Double Checking

 

While puzzling over the will of Sarah Kenyon Heslop—and reviewing the links provided in a comment by fellow genealogy blogger Patrick Jones of Frequent Traveler Ancestry—it occurred to me to double check the hints I had found for Sarah's apparent brother James Heslop, both of whom were descendants of John Carter.

I'll admit: yes, I want to focus on the female descendants of my fifth great-grandfather John Carter, but let's just say I got sucked into a beguiling rabbit hole. Finding James Heslop's will right next to Sarah's slapped my curiosity upside the head. I had to piece together this family line of a man who, dying at age seventy nine, was still waiting to see whether his wife would bear him an heir.

The story, as I'm sure you suspected, involved a marriage later in life for James. Over at Ancestry.com, looking at hints provided ample choices for wives' names, making me wonder whether any of them referred to our James Heslop in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Fortunately, the transcription at Ancestry.com offered for the 1851 marriage of James Heslop and Lucy Ann McCalley gave a film number for the digitized record, held at FamilySearch.org. 

Sure enough, signing in at FamilySearch and heading straight to the catalog to perform that search led to an entry labeled "Marriage Books 1795-1970" for Spotsylvania County, Virginia. The bad news: the actual entry bearing that film number was a collection of "photostat copy" records. I'd have to poke my way through the thumbnails to find the right entry.

First step was to find an index, which told me that I could find James Heslop on page thirty one. Poking my way through the thumbnails once again, I located the page number and began scanning the entries to find any mention of James Heslop.

At the bottom of the righthand page, I found him. Only in this entry, James was listed as marrying someone named Lucy Brown—and the date was far from the 1851 date I had expected from the Ancestry entry. This entry was, unfortunately, undated, but it followed an entry dated January 30, 1813—not anywhere near 1851.

 

This, I'm presuming, could be James Heslop's first marriage. This first Lucy might have been the mother of William, James' heir according to his will, should the second Lucy Ann have failed to give her aging husband any children. This first Lucy may also have been the mother of the other son mentioned in James' will: Isham. Of either of those suppositions, though, I'd need more information before I can enter them as fact.

I did, after much more wandering, locate the promised marriage record for James Heslop and Lucy Ann McCalley in 1851. Let's just say the ministers in Spotsylvania County must have entered their marriage records when they got around to it. This Heslop marriage was part of a list of several line entries of such ceremonies.

There are so many gaps in the life story of James Heslop and his wives. To fill in the blanks, I'll need to locate a few more court documents—if, that is, I don't first haul myself out of this tempting rabbit hole and get back to business as promised.