Cheering for the Girls' Team

 

With a goal this month to research the matrilineal descendants of my fifth great-grandfather John Carter, I'm beginning to feel like the cheerleading mom of a family large enough to field two teams for a softball tournament. Do I cheer for the boys' team? Or the girls' team?

This month, the answer—genealogically speaking—is: I'm cheering for the girls' team. 

I started out, finding what documentation I could for each of John Carter's daughters. This is not easy, considering the time frame we are working with, spanning much of the eighteenth century. I jump-started my search by selecting as my first attempt the granddaughter mentioned in John Carter's own will: Sarah Kenyon Thomas, whose mother was John's daughter Elizabeth.

Keeping in mind the risks inherent in relying on published genealogies, I nevertheless defaulted to using some of these to guide in discovering names of potential husbands for each of these female Carter descendants. Sure enough, there was a mention of Sarah Kenyon Thomas as second wife of a Virginia widower named James Frazer—this, according to genealogist John Goodwin Herndon's privately published 1951 book, The Herndons of the American Revolution.

From this union, fortunately, I found three daughters to trace, and began my long slide down to the present era, document by document, daughter by daughter. I began this next iteration by focusing first on the Frazer daughter with a sure-bet given name: Sarah Kenyon Frazer, whose own marriage and family yielded four daughters.

Onward I searched, until I reached the present time, and a daughter born in 1939. I had made it to the brink of the generations of our own memory, and was poised to uncover the identity of someone eligible to  participate in a Carter matrilineal project, should it ever become a reality.

As often happens in these attempts, that was where I ran into a matrilineal roadblock. Unfortunately, that daughter tragically died in an automobile accident as a teenager. Her only sibling: a brother.

There are some families we research which, over generations, clearly present as families of sons of sons. Thankfully, what I'm seeing of the Carter family history shows me that there were several daughters in the branches extending over several generations who may still permit us a chance at this mtDNA experiment.

At this point, to be able to launch such an experiment will still involve much preparatory work simply building and documenting each line of descent, from each of John Carter's wives forward in time to living matrilineal descendants.