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.