander into that age slot, and count Abram in the next, younger, age category along with his brother Henry. But that "if" would be my conjecture, not supported by any documentation. I'll need to search further for records on that family which might include the missing information I'm seeking—a task for another year.

As for Andrew Boothe, apparently the youngest of the Nansemond County Boothe men, his age alone would disqualify him from being Alexander's father. I could not even find a listing for Andrew in the 1820 census, where Alexander would have shown up as a son in the "under ten" age category. Even the 1830 census showed a household of a young married couple with only children under the age of five.

If any of the Nansemond County Boothe men were to be my suspected direct line ancestor, it would have to be Nathaniel Boothe. Though his death—and any possible will—occurred just before an unfortunate courthouse fire, obliterating any hope of finding handy documentation, the son administering his (apparently considerable) estate—Joseph—was a child born of what appeared to be a second marriage, and one long post-dating Alexander's own birth. Indeed, Nathaniel's 1830 census suggested a household comprised solely of one adult male and one male child between the ages of ten and fourteen, precisely where Alexander would have fit in. Alexander's entry just one line below Nathaniel's in a personal property tax register for 1836—just when Alexander would have turned twenty—seemed also to indicate a connection. And the fact that the next decade's enumeration for Nathaniel indicated the arrival of a new wife and baby a few years after that previous census might well have been Alexander's signal to leave home (and step-mother) and start afresh with his own family for that 1840 census.

While I can point to no records which would positively assure me that that guess was spot on, I wonder, given Nathaniel's successful business reputation, whether he might have had a son from a previous marriage who would have been knowledgeable about horsemanship to the extent that Alexander seemed to exhibit. Even in his later years, Alexander was simultaneously claiming extreme poverty and a reputation for owning—possibly selling—stallions. Two different newspapers ran announcements of the passing of "Uncle" Alex Boothe. The Comet of Johnson City, Tennessee, where Alexander died in 1895, noted on August 8  that he was "well known in this and adjoining counties" for traveling through the area "with famous stallions" in past years. News of his death was also carried by the Knoxville Journal two days later, mentioning also that he died at the home of his eldest daughter, Laura Caroline, wife of William F. Brooks.

There will be another year for returning to this puzzle. Hopefully, more records will become available online, aiding research for those not at liberty to fly across country to personally dig through locally archived documents. But even as we discovered this month, old published genealogies, while containing errors, may provide helpful pointers, and thorough searches through collateral lines may turn up answers where we least expect them. Next chance I get to revisit Alexander's past, it will be time to explore as much of the extended Boothe kin in Nansemond County as I can find. The answer may well be hidden in records that didn't burn down in courthouse fires. It's just a matter of patience and turning lots of dusty pages.

Image above: Insertion on page four of the August 8, 1895, Johnson City, Tennessee, newspaper, The Comet, regarding the death of Alexander Boothe; image courtesy of GenealogyBank.

Putting the Brakes on

 

Some quests for mystery ancestors produce lots of leads or round up unexpected relatives. Not so this month. For the last two weeks, especially, progress has been slow as I pursued possible connections that turned out to be, well, bum leads. With only one more day left to this month's chase, it's time to put the brakes on and slow down enough to park this family history vehicle.

The goal this month was to identify the parents of my second great-grandfather, Virginia-born Alexander Boothe. Unlike past projects where I felt confident in adding tentative family connections with a "hypothesis" tag or bright yellow warning sign, the leads I followed for the Boothe family didn't inspire even that much confidence—not even the DNA matches.

Perhaps that repeated experience of viewing—then rejecting—possible relatives was what caused my biweekly count to tank. I did manage to add ninety six relatives to my family tree with confidence, but mainly those were members of the Boothe family whom I already knew were descendants of Alexander, not any newly-discovered siblings or parents. My tree is still quite full and "bushy" at 40,206 researched relatives, but I certainly would have welcomed more, if I could just crack the code to solve this mystery family connection. (I have some observations to make tomorrow, but the bottom line is: no solid answer yet.)

As far as my in-laws' family tree goes, I haven't made one bit of progress on their side of the family for this entire first quarter of 2025, with the exception of some family news received over the winter holidays which tempted me to do some searching early in January.

That static situation will change with the flip of the calendar page from March to April, when I leave my Twelve Most Wanted goals for my mother's side of the family, and venture into the to-do list for my mother-in-law's relatives next. With that fresh start in April, we'll be working on a tree which now has 37,367 researched individuals to see if we can push beyond the brick wall on my mother-in-law's Schneider/Snider/Snyder line before the family's arrival in Ohio in the 1800s.

Someone Else Might Know

 

At a loss for how to solve my research problem this month—finding the parents of my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe—I decided to step out and take a look at who else might know something about this family. My specific route was to DNA—but not just the ThruLines possibilities I mentioned yesterday. This time, I went searching for potential matches at other testing companies which might share the Boothe and related surnames tied to this branch of my family.

Specifically, I headed to my DNA match list at MyHeritage. First, I tried the obvious: search for that Boothe surname in the trees of my matches. That didn't produce significant results, so my second attempt borrowed a more unusual surname from the hints back at AncestryDNA: McAlexander, the maiden name of the wife of Daniel Boothe, the suggested father of my Alexander, according to ThruLines. Again, nothing special showed up.

From that point, I turned to my recent readout from MyHeritage's tool, called AutoClusters, the very development which had helped me break through another brick wall on my paternal side a few years ago. AutoClusters had pinpointed sixteen clusters—some so small, they only contained three people. No matter; when I had found my paternal grandfather's roots that previous time, there were only a few people in that cluster, as well. Small can still be powerful.

In the process of reviewing all these clusters, I realized I could also cross-check those DNA matches at MyHeritage with my extensive family tree at Ancestry. After all, in the eleven years since I sent in my first test sample, I've been busy building out a very "bushy" family tree, in the hope of pinpointing how all these matches were related to me. Surely someone out there might know about my second great-grandfather's roots—or at least their genes could tell me something.

In the process, I've now identified and labeled some clusters based on our shared ancestor, including some brick wall ancestors I had struggled with in past months. While my Boothe question may remain unanswered this month, there's always the hope that someone from that line will eventually show up in my DNA results.

Three Boothe Ancestors

 

When brick wall ancestors have brought research progress to a dead stop, DNA testing can provide the bypass to reach an answer. In my case, I have three DNA matches who each claim a different Boothe ancestor. At least two of those matches' ancestors were children of Daniel Boothe, the Ohio resident who some people claimed to be parent of my brick wall ancestor Alexander Boothe. Let's start today by taking a look at one of them.

Unlike the other two DNA matches, this one's ancestor was listed in ThruLines results for both Daniel and his wife Mary. The match's progenitor was the couple's daughter Evelina. According to ThruLines, this match would be my fourth cousin once removed, a distant cousin indeed. Perhaps that's why we share only one segment of nine centiMorgans, a slim sliver of genetic material indeed.

Since we had already found Evelina's supposed parents in the 1850 census, living alone as an elderly couple in Lawrence County, Ohio, the search was on to find this Boothe daughter listed elsewhere for that census. That required an additional step, for by that point Evelina was already married. The date of their marriage had been back in 1837, still in Lawrence County, so by the time of the 1850 census, Evelina and her husband, Shadreck Ward, were already proud parents of four daughters.

I found a brief glimmer of possibility with this connection. Despite the family's residence in Ohio, the two oldest daughters, May and Martha, were reported to have been born in Virginia. Since May was born in 1839 and Martha in 1840, I looked for a family with that composition in the 1840 census. There they were, living in Cabell County, then part of Virginia (though now in West Virginia), one county removed from Lawrence County, which was across the state line to the northwest.

This was not near Randolph County, where I had found another Daniel Booth living in earlier years—Randolph County being nearly two hundred miles away—so I dismissed any thoughts of Evelina moving to be closer to grandparents. At any rate, the Ward household had apparently lived in Virginia only briefly, as both the 1850 census and 1860 census showed them back in Lawrence County, Ohio. Evelina died in 1886 and was buried in Lawrence County, indicating what likely was a lifelong residence in that location, other than that brief move across the state line. Indeed, that 1860 census had reported her own birthplace as Ohio, a possible sticking point, considering her 1818 date of birth would have been only two years after my Alexander was said to have been born in Nansemond County, Virginia, hundreds of miles to the east.

With only nine centiMorgans shared between myself and this descendant of Evelina, such a slim margin could be attributed to other reasons. We both could be related through another, as yet undiscovered, family line. Or we could simply share more distant relatives—or merely the fact that our ancestors were from the same regional origin, sharing history from centuries previous to this Boothe family puzzle.

Considering that the other two ThruLines Boothe matches, descended from supposed siblings of my Alexander, shared even less genetic material, they too could be considered identical by state, rather than identical by descent. Looking at the records showing various men named Daniel Boothe, as we did yesterday, causes me to doubt the fact that we're even looking at one specific individual—let alone a man who could have been my Alexander Boothe's father. In the next few days, we'll wrap up this exploration, noting possible next steps for continued research in future years.

Deconstructing Daniel

 

March has been a month of negatives. In pursuit of my candidate for this month's Twelve Most Wanted, my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe's unidentified father, the bulk of this month's exploration has been devoted to finding documents to signify why possible choices would not be the right man. In this process of elimination, there is one more candidate we need to consider: the suggestion given by Ancestry DNA's ThruLines tool, Daniel Boothe.

It's time to deconstruct that proposal about Daniel Boothe. Let's start with the information gleaned from family trees of the few DNA matches I have who are linked to that supposed ancestor. According to ThruLines, this Daniel was born in 1785 and died in 1853. Plugging in those dates, coupled with his name, I almost instantly was led to the Find A Grave entry for someone with that same information.

Unfortunately, that entry did not include any photographs of the headstone or supporting documentation. While I appreciate information provided by Find A Grave volunteers, documentation trumps mere hearsay masquerading as genealogy. Despite the lack of the usual headstone picture, though, one other detail stood out to me immediately: unlike my Alexander, native to Nansemond County in Virginia, this Daniel was born in New York and died in Ohio. This was a far different narrative than Alexander's own migration story from Virginia to Tennessee.

Digging deeper into Daniel's story, only three years earlier than his death—but in the same Ohio county of Lawrence—I could find Daniel's entry in the 1850 census. There, along with his wife Mary, these two aging parents lived alone in their home, with no sign of any children whose descendants could some day discover that they share DNA with my Alexander's great-great-granddaughter. 

Though the 1850 census would be the last census where I could find this couple with all family members named—not just counted—I checked for previous records on the couple. The 1840 census revealed that Daniel was still living in Lawrence County, Ohio, along with his wife, two sons in their later teen years, plus a daughter between the ages of ten and fourteen. Daniel's family was even living in Lawrence County in 1830, according to that decade's census.

The only ray of hope from that more recent 1850 census was the sign that Daniel's wife was born in Virginia. Sure enough, there was a Daniel Boothe who married a Mary McAlexander in Patrick County, Virginia, on April 24, 1806, so it was back to Virginia I went to see if I could trace Daniel back to that temporary stopping place before his move to Ohio.

Success came with an 1820 census entry for the young family in Randolph County, then part of Virginia, and again in 1810. In fact, there were census entries for three Boothe families in Randolph County, suggesting the reasonable argument that while Daniel might have married his bride in Patrick County, following the wedding in the home county of Mary's parents the couple might have moved to Daniel's own home county.

It was there, however, that I ran into trouble: court records from Randolph County reported an estate sale for one Daniel Boothe, deceased, which was appraised on May 12, 1827. Among the purchasers listed in the sale's inventory report were Isaac Booth and Sarah Booth.

That's when the thought hit me: what if there were still a man named Daniel Boothe residing in Patrick County, the Virginia location of the Boothe-McAlexander wedding? 

To check for that possibility, I located two likely indicators. The first was an entry in Find a Grave. Again without a photograph of any headstone, the memorial gave this Daniel's dates as 1776-1857—dates quite different from those supplied by ThruLines for my DNA matches. The second record was this Daniel's entry in the 1850 census. Showing his wife's name as Susan, not Mary, that aberration might be explained by the death of the previous wife, as suggested by the volunteer who created the Find a Grave memorial—or could be advising us that this wasn't the right Daniel.

With the three possible Daniels found in records, much more research would be needed to follow what became of the children of each possible candidate, in hopes that at least one document would provide an explanation of where my Alexander might have fit into that family constellation. Right away, though, I can think of three possible candidates among those said to be children of Daniel and Mary: the three who were named as ancestors of my DNA matches from that original Boothe couple in Ohio.

Double, Triple, Quadruple

 

Double-checking facts found for a brick wall ancestor? Maybe make that a triple-check. Or possibly a quadruple-check. Just in case someone gave a wrong report.

In the case of the Boothe men in Nansemond County, the fact that three of them were said to have been sons of Henry—no, whoops, make that Abram or Abraham—gave me cause for concern. Either it was one father or the other. Can't have both results for the same sons. So, given my predicament in trying to figure out where my brick wall second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe might have fit in, I decided to look for more confirmation.

Despite a genealogy book featured on Ancestry.com stating that Robert, Kinchen, Nathaniel, and Andrew were sons of Henry Boothe, I had already found one tiny detail reporting otherwise. That report was one single answer on the death record for Andrew Boothe, who died in Nansemond County in 1860. According to his brother, Andrew's parents were actually Abram and "Cherry" Booth.

So I went looking. I needed to double check that report. Could I find another Boothe sibling whose death record confirmed those same parental names?

Well, I found something, alright, but it added another tailspin to my journey. Found in the same death register for Nansemond County was the entry for a sister (see line number thirty two) who—at least according to the reporting party, her son Edwin Duke—also claimed Abram Boothe as her father (although naming her mother as Charlotte, not Charity or Cherry). Only problem was: the woman's given name contained a questionable first letter. What was her actual name? 

Since her son Edwin Duke was identified as the reporting party, and the death occurred in 1853, it was a simple matter of finding the family in the 1850 census. There, the woman's name was given, in a clear hand, as sixty five year old Pennina Duke, assumed wife of Jacob. Checking further, a similar name was mentioned in a collection of North American family history books assembled at Ancestry.com—but also accessible through Internet Archive under the specific 1909 title, A Genealogy of the Duke-Shepherd-Van Metre Family. That time, her name was rendered as Penniniah Booth—and thankfully, her fifth child was indeed named Edwin. (Her first-born, incidentally, was given the name Abraham, if that Genealogy was correct.)

No matter whether that woman's name was Penniniah or Pennina, that's a far cry from the report claiming Henry Boothe named his daughter Lottie. Perhaps, indeed, he did—but he apparently was not the father of this Booth woman, nor her brothers Nathaniel, Robert, and Andrew. Granted, some grandchildren may not have been as familiar with their grandparents' names as we might like, but I have a nagging suspicion that Henry Boothe was not the man we thought he was.

Having examined documents for each of the supposed sons of Henry—now, presumably, actually Abram—we'll take a final look at what we've found in this exploration, come the last day of this month. In the meantime, we have another puzzle to unravel from its family-myth moorings: the claim that my second great-grandfather's dad was actually a man named Daniel Boothe. Time to begin quadruple-checking all over again.

When Death Records Get it Wrong

 

While it may seem that the holy grail for genealogists is the documentation verifying our ancestors' life details, I've had my own complaints about the use of one particular type of documentation: death records. While they may get it right when we look for verification of date and even time of a relative's death, the other details on a modern death certificate can range from reliable to ridiculous.

Take my prime bugaboo with death certificates: mother's maiden name. To illustrate what I mean, we need only to take a step back and view the scenario at the moment of that unpleasant interview between official record keeper and designated spokesperson for the bereaved family. Think about it: the family has just received the worst possible news about a loved one, and is currently experiencing predictable waves of grief and, sometimes, incredulity. Then some stranger pops on the scene, abruptly demanding information on the identity of the deceased.

I can't tell you how many times I've realized that the respondent to such interviews, in the midst of personal grief, reverts from answering questions about the relative, and instead begins answering for one's self. Take the question, "Mother's maiden name?" That question follows in a logical progression from name, details about residence, maybe even about usual occupation, to date and place of birth. All well and good—until we hit that sticking point of the mother's maiden name. I'm not sure why I've seen so many informants blurt out as answer to that question their own mother's maiden name, but there it is, plain as can be, on the deceased's completed death certificate.

Chalk it up to nerves, I guess. Family members have gone through a lot by the time a loved one has passed—whether that death was an unexpected surprise, or the end of a very long and difficult illness. So when I find an old death record in Nansemond County, Virginia, for the suspected relatives of my second great-grandfather, Alexander Boothe, I can't be sure the report about the man's parents is actually correct.

The reporting party at Andrew Boothe's death in 1860 was his older brother Nathaniel. A savvy businessman known for his successes, Nathaniel was not likely to flub this mention of his brother's parents' names. After all, he shared those same parents; this was life-long knowledge. According to Nathaniel Boothe, their parents were named Abram and Cherry Booth—at least, that's what the official record keeper noted.

When we go exploring on genealogical websites, though, we can find records indicating otherwise. Take, for example, this find from a book originally published by Clearfield Company in 1963, volume seven of Historical Southern Families. There, on page 109, we discover:

Family tradition states that Henry Boothe m Elizabeth Rabey, dau of Kedar Rabey of Nansemond County, and they were the parents of Robert, Kinchen, Nathaniel, William, Andrew and Lottie Boothe, who were b between 1779 and 1805. This tradition also states that William Boothe, son of Henry, owned a tavern in Gatesville, N C,  and that Lottie (Charlotte) Boothe m James Rabey.

Well, doesn't that put together a splendid package?! A genealogical report even outlined the connections a bit further. But what happened to Nathaniel's own report that his brother's parents (and thus his own) were Abram and Cherry? Must we assume that, grief-stricken, he reported the wrong names on his brother's death record?

Almost as an afterthought, the article continues with this curious addendum about Nathaniel and another brother, Robert. The two had apparently purchased 

land in Nansemond which had belonged to an Abraham Boothe, near the original Boothe grants. Abraham Boothe was dead by 1812, when his estate was carried on the tax lists. He left a widow, Charity (Cherry) Boothe, who d in 1825, when Nathaniel, Kinchen, Robert and Charlotte bought items at the sale of her property.

Ironically, that passage in the book concluded, "Abraham Boothe's relationship to this family is not known."

Last of the Nansemond Boothe Men

 

There were six Boothe men listed in the 1840 census for Nansemond County, Virginia, birthplace of my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe. Still unable to verify Alexander's parents' names, my quest this month has been to sift through all available records to examine the stories of each of the other Boothe men in that county who might be kin to Alexander.

Last on our list is Andrew Boothe, someone we encountered briefly when noticing that his final appearance in census records was in the household of Nathaniel Boothe in 1860. Not having any confirmation of family connections at that time—the 1860 census gave the names of each resident in the household, but not the relationship—all I could do was note the occurrence. 

Now, we'll focus in on Andrew himself, finding him in each decade's records in hopes of gaining a brief sketch of his life story, at least the part indicating any possibility that my Alexander might have been related to him.

Unlike our exploration of Kinchen Boothe, one of the other Boothe residents in Nansemond County, I was not able to locate Andrew in the 1820 census. This likely meant that Andrew was still living in the home of his own parents, possibly still a minor. The younger the person was, the less likely it would be that he was father of my Alexander, who was reported to have been born in 1816.

Jumping ahead a decade to the 1830 census, I located Andrew Boothe's household. Showing as a thirty-something male along with a woman in her twenties, Andrew's household was completed by two possible sons under five years of age. We can guess that Andrew was married sometime after 1820 but by 1825—but unless marriage records can be found for that time period in Nansemond County, we'll never know for sure.

The 1840 census revealed a growing family for Andrew, but prompts questions about whether he had the same wife. Predictably, Andrew had aged by ten years, but indications were that his wife was more than ten years older than the wife showing in the 1830 census. Of course, that could have meant that his wife was at the top of the range for the previous age bracket given—twenty to twenty nine—and for the 1840 census, she had just passed a birthday moving her from, say, thirty nine to forty to fit into that forty to forty nine year bracket.

Or, Andrew was a widower who married a woman slightly older than his previous wife. Hard to tell from such broad age brackets, given how so many people seemed to estimate their age.

The 1850 census was our chance to get a less fuzzy snapshot of the family constellation, keeping in mind that some of the children noted by tick marks in previous enumerations might now be married and in their own households—or possibly had met a premature death. There at the head of his household was a sixty year old Andrew, said to have been born in Nansemond County. Along with him was his forty five year old wife, Priscilla, and two daughters. One, aged fifteen, was listed as Amelia, while the younger, named Elizabeth, was ten years younger. None of the sons from previous enumerations was showing in this 1850 Boothe household.

A far different story was revealed by the 1860 census, as we've already noted. Andrew was living with Nathaniel Boothe. Both men appeared to have lost their wives, though Nathaniel's son Joseph was still in the household. Not much later, on October 25 of that same year, sixty year old Andrew died of "paralysis." In the county's death register, Andrew's parents' names were given as Abram and Cherry Booth. The reporting party was listed as brother Nathaniel Booth.

Thus, that reasonable guess that the two men were brothers was confirmed by one line in the younger one's death record. Looking a bit further, an 1856 marriage record for Henry Skinner and Andrew Boothe's elder daughter—under the name Permelia—confirmed her mother's name was Priscilla. Fast forwarding even further, a 1913 death record for Mrs. Mary E. Brinkley—likely the five year old Elizabeth in Andrew Boothe's 1850 census readout—gave us the maiden name for Andrew's wife: Spivey.

Seeing that Andrew's death record gave his specific relationship to Nathaniel—as brothers—can we now assume the other Boothe men in Nansemond County were also part of the same family? It seems tempting, except for one snag: I've run into an old genealogy book which indicates otherwise. Let's take a look at that report tomorrow.

Daniel and D N A

 

One use of DNA testing for genealogy is to help point us beyond brick wall ancestors to their possible parents. With my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe, I need that sort of help. Stuck as I've been with records from his birthplace in Nansemond County, Virginia, I thought this weekend might be a good time to jump to this other mode of research. After all, once the weekend is over, we do need to return to our search through early 1800s census records for the rest of the Boothe men mentioned in that federal enumeration.

One of the "helpful" tips at Ancestry.com's DNA ThruLines tool pointed me in the direction of possible parents for Alexander: a man named Daniel and his wife, the former Mary McAlexander. Sure enough, on ThruLines I had one DNA match said to have descended from their daughter Eveline. If, however, rather than looking at the matches for that daughter of Daniel Boothe, I looked at the ThruLines result for the proposed mother of my Alexander, there were actually matches from descendants of three children of Daniel and Mary: one match descending from Tamar, one from Sarah, as well as the one from Eveline.

Could any of this be correct? After all, though all DNA matches to descendants of a third great-grandparent will be slim,  they still could be viable connections if supported by reliable documentation.

I started looking for that paper trail. I began by searching for someone named Daniel Boothe with the dates provided by the trees of these DNA matches—though keeping in mind that ThruLines is a tool based not only on shared DNA but also a preponderance of subscribers' family trees which include this couple as their ancestors.

The dates for this Daniel Boothe showed a birth year in 1785, certainly nothing unreasonable. That would be an expected date for a father of a man born in 1816, like my Alexander. The date of death for Daniel was given as 1853. Again, nothing beyond a normal lifespan.

It was when I began looking more deeply into records associated with this Daniel Boothe that I ran into problems. With a given name like Daniel combined with a not-rare surname like Boothe, there were bound to be multiple possibilities. The further I looked, the more documents I pulled up, the less certain I was that my Alexander would be son of Daniel and Mary.

The bulk of the details convinced me to write up what I found, in hopes others might join in the conversation about whether we should collectively assert this as fact when the records don't seem to support the notion. Following the paper trail, though, will take more than one post—and will need to get in line behind Monday's focus on the one remaining Boothe man in Alexander's native Nansemond County. After Andrew on Monday, we'll take the requisite time to turn our attention to this other puzzle about Daniel.

Zooming Out

 

It has been a long five years since the pandemic caused our local society to abandon in-person meetings and exchange them for live online sessions. The funny thing was, though, once the restrictions were lifted and people were no longer required to remain isolated, our organization stuck to the status quo.

There were several reasons for that, first among them being that even our most tech-phobic members discovered the relative convenience of not having to drive somewhere on a blustery evening for the sheer reason of showing support to one's organization. Bunny slippers and hot chocolate or not, staying home is far easier than going anywhere.

Other reasons stood in our way as a group, as well. The onslaught of rising prices everywhere—from a cup of coffee to the gasoline to drive to the meeting—eventually conspired against us. When we used to see multiple offers of free space to use for our meetings, now we see dollar signs. And yet, our budget is constrained, too. It's far cheaper to maintain our website and host online meetings than it is to pay a rental fee for a year's worth of monthly meetings.

The down side to all that, I noticed, was perhaps something other groups might not experience: when we zoomed in to these handy online meetings, everyone sat still and listened to the speaker. Rare was the too-talkative member's interruptions (yet again) of the speaker; everyone was on mute. Even attempts at encouraging discussions among members seemed stilted, mostly a function of the technology, I suspect. The give and take of normal, everyday conversation just doesn't play well over online delivery.

For that reason, our board had been entertaining the idea of finding a way to meet again in person. If only occasionally, we wanted our talkative bunch to get together face to face once again. 

A few months ago, that reality began taking shape. One of our society's members had connections with the people who run our local FamilySearch Center, and asked about the possibility of their co-hosting one of our meetings. This week's meeting was the result of that open house gathering.

What happened at this in-person gathering, as the speaker's presentation finished, was that she recommended our members download the FamilySearch "Family Tree" app to their phone. On that app, she explained, was a section called "Relatives Around Me." Since I already knew there were several members who had already downloaded the app, I asked if we could all pull out our phones and try it during the gathering.

Almost immediately, people began calling out, "who's John?" or "who's Nancy?" We had several visitors for that meeting, so it became a time for people to meet each other—especially those people who, unbeknownst to them, might actually be distant cousins with someone else in the same room.

Of course, such calculations are only as good as the trees from which they are gleaned, but it was a great ice-breaker. Even more than that, I can't imagine any such form of interaction occurring, had we held a meeting like that online.

The electric energy level that carried through the next half hour, people sitting around computers, comparing notes on family trees, or sharing stories about research conquests or battles to overcome brick-wall ancestors—I can't imagine that happening online. Spontaneous life happens best in, well, real life. We can approximate it through technology. Make meeting easier through technology. But technology can't make life real. That comes with people reaching out to people, face to face in real life. 

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.  

Could Kinchen be Kin?

 

If my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe was born in Nansemond County, Virginia, then it would stand to reason that any of the other six Boothe men listed along with him in that county's 1840 census could possibly be kin—better yet, this brick wall ancestor's own father. We've already searched for records on three of those Boothe men—Nathaniel, Robert, and Henry—without finding convincing documentation, though the door is still open for possibilities with either Nathaniel or Robert.

Next, we'll consider another of the older men, in hopes that his records might indicate the possibility of a son the age of my Alexander who, according to his widow's Civil War pension application, was said to have been born in 1816. This man, Kinchen, made his appearance in the same 1840 census where I had found Alexander: in his native Nansemond County. There, Kinchen was listed as a man in his fifties, along with an unnamed wife said to be in her forties.

It was the listing of Kinchen's children which caught my eye. Kinchen reported one boy between the ages of ten and fourteen, another two in their upper teen years, and one man in his twenties. At the time of the 1840 census, my Alexander would have been twenty four years of age—if we can believe his wife's report about his date of birth—but by then, he was already married and showing in his own household. Could he have been reported in two entries?

Rewinding those census reports another ten years, though, would show a household which could have included a much younger and single Alexander. Could Kinchen's 1830 enumeration reveal a spot for Alexander? In that census, Kinchen actually reported five possible sons: one under five years of age, three between the ages of five and nine, and one between ten and fourteen years of age. At that point, Alexander would have been fourteen, putting him in the eldest age bracket for Kinchen's possible sons. Indeed, if we peek back another ten years to the 1820 census—where Kinchen was mislabeled as "Rinchin"—the only child in that household at the time was listed as a boy under the age of ten.

The catch in all this hopeful thinking is the difficulty in pinning ages within the brackets used in those pre-1850 census records. As it turns out, fast forwarding through time to the actual 1850 census, we discover the names of the two remaining sons in Kinchen's household. The younger was named Henry, who by then reported his age as twenty three, making his year of birth approximately 1827. The older remaining son was named Abram. And that is the sticking point: Abram's age was given as thirty, putting his year of birth at approximately 1820.

With a birth date in 1820, Abram could well have been that first son showing in the 1820 census as a child under ten. Thus, he would have been the one male in 1830 in the age bracket ten through fourteen—in other words, the only son in that category, the same grouping where we would expect Alexander to appear, if he were son of Kinchen.

That is a sticking point—if we could assume that year of birth were accurate. However, pushing ahead just one more decade to the 1860 census, Abram, now listed as head of the household which included his parents, gave his age as thirty nine, thus yielding a birth year of 1821, pushing him down to the second age bracket in the 1830 census.

Could Abram have been Kinchen's second-born son, and Alexander the eldest in this household? It's a moot point, seeing Alexander would have married and moved out of the household by 1840. I'm not too convinced, but it's hard to tell without further documentation. It's a vague possibility we need to keep in mind.

Finding a Missing Son

 

Questions about family composition become complicated, once our genealogical research pulls us behind the curtain of the 1850 census. Before that date, everyone but the head of each household becomes a nameless tick mark on a page in the enumeration. 

As we go through the possible Boothe men residing in Nansemond County, Virginia, during the 1840 census, we've been exploring each household's composition to see where a young man in his twenties might once have fit in before his marriage. The young man in question this month is my second great-grandfather, Alexander Boothe, who was born in Nansemond County about 1816, and lived there through the early 1840s, according to the one census record in which his name appeared.

So far, we've explored the possibility that Alexander might have been part of Nathaniel Boothe's household—but with no solid leads, thanks mostly to Nathaniel's intestate situation at the time of his death, plus a courthouse fire just as his son Joseph was appointed administrator of his estate. We've also begun working our way through the list of the other Boothe men resident in that county, according to the 1840 census, beginning with Robert Boothe.

Up through the 1830 census, it became apparent that Robert Boothe had two sons in his household. One son, as we discovered by pushing forward in time to that precedent-breaking 1850 census, was named Daniel, who was born about 1816, same as my Alexander Boothe, but who, unlike Alex, remained in Nansemond until his death in 1882.

However, Robert also had another son, according to that 1830 census—someone who would have been in his thirties by the time of the 1840 census. Could we assume, by the juxtaposition of Henry Boothe's name after Robert's own entry in the 1840 census, that Henry could have been that son? Or could it have been Alexander, with a vaguely incorrect year of birth? We'll need to take a look.

Just as I did yesterday in following Robert's own appearances in each decennial enumeration, we'll trace Henry's own census track record. Before 1840, as suspected, I couldn't find any entry specifically naming Henry in Nansemond County's results. But in 1840, Henry's household reportedly contained one male in his thirties, one girl under the age of five, and two young women between the ages of fifteen and nineteen.

That didn't paint too clear a picture of the family constellation. Even assuming the youngest girl were only one year of age, if either of the older girls were nineteen at the time—the upper limit of that age bracket—that would have meant a wife marrying at age eighteen. Granted, that was more than possible, but we don't want to assume anything here without checking for other confirmations.

That census, conveniently, was only ten years away from the record which named every member of the household. The 1850 census captured the details that the head of the household, Henry, was born in Nansemond County about 1809. Although this census did not specify relationships, the next entry was for a twenty eight year old woman named Mary J. Boothe—but she was followed by another household member also named Mary. This second Mary—Mary A.—was about fourteen years of age.

Looking to the next census in 1860 in hopes of finding clarification, we can see Henry and the elder Mary in a household which includes another Mary—but this time, the younger Mary's surname is Morgan, not Boothe. Along with this Mary was her supposed husband, Augustus Morgan, and a son, whom they named, predictably, Henry.

With this clue, I looked for any marriage confirmations, and fortunately found one helpful record. On May 24, 1858, this younger Mary from Henry's household married Augustus Morgan, son of a woman named Patsey Morgan. The record also confirmed that Mary's father was indeed Henry, although her mother was not the elder Mary in the 1850 household, but a woman named Amelia, thus calming my suspicions about the two Marys being too close in age to have been mother and daughter.

That resolved the question about the identity of the other son in Robert Boothe's earliest census records in 1820 and 1830, but what about Alexander Boothe? It seems clear that he couldn't have fit in that family grouping unless he had left the home as a young child before the 1820 census—an unlikely story.

With that question about Robert's other son resolved, it's time to move on to the rest of the Boothe men included in that 1840 enumeration. Our next focus: another Boothe man then in his fifties, Kinchen Boothe. 

About Robert — and His Sons

 

Running down the decennial census results in pre-1850 Nansemond County, Virginia, to assemble a list of Boothe households is my desperate attempt to figure out just who might be the father of Alexander Boothe. Alexander—or Alex, as he often was called after he moved to Tennessee—was my second great-grandfather, and the brick-wall end of the line for that part of my family tree.

If answers don't come easy, maybe the hard work will produce what I'm looking for. I've assembled the names of each of the Boothe heads of household listed in the 1840 census. The next step has been to see how far back I can go for each one of them, first with census records, then with tax and land records (and hopefully a will thrown in for good measure, though Nansemond County hasn't been helpful in the courthouse fire department).

In Robert Boothe's case, going through each decade's census has been informative. Granted, there are a lot of blanks to fill in and not much information to glean from the tick marks on those early census returns, but a possible story does emerge. Here's a brief tour of the findings.

Let's start with 1820, the earliest enumeration in which I could find Robert named. In that Boothe household, there was one man, aged between twenty six and forty four—I would presume that was Robert himself— plus two boys. One (presumed) son was aged between ten and fifteen, and a younger boy was under ten years of age. Rounding out the household was one girl under ten, and another young woman between sixteen and twenty five. The puzzling part was the addition of not one but two women over twenty five years of age, but below forty four—a wife and a sister, perhaps, but hard to tell without further guidance.

Moving ahead ten years, the household showed some predictable changes. The two boys had advanced by ten years for the 1830 census, with the younger one in his later teen years, the elder now a man in his twenties. There are some changes among the women from the last census: the youngest girl is now in her later teens, but in addition, there was only one other woman in her fifties. I suspect the other two girls were by now married, unless having lost their lives to the many diseases and dangers of the time. Robert himself was in the fifty to fifty nine age bracket, and extrapolating from his age bracket given in 1820, that would mean he was about fifty four or younger, possibly with a birth year on or before 1780.

By the 1840 census, this Boothe household had shrunken to three people: the younger son, now in his twenties, plus his parents, Robert and his wife.

The 1850 census provided the big reveal, at least for Robert's remaining son. Judging from Robert's given age, he was born in 1779. However, I am presuming his wife had, by this time, died, as the only woman remaining in the household, though of a right age, was named Honor Brasely. From this census, we also learn that Robert's son was named Daniel, born about 1814, making him the younger of the two male children from Robert's earlier census reports. And sure enough, finding Daniel's October 26, 1856, marriage record, we learn that his mother's given name was Christian, not Honor.

Seeing the big picture on the Robert Boothe family, I'm left wondering: who was Robert's older son, and what became of him? Perhaps that's where the next entry in the 1840 census comes in: the household of Henry Boothe.