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.