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.