Hinting About Marriage

 

There will always be complications encountered by those pushing back through the generations in search of their family's history. That, at least, has become the case with Polly Firth, sister of my fourth great-grandmother Sally Firth. If she wasn't married twice, as one record I just found seems to indicate, then she has a name twin. I need to determine which one is the case for my ancestral line.

No sooner had I located a marriage record for Polly in her home county of Brunswick in Virginia than up popped an alternate proposal. On its face, it seemed likely that Polly Firth might have been married twice. A closer look, however, steers me clear of such an assumption. Here's what showed up as I searched for details on Polly's life.

First was a hint at Ancestry.com, indicating that Polly was married to someone named John Burch. To top that off, the record supposedly also contained the clincher that Polly was daughter of someone named Thomas Firth. Yes, I agreed, both my fourth great-grandmother Sally and her sister Polly were daughters of someone named Thomas Firth.

Following that hint was another. This time, the resource was a page gleaned from a book called Related Royal Families. This two-volume genealogy was compiled by Marilu Burch Smallwood and published in 1966. The book can be found at the FamilySearch Library. As a copy of the book was also scanned by the University of Virginia and can be digitally searched through Hathi Trust, it is fairly easy to access.

The Ancestry hint dropped me squarely at the top of page 154, where the first sentence asserts: "John Burch Jr. born 1758 died 1796 married Polly Firth." The entry goes on to explain that a transcription of Brunswick County marriage records had indicated that Polly Firth, daughter of Thomas, had been married to John Burch on May 30, 1782.

Indeed, there were other Ancestry hints providing transcriptions of this same assertion. Fortunately, some of those hints included the "FHL Film Number" which could lead me directly to a digitized copy of that same Brunswick County record from 1782. Naturally, I wanted to check that out.

Copying the film number, I logged on to my account at FamilySearch.org, clicked the "Search" tab to select "Records" from the drop-down menu, scrolled down the page to select "More Options." That opened up a new dialog box, where I zoomed straight to the option near the bottom, "Add Record Options." I selected the wordiest choice, "film/fiche/image group number (DGS)," and pasted the FHL Film Number I had gleaned from the Ancestry hint.

Up came an option, into which I entered the names I was seeking. Sure enough, it led me to a May 30, 1782, marriage record for John Burch and Polly Firth. And Polly's father was entered as Thomas Firth, just as the Ancestry hint had noted.

But could this be right? Could this actually be our Polly Firth, daughter of Thomas? How many father-daughter pairs of the same name could there be in a county of, at the time, twelve thousand people?

I couldn't say why, but something seemed off about this record. I decided to retrace my steps and review all the information I had gleaned about Polly and the Firth family. After all, despite lack of all the usual documentation we rely on for finding family later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, what little I had already found included a few pertinent details.

The first record was the 1794 will of Polly's father, Thomas Firth. In that will, as I've already noted, all the Firth daughters were listed by their maiden names with the exception of one: Betsey Rawlings. If Polly had married John Burch in 1782, her father would have listed her by her married name, since he drew up his will subsequent to that wedding—even if her husband had died before her father's wishes were set to writing. She was, however, entered simply as Polly B. Firth.

There was, however, a second issue which surfaced as I reviewed the documents I had found. In the later marriage record for Polly, in which she was married to Howell Duggar in December of 1795, a note inserted in the record stated that on that date, Polly was twenty one years of age. If so, that would fix her year of birth at about 1774. Someone born during that year would only have been eight years of age in 1782, when our Polly supposedly married this John Burch. If, jumping back to the Smallwood genealogy, John Burch's wife had a son named Bazell in 1786, our Polly as his mother would have been twelve years of age—an unlikely scenario.

What seemed like an easy-to-accept suggestion from Ancestry turns out to be, at best, the case of name twins. Yes, finding two daughters in the same locale named Polly claiming a dad named Thomas Firth may seem to be a stretch, but apparently in Brunswick County, Virginia, it is far more likely that that was so, than that an eight year old child was given in marriage, even if it was to a descendant of royalty.