Stuck in the Murky Middle Again

 

There is a familiar pattern that appears every time I launch into new research waters. I dive in to the work, sinking deep into the middle. Surrounded by piles of documentation, the sheer number of files I still need to read seems to drown out the daylight. Right at the start, before I even know it yet, I'm stuck in the murky middle. Again.

When it seems there's no light to guide me—not even that ominous light at the end of the tunnel—by now I know to just keep plugging. So it wasn't dismaying this weekend when I pulled up my DNA matches and discovered that my seventeen suggested John Carter matches among my DNA cousins at Ancestry's ThruLines tool seem to connect through lines of descent that, well, wobble more than I'd like. Things are still murky; I can wait until that shaft of explanatory daylight makes its way through the thickness.

Not to be undone in numbers, those fifty nine DNA matches attributed to John Carter's last wife, my fifth great-grandmother Hannah Chew, have also kept me stymied. Most of them descend, as I do, from Hannah's daughter, Margaret Chew Carter. But do you think the Carters were aiming to keep things simple when they named that daughter? Of course not; papa John Carter had already named another daughter by that same first name, Margaret. Granted, she was daughter of a different wife—whoever that woman turns out to be—but that fact has seemed to evade detection by several family historians, including those who are my DNA matches.

When I face such research conundrums, I've learned that to conquer the murkiness, I first have to research my way through that messy middle. It will take wading through pages and pages of court records to organize them into categories, and by relatives, before I can comprehend how the pieces of the family story fit together. 

I admit: actually finding the records necessary for this sifting process can be headache job number one. For that heavy lifting—at least, as soon as I have reliable names, dates, and locations—I head first to FamilySearch's Full Text Search. After wandering through some wills and deeds for a few Carter family members—mostly men, not helping my goal to search for the daughters—the Full Text Search led me to a paper written by a fellow of the American Society of Genealogists. 

This typewritten report from the 1960s, though admittedly long past the 1700s of John Carter's lifetime, referred to several court records which I am keen to inspect. Yes, here comes more of the murky middle, as I pull up digitized copies of those records which haven't been lost to courthouse fires and other catastrophes, but as each document gets placed in its logical order in the timeline of the Carter pedigree, I'll hopefully begin to see a glint of that far-off light.