Plowing Through Piles of Paperwork

 

Researching ancestors who lived in the United States prior to the 1850s can put the brakes on progress. Instead of breezing through the many documents we rely on for more recent family connections, finding records to connect those more distant generations finds me plowing through piles of paperwork. Wills, mostly, and property records become the mainstay—those handwritten faded pages which too often leave me bleary-eyed.

So when I turn to my biweekly count, my habitual ritual for checking research progress, I expect to see numbers sadly lackluster. After all, harvesting names and ages of family members from a hundred-year-old census record is a process which moves far quicker than stumbling through word after word of near-illegible handwriting in a last testament which may or may not turn out to be, say, my John Carter and not someone else's.

Surprisingly, even after my pursuit of John Carter's most recent wife's parents—John Chew and Margaret Beverley—that walk through the documents didn't slow me down in the least. I somehow managed to add 285 new family members to my tree. Of course, keeping in mind that process includes the long slide back down to the present generation for DNA testing purposes—my preferred way to figure out those many DNA matches—each pursuit of an ancestor eventually includes the more modern, and quicker, process of adding the newest generations.

With that blend of the tedious search for the long-since past and the quicker discovery of the recent members of collateral lines, my tree is now up to 38,027 documented individuals. Whether that process will hold true for the next two weeks—I'm back to square one, looking at Mary Meriwether Gilmer, my March focus for my Twelve Most Wanted for 2024—I can't yet say. For a woman whose last days barely made it past that 1850s dawning of improved access to documents of genealogical interest, she will likely lead us back to those days when women were much harder to locate in public records. We'll find out soon enough what the next two weeks will hold in the way of research progress.

With a Name Like John . . .

 

...it's easy to get lost in the crowd.

My sixth great-grandfather's given name was John. Granted, with a surname like Chew, that might help differentiate him from all the other Johns who lived in Spotsylvania County during Virginia's colonial age. But I'd guarantee that quite a few of his neighbors in that era, despite the county's population likely being less than ten thousand British subjects, sported that same common given name.

Besides that, as we enter the realm of seeking relatives solely through court records—the Chew family's Saint George Parish being among those whose parish registers are lost to time—we may discover that even amongst members of his own family, that name John will appear again and again.

Still, thanks to a glance through an abstraction of court records for Spotsylvania County, we can see that our Hannah Chew's father John had his will presented in court in 1756. We are fortunate in seeing that record—or at least its facsimile—preserved for posterity. Very distant posterity.

From that record, we can see that John provided for his as-yet-unmarried daughter Hannah by naming her guardian, likely her older sister Mary Beverley's husband, Joseph Brock, who also served as John's executor. From John Chew's will, we can see that Hannah had a young brother, also named John, whose appointed guardian, Harry Beverley, may well have been a relative from their mother's family. In addition to those two younger children of the elder John Chew, his will also named an older son, Robert. Finally, we can assume from the absence of any mention of John Chew's wife, that the woman was already deceased. She remains, at least for this point, unnamed.

Having all these names documented helps isolate this John Chew from any others. This is necessary as we push our way back through the generations in the American colonies, moving on to our next step in the process.

Going back to the old Carter genealogy by Joseph Lyon Miller, we see there is a brief entry on the Chew family line. We'll take a look at that in the next few days, but remembering how easily we can be led astray by not double-checking the author's assertions, we'll need to seek records to verify any statements—or at least adjust our path and point our research in the correct direction.

According to Joseph Miller, John Chew was a man well known in his county. He was appointed Justice of the Peace in 1731, according to Miller, and had previously married, in 1729,  Margaret, the daughter of Harry Beverley of that same county. (Lest you jump to the conclusion that this Harry Beverley was the one appointed as guardian to John Chew's son John, other notes I've located state that John Chew's father-in-law Harry had died in 1730, making quite impossible his appointment as guardian for his young grandson John.)

While I'm thankful for the identification of John Chew's surviving family members in his will, that document only provides information for those living members of the subsequent generation. Our goal, however, is to press backwards in time to learn who John Chew's own parents might have been. To help serve as the trailblazer which it can be, we'll turn again next week to Joseph Lyon Miller's Carter book to see what other brief comments on the Chew family he provides. In the meantime, you know I'll be busy this weekend locating any court records to verify the statements in the Miller book for myself.

Getting Back on Track

With all the uproar this month over discovering that John Carter's wife might not have been the one we had always presumed she was, I'm beginning to lose my confidence in quite a bit of old research assertions. While the question of whether Mary Elizabeth Armistead was John Carter's wife is still unresolved (at least in my mind), my fifth great-grandmother Hannah Chew still remains confirmed as John's last wife by documentation. For one thing, her name is mentioned in John Carter's will, drawn up in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, in 1783. In addition, we've since seen that there are other court documents which identify her as well.

What I still need to do for the remainder of this very short month is to get back on track with my research plan. That means, primarily, to wrap up what can be discovered on Hannah Chew's own line. According to this month's research plans for my Twelve Most Wanted for 2024, February was the month to focus on the Chew line as well as the Beverley line of Hannah's mother. And that we will do in the coming days.

There is also one other loose end to revisit from last month, when we began our exploration of the Carter line in colonial Virginia. That detail was to answer the question my sister had posed when I first mentioned that we had Carter roots: whether our family was descended from a man fabled to be the wealthiest Virginia colonist, as one age-old genealogy book had asserted. Somehow, before the end of this month, I hope to fold that conversation into the research mix.

For now, we'll stick to the straightforward question of Hannah Chew's direct line. For this, Spotsylvania County court records—or at least their transcription published almost sixty years ago—provide us with a start through the confirmation that Hannah's father was a man named John Chew.

From John Chew, the path back through colonial history gets interesting. I wouldn't want to run out of month before we get a chance to snatch a birds-eye view of that Chew line in Virginia and the rest of the colonies. While we'll take a quick look tomorrow, we'll discover that we won't have to go far to realize that, once again, we'll be plagued with the snags of multiple generations of namesakes.

The Parallax of Previous Centuries

 

Can our viewpoint of history be distorted over the centuries by a form of parallax? That is what I wondered this week as I pondered the strange connection between names in the extended family trees of the Beverleys, the Carters, and the Chews of colonial Virginia.

When I first struggled with the two different middle names cited for the same young child—John Carter's granddaughter and Owen and Elizabeth Thomas' daughter—I was struck by the connection of the one possible name, Kenner, to another branch of the extended family tree. That Kenner name had made its appearance by marriage into the related Beverley family.

It was only when I sketched out the contorted branches of the merged family trees that I began to see my problem. What is it about blithely running through old genealogies of eighteenth century families and court records spanning those same years of the 1700s? It is as if time got compressed.

From my twenty-first century viewpoint, the 1700s were the 1700s, all in one lump. Never mind that one date was in 1734 and the other in 1783. They both seemed so close together, because I was the one who was far away. My perspective distorted my vision. The little girl whose middle name might have been Kenner was listed in the 1783 will of a grandfather who was born about 1715, and who in later life married a woman whose mother was older sister to another woman who married a man who was likely even older than the girl's grandfather. Put that spaghetti bowl of relationships in perspective!

The same trick blinded me when I considered another family connection: the mention of the surname Roy both in the Beverley line and in the Chew line. Yet, for Thomas Roy, Kenner's widow Judith's second husband, to be related to his brother-in-law John Chew's grandfather would put him as brother of John's mother. Hardly likely, when I think more concretely about the dates involved.

Perhaps the 1700s, seeming so far removed from our current time, can lull us into a complacent mood, as we struggle to focus our eyes on blurry handwriting of three hundred year old wills and other mind-numbing legal documents. Much like the risk of parallax can throw off measurements based on differences in one's relative point of view, looking back through time can bring with it the hazard of making far more assumptions about the time period than might be warranted. Sketching it all out, literally making the scenario we're researching into a visual diagram labeled with dates and positions, can serve not only to take a snapshot of the research question, but allow us to ponder whether our perspective from the sidelines gives the most accurate reading of our ancestors' reality.

Tying up Another Loose End

 

Sometimes, it is those loose ends we find while we race to pursue our ancestors' records that trip us up. 

This week's discovery started out innocently enough: I was looking for any reason for the discrepancy in the middle name of John Carter's granddaughter Sarah Kenyon Thomas given in his will, and the name provided in another will by her own father, which stated it was Sarah Kenner Thomas.

While finding several entries concerning people with the surname Kenner in colonial Virginia court records, I stumbled upon another puzzle: the introduction of the name of Thomas Roy, who seemed to be mentioned often in the situation of one deceased Rodham Kenner and his widow, the former Judith Beverley. Today, I need to tie up that unexpected loose end in our Kenner foray down the genealogical rabbit trail.

Barely five years after the Reverend Kenner's passing, a March 1740 entry in the court records of Caroline County showed someone named Thomas Roy was appointed as guardian for George, the young son of the widow of Rodham Kenner. A mere month later, a suit brought in the same Caroline County against the same Thomas Roy did us the favor of identifying Thomas' wife as Judith, executrix of Rodham Kenner's will. And later that year in August, the record showed that the jury in that case found the same Judith, now Thomas Roy's wife, entitled to the whole of Rodham Kenner's estate.

Indeed, since Judith was born a Beverley, I could have consulted the posthumously-published genealogy by John McGill, The Beverley Family of Virginia. There, the entry for Harry Beverley's daughter Judith listed two spouses: first husband Rodham Kenner, followed by her second marriage to Thomas Roy.

According to the book, Thomas Roy was born about 1712 and died in 1772. An interesting sidelight of the book provided the note that Thomas Roy, Judith's second husband, was a son of someone in Caroline County named John Roy. An earlier record in Caroline County showed that the will of one John Roy had been proved in 1734 by Dorothy—possibly his wife—and someone named Thomas Roy. The same Thomas as Judith's second husband? 

What I have yet to discover—though I'm still working on it—is whether Thomas Roy might have been related to yet another connection in this extended family: the in-laws of Judith's sister Margaret. Margaret Beverley was Judith's older sister who had married John Chew of my family line. Margaret's mother-in-law happened to also be a daughter of a couple named John and Dorothy Roy. While the timeframes may be off, discovering this still makes me aware of just how often these same colonial surnames seem to cycle through family histories of that era.

Whether it was this Kenner connection which, decades later, yielded us the name of Sarah Kenner Thomas in her father's will, I can't yet say. First, we'll need to discover what might be found for the alternate middle name for young Sarah, the one mentioned in her grandfather's will: Kenyon. We'll explore that possibility next week.

Kenyon or Kenner? Gets Stickier

 

I admit it: I'm already deep into the family history forest's latest rabbit trail. And with every step, the trail gets thicker and stickier.

Last month, I spent time trying to locate all the information I could find on my fifth great-grandfather John Carter of Spotsylvania County in colonial Virginia. This month, the plan was to move to John's supposed second wife, Hannah Chew, and examine what could be found on her family line. And yet, there was a snag. There's always a snag.

The problem is that John Carter may have had yet another wife. No, take that back: the wife we thought he had might not have been the right person. After all, even the D.A.R. entry for the Captain seems to indicate otherwise.

The complications, however, burrow deeper than just that glitch. For one, we spotted yesterday the possibility that the name he gave in his will for his granddaughter might not have been entirely correct. According to her grandfather, that child's name was Sarah Kenyon Thomas. But according to the will of her own father, her name was Sarah Kenner Thomas.

Which one was the correct name?

To try to answer that question, I began by first searching for anything I could find in county court records for the surname Kenner, followed by another search for the surname Kenyon, which we will consider in a later post.

As it turned out, there were several entries containing that Kenner surname in abstracts of Spotsylvania court records, from which we can piece together a story of possible relationships. And that's where things get sticky, when it comes to piecing together a family tree. Apparently—and I've heard this before—families in the early years of colonial Virginia were quite intermarried. We'll see this as we trace the Kenner connections.

Before we run through this obstacle course of court resources, to put this rabbit trail in perspective, the mention of Sarah Kenner Thomas was made in her father's will dated in 1772. Yet, the only other references I could find for a surname Kenner occurred several years before that point. Here's how they unfolded.

First was the discovery in Spotsylvania County of one and only one name attached to that search: a man identified as the Rev. Rodham Kenner. I found mention of him in several Spotsylvania County records, but then, since property owned by the man who got me started on this chase—John Carter, Sarah's grandfather—spanned the border between Spotsylvania County and Caroline County, I discovered more entries in that second county.

To set the stage—though not the order of original discovery—I found mention of the nuncupative will of the Reverend Kenner listed in Caroline County. The abstract mentioned the will was proved by Judith Kenner, and that the estate was divided by an unnamed wife and son. Digging further for Rodham Kenner's wife's name, I found a Spotsylvania County mention of a 1729 (or 1730) marriage license issued for Rodham Kenner and Judith Beverley.

Thus, the Judith Kenner mentioned in Rodham's will could very possibly be this same wife identified as Judith Beverley. The interesting point here is that we've already found a Beverley family connection in the mother of my fifth great-grandmother, Hannah Chew, who married John Carter. Hannah's mother, Margaret, was daughter of Harry Beverley, who also was the father of Judith Beverley. When Hannah's husband John Carter was drawing up his own will and thinking about his orphaned granddaughter, did he somehow recall the wrong name when he meant to identify his in-laws' Beverley connection?

A guardianship proceeding from Spotsylvania County brought up another tie-in to that same Beverley family: at about this same time, Hannah's father John Chew had been designated as guardian of his wife's younger sister, Agatha Beverley. Security for the appointment was provided by none other than this Rodham Kenner, in-law by virtue of his marriage to Judith Beverley.

While indications were solid that Judith Beverley was Rodham Kenner's wife, who was the unnamed son in his will? Back in Caroline County, abstract of a March 1740 court entry revealed the son's name to be George Kenner, specifically naming his father and noting that the man was already deceased. (An interesting side light, which we'll save for later, was that the guardian appointed for the still-underaged George Kenner was a man named Thomas Roy.)

The court record also indicated that young George Kenner, through his new guardian, was to receive (in trust, presumably) "all the estate" from his "late guardian" Howson Kenner. That set the stage for a final record found back in Spotsylvania County. Fast forward another twenty five years, and the now-married George Kenner—along with another party by the name of Roy—is selling his portion of an inherited property passed from his grandfather Harry Beverley through Harry's five daughter, with the portion of George's now-deceased mother falling to him. Judith apparently had left no will—or at least did not mention this particular parcel of inherited land in her will, if she did draw one up.

This last court record provided a neatly-summarized overview of part of the Beverley family tree, listing the daughters whose husbands could now claim they had been in-laws of a significant colonial Virginian. But other than discovering the identity of three additional men with the surname Kenner—Rodham, his relative by the name of Howson Kenner, and Rodham's son George—this excursion taught us nothing more than that those colonial Virginians had multiple family connections. It certainly didn't reveal just who it might have been whose namesake became Owen Thomas' daughter and John Carter's granddaughter. 

Taking One Step Backwards

 

Finding a female ancestor whose life spanned the eighteenth century can be a challenge. Looking for any leads on my fifth great-grandmother Hannah Chew means looking first to the trailblazers who have already led the way—and then tracking down the records which might verify (or dismiss) such assertions. From these leads, we can hopefully take a confirmed step backwards in time to verify Hannah's parents, and maybe even grandparents, too.

Thankfully, because Hannah Chew became the second wife of John Carter of Spotsylvania County, Virginia, we can glean some information on her from her husband's will. Drawn up in 1778, the date on the executors' bond points us to a date beginning her widowhood at the close of 1783. Through that document—and a subsequent codicil upon the birth of their youngest daughter Elizabeth Matilda—we can glean some of the names of John Carter's family, but not all. (For those whose eyes water at the mere sight of the poorly-aged document, a transcription of the documents may ease the strain.)

Lack of any obvious family names among the witnesses and executors of Hannah's husband's will leaves us with few clues there as to her roots. However, embedded within the given names of two of her daughters are signs pointing to Hannah's parents. The name of her daughter Margaret Chew Carter, my fourth great-grandmother, resonated with Hannah's own maiden name. And Margaret's older sister—Mary Beverley Carter—pointed toward Hannah's mother's Beverley family.

Fortunately, a genealogy published in the mid-1950s—John McGill's The Beverley Family of Virginia— provides a potential guide on Hannah's own marriage and children, and then that of her parents. From this, we learn that the possible identity of Hannah's parents would be John Chew and Margaret Beverley.

Granted, books can contain mistaken material—even those which were well-researched by respected genealogists. Right away, I can spot some discrepancies in this published account, and we'll certainly take time this month to review those. But even with a quick look, I can find transcriptions of old court records of Spotsylvania County supporting a marriage between John Chew and Margaret Beverley, and a transcription of John Chew's own will in the same county, naming an underaged Hannah among his children.

Looking at these documents—and even their transcription—brings up other questions, though. One, which we'll look at tomorrow, presents a discrepancy which grows out of one mention in Hannah's husband's will, and links to some other material I've spotted online, both in other people's family trees and in other actual documents linked to this same family.

Which report was right? And what caused the variation? Transcription errors? Clerical errors? I'm not sure I'll be able to figure out the answer, but one thing I know: that same discrepancy echoes in the trees of DNA matches I've reviewed, as well. While we may never be able to discover the truth, at least we can investigate the possible causes of the discrepancy. 

Getting it on the (Right) Calendar

 

The other day, I ran across a snarky comment on a tree posted at Ancestry.com. Perhaps complaining about the many trees posted under a title which includes the phrase "work in progress," this subscriber noted something to the effect that every family tree is a work in progress. Almost as an afterthought, the next sentence warned, "Copy at your own risk."

Yet, here I am, wandering my way around abstracts of three hundred year old court documents, trying to piece together the story of my Carter, Chew, and Beverley ancestors from copied documents—and feeling stumped at every attempt to verify rather than simply copy. For instance, looking at one transcription of marriage licenses from a Spotsylvania County record book labeled "An Account of Ye Governor's Dues," I was glad to glean the date for John Chew's marriage to Margaret Beverley on June 26, 1729. But scanning over the rest of the page, I couldn't help but notice another possible related couple, Judith Beverley and her intended, Rodham Kenner. Their wedding date? Entered as June 1 of 1729-30. Say what?

Oh, yeah, I remembered: isn't that around the time they switched calendars? The time when dates became double-barreled because everyone had to play catch-up for cheating days out of previous years? So, which year was that marriage, I wondered. I'll need to get it on the right calendar.

Sure enough, checking the FamilySearch wiki for a quick take on the situation, a simple background explanation told me that the switch went from the Julian calendar—instituted by Julius Caesar—to the Gregorian calendar of Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. All was not so smoothly executed, however, since not all the world's countries followed the Catholic holiday traditions. England, notably, held out for political reasons until finally relenting in 1752.

Part of the process of making the shift from the one calendar to the other was a requisite relinquishing of ten days from the year, in addition to moving the New Year's Day designation from the month of March to the beginning of January. The dates between January 1 and March 25 therefore represented enigmatic territory—did the clerk rely on the old calendar, or decide to make the switch to the new year and new calendar? Depending on where in the vast British Empire that record-keeper might have lived, a date like today during those years might have been in 1751 or 1752, depending on when that locality celebrated New Year—thus, the double-barreled appearance of dates such as 4 February 1751/1752.

The problem with just now entering that world of double-barreled dates in my own research—after all, I've never been this way before—is that I can't be entirely sure whether such entries were owing to the actual clerk's report or an inaccurate transcription. Looking at that entry in question today—that of the marriage of Rodham Kenner and Judith Beverley on June 1 "1729-30"—could be due to the calendar change (though a much earlier year than the stated British change in 1752), or it could be due to some other clerical mis-entry in the record book itself. The only way I can know for sure would be to inspect the original record for myself.

We'll be exploring more about Judith Beverley and her beau, Rodham Kenner, in the weeks to come, as we learn about all the in-laws of my sixth great-grandfather, John Chew of Spotsylvania County in colonial Virginia. In fact, as I go through the process of adding many of these family names from old transcriptions—then verifying them through other documents—the numbers on my family tree are swelling. In the past two weeks, I've added another 452 names to my tree, which now contains 37,502 individuals. Still, I have yet to further verify many of them, as several digitized record sets from this time period and location are still browse-only at FamilySearch.org—if even available online at all.

Start With What you Know

 

If my research goal this month is to learn all I can about the family of my fifth great-grandmother Hannah Chew, the first step in this process is to start by reviewing what we already know about her. While I technically don't know these details personally, this will actually be an exercise meant to write down the details I have gleaned from others' assertions in published genealogy books, some of which date back almost one hundred years. From that introductory step, I'll then need to set about confirming by documentation what others have written without support. As I've noted so many times before, genealogy books are useful as trailblazers to lead us to the records. 

Fortunately for this month's research, I had already found some information shared in a book concerning Hannah's mother's family. According to that book, John McGill's The Beverley Family of Virginia, Hannah Chew was born in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, and remained there her entire life. As we already learned last month, Hannah became the second wife of Captain John Carter sometime around 1767. She bore to him one son, Robert, and five daughters.

It was likely before the time Hannah's only son Robert died—when barely three years of age—when her husband drew up his own will, which he then had to amend with a codicil following the birth of yet another daughter, Elizabeth Matilda, born in 1780. John Carter's mention in his 1778 will of making special provision for the care of "my five younger children" (rather than simply five daughters) after his eventual death likely reflected Hannah's original family composition of four daughters and a son.

Because Hannah's husband was eventually appointed as a captain in the American Revolutionary War, that would make Hannah not a "daughter" of the American Revolution but a wife of the Revolution, if there were such a designation. Her life spanned both Virginia's colonial period and that of a fledgling nation, including the continued struggle with Britain during the War of 1812. According to the Beverley genealogy, Hannah died in 1821 in her native Spotsylvania County.

Fortunately for us, Hannah appeared in the generations of the Beverley family history book because of her mother's association with that line. Next step will be to push one generation further back in time and review what author John McGill and others reported about Hannah Chew's parents. From there, we'll launch out on our own to see what else can be discovered about Hannah's Chew family history in the coming weeks.

The Daisy Chains of Genealogy

 

We may be smack in the midst of winter—just the right time for staying out of the weather and working on genealogy—but right now, I'm envisioning a scene which better fits the much warmer days of summer. Ever sit on a lovely hillside overlooking the view of a grassy meadow, whiling away the time with  friends? In such a summertime scene, I've reached for some wildflowers and made daisy chains while chatting, slipping one stem through another until a necklace emerges.

As I work my way backwards through time in my family's history—set in a much more wintry scene—I still see myself crafting a daisy chain. Only this time, it's not one daisy looped through another, but one name drawing me to a previous generation. Slipping from one to another through times, name changes, quickly-passing dates: that's what happens when we keep on tying together our family's history.

At the beginning of the year, when setting up my Twelve Most Wanted for 2024, I decided to take on a project to learn more about my mother's Carter ancestors. I could hardly believe I was finally to the point where I was researching ancestors who lived in the 1700s. We start out with ourselves, adding our parents, then grandparents, and think we will never get "there"—that far-away time we hear others boast about. ("How far back have you gone?" we hear people ask others, while thinking we can hardly make it past our own grandparents.)

And then, as I looked at that Carter line—my fifth great-grandfather, a mind-boggling thought to me—I realized that name merely represented another flower in the daisy chain. If I researched John Carter, I'd have to research his wife, too. And if I researched her—making my fifth great-grandmother Hannah Chew my research goal for February—I'd soon find myself adding another daisy to the chain of family names, pushing back another generation to Hannah's own mother, part of the colonial Beverley family.

With the start of this month—with one hand still holding the Carter daisy, while the other hand reaches for the next daisy—we'll begin learning what can be found on the colonial Virginia family known as the Chew family. With some preliminary scouting, I already can see that this surname will lead us back as far in colonial American history as we can go. I also can spot some junctures where we'll need to take caution to not follow the wrong person with the same name—or the branch of the tree which led away from Virginia to Maryland, or the other branch which headed for Pennsylvania. Those are some of the research hazards we face when an ancestor's given name was one as simple—and common—as John.

We'll start off tomorrow with a review of what we already know about John Carter's second wife, Hannah Chew, mother of my fourth great-grandmother Margaret Chew Carter, whose middle name pointed me toward this new branch of my family by calling attention to her mother's own maiden name.

That's Beverley — With an Extra "E"

 

When it comes to digging deep into our family history roots, I've noticed two possible situations for ancestors who flaunted a middle name. One was simple enough: a second given name like, say, Beverly. The second possibility used the option to carry down a family name—a surname of a significant someone from a past generation. If you spot a middle name like Beverley—spelled with that extra "e"—that may be an example of the latter.

As I delve deeper into the history of my fourth great-grandmother's parents, I realize how fortunate I am that her family opted for that latter naming style. My fourth great-grandmother, born Margaret Chew Carter, provided me with a middle name guiding me to her mother Hannah's maiden name: Chew. The second wife of John Carter, Hannah Chew used that naming device not only to carry forward her own maiden name to the next generation, but she used the same device to recognize other members of her family, such as in the naming of her firstborn daughter, Mary Beverley Carter.

Dispel any notion that that Beverley was simply a given name spelled elaborately. That Mary Beverley with the extra "e" received her middle name from her mother Hannah's own mother, Margaret Beverley, part of a longstanding colonial Virginia family, the Beverleys. Of course, mentioning that today means I'm jumping ahead to next month's research goal.

For now, as I continue this month's process of checking all my Carter DNA matches with Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool, it turns out I do have a DNA match with a descendant of this Mary Beverley Carter. According to Joseph Lyon Miller's Carter genealogy, Mary Beverley Carter married a local military man by the name of Richard Stevens, and had seven children: Lucy, Lewis, Robert, Hiram, Horace, Polly, and Judith. The same litany was repeated in a later genealogy book, The Beverley Family of Virginia.

Notice, in that list, the lack of any son named after his father, Richard Stevens. Yet when I turned to examine the line of descent from the one DNA match I share with Mary Beverley Carter's line, that is the very name showing on the line of descent as son of the couple. This makes for a problem.

Since the two genealogy books identified Mary Beverley Carter's husband as Captain Richard Stevens, given the time frame of that generation, I wondered whether that captain might have served in one particular war for which we have ample records: the American Revolution. 

I took my question to the national website of the Daughters of the American Revolution—D.A.R. Looking for a Richard Stevens who served from Virginia, I found my answer in no time. The entry for Captain Richard Stevens, husband of Mary "Beverly" Carter, listed the specific names of his children from whom D.A.R. applicants had descended. Along with entries claiming eldest son Lewis and youngest daughter Judith, there were several who had designated another man not named in the two genealogy books we saw: Richard.

Yes, Richard: the same Richard who was listed in Mary Beverley Carter's line of descent for my DNA match. Time to pull up another court record on this Spotsylvania County family in Virginia to see whether there was a will with any mention of a son named Richard...or not.

Ancestor #2: One Thing Leads to Another

 

One reason I have trouble wrapping up a research project is that, in family history, one thing always seems to lead to another. We may call what we are building a family tree, but in reality, it is more like a daisy chain. One family name always links us to another.

That's the way it seems to be for me as I lay out my plans for researching my Twelve Most Wanted for 2024. Yesterday, I may have mentioned that my plan for January is to research the Carter line on account of my fourth great-grandmother, Margaret Chew Carter, but that leads to the question: where did she get a middle name like Chew?

That, of course, means spending some time this coming February on the Chew family name and history. Chew, as it turns out, was Margaret's mother's maiden name. And that Chew line, as we'll find out, is connected with another colonial American surname, Beverley.

It will take some digging through old history books and documents to find information on this specific Chew family line during that time period of the early 1700s. Once again, utilizing what can be found on local history of that time period may deliver some insights regarding what we might otherwise miss about the specific family line, but it will be worth the effort of exploring that time period. There is still so much to learn, even if we come up empty-handed from a document search on this woman's family. However, based on what I've already observed, I'm sure we will find so much more.