End of Another Messy Month

 

The month is out, but not the messy project I had planned for January. Perhaps it's a rule: in genealogy, we always bite off more than we can chew, but we don't always realize that predicament at the first bite. Choosing to outline the descendancy of John Carter's two, possibly three, wives couldn't possibly be a project that would fit into thirty one days.

As this often happens for those Twelve Most Wanted projects, at the end of the month I still have far more work to do on the Carters of Virginia. At this stopping point, as usual, I'll outline what still needs to be done for the next time I pick up this research question.

The overarching goal was to seek out those lines of descent which would follow the matriline leading back to John Carter's two documented wives, Sarah Kenyon and Hannah Chew. That would mean charting the daughters of the daughters of those two Carter wives. The goal—in case this project could ever become a viable reality—would be to find eligible descendants willing to take a mitochondrial DNA test to help trace back to the specific Carter wives. I am far from done with that work, meaning that this will be a task to continue behind the scenes.

As I went through this process during January, I noticed one detail. Just as genealogist George Harrison Sanford King had observed in researching the line of descent from first Carter wife Sarah Kenyon—that the Kenyon surname kept appearing as a family name in subsequent Carter generations—I saw the same repetition for the Carter wife for whom marriage records have been elusive. That wife was said to have been named Elizabeth Armistead, and for her likely descendants, that Armistead name seems to appear quite frequently over the generations. Completing the matrilineal line of descent for the supposed Armistead offspring may help clarify that question—though it will also call for examination of the family names which may have been inherited from the other, non-Carter, side of their family.

In the future, the mainstay of this continued research will be a thorough examination of court records for generations to come, in some cases the only way to find mention of the names in each Carter child's own family. This, too, will be a process requiring much time—although the help of technology through such conveniences as FamilySearch's Full Text Search will help expedite this exercise. It will also be a project which requires us to trace some family members as they moved away from their childhood home in Virginia to settle in other states.

For now, we'll close the books on John Carter's family and our exploration of what can be found of his colonial Virginia home and neighborhood in Spotsylvania County. It's time to step into a new month, and the second of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026.