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.