Given Under our Hands This Day

 

FamilySearch.org's Full Text Search is becoming my new best friend. When it comes to researching those hard-to-find ancestors from centuries past, the best place—sometimes the only place—to find mention of those near-invisible relatives is in court records. Yes, those tedious-to-read, overly wordy, illegible handwritten documents buried in back rooms of courthouses can bring us exactly the details we're seeking on our kin—if we can find the right records. And Full Text Search can zero in on the most reasonable possibilities.

As we wade through flowery phrases like "In the name of God, Amen," that open pages-long documents, or search for concluding statements such as "given under our hands this day," just to uncover the date confirming we've found the right person's record, our exhausted eyes are rewarded by the goldmine we are chasing. Sure, the handwriting may frustrate us, and the length of documents may weary us, but the good news is that we have it so much better than those family historians who went before us. The computerized digitizing process and transcribing AI systems have now made this process possible in a snap.

For this month, that is excellent news for me. Ever since discovering that I could break through my brick wall and find my third great-grandfather Thomas Rainey's parents' names, it's been far easier to continue down this path beyond that brick wall. I've started working on Thomas Rainey's maternal grandparents back in Brunswick County, Virginia, then branched out to their children, Thomas' aunts and uncles on the Firth side of the family.

We've already started work following the descendants of one Firth sister, Rebecca, who married Henry Abernethy. Then, the next attempt was to decipher the name of another sister's husband, supposedly listing Elizabeth Firth's spouse in one document as "Randle" Rawlings.

I took that question about "Randle" to Full Text Search at FamilySearch.org and played with the possibilities. Searching first for "Randle," some spelling alternatives popped up, beginning with "Randal." Pretty soon, another alternative was offered up at Full Text Search: the more reasonable Randolph.

I didn't want to presume that that was the actual name at first, as I didn't want to mislead the search process by jumping to that conclusion. Doing so might have caused me to miss some other possibilities. But with patience, I noticed that Randle and even Randal seemed to lead nowhere, no matter which keywords I combined with those options.

It was easy to eliminate those other options, even though they popped up in actual documents. The more reasonable option, Randolph Rawlings, soon took the lead with a preponderance of search results. And despite missing some key documents I'd like to see—a will, for instance—the documents Full Text Search offered up turned out to paint a useful picture, indeed.

In particular, one document started me on a new research path with its concluding statement, "Given under our hands this 9th day of January 1828." Following Elizabeth Firth Rawlings from that document's date uncovered an entire cluster of possible family members and business associates of her by-then deceased husband Randolph Rawlings—a project to piece together over the next few remaining days of this month's research project.

Clawing Through Another Brick Wall

 

As often happens in genealogy research, one long-awaited breakthrough precipitates others. Whereas before, that brick wall seemed impenetrable, now it becomes a matter of simply clawing our way through the next brick wall. The research is still tedious, but it's no longer at a standstill.

After having discovered the will for my brick wall third great-grandfather Thomas Rainey's maternal grandfather, of course I was elated—until I realized all the work that awaited at this next iteration. For a man whose last testament was signed in 1794—leaving all but one of his daughters still unmarried—slow progress was understandable. Yes, women back then could be nearly invisible, but documentation on anyone was hard to come by.

I did follow the lines of descent for one sibling of my fourth great-grandmother Sally Firth: her sister Rebecca, wife of Henry Abernethy (and conveniently the mother of a widely known Methodist preacher in Alabama). Even so, trying to identify the lesser-known siblings in that family's next generation has been, so far, beyond my reach.

Today, I explored another Firth daughter, at least far enough to discover some documentation on her own marriage. This daughter, "Betsey" in her father's will, was the only one listed there by her married name, Rawlings. Fortunately, a line item in a ledger of Brunswick County, Virginia, marriages showed an "Eliza" Firth marrying someone entered in the record as "Randle" Rawlings. An additional note in the 1784 ledger identified the bride's father as Thomas Firth, to assure us we had found the right one.

Granted, my question at this point is: was that husband's name actually Randle? Or are we once again witnessing some creative record keeping? I'll follow this line as long as I can to see what else might be uncovered from those early American records. In the process, perhaps that, too, will explain some distant cousin DNA matches.

Things You'd Otherwise Never Have Known

 

Walking through airport terminals brings with it a haunting sense that I am passing by family members whom I never knew. Perhaps most people would never give such a thought any consideration, but when you are immersed in genealogy—and even more so, genetic genealogy—you see as likely what others would dismiss as unlikely.

Even so, the nagging suspicion that I'm crossing paths with, say, a sixth cousin did not quite prepare me for the discovery that I might have just missed an encounter with a double sixth cousin. Such possibilities enter the realm of things you'd otherwise never have known, but today, I almost discovered the bearer of such an unlikely relationship.

Since I've been working this month on the line of my (formerly brick wall) third great-grandfather Thomas Rainey, discovering his parents' identities, and then his maternal grandfather's identity, I took that information to the ThruLines tool at AncestryDNA. Sure enough, there were several matches already assembled for my consideration regarding my fifth great-grandfather Thomas Firth. 

I selected one possible sixth cousin, and pulled up the readout proposing how we were connected. What was strange about that diagram was that the ancestors at the top of the list—Thomas Firth, followed by his daughter Rebecca—were not the only boxes entered in solid-white appearance. Skipping three dotted-line boxes for the subsequent generations not listed in my family tree, the last two boxes itemizing the generations preceding my DNA match were also solid white boxes, meaning I already had those people in my tree.

This DNA match had apparently already been confirmed in my tree, connected through another relationship in my family. Could this have been a case of some sort of double cousin link, only far more distant than the usual cousin of this sort? I had to look closer.

Yes, it is possible that, far back in our family's past, yet another person married someone from another branch in our tree. That's the same dynamic which brings us endogamy and pedigree collapse. No surprise here. I just didn't expect it on that side of my own family tree.

Of course, I had to look further into that assertion. After all, ThruLines suggestions are based on support from family trees. And family trees on genealogy websites are notorious for being copied from other family trees. Some of those trees contain errors. Where does that leave us?

While my DNA match's paternal grandmother's line did indeed line up with my own mother's line, this supposed second relationship would have come from the match's paternal grandfather's line. I started building that line up in my own tree, using documentation. At first, it seemed difficult to find any trace of documentation for that grandfather's line, partially because of a move from a different state, and partly in following someone with a series of misfortunes, such as remarriages and step-children.

In the end, I realized what had happened. It was the spouse of my related line who had married twice, with the child in question actually being a step-child for my family's direct line. Some family trees had mis-attributed the parents for this child, who then showed up as a direct relative instead of a step-relative. Ancestry.com went with the subscribers' trees; I chose to follow the paper trail.

I suppose at some point, with all these DNA tests showing us how we are all related, I might stumble upon someone who is doubly related to me, maybe in ways I would never suspect. Results from DNA tests can be surprising. But so can the people who build those trees.

Where There's a Will . . .

 

Succeeding with this month's research project to find the names of my third great-grandfather Thomas Rainey's parents—Isham Rainey and Sally Firth—I've since gone beyond that and found mention of Sally's name in her father's will. With wills being what they are—and since I also am using DNA to connect the dots between distant cousins—I couldn't pass up the chance to take a closer look at that earlier generation. After all, where there's a will, there's a chance I can find a mention of the entire family.

Sally Firth, wife of Isham Rainey, was apparently daughter of Thomas Firth and his wife, also named Sally. It was not hard, once the original document pointed me back to Brunswick County, Virginia, to locate Thomas Firth's 1794 will. From there, a reading of the simple will provided the names of Sally Firth Rainey's surviving siblings, something I'd like to review today.

The elder Thomas Firth first named his sons in his will, beginning with son William, then mentioning his namesake son, Thomas Firth junior. Then the document moved to the daughters, beginning with Polly B. Firth, then Betsey B. Rawlings, Sally Firth, and last, the youngest daughter, Rebekah Firth.

Since the senior Thomas Firth would have been my fifth great-grandfather, his relationship was still within range to yield some possible DNA matches—slim connections, but there, nonetheless.

Now that I have those names of the elder Thomas Firth's children, I'll be working on the lines of each of these descendants to see whether I have any DNA matches among those collateral lines. You never know when a detail discovered while exploring a sibling's line might reveal the answer to a fact about our own direct line that may have had us stumped up to this point.

Sally Firth

 

Ever since the 1980s, there has been a comic strip featuring a title I love: "Sally Forth." The title itself is a play on words, calling to mind the phrase which essentially means to launch out on an adventure. How apropos it has been to discover, in this month's research adventure, that the ancestor whose parents I've been chasing through centuries-old documents turns out to have a mother who claimed a slightly-morphed version of that same "Sally Forth" name. Only, in this case, her name was Sally Firth.

It was earlier this month, in slogging through mind-numbingly tedious court documents, that we discovered Thomas Firth Rainey's mother was named Sarah Firth. Yet, since one nickname often used for the given name Sarah has been Sally, that is exactly how I found her name documented in yet another court document. 

This time, her name appeared in an even older record, that of the will of her father, drawn up in Brunswick County, Virginia, in June of 1794. His name? Thomas Firth, providing a fuller explanation of just how my third great-grandfather received his own name. Not only did his middle name reflect his mother's maiden name, but his full name clearly linked him to his maternal grandfather, who likely died the very month that my third great-grandparent's parents were married.

So far for this month's research goal, we've discovered the names of Thomas Firth Rainey's parents—and now, the identity of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Firth. In addition, the will revealed that the elder Thomas was married to a woman also identified as Sally.

Whether the senior Sally was mother of the younger Sally, I can't tell, but the pull of the identical names lends credibility to that possibility. Since we've got quite a bit more time to pursue this research project for this month, perhaps that will become clearer before we need to move on to April's challenge. 

Advancements to the Heirs

 

In the Monroe County, Mississippi, court records assembled in the administration of the estate of Isham Rainey was one page inserted with the label, "A Bill of advancements to the heirs of the Estate of Isham Rainey, decd."

That, precisely, was what I was looking for. In the jumble, however, I couldn't be sure that the preceding scanned entry was the reverse side of that label. However, there were enough names ending in "Rainey" entered in that list to make me decide to save it for future reference.

What was recorded on that previous scanned entry was a mostly legible note reading,

The undersigned agree that they have received from Isham Rainy dec'd in his lifetime [?] the sums respectively charged to them in the above acct. 7th Jan'y 1845.

Whether that was the settlement to heirs or an exchange for a different financial transaction, I can't tell. The court records seemed to be filed in disarray, so there was no guarantee that the sequence of appearance held any significance. But the list introduces several more Rainey family members than I had previously been aware of—a good list to hold close for this month's project.

The list was headed by the signature of Thomas F. Rainey, Isham's son and one of the administrators of his estate. That known name was followed by some other Rainey family members I still need to identify, beginning with William Rainey. George W. Mealer we first encountered last Friday as the representative of some of Isham's grandchildren of the same Mealer surname. Uriah Duncan we likewise saw last Friday as a representative of one of Isham's daughters. Then came H. C. Rainey, unknown to me so far, and another Isham Rainey, possibly the deceased man's grandson, son of Thomas. An illegible signature appears to be W. R. Broo---, followed by H. W. Allen, and yet another Rainey family member whose signature appears to be W. P. Rainey.

How these names fit into the family constellation—if at all, in some cases—may help build that branch of the family tree in answer to my research question for this half-over month.

Image above from the 1845 Monroe County, Mississippi, probate file of Isham Rainey, deceased, courtesy of Ancestry.com.

Mixed Goals, Mixed Results

 

Having a research goal is good policy; focusing on one specific detail hones attention. Having multiple projects in the air all at once is good juggling practice, but it doesn't always yield the results we were hoping for. So far this month, mixing research goals has produced mixed results. And for those results, my biweekly count only reveals part of the picture.

In the past two weeks, I've mostly been focusing on my March research project: discovering the parents of my third great-grandfather, Thomas F. Rainey. Looking at this latest count, I can see I did make progress: I added eighty two additional names to my family tree. Mostly, these were collateral lines gleaned from names mentioned in court records, with their descendants also connected to the picture.

Included in that effort was a review of DNA matches uncovered either by the ThruLines tool at Ancestry.com or the ProTools option to view Shared Matches. But I also got a bit off the selected path for this month's Twelve Most Wanted, thanks to the unexpected revelation of an adoptee who turned out to be a close relative, a most welcome addition to that same family tree, which now has grown to 41,804 documented relatives.

That, however, wasn't the full tale of this multiple-goal fortnight. A welcome email from my husband's niece started me down a different family path, building out a branch on her father's tree which resulted in forty more names on my in-laws' tree. So that count gets upped to 41,793—a tree which will see regular growth come next month, when I shift my focus to my mother-in-law's branches of that tree.

Granted, trawling through pages upon pages of court-recorded family disputes can slow down progress with my count—but gives a clearer picture of family dynamics, for sure. That will be the path for next week's research on the Rainey family and related branches, and those endless pages of court records as we sort through the remains of Isham Rainey's estate in Mississippi.

A Different Kind of Surprise

 

I have a confession to make. It has to do with all those saccharine TV and magazine stories about adoptees meeting their birth family. While the stories may be sweet—even heartwarming—they almost seem to me to be just a little bit too effervescent. As in, over the top. I've always wondered whether the journalists producing the stories—not to mention the companies sponsoring such stories—put just a little bit too much icing on top of an otherwise interesting story. After all, there may be more DNA kits to sell in the process.

Well, that's what I thought until last month, when I got a message from another Ancestry.com subscriber. In a letter that couldn't have been more considerately written by "Your DNA Guide" Diahan Southard herself, a total stranger reached out to explain that we share far more centiMorgans than most other relatives could have expected.

This stranger happened to be an adoptee. And I unwittingly happened to be a close relative.

Carefully and cautiously, we bridged the gap between strangerhood and close family connection. First through the anonymous channels of Ancestry's messaging system, then gradually to email, we eventually took the next step to a phone call.

At the time of that first call, I happened to be accompanying my husband on a business trip. Far from home in a hotel room where nothing was familiar, I placed the call and made the first tentative exchanges of small talk. By this time, I had gathered enough information to figure out the possible connection between us and began explaining that theory, while the person on the other end of the line shared a review of the independent research—actually, the guessing game—that led to unsealing adoption papers and discovering the once-redacted story.

We talked for an entire hour, a surprise to me when I realized how quickly the time had passed. If it weren't for an upcoming appointment I had that next hour, I could easily have stayed on the line and chatted for much longer.

Why? Well, this is the point: no matter how cheesy those adoptee reunion news stories may sound to strangers, there is something uncanny about the experience of connecting with a close relative you never knew you had. Granted, that one phone call might have been an exception, a time shared between two people who can really keep a conversation going. But it wasn't a one-off; our next phone call easily lasted for two hours. And we both have been amazed at the unexpected sense of connection. How can that be?

The more I study genetic genealogy, the more it has always left me in awe. But this most recent discovery has reached beyond that. Much like the experiences I've mentioned years ago, when transcribing World War II letters home from my father-in-law—my husband would find himself thinking, "I would have written it that way, too," even though his father died when he was barely five years of age—this new connection between close relatives who never knew each other has been just as awe-inspiring.

We play with chromosome segments and centiMorgan counts as if we were working math equations, but those finite numbers are the measure of something far more intangible about life. Yes, it's great to find a new DNA match, but it's the mystery buried deep inside the genetic substance that holds me entranced. How does something so small as that direct such vitally expressive connections between otherwise total strangers?

Who Got the Money?

 

Now that we've figured out the parents of my third great-grandfather Thomas Firth Rainey and seen him labeled as the son of Isham Rainey and Sarah Firth, it's time to revisit that pile of legal papers assembled in Monroe County, Mississippi, at the time of Isham's passing. 

Normally, a will would clearly spell out the surviving descendants, but we don't have such a convenience, as Isham apparently died intestate. What we do have is a file of court records, complete with scraps of paper containing handwritten notes by all the men who felt that Isham's estate owed them money. In other words, what we now have to sort through is a mess. And the only reason I'd be sorting through this file, page by scribbled page, is to determine just who got the money. I want to know who his children were.

There are a few clearly labeled documents in the file, thankfully—such as this letter to the court by one woman named Elizabeth Arnold. According to her letter, she was appointing Uriah Duncan as her attorney, to ensure that she received the "proportionable share" of her father's estate.

Back in Oglethorpe County in Georgia, where Isham's son Thomas once lived, three people jointly sent a letter to the court in Mississippi. They were James A. Mealer, John M. Mealer, and Mary Ann Mealer, who together were appointing George Mealer of Lowndes County, Mississippi, to serve as their attorney in representing their rights as the grandchildren of the deceased Isham Rainey.

There were, of course, numerous others sending notes to the court to make sure that money owed to them from the Rainey estate did indeed make its way to its creditors. All that takes time to follow.

Though there were many lining up to claim their due from the administrators of the estate, the ones I'm interested in will be the ones who could demonstrate their legal right to an inheritance from that same pot of money—if any was left after that long line of inquiring creditors received their due. Perhaps it is a good thing that I have a weekend ahead of me to read through all those statements.

Revisiting Virginia

 

Over fifty years after the fact, Thomas F. Rainey reported that he had been born in the state of Virginia. While the sole location of any documents I had been able to find for this third great-grandfather of mine had been the state of Georgia, where he had married his wife and raised his family, I've now been able to connect him to someone who had died in Mississippi. But Virginia? What were my chances for finding Thomas by searching through an entire state?

The 1850 census showed that Georgia resident Thomas Rainey had reported his age to have been fifty three at that time. Hence, a birth year of approximately 1797, right? At that point, Virginia's population would have been around eight hundred thousand. What were my chances of finding him in a crowd that size?

I decided to look, anyhow. But not for Thomas, himself. Instead, I tried my hand at searching for his father whose gift—at least to me—was the more unusual name Isham.

One item that stood out for me in that quixotic search was a marriage entry in a Virginia ledger preserved from Brunswick County. Dated July 31, 1794, it named Isham "Raney" as the groom. Granted, I still had my doubts that he would be the only person with that name among eight hundred thousand residents. But seeing the name of the bride made all the difference.

Her name? Sarah Firth. The very name represented by the middle initial "F" in Thomas Rainey's own name.

Image above: Line item entry from the Brunswick County, Virginia, marriage ledger as transcribed by The Virginia State Library; image courtesy of FamilySearch.org.   

Isham in Mississippi

 

If, in 1844, the Coweta County, Georgia, court appointed resident Thomas F. Rainey as administrator of the estate of a deceased man named Isham Rainey, what connection between the two would make such an appointment reasonable? Considering that this Isham Rainey had died not in Georgia but in Mississippi, there must have been a significant link between these two men.

I decided to check the records available for Mississippi during that time period to look for anyone by that same name, Isham Rainey. Whether I found the right one will apparently take quite a bit more reading, but I did locate one document regarding the administrators for the estate of one Isham Rainey in Monroe County, Mississippi.

Granted, Monroe County in the 1840s boasted a population of under ten thousand people, but its population, based on census returns, was more than doubling every ten years. The appearance of this Isham Rainey in court records could be a case of a name twin.

The trouble with this document was in the listing of the named administrators. Just like the record we had found yesterday from the Georgia county court, it named more than one man as administrator. There was, however, a problem. While the Georgia appointment named Thomas Rainey as administrator along with a man named Jonathan Lee, the Mississippi record identified someone named H. W. Allen heading up an unnamed group.

In opening up the first pages of the file, though, I barely needed to look farther before spotting one detail: the heading on the next page included the name Thomas F. Rainey. One page beyond that, complete with ink blots and crossed out letters, included the unclear entry, "Isham Rainey paid the above account for Thos. F. Rainey his son."

The complete file—which I have yet to finish reading—contained an accounting of the then-current estate of the man said to be Thomas Rainey's father. If this Isham Rainey in Mississippi was indeed the father of the Thomas F. Rainey then living in Coweta County, Georgia, this little slip of paper was indeed a fortunate find.

Still, I'm unable to quell the doubt, "What if this was a different Isham Rainey who also just happened to name his son Thomas?" Since our Thomas had, years later, reported his birthplace to have been in yet another state—Virginia—the next reasonable stop in checking out this wandering Isham would be to rewind the clock and see if he could be found listed in any records back in Virginia.

Above: Handwritten note inserted into the file including the estate records of Isham Rainey of Monroe County, Mississippi; courtesy of Ancestry.com. 

Is Isham the One?

Finding a name like Isham Rainey in the 1830 census, right in the same Georgia county where my third great-grandfather Thomas Rainey had settled, was encouraging. As rare a name as Isham might have been, though, that was no guarantee that Thomas' neighbor by the same surname was his father. I had to wonder, is this Isham the one? Or was he a brother, a cousin, or even someone totally unrelated?

Granted, Oglethorpe County in 1830 had thirteen thousand residents. I suppose there could have been a name twin in the mix of a crowd that size. But Isham was indeed a less common name. Though an infographic from Ancestry.com—not surprisingly, the genealogy company features details on many given names—attributes an Arabic origin to the name Isham, it also mentioned that according to their data, the country with the most men named Isham is the United States. But don't assume that's today's details; according to that same infographic, the year in which the U.S. had the most people born with that name was 1840—just about ten years after this census record helped me spot that Rainey name.

So, where did such a name come from? One quick detail from Wikipedia noted that Isham is actually the name of a village and civil parish in Northamptonshire, England. It apparently became a surname, also from England. Eventually, as names sometimes do, that surname became a given name; third U.S. president Thomas Jefferson, for instance, had a maternal grandfather named Isham Randolph (though his own mother's maiden name was Isham). In fact, I found a genealogy book filled with details on eight hundred years of family history for one line claiming that surname.

Does that make this Isham Rainey kin to the famous families of colonial America? I doubt it. But I did find an interesting document, filed in 1844 in the Georgia county where Thomas Rainey had, by that time, moved, naming him and another man as administrators of the estate of the late Isham Rainey, senior, of Mississippi.

While that document doesn't necessarily explain the connection between Isham Rainey and Thomas Rainey, the five hundred dollars bond posted by the two named administrators certainly infers more than a passing acquaintance in the old neighborhood.    

While We're Still in the Neighborhood

 

Last week, I had speculated that a thorough search through records from the late 1700s or early 1800s in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, might help tell the tale of just who else migrated from Virginia to Georgia after the American Revolution. That, I already knew, was the story behind my Taliaferro fourth great-grandparents' migration south to the area around the Broad River valley. I had wondered whether the same would hold true for this month's focus from my Twelve Most Wanted, my third great-grandfather Thomas F. Rainey. After all, that's where he met up with his future bride, Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro.

While working on records from this neighborhood, I thought I'd delve into this possibility further. Since the couple married in 1818, I tried my hand at the digitized copy of the subsequent 1820 census first. I could barely make out the name Thomas F. "Raney" toward the bottom of one page, but have struggled to read through the rest of the listings. No other possible family members' names have jumped out at me so far.

When I moved ahead to the 1830 census in Oglethorpe County, however, I found a different scenario.

In the same neighborhood as Thomas "Raney," I spotted a few other possibilities. One was the name of Nicholas Powers. He, you may remember, was the minister who had performed the wedding ceremony for Thomas and his bride, Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro—after having just married Mary Elizabeth's widowed mother, himself.

As my squinting eyes searched farther down the list, I spotted another name of interest. This other person, like Thomas, also was surnamed "Raney" and went by the first name Isham. That unusual name I had seen elsewhere: Thomas Rainey had given one of his younger children that same name. 

There was one problem with that discovery. Thomas' son Isham Rainey was born about 1840. And this name I had found in the 1830 census.

Something worth following up on? You bet.

Above image: excerpt from the 1830 U.S. Census for Oglethorpe County, Georgia, containing the names of heads of household for two Raney families; courtesy of Ancestry.com.

My #NotAtRootsTech Week

 

Well, it's been a week. Amend that: not only was it a week, but it was a week when I wasn't even a stay-at-home #NotAtRootsTech participant.

There are a few reasons for that. To start with, the past week has been rough. Along with a co-instructor, I've begun a new, four-part genealogy class in person—something I've long felt the need to do. Doing stuff in person takes time, effort, travel, and other logistics. No wonder people prefer the convenience of Zooming in—but I firmly believe we miss something in the bargain.

Add to that, with beautiful spring weather comes a long-awaited construction project for our home, held at bay during the rainy weather last month. Only problem: those convenient virtual meetings used to conduct genealogy society business during the week also find a way to share the hammering, sawing, and drilling occurring outside my now-demolished living room wall. If I knew this was going to be the week the demo actually happened, perhaps I would have made this my week to travel to RootsTech in person.

Not to worry; I can always go back and watch the recordings. Sure, I'll miss out on the great sales exploding out of the exhibit hall, even for those #NotAtRootsTech. But perhaps some time later in the year will be more peaceful—or at least conducive to watching reruns of RootsTech sessions.

Who am I kidding here? Truth be told, what I was doing in my "spare" time was hyper-fixating on my latest project: examining all those Rainey DNA matches to see who their matches might have been, and whether those shared matches might tie me in to the other branches of Thomas Firth Rainey's family tree.

And I think, after several iterations of that process—did I mention the word "tedious"?—I may have found one new connection. I'll keep at it next week, as well. But it's encouraging to find a match which may well lead me to other connections to my third great-grandfather in this Rainey line. I need some wiggle room to explore his possible extended family.

Not Looking for Names Alone

 

Whether names alone can provide a clue to guide me backwards in time as I research the roots of my third great-grandfather Thomas Firth Rainey, coupling that detail with DNA matches can give this search added insurance.

While behind the scenes, I've been scouring numerous court documents related to possible Rainey family members, I thought I'd pop over to check out how many DNA matches on Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool might reveal a connection.

One standout echoed what I was hoping for yesterday: a namesake who clearly was related to my Thomas Firth Rainey. No surprise with this discovery: the category with the most DNA matches in this family, according to ThruLines, belonged to the son who was named after his own father. 

The junior Thomas Firth Rainey gives me twenty out of twenty seven DNA matches linked to the Rainey surname. That far supersedes the number of DNA matches connected to my own direct line ancestor, Thomas senior's daughter with the impossibly long name, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey.

I suspect there may be more Rainey matches who have not yet been pointed out by Ancestry's ThruLines tool. One way to check will be to explore the ProTools' "Shared Matches" function to see whether I can spot any more results. After all, since Thomas and his wife had at least ten children, there should be more Rainey DNA matches out there to find. Right now, ThruLines only spotted descendants of four children—so far.

In hopes of discovering more DNA matches connected to this Rainey patriarch, I'll be adding that task to those behind-the-scenes explorations to do as this month unfolds.

There Was Another Clue

 

I wasn't kidding when I recently mentioned that reading court records can put you to sleep any time of day. I was on the hunt for a document which might combine my third great-grandfather Thomas Rainey's name with any other family member from his past. Apparently, there are several such possible records—it's just that they all seem to involve complicated situations.

Before I forget to mention one thing, though—trawling through piles of court records can also make you forget things—there may be another way to power our way through to an answer to this month's research question: who were the parents of Thomas F. Rainey?

Not that the Rainey family had a traditional naming pattern that they adhered to—if there was such a detail, I've failed to notice it—but there were some interesting details in the family's choice of names which could turn out to help us.

One example of these naming idiosyncrasies was that of their youngest daughter, my direct ancestor whose full name was Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey. Almost as if they already knew she would be their last child, her parents had made good on their intention to memorialize her older, now deceased, brother Warren Taliaferro Rainey.

Warren, in turn, had been named for his paternal grandfather, who had died some time before the baby's own birth. Who knows? Mary Elizabeth's older brother Charles and sister Sarah may well have been named for their mother's own brother and sister by those names. And, of course, her own next-older brother Thomas Firth Rainey was obviously named for their father.

While I don't yet know enough about the family to realize whether the other Rainey children were namesakes for aunts, uncles, or older relatives, I'll surely keep an eye out to see if the names of Mary Elizabeth's older sisters Martha and Mildred, plus older brothers Isham and Richard, may have been echoes of other ancestors. Perhaps these can provide clues about the Rainey family from which my third great-grandfather Thomas descended.   

Getting to Georgia

 

If the goal this month is to research a family which had originally lived in Virginia, how did they get to Georgia?

Though we are barely into the month of March and the third of my Twelve Most Wanted research topics—Thomas Firth Rainey—I can already see that while this third great-grandfather may have spent his adult life raising a family in Georgia, he claimed to have been born in Virginia. What made a young resident of one of the leading locations of the nascent United States decide to move elsewhere?

On the surface, the reason might seem to do with Thomas Rainey's choice of a bride, for he married a Georgia-born woman by the name of Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro. But even her maiden name told me that this, too, was a family name known for its roots in Virginia.

As it turns out, that connection between the Raineys and the Taliaferros may have revealed only a small part of a larger circle of Virginians who all decided to head south to Georgia. That migration may have reached back to the days of the American Revolutionary War, when support for colonial military action was weaker in Georgia than in the other American colonies. Some of the early recruits sent to serve in Georgia were actually from Virginia. The second Georgia regiment formed in 1776, for instance, was comprised of eight companies of men from Virginia.

Whether any men from the Rainey family were among those recruits, I can't yet say, though I do know that a Taliaferro relative of Thomas' future wife did serve in Georgia. After the war, though, a small group of Virginian Continental soldiers returned to Georgia, remembering that they liked what they had seen there. They petitioned the legislature for a grant of 200,000 acres, which was provided upon the condition that two hundred families would be brought into the settlement.

That group of settlers arrived and claimed land in the Broad River valley, a location which, before 1790, was part of Wilkes County. Beginning in 1790, Wilkes County was divided to form a number of smaller counties. Among those newer counties was Oglethorpe County, the same county where, in 1818, Thomas Rainey took Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro as his bride.

Was the Rainey family part of that migration of two hundred Virginia families to Georgia after the Revolution? I can't yet say, but I do know that Mary Elizabeth's extended Taliaferro family was among those Broad River settlers. It may be possible that that was the same reason that drew Thomas Rainey's family to the area as well. If I can find census records, land records, or even tax records for that area during that time period, it may help to locate any families there claiming that same Rainey surname.

When There Isn't Much to Go By

 

Beggars can't be choosers, as the saying goes. When there isn't much to go by, we must take what we can get. In the case of my fourth great-grandfather Thomas Rainey, he didn't leave much of a paper trail. That, however, is understandable; this pre-Civil War resident of Georgia may likely have been one of the many southern residents whose records subsequent to his death were destroyed by fire, flood, or even wartime casualties.

There are a few clues we can go by, however—weak leads, but possibilities, nonetheless. Keeping in mind my role as the Genealogy Guinea Pig, I'm willing to test any theory.

After searching hopelessly for more documentation—side note: reading court records can put you to sleep at any time of day—I decided to take a cue from some of the names in Thomas Rainey's own family.

First on my list was the patriarch, himself. Written in the records I found as "Thomas F. Rainey," I wondered what the "F." could mean. Though none of the documents I already located divulged the answer to that question, I did notice two clues. One was the fact that his namesake son was called Thomas Firth Rainey, as was that man's son after him. The other was that, apparently, other family members among Find a Grave volunteers had inserted that information on Thomas' own memorial on that website. Firth might be a clue worth keeping in mind.

If I couldn't find anything from that first clue, I could take a more indirect route and trace Thomas' wife. After all, the two of them would have met up somewhere. What was their connection? Finding the history of Thomas' wife Mary might give us a more well-rounded picture.

However, relying on the marriage record itself to guide us in finding Thomas' in-laws would not be a wise move. The minister, Nicholas Powers, had entered Mary's maiden name as "Talafero." Her real family name, as it turned out, was Taliaferro—as we have already seen from her baby daughter's impossibly long name, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey. Why the minister couldn't get Mary's maiden name right is beyond me; at about the same time as Reverend Powers performed the ceremony for the young Rainey couple, he himself married the new Mrs. Rainey's widowed mother, Mrs. Mary Taliaferro.

If that detail doesn't sound complicating enough, it is important to know that the young Rainey couple named their first son Warren Taliaferro Rainey, after Mary Taliaferro Rainey's father. And when that son died young in his twenties, the couple must have decided to name a subsequent child by that same name in order to honor Mrs. Rainey's deceased father. The only problem was that that next child turned out to be a daughter, not a son.

With all of that family detail—even if much of it was about the in-laws—we may have enough to search for the nexus between the two families. And that nexus might lie buried in the details of what convinced a number of colonial Virginia families to move the distance to the borderlands of Georgia. 

Beginning at the End

 

It is interesting to read family history assertions noted by other researchers who evidently had missed the details of one or more pertinent documents. Such may have been the case, yesterday, when I mentioned a July, 1988, query from a Rainey researcher who had provided a list of "all" Thomas Rainey's children. As it happened, there was at least one family name missing—that of my second great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey. 

Beginning our search at the end of Thomas Rainey's life helps to fill in the picture, for there in his will, he specifically records his youngest daughter's full—and unusually long—name. Drawn up in October of 1857, the document was not entered into the record in the county of his last residence—according to the 1850 census, that would have been Coweta County, Georgia—but in the now-extinct Campbell County.

The 1850 census itself wouldn't have provided the full picture of Thomas Rainey's family, for Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey had not yet been born. Not until her father's death could I find any confirmation of her birth—and that, only from inferences based on those two documents. Orphaned at a young age, then dying shortly after her own marriage, Mary Elizabeth was for a long time the missing link who kept me from connecting her to Thomas' Rainey family line.

Now, Thomas apparently has become the next pivot point in the Rainey generations. We can move from the point of his last testament filed in Campbell County, to his 1850 residence in Coweta County, and then jump to his possible residence, according to the 1820 census, in Oglethorpe County, the same Georgia location where he had married only two years earlier. But then what?

Pushing Thomas back to his origin in Virginia—his reported state of birth, according to the 1850 census—would be a different matter. No steady procession of documents could easily point the way to the late 1700s. There were, however, a few clues we could consider from what we already know. Those hints are certainly worth the try to follow.

Chasing Unanswered Questions

 

Back in July of 1988, someone from Texas posted a query in a genealogical publication called Rainey Times.

That researcher basically asked the same question I'm chasing after, nearly thirty eight years later: Who were the parents of Thomas F. Rainey? Perhaps that curious researcher back in Texas might have found the answer to that question by now, but I certainly haven't. This will be my month to see if I can.

I have some ideas about this third great-grandfather of mine, but so far, I've failed to produce satisfactory documentation linking him to his past. I did manage to discover that his middle initial—F.—likely stands for Firth. And I've also realized that the very child who is missing from that 1988 listing happened to be my own second great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey (yes, that was indeed her full name).

There has been a lot of time invested in learning more about this family over the years. Tracing back to those roots leading to the Rainey line has been information hard won. But I can't let that brick wall remain standing; I selected Thomas Firth Rainey as the third of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026 in hopes of pressing back at least one more generation to his past.

While I know that Thomas Firth Rainey spent most of his adult life in the state of Georgia—marrying in Oglethorpe County in 1818 and dying in Coweta County in 1858—there is a possibility that his origin was in Virginia. At least, that's what he reported for his entry in the 1850 U.S. Census. This month will hopefully tell more of that tale.

Image of query from Rainey Times above is courtesy of the actual insertion, as shown at Ancestry.com; the image of the publication's July 1988 cover is courtesy of FamilySearch.org where the entire Volume 8 is available to view.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

 

The start of each month has me facing forward, looking at the plans from this year's Twelve Most Wanted for the upcoming month. When that starting date falls on a Sunday of my biweekly count, it also has me looking backwards at what I've accomplished in family history pursuits for the past two weeks.

Since February had me examining colonial records to see what could be discovered about my fourth great-grandfather Job Tyson—hint: it wasn't much—I didn't think I had made much progress on my family tree. Surprise: the numbers told a story that was a bit more encouraging.

Though progress wasn't galloping forward at my usual two-hundred-plus rate of the past few reports this year, in the past two weeks, I did manage to round up records for an additional 148 ancestors and their collateral lines.

Much of this was thanks to examining DNA matches linked to the Tyson line of descent, as I brought several lines down to the present time through solid documentation. There is much more work to be done on these Tyson descendants, despite my inability to identify Job's parents yet. Hopefully, in a future year, I'll narrow the possibilities from the three locations which were under consideration this month, possibly through inferences, as actual documentation has, so far, eluded me.

Bottom line in looking back is that I now have 41,722 documented individuals in my family tree. It's growing slowly but steadily. Research attempts like this month's quest to find Job Tyson's origin may have gone especially slowly, but future months may fare better.

For this upcoming month, we'll turn our attention from the coastal Georgia home where Job Tyson spent his adult years to another southern ancestor. For March, that featured research project will involve finding the roots of yet another Georgian ancestor, my third great-grandfather Thomas Firth Rainey. Again, this will be a man whose adult life can be documented through records in Georgia, but his connection to the past will involve finding colonial connections, this time possibly in Virginia.

Tomorrow, we'll take a closer look at what has already been found concerning Thomas Firth Rainey.