There's Always Something

 

When I hear people say that they are "finished" building their family tree, I always have to re-translate that idea in my own mind. Someone like that might have tired with the process of searching for ancestors, but you and I know there is always something—or someone—more to find. Whether that is owing to a new insight regarding an intractable mystery ancestor, or revelation of a previously missing clue, new discoveries bring more research possibilities. 

It will be no surprise to learn that, in the past two weeks, I've added 348 names to my in-laws' tree, which now holds documentation for a total of 34,831 individuals. Since I've been concentrating on my mother-in-law's Ijams ancestry—the descendants and, hopefully, the ancestry of her fourth great-grandfather, William Ijams—progress had been hampered as I tried to push backwards to previous generations specifically using documented resources. But then, a surprise discovery thanks to the ThruLines tool at Ancestry.com broke opened an entirely new source of distant cousins—and another matrilineal route to explore for mtDNA purposes.

Following that, another surprise discovery that I may share ancestral Broyles connections with a fellow member of our local genealogical society has sent both of us on a chase to discover just how close that connection might be. Since our most recent common ancestor may point us to the level of seventh cousin or possibly a connection more distant, it's no surprise to see that the initial sketches of the connection have already added an unexpected sixty names to my own family tree, which now contains 38,366 names. And even though my research goal this month is to focus on the Ijams line in my mother-in-law's family, I'll continue working on this Broyles project behind the scenes. It's so fun to discover our friends and neighbors can also be relatives.  

The Complications of Pedigree Collapse

 

When constructing a family tree, perhaps we expect a diagram with lines stretching straight back into the past, never giving a thought to the possibility of tangled lines crossing and recrossing each other. However, when a family settles in a limiting area—whether the proverbial desert island or a small valley enclosed by impassible mountains—their children's choice of mates becomes limited, as well.

I never thought of southwest Virginia or the neighboring land in northeastern Tennessee as being land-locked in any limiting way. Apparently, when searching for a prospective spouse, some of my forebears may not have looked as far away as they could have done, for one DNA match found on my Tilson ThruLines results pulled me up short this weekend. I totally forgot about the possibility of pedigree collapse in this longstanding family settlement.

Working my way through the matches sharing my fourth great-grandfather, Peleg Tilson, I had just advanced to another of his daughters, someone with the rather common given name of Mary. To make matters worse, Mary happened to marry someone with a name designed to create an even more challenging research prospect: John Brown.

I didn't have much detail on this couple, other than the information I had gleaned from an old Tilson genealogy published in 1911, but supposedly, the first DNA match I had for this ThruLines entry shared far more genetic material with me than I had come to expect.

Most of the matches connected to me through Peleg Tilson's descendants are at least my fifth cousins, sometimes even fifth cousins once removed. If a cousin at that distant level of relationship shows up in my matches at all, the centiMorgan count is generally very low. True, according to Blaine Bettinger's Shared centiMorgan Project at DNA Painter, a fifth cousin once removed could share up to eighty centiMorgans with me—but could also approach zero. An expected average is likely to be around twenty one centiMorgans, but in many cases of my Tilson cousins, the numbers dwindle precipitously lower than most people consider reliable.

Contrary to those minuscule matches, though, the DNA match with the highest count under Peleg's daughter Mary came in at fifty eight cMs, which surprised me with its stark difference. Taking a closer look, I realized this match was already tagged in my records as a match—for a different ancestor. That other ancestor came from my maternal grandmother's Broyles side of the family, while the Tilson line reaches down to her husband's line.

While I already knew this DNA cousin was connected through my grandmother's Broyles aunt, in seeing this result, I recalled that the aunt had married someone who came from a family with a long history of calling that corner of Tennessee home. With yet another unhelpful name to research—this family was named Jones—rather than taking the usual approach to checking ThruLines results from the ancient ancestor forward in time to the current generation, I worked my way backwards on the ThruLines results. I wanted to see just how this Broyles cousin was connected to my Tilson line.

Thus, I worked my way through documentation from this Jones cousin, backwards in time until the Jones surname gave way to that other research challenge, the Brown surname. Along the way, I spotted collateral lines with names too familiar to be coincidental name twins, and my head ached with thoughts of how much this tree may call for cleaning up duplicate entries. Cousins marrying cousins and other near misses make for many déjà vu moments in family history. Time to warm up that "merge with duplicate" button on my family tree.

Initial Response

 

It's been another week of cleaning up those DNA matches through Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool. My goal has been to work on the matches linked with my fourth great-grandfather, Aaron Broyles. I've been able to clear out all but one of the descendants of Aaron's eldest daughter, Jemima—with the one straggler out of the six matches being a case of mistaken identity from a different branch of the extended Broyles family. I've also worked on all but one of the four matches belonging to a different child of Aaron Broyles, his son Cain.

I'll admit, I was hesitant to work on that fourth match for one simple reason: instead of displaying an actual name, the match was labeled with a moniker. Now what? My initial response was to just bypass this match and move on to another part of my end-of-month project.

As with almost anything else in genealogy, what at first may seem like a puzzle—or even a roadblock—can be tackled successfully if taken step by step. The ThruLines tool itself walks us through that very process, if we use the steps outlined for each generation. I've found that so, when I've had to figure out the identity of a match listed only with initials—and I'll admit, some of the tests I administer have been identified only with initials, too—so I decided to take that step-by-step approach with this match, as well.

Starting with Aaron Broyles himself, there were eight generations involved in this pedigree pathway. I had already laid down three of them in my tree, then had worked on two more because of another DNA match. All I had to do was work on the last three generations, including the one labeled with the moniker.

Sometimes, when I work on such matches and they turn out to be labeled with initials, this process can provide a clear indication of the identity of the DNA match, and I can place that person in my tree. The only time that wouldn't work is when the parents were the type who thought it would be cute, or perhaps add to family unity, by selecting names resulting in the same set of initials for each of their children. I've sure been grateful for the families in which the only son turns out to be my DNA match. And this guessing game works far better for families in which the parents are already deceased—and were memorialized in the type of obituary which makes a genealogist's heart sing.

The same process can work almost as well for those matches labeled only with monikers. Initials give us at least one more clue than monikers, though, making monikers a bit more challenging. Still, sometimes that moniker turns out to be a lifelong nickname, which might be found in a high school or college yearbook picture, or in a newspaper article, especially from a sports or social section. I've seen some with a meaning which became more clear, once I discovered specific circumstances of that person's life, like where he or she lived, or a favorite hobby or characteristic.

In this particular case, once I worked the line of descent step by step through the generations from Aaron Broyles to the current time, I realized I had a gift from ThruLines. Each generation's specific descendant checked out, according to confirming documentation, leading up to the match's grandfather. From that point, each of two now-deceased sons had an only child. And because the match's father was deceased, access to his obituary provided the person's name for my tree, and for the DNA connection.

Perhaps we live in an age when almost anything is—or can be—discoverable. This is a risk we need to consider as we leap for the chance to confirm our position in our genetic family tree. With all the information out there, publicly accessible for those who know where to look, initials as a disguising label for a DNA test are hardly the cloak of anonymity we had hoped for.

The truth is out there, as has popularly been said, and yet we suffer a sort of future shock over what might eventually be done with that knowledge. Perhaps we are simultaneously longing to be found yet hoping never to be discovered.

At Least it Isn't John Smith

 

I've run into a problem with this most recent research goal of mine. I'm tidying up my ThruLines suggestions for DNA matches who descend from my fourth great-grandfather, Aaron Broyles. My first step had been to connect the six matches descending from Aaron's son Cain—a small number which should be fairly easy to complete. Right?

Think again. There is one DNA match whose ThruLines chart has me stumped. The line of descent moves from Aaron himself to his son, Cain, and then to Aaron's namesake grandson, Aaron R. Broyles. From there, supposedly, the next generation included a son named William. And there's the problem: I can't find a son named William. In fact, I can't find any sons at all; the younger Aaron had only daughters.

I spent a lot of time poking around all the possible collateral line routes to unearth any clues about the missing William without success. There was no William to be found.

And then, it hit me: what if the trees this ThruLines diagram was drawn upon were based on the wrong Aaron Broyles? After all, I've run into that problem before with the name Aaron Broyles. While having to find multiple Aaron Broyleses might make the possibilities even messier, at least it isn't a John Smith that I'm seeking!

Doing a quick search through records at Ancestry.com, I located another Aaron Broyles who happened to have a son named William. Checking the data on my ThruLines match, it gave the same year of birth as the William I had found in this quick search. And this William's middle initial—"H."—made all the more sense once I realized this other Aaron was married to someone whose maiden name was Hays.

It is easy to see how someone could make the mistake. The other Aaron Broyles was born in 1821—the same year, but not the same month, as my Aaron Broyles.

How I'm related to this other Aaron Broyles I don't yet know. I'll have to construct my own tree to determine the connection to the correct ancestral Broyles linking me to this DNA match. Or—who knows?—perhaps extending the family line and vetting it with adequate documentation may point me to another most recent common ancestor shared with this DNA match. In fact, I'll need to confirm every step along that generational journey. There may be yet another unexpected turn to find. 

Genetic Road Maps

 

When you consider how many matches the average participant in DNA testing can receive, it becomes mind boggling to think of all the people with whom we connect genetically. I have, for instance, over twenty four hundred people who have tested their DNA at Ancestry.com and match me at the level of fourth cousin or closer. And that is just the matches I have at one of the five companies where I have tested.

In the process of reviewing all these matches and finding a place for each of them in my family tree, I inevitably end up adding several more generations of cousins as I chart my way back to the most recent common ancestor we—my match and I—share. That process alone can be a tedious exercise—something I can vouch for, having managed to merely complete one such matching task per day, now that I've started reviewing my Broyles connections. It's the documentation which puts the brakes on the otherwise willy-nilly temptation to go careening down the steep slope of descendancy. 

When you consider how many families in our past generations were composed of multiple children, you realize that documenting each one of them down to the present age can be a mind-boggling process. There are so many points at which to make a wrong turn.

Now that I've taken to using the DNA shortcut to that tedious every-child-in-the-family approach, I realize that tools like Ancestry's ThruLines serve as genetic road maps guiding my progress. I have the starting point, pinpointing my possible DNA cousin through the actual test results. And then I have suggestions, based on computer-guided searches through multiple resources within the Ancestry tree collection, laying out the possible route from where I stand, up through the ancestor I share with my match, then back to the generation of that specific DNA match.

While I appreciate having access to those genetic road maps, the route proposed still needs to be carefully traveled. Why? Because many of the clues pointing the way are drawn from other subscribers' family trees. True, there is a genetic connection, but any tree is only as reliable as the documentation which supported it in the first place. I've got to compare what others assert with a thorough examination of available documentation. I owe that process to myself—and to all the family members who will eventually come to rely on my research.

Thus, the reason for such slow progress, despite the handy genetic road map. Hopefully, by the end of this week, I will have completed confirming the six DNA matches whose ancestor was Jemima Broyles Horton, sister of my third great-grandfather, Ozey Robert Broyles. From there, I will move on to the four DNA-matching descendants of her older brother, Cain Broyles. If there is any time left, perhaps I'll be fortunate to also squeeze in work on the one DNA match each for their siblings, John Taylor Broyles and Edna Broyles.

As for the DNA matches leading to my own third great-grandfather Ozey Robert Broyles, don't think I'll be able to follow that route in the remainder of this month. With thirty nine matches on that line alone, it will be a while before I close out that process. Road map or not, DNA work doesn't proceed well on a speedway.

Aunt Jemima

 

Yes, I have an Aunt Jemima. Well, technically she was my third great-grand aunt, a sister to my third great-grandfather, Ozey Robert Broyles. The reason I've been paying particular attention to Aunt Jemima this past week is that she was the ancestor of at least six of my DNA matches, according to Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool. And yet, maddeningly, I can't find documentation to confirm some of those DNA matches'  lines of descent.

Have you ever run into a problem like that? I've seen other ThruLines results asserting that the way I connect to a DNA match is through a particular line of descent, when in actuality, I discover an entirely different—and thoroughly documented—line of descent connecting my match with our most recent common ancestor.

As I run through this unfinished business of connecting all my Broyles family DNA matches, I've even discovered some ThruLines proposals which lead to distant cousins who are related to me in more than one way. In a case I worked on yesterday—amidst the four earthquake tremors which hit our home in rapid succession—I discovered a DNA match who descended in two different ways from my Broyles ancestors. And there was the catch: I actually have two different Aunt Jemimas in my Broyles ancestry.

The Aunt Jemima I had been working with was listed in ThruLines as the daughter of Aaron Broyles, my fourth great-grandfather. As it turns out, Aaron also had a sister named Jemima—possibly the very person after whom he named his daughter. The elder Jemima, Aaron's sister, was daughter of Adam Broyles—who, as you may have suspected, was also Aaron's father.

This elder Jemima married a man with the rather unremarkable name of Joseph Brown. While surnames like Brown can be the source of great consternation for unassuming family historians, this Joseph saved me some research grief by becoming the patriarch from whom at least two future Georgia governors descended.

The younger Jemima, niece to the elder woman by the same name, granted me the relative ease of research when she chose as her husband a man with a rather unusual name: Grief Horton. It is with six of her Horton descendants that I am currently struggling. What ThruLines asserts is not what I can find through supporting records. Granted, it will take quite a bit more patience and concentration to locate the type of documents which will reveal her female descendants' married names, but I am willing to tough it out and look beyond the usual sources for online records.

In the meantime, the slow slogging reminded me that sometimes, what online services assert is the right relationship may not always be so. Or there might be verifiable alternates. Or maybe both versions will turn out to be correct, as in the case of the doubly-related DNA match I've discovered.

While there may not be many Aunt Jemimas out there nowadays, there were at one point. Even for two hundred year old ancestors, we still need to keep our Aunt Jemimas straight. 

When Lightning Strikes and Earthquakes Hit

 

Some things you never expect to happen...and then, they do. This will be one of those posts which has to happen quickly because of the risk of one unexpected event occurring, yet while I'm racing that risk, I'm in the process of discovering the likelihood of another unexpected event unfolding. These sorts of things occurring may be far more like when lightning strikes twice than I had ever thought possible.

I'm writing quickly because tonight we have been experiencing a cluster of earthquakes hitting within thirty miles of our home—closer than usual for this New York transplant in California. This is not the time when I'd like to be lolling around at my desk with the luxury of electricity powering my worldwide Internet connections. 

When I came home earlier this evening, my California-born daughter asked if anything had hit the side of the house. New York native me: I thought that was an unusual question to ask. Until, that is, I was sitting at my desk, preparing to write this post. The desk under my resting arms vibrated after a sudden jolt—and then I clearly understood what my daughter had been asking. We were having an earthquake. Another one.

Despite living in a place having the reputation of someday "falling into the ocean," it is not an everyday occurrence when we find ourselves rocking or rolling—literally—but we do know how to click on to the U.S. Geological Survey's Earthquake Map to see where the activity is happening. Clue: it happened—so far, four times today—beginning with the first crack my daughter heard, all clustered in one place not far from our home.

Meanwhile, I had been continuing my research plan, confirming several of the DNA matches showing on my ThruLines readout for descendants of my Broyles line. These match confirmations take time, at least for those who wish to also include documentation to demonstrate the actual family connection. I was working on one particular Broyles fifth cousin, when I noticed that, after her father's death, her mother had remarried. It was the surname of the next husband which caught my eye: an unusual surname someone in my local genealogical society has been working on for years.

This is what I like to think of as a genealogical lightning striking: the rare chance that someone else in my society might also be researching a family line I'm connected to. After all, it wasn't that long ago when I discovered that the ex-husband of one of my distant cousins ended up marrying a society member's sister. I would never have known that if we didn't make a habit at our society of keeping up on each other's research progress.

While we love to keep in touch over our latest family finds, we never actually expect to discover that we, ourselves, are related! Yet, with this new discovery tonight, I might be witnessing lightning striking the same place twice. And if this California ground ever stops shaking, perhaps I'll get a chance to compare notes over coffee again with a fellow genealogical society member.

Learning About the Katy

 

If it weren't for the consistent pursuit of my family's story over the generations, I doubt I would have learned as much about history as I have. Add to that geography, economics, and human hopes and dreams, fulfilled or dashed. Learning about the life of others in the family eventually means learning about Life, itself.

With the last of my research goals abandoned for lack of material allowing me to continue that track, I'll be dedicating the upcoming two weeks to reviewing the loose ends left behind from previous months' goals. First on my list is a review of DNA matches in my ThruLines results for the Broyles family line. While that may seem a simple assignment, I hardly expected I'd be learning about a train line with a claim to fame of going against the grain. This is what I learned about the railroad line known, over a century ago, as "the Katy."

Apparently, unlike other lines known for shipping goods and passengers across the continent, connecting east and west, the Katy was part of a company which became known as the first railroad to enter Texas from the north. The "unconventional north-south network" of the Kansas-Texas division (the K-T, or "Katy" for short) of the Missouri Pacific Railroad owed its roots to a formation designed to build a supply network connecting frontier military posts in the midwest with port cities in the south. The dream was to eventually expand to a rail system stretching from Chicago to New Orleans.

Before 1870, the U.S. Congress had passed acts promising land grants to the first railroad to complete a route through the Neosho Valley to the Kansas border. Though the Katy line was the first to do so, they never received the promised land due to other restraints. However, the company continued its push southward, completing a route to the Texas border by 1872, and incrementally beyond that to several other Texas cities by the early 1900s.

All this I would never have known, had it not been for a newspaper report involving one of my Broyles line DNA matches' ancestors. On Friday evening, July 12, 1907, the Parsons, Kansas, Daily Eclipse carried the story:

Second section of Katy freight No. 414 went into a weakened culvert about three-quarters of a mile north of Colbert yesterday morning about 5:10 as a result of which the entire crew of five men were more or less injured, one very seriously.

Despite the seemingly offhand comment, "more or less," reading beyond the first paragraph did indeed spell out the story more clearly. The train was "running light"—consisting of only the engine and caboose—and had just passed Colbert in what was then "Indian Territory." The conductor had just received a "slow order" regarding two approaching bridges upon which construction work had recently been done. The train safely crossed the first. However, in attempting to slowly cross the second, after the engine cleared the area, the construction gave way, leaving the caboose crashing down almost on end.

It was there in that falling train car that brakeman Horace Maxwell Rolater was thrown to the floor of the caboose, knocked unconscious as the fall fractured his skull and caused internal injuries. By July 17, the next edition of the weekly Parsons newspaper reported that Rolater had died the evening of the day following the crash. By then, he had undergone surgery to remove a blood clot from his brain in hopes that would improve his chances of survival. He never regained consciousness.

Horace's father, who lived in Oklahoma, was present at the time of his passing. Not much else was said about the man who lost his life due to construction issues along the route he took that last work day. The newspaper did mention that Horace left a wife and two children—a boy and a girl—but they remained nameless. The only other comment provided by the article was that it was believed Horace Rolater was not a member of any Brotherhood or fraternal order, most likely meaning that there would be no help in providing his funeral and burial expenses—a hard burden for a young widow to bear unexpectedly.

While Horace Rolater was not anyone my family knew personally—he would have been my grandmother's third cousin—stories like this implore me to look further. Of course, you know there had to be more to this story, for the only reason I found it was because one of my DNA matches is a descendant of one of Horace Rolater's children.

Those children were indeed quite young when they lost their father—a devastating thought to consider, never mind live through. Horace's son was not quite five years old—an age in which a missing father might not be much more than a fuzzy memory. His daughter, still only one year old, would likely only have experienced the sudden sadness enveloping the home, not actually remembered the father she had lost.

Stories such as this are ones which cause us to stop and consider, no matter how far removed we are from the actual relative. They belong to the life history of another branch of the family, true, but they also belong to the tapestry of what makes our extended family what it is, even now. They remind me how important it is to capture those memories for the others who share those roots with us. They are all part of our fabric of life.

 

  

Keeping on Track With D N A

 

The larger the family tree grows, the more ways we need to organize our approach to systematically research all branches. Unless the goal is to only learn about one surname in the family tree, we face a multiplying spread of unidentified ancestors if we don't develop a system.

For the most part, since I've decided to include research on all collateral lines—in other words, the siblings of each of my direct ancestors—that has become a helpful approach to overcome two potential pitfalls in genealogy. One is the "brick wall" ancestor—that great-great whoever who becomes the roadblock in research progress due to lack of information. The other is that overwhelming dazed sense, in looking at the avalanche of DNA matches and realizing that none of the names look familiar: who are all those people?!

Doing an end run around the brick wall ancestor became far easier, once I learned to look to siblings to unlock the puzzle. Sometimes, it's the kid brother whose life story makes it into the tell-all obituary when older sister's prim and proper generation didn't have much to say at her passing.

It's the DNA approach, however, which took much more effort to snap into shape. I did develop a system to work through all the descendants of collateral lines, so I could pin those DNA matches into my family tree. Let me tell you, when working with large families with many children who do likewise in the next generation, that process, though thorough, can be tedious.

That's why I've developed a second, faster approach to provide information up front as needed. Rather than researching every single line of every sibling in each generation, I've used my DNA matches as my guide. In particular, I'm working with the ThruLines matches at Ancestry.com and the Theory of Family Relativity at MyHeritage. Yes, of course, that leaves big gaps in my tree; I'm only working on those who have tested their DNA and have posted enough of a family tree to grant me a toe-hold on finding our ancestral nexus.

With that process, I'll be taking the next two weeks to double check on family lines which I had long ago meant to complete—namely, the three maternal lines I mentioned in yesterday's post: Broyles, Tilson, and Taliaferro. My starting point will be to examine the ThruLines for those specific ancestral surnames.

Starting that process today, I managed to add seventy more names to my mother's tree, most of them in one day of work. Though my own family tree has languished in the last several months while I focused on my father-in-law's Tully and Flannery lines, the count for my own tree has started to grow. Total count for documented ancestors and related lines is now at 33,977.

Because I had spent so much time working on my father-in-law's lines for the past three months, of course there was much progress there. In the last two weeks, I added 221 more documented individuals to that tree, which now stands at 34,019 names.

As I wrap up the last two weeks of September, and before springing into research on my own father's lines for the last three months of the year, I'll be focusing on the ThruLines results for my Broyles, Taliaferro, and Tilson lines. With each DNA match listed in that program, I'll then work through the documentation to confirm those ThruLines suggestions—or reject them, as sometimes happens, once a problem manifests itself through conflicting records. This can become a multi-generational process for each DNA match, but it can also become a deep and wide procedure, as the research stretches not only from founding immigrant ancestor to present time, but also through each sibling's line of descent over the generations.

Since I've saved way-markers for my more thorough but plodding family-wide sweep through the generations, I'll always be able to return to the places where I left off that process. In the meantime, though, since I have a limited two weeks for this catch-up period, I'll keep on track more quickly by focusing on what the DNA matches show me on specific lines of interest. When that two week test run is completed, I'll take another look at the results and see whether it will be worthwhile to pick three more surnames for this fast-track approach before the year is out.

Keeping Track of the Collateral

 

It wasn't much of a surprise to discover that in the last two weeks, I had added 288 people to my mother-in-law's family tree. After all, hers is the family I've been working on during the month of April. When I discovered that the research goal I had selected for this month—to learn more about her fourth great-grandmother Elizabeth Howard—placed my sites squarely on her matriline, my first step was to work on all Elizabeth's daughters' descendants. That meant learning more about those collateral lines in the family tree—especially the sisters connected to Elizabeth's daughter Sarah Howard Ijams.

The result of that flurry of research activity means that my in-laws' tree now includes data for 31,341 relatives. That, however, wasn't all I had been working on for this month. While I do select one research goal per month, when I discover at the end of each month that there is yet more work to do, I continue the process behind the scenes.

While I haven't written about it much lately, I'm still working on the collateral lines for my Broyles line (January goal), my Taliaferro line (February goal), and my Tilson line (March goal). Just like I mentioned yesterday, the process for this behind the scenes work is to take each collateral line and follow all the descendants down to the present-day generation. Data like this makes for a much easier time of plugging in DNA cousin matches to my family tree.

So, what did all that behind-the-scenes work do for my own tree? Since all three of the family lines I mentioned come from my own mother's tree, it should be no surprise to learn that her tree grew by 241 people, despite it not being my major research goal for the month. That means my own tree is now up to 33,458 names, all thoroughly documented.

Not only is the practice of researching collateral lines helping me to identify the right place for each DNA match, but it helps me spot family trends, seeing geographic and economic changes and getting a feel for each family. Sometimes—and this happens quite often—a collateral line can give me the breakthrough I need when stuck on a "brick wall" ancestor.

Of course, cumulatively continuing those research goals from past months while still pressing forward with each new month's own goal will eventually leave me swamped with work. After all, I'm still working on those Broyles cousins from January.

Later on this year, I'll have to give up some of that collateral search process. But for now, it's a work in progress which I can pick up at odd moments of down time. Here a little, there a little sometimes is all it takes to get a job done—and paint a bigger picture of a family down through history.

Friends, Ex-Husbands of Sixth Cousins, and Me

 

So there I was, sitting at my laptop and working on the endless collateral lines descended from the surnames I'd been researching earlier this year—names like Broyles and Tilson, with deep roots in this country's colonial history. My self-imposed assignment was to trace each line of descent to the present day for the benefit of placing my thousands of unknown DNA cousins on their proper branch of my family tree.

Working on one family's extensive line, I made it down to the level of my sixth cousin—a suitable stopping place, since the likelihood of two sixth cousins sharing DNA can drop below the two percent mark, depending on which company you choose for your autosomal test. But I'm a greedy researcher, and my mantra sometimes becomes, "Just one more." I wanted to find the next generation for this one particular, married sixth cousin.

In the process of searching for an obituary—those tell-all documents which have become research necessities for those of us smitten with the genealogy bug—I discovered a few things. I found the coveted names of the next generation, alright, but I also discovered the sixth cousin's spouse was actually an ex-husband. Who had remarried. With a spouse whose name sounded vaguely familiar—and triggered a volley of hints on my online tree at Ancestry.com.

One of those hints was for a listing of all other Ancestry subscribers who also have that name entered in their family tree. One of those trees happened to belong to a friend of mine.

I messaged that friend to ask just how she might be related to that wife of my sixth cousin's ex-husband.

"She's my sister," came the reply.

You know we had to get together for coffee and to compare notes. After all, it isn't every day that we genies bump into friends with connections to the ex-husband of our sixth cousin.

Come to think of it, it isn't often that we even meet anyone who could follow a relationship like the one I just described in that last sentence, let alone name that person.

What a uniquely-organized world we've plotted on our digital family trees, with tools which would seem to be no more than science fiction to the ancestors whose names populate the boxes in our pedigree chart. Our research world has exploded with possibilities. The time it takes to solve a genealogical riddle has shrunken. And the closest route to a sixth cousin can be a distance as short as the span of the table between me and the friend with whom I'm sharing a chuckle over a morning's cup of coffee.  

R@RT: A Weekend Divertissement

 

Before you know it, the time will come for yet another RootsTech extravaganza. Don't count on me being in Salt Lake City after this weekend; too big a crowd for me. I'll watch from my own cozy hideaway.

Even though the big event doesn't occur for another five days (it begins March 2), there are a few preparatory items to take care of beforehand. First, of course, is to register to attend online. Then, to scope out the online offerings and plan which ones to attend right away and which can't-miss opportunities can be viewed later.

Top of my list, once I've taken care of those other details, is to check out this year's Relatives at RootsTech—or, for a short take on that name, R@RT. Yes, I know, I know: apps like that are only as good as the input which fuels the fun connections. But I'll keep an eye on those false matches, I promise.

Last year, I had a chance to connect with a McClellan cousin via R@RT, right before my trip back to Florida to show my sister the old family home there. It was fun to connect with this distant cousin. After all, we may have thousands of distant cousins, thanks to all the ancestors we've researched, but that doesn't mean they all share our deep enthusiasm about genealogy. Finding a cousin via R@RT means using the app to sift through all those other relatives in our tree to find the ones who share our love of family history.

This year, my cousin count has improved. I'm not necessarily keen on how many cousins are on my readout for R@RT. More important to me is finding closer cousins. Fifth or sixth cousins may be mildly interesting, but I much prefer to find those third or fourth cousins.

Why? One simple reason: DNA testing. Yep, I'm looking for genealogical cousins who also show up as genetic cousin matches at any of the places where I've tested—or, who would be willing to take a DNA test. While it may be possible to find a fifth or sixth cousin match through DNA, it is highly unlikely to detect such matches. The third cousin level is far more reliable, and fourth cousins can come shining through fairly reliably, as well. Those are the cousins I want to message so we can keep in contact. And since the readout for participants in R@RT is only available for about one month, it's time to get busy now.

Since the R@RT system allows participants to search their readout by different keys—location, specific ancestor, or family line—I tried looking specifically for Broyles and Taliaferro cousins. After all, those are the two lines I've been researching this year. It turns out there are two fourth cousins who have those surnames in their ancestry—not many, agreed, but maybe two fellow researchers who are interested in delving into our mutual lines. Collaboration can be a great way to tackle research problems.

I've still got a few more days this month to devote to my Taliaferro research, but for this weekend, time invested in sorting the R@RT cousins—and getting in touch with family I didn't know I had—will be well worth the effort.  

Are You Your Own Cousin?

 

I have to tell you, right at the start, that it was thanks to this month's research project that I discovered I am my own sixth cousin.

I used to laugh at my husband, when I discovered that his mother descended from two ancestral lines whose founding individuals turned out to be half-siblings. He is his own umpteenth cousin. Me? I have Thomas Taliaferro Broyles' unfortunate wife, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey, to thank for this genealogical pickle. (And yes, that was her full name, according to the entry in her father's will concerning his youngest child.)

Here's how this happened. Mary, born in some unidentified location in Georgia, was the last of at least ten children of Thomas Firth Rainey and Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro. Baby Mary arrived on December 12, 1852, five years before she lost her father. Five years later, at the death of her mother, she and her surviving siblings became orphans.

Mary was not the first in the family to have been given that name. A sister born in 1835 had been named after their mother, but had died just one year before our Mary was born. Likewise had their oldest brother died before reaching adulthood—as, I think, had some of their other siblings. It was because of that brother—Warren Taliaferro Rainey—that it fell upon this young girl Mary, the baby of her family, to serve as his namesake, keeping his memory alive.

The name Warren Taliaferro was an important one to that Rainey family, for it was the name of young Mary's maternal grandfather. That senior Warren, in turn, happened to connect to my fourth great-grandfather, Zachariah Taliaferro, because the two were brothers. Thus, I descend from two Taliaferro men: on the one already documented Broyles line, I claim Zachariah Taliaferro as my fourth great-grandfather. But through my matriline, I descend from Mary Merriwether Gilmer and her husband, Warren Taliaferro. 

That connection came about when Thomas Taliaferro Broyles, living in Tennessee, must have followed a tip from his parents in South Carolina, to marry a young orphaned woman in Georgia who just happened to be his own second cousin.

It was a stretch to explore the possible pieces when I first attacked that research puzzle, but in retrospect, that sort of liaison was not unusual for the time period. In fact, once I started finding DNA matches on either the Broyles or Taliaferro lines, my distant cousins could often point out more than one way that we were related. The earlier the matches in the framework of American history—thus a smaller pool of eligible contenders—the more likely it might be that families looked for spouses among those whom they knew best: their own extended family.

So think again if you supposed the answer to my question to be a resounding "no." If you go back far enough in your family tree, you may find you are actually your own distant cousin.   

Musings on the Matriline

 

If you have ever considered taking a mitochondrial DNA test—that specialized test which, unlike the autosomal cousin connector, zeroes in strictly on the matriline—you will appreciate learning of my experience when I sprang for that same pricey DNA test alternative. You see, I have a gap in my family tree, one which I knew about ever since those early years when starry-eyed children asked their parents to tell them all about their ancestors.

Granted, I didn't get too far with that question when I posed it to my father. With my mother, I had only a bit more success: she could tell me about her mother, and then her grandmother. But when I asked for details on her mother, all I got were roadblocks—two of them.

That woman—my mother's great-grandmother and thus my own second great-grandmother—died at a young age. Her daughter barely knew anything at all about her, for the child had only turned three when she lost her mother. To complicate matters further, my mother indicated that, besides dying young, the unfortunate young mother had herself been an orphan.

I had my guesses, of course, which I had written up in posts years ago. My first obstacle was to escape the mindset based on understandings of adoption cases of our current times. Unlike closed adoptions of the twentieth century, when a child was orphaned in previous centuries, it was more likely that some member of the extended family would take in that orphaned child or children. If the researcher was fortunate, there might even be court records of guardianship proceedings.

Once I got used to thinking more like Pollyanna than a placement worker of the 1960s, I realized there might be clues within my extended family. The unfortunate woman who made my second great-grandfather a widower was not simply a nameless orphan. She had a marriage record, and a census entry just prior to that 1871 wedding, opening the door for some Pollyanna-esque speculation about just which relatives might have taken her in.

There was one other way, however, to help me be sure my guesses were well founded: take an mtDNA test, myself. Then, the only obstacle standing between me and confirmation of this orphan's birth family would be whether any exact matches would also have tested.

As I awaited my test results, I had composed a hypothetical tree for my orphaned second great-grandmother, focusing on her matriline. Moving step by step, I had entered and documented the one whom I thought would be her mother, then her maternal grandmother, and so on, back through the generations of mothers. I was ready for any likely candidates to show up in my test results.

Thankfully, someone did test who was an exact match to me—someone who, as a bonus, also had posted a complete tree back to the 1600s.

Far back through the generations, comparing both my hypothetical tree and that of my mtDNA match, I spotted our Most Recent Common Ancestor: a woman by the name of Margaret Watts. Said to have been born about 1700 in Virginia, Margaret had married a man by the name of William Strother. Their daughter Jane married Thomas Lewis, whose daughter Elizabeth became the mother of Mary Meriwether Gilmer, bringing this genealogy down into more familiar territory.

I think you may see where this is going now.

In the meantime, that original Margaret and William Strother had another daughter, who became the head of my exact mtDNA match's matriline, helping to confirm my guess as to the identity of my orphaned second great-grandmother.

I was elated at that discovery when it happened. But its full impact didn't hit me until I started working on this month's research project on the Taliaferro line. Sure, the mystery orphaned woman became the bride of my second great-grandfather, Thomas Taliaferro Broyles, whose very middle name trumpeted his connection to his grandfather, Zachariah Taliaferro.

But that unfortunate bride had a Taliaferro connection of her own. It just wasn't the same Taliaferro. We'll save that discussion for tomorrow.   

 

Wills and Their Ways

 

It is sometimes aggravating, after finally finding the will of a brick-wall ancestor, to discover that the hoped-for Big Reveal isn't quite up to our standards. After all, if that beloved wife were such a dear companion, why didn't her husband even mention her name? In wills, I've learned to expect a full accounting of all children's names, too—but have sometimes been sorely disappointed when locating the coveted document.

It is those frustrating ways that our ancestors might have had—leaving things unsaid when we most expected them to be more explicit—that I want to muse over today. As it turns out, I did uncover a Broyles descendant's will last week which almost—but not quite—left me pondering what it is we wish to find in wills, and why we sometimes don't find it.

I mentioned, yesterday, one observation that dawned on me during this mental journey: that perhaps it is nigh impossible to read some names and details in wills due to a combination of sloppy handwriting and faded ink. But in the reading of this Broyles descendant's will last week, I may have stumbled upon some other dynamics which might translate into a more forgiving way to look at our ancestors' wills.

Let's take a look at the background story behind researching this will. Though my Broyles research goals extend from my Most Wanted ancestral line for January, I am still working behind the scenes to trace my fifth great-grandfather's descendants down to the sixth cousin level for use in connecting with DNA cousin matches. From Adam Broyles' daughter Jemima and her husband Joseph Brown, I've gone step by step through all their descendants. Right now, I'm working on the lines of their grandson James Rice Brown (1827-1915).

I noticed that James' son George died in 1896, a very difficult time for the object of my research to disappear off the scene, considering that he married Fannie McAfee after the 1880 census. This unfortunate situation thus left me little recourse for discovering their children's identity. (Well, there still were ways, but considering I'd be looking for the household of one Fannie Brown, you can imagine all the ways this search could take a wrong turn.)

Thus I was quite pleased to locate a copy of the will of George Brown, and read it through. While George did—unlike some men regarding whose wills I have been disappointed in the past—actually give his wife a name, in several places he mentioned his children only as "our younger child" or "our youngest child."

That is where the thought occurred to me that perhaps George Brown, unlike most of us who tend to defer unpleasant tasks until a more "convenient" time, was the type of person who liked to keep his personal affairs well organized. Perhaps the nebulous terms for his children were meant to make the document all-inclusive without actually naming all the children because, at his age, he might have more children born to him in the future.

Eventually, George did mention the name of two of his children—sons James R. Brown and George M. Brown—but I couldn't be sure those were his only children. Granted, the will continued at length with several stipulations—for instance, explicitly stating that his wife's father, Joseph M. McAfee, "have nothing whatever to do with my estate"—but before I ever reached the end of the document, a few more thoughts occurred to me.

Due to finding George's obituary in the October 29, 1896, edition of The Morning News of Savannah, Georgia, I realized his was a sudden and unexpected passing. Not quite yet thirty five years of age, George Brown was just entering the prime of his career, serving as solicitor general "of the Blue Ridge circuit," and traveling to Atlanta for some political purpose when he was stricken with what physicians called cholera morbus.

His death on October 28, 1896, apparently came quickly. His wife, perhaps summoned to travel to Atlanta due to the seriousness of his illness, or perhaps planning to join him a few days after he began his business trip, arrived too late be at his side before his passing.

What was surprising to learn, when I read to the end of George's will, was that despite his young age, he had drawn up the will only months before his unexpected demise. The will was dated June 26 of that same year, 1896.

As it turned out, my guess about additional children was well founded. I got brave and looked for census records for all possible widows named Fannie Brown in his hometown of Canton, Georgia. One household in 1900 showed sons named James and George, just as their father had mentioned in his will. 

That household also included a five year old daughter Margaret, and a three year old son named Joseph—perhaps named after George's uncle Joseph Emerson Brown, once a governor of the state of Georgia. Born in January of 1897, young Joseph arrived not quite three months after his father's passing. Though at that point unnamed, he was likely on his father's mind when he drew up his will.    

An All-Time High for Understatements

 

The columnist for the local Society section of South Carolina's The Greenville News was fairly gushing when she penned her column for Sunday, December 11, 1949:

The photograph on the front page of today's society section...is of particular interest here (an all-time high for understatements) for the bride is a Greenville girl...

As it turned out, I wouldn't have stumbled upon that newspaper clipping if it weren't for a few preceding details. The first on that list would be my dogged pursuit of all distant cousins descending from my Broyles ancestors, immigrants to the 1717 Germanna settlement in colonial Virginia.

By now in this plodding process, I had already run into anecdotes about the extended Brown family descending from my fifth great-grandfather Adam Broyles' daughter Jemima. I discovered my relationship to the real Georgia Brown immortalized by the 1925 hit tune, Sweet Georgia Brown. Yesterday, I realized I was related to an airline pilot determined enough to stare down the Cuban government and be the first to win the right to fly his passengers back home to the United States in the same hijacked airliner in which they had unexpectedly arrived.

Along this same family line of William Carroll Brown, direct ancestor of both those distant cousins I've mentioned, I ran across another story, the one referred to by the Society columnist above. The woman in question, the bride causing such breathless commentary, also descended from this same William Carroll Brown. Like some of William's other children, the bride's grandmother had also named her child after her father, William Carroll. Unfortunately, she only had one child, who in turn became a father of only daughters.

No matter; this man named one of his daughters by that same middle name, spelled as Carroll, instead of the more expected spelling for a woman's name. As I traced his daughter Carroll through life and added her to my Broyles family line, I ran into trouble when I started entering the name for her husband.

Unfased by the fact that anyone could have more than one middle name—after all, these are southern families I'm researching—I began entering the name of the groom. Alfonso...Antonio...Vicente...

When I was done recording the groom's name, I had taken up two full lines of print in his entry on my Ancestry.com tree. Something was clearly up here. No one has a name that long.

So I googled it. Sure enough, the prospective groom had made a name for himself when, at the age of seventeen, he bet $500 that he could fly a plane under the Tower Bridge in London. He won. He went on to compete in horse races, bobsled teams, and, eventually, car races.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, he met—incredibly—and married my mother's fifth cousin, Helen Carroll McDaniel of Greenville, South Carolina. Hence, the Society editor's amazement that someone from a town the size of Greenville would become the wife of the Eleventh Marquess of Portago, Grandee, a Spanish aristocrat.

Of course, I wouldn't have uncovered a story like that if I didn't pursue those collateral lines to make it possible to connect distant cousin DNA matches to their rightful place in my family tree. True, it takes a lot of sifting through countless stories before discovering some of the ones I've shared over these few weeks since the beginning of the year. For instance, in the past two weeks alone, I've added 476 documented names to my tree, which now contains 32,209 people.

Granted, that focus on one line—driven by research goals outlined at the start of each year in my Twelve Most Wanted plan—means the other lines see no action. For my in-laws' tree, I made zero progress in the past two weeks, simply because I won't focus on that part of the family until this coming April. That tree still remains at 30,715—same as it was two weeks ago. But when I do shift to cover the research goals for my mother-in-law this spring, I'm sure I'll stumble upon a few fascinating stories there, too, as I work to plug those distant cousin DNA matches into their right places in her tree.

In the meantime, I'll keep adding those distant cousins and linking them to DNA matches, all the while on the lookout for another story about the extended family. 

Discovering Some Broyles Cousins

 

Do you ever take the opportunity, in researching your DNA matches, to discover the stories of the distant cousins who link you to your matches? Although I've finished working on the Broyles family, my Twelve Most Wanted research goal for January, behind the scenes, I'm still working on bringing down the lines of descent in my family tree on the collateral lines of those Broyles ancestors. Sometimes, I run across stories which I just have to share. I'll take this weekend's two opportunities to tell you about a couple distant cousins I discovered along this research trail.

When you come across a distant cousin's story through research, do you ever get a strong feeling about that cousin? Sometimes, that feeling can be positive, but this past week, I worked on one Broyles descendant whom I have to admit stirred up some negative feelings. Take this as true confessions of a Genealogy Guinea Pig, but in the end, I'm happy I got to "meet" this cousin.

First, let's set the stage—at least, genealogically speaking. We'll begin with a man born in 1851 called Asbury Churchwell Latimer. With a name as distinguished-sounding as that, you might think he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

That was not exactly the case for this man. Born in Abbeville County, South Carolina, he was fourteen years of age when the Civil War drew to a close, leaving the entire South in an impoverished state, and his own family unable to provide him with a decent education. Thus, he chose the practical approach, threw himself into farming and business to make a success of himself.

Asbury Churchwell Latimer chose, despite these financial challenges, to marry early. He chose as his bride one of my distant cousins descending from the Broyles family of my fifth great-grandfather's daughter, Jemima.

This Broyles descendant, Sara Alice Brown, just happened to be a niece of Georgia governor Joseph Emerson Brown. Whether, in the midst of raising the family of five children which she bore to him, Asbury's wife ever talked politics, I can't be sure. But by 1890, when he was nearly forty years of age, Asbury Latimer decided to turn his attention to running for office, becoming a congressman for his state and eventually their senator. It is from the memorial remarks at his sudden passing while in office in 1908, still available to read online now, that I draw much of the information on his early life.

That, however, is not the cousin I wanted to talk about today. Remember, this is only setting the stage, genealogically, for the one I want to mention.

As I worked my way through the descendants of "A. C." and Alice Latimer, I started first with researching their oldest, their only son whom they named William Carroll, after Alice's father. Perhaps owing to his father's political influence, son William chose to go into the legal profession, moving to Atlanta, Georgia, to establish his own practice. He must have been quite successful, for he married a beautiful daughter of a socially prominent family of Paducah, Kentucky—think thoroughbred racing—and raised four children in Atlanta.

All went well until, like his father before him, William Carroll Latimer died in 1927 before reaching the age of fifty. His oldest child, whom he named after himself, lost a father when he was only seventeen.

Perhaps I should have gone more lightly in my judgment of this distant cousin. After all, that kind of loss can have repercussions throughout life. Besides, it didn't help my prejudiced position to accidentally assume that the two-year-long marriage I discovered between a woman and "William C. Carroll"—ending childless in divorce so soon afterwards—was a document belonging to William Carroll Latimer when it really should have belonged to William Craig Latimer. Not the right guy.

Like his father before him—perhaps because it was the thing a son was expected to do—the junior William Carroll Latimer went into the practice of law, and soon claimed a socially prominent bride from among his mother's circle of acquaintances back in Kentucky. While strikingly beautiful, and eventually the mother of his firstborn child, William's wife became, before the next ten years were up, his first wife. William married again, returning to the social scene in Kentucky for a second bride, and subsequently fathering another two children.

If it were only for chasing genealogical details through documentation, a story like that would have left me disappointed in this newly-discovered cousin due to my own point of view. Thankfully, though, there were ample newspaper reports and other resources to tell some of the rest of this man's story.

Although William was well into his thirties—not to mention, married and a father—at the beginning of the second World War, he chose to leave his job to join the war effort. Gaining "duration leave" from the company where he was employed, he joined the Army Air Corps, as he had long since left his work as an attorney to train as an airline pilot.

One of those thoughtful but unnamed lovers of history who decided to archive an article from the news output of the old Brookley Field in Mobile, Alabama, was the first to help me see this distant cousin with a more three-dimensional view. From a news clipping there in Mobile from October 18, 1942, I learned that First Lieutenant W. Carroll Latimer spent his time as a test pilot, including running such World War II machines as the "Airacobra" for which his six-foot-two frame seemed an unlikely fit.

Back to his regular job with Eastern Airlines after the war, Carroll Latimer piloted such more decidedly docile routes as New York to Miami. However, if you remember the times during the late 1960s in which such routes ran the risk of sudden, unplanned itinerary changes to Cuba, such became the case for Captain Latimer.

Headlines in newspapers, such as this one from South Carolina, noted one such hijacking in February, 1969: "A fat man with a sick father in Havana hijacked a jetliner Monday." Pulling out a gun and informing a steward of his intentions, the man convinced the cabin crew of his argument and the pilot, our cousin Captain Latimer, complied.

That move, of course, brought complications—more than the kind we might assume. In such hijacking cases, according to one report on the incident, the Cuban government would allow the pilot and crew to return home on the "pirated" craft, but the Cuban policy was that all the passengers be retained in Cuba until another plane be sent from the United States to retrieve them. This involved busing the passengers to another airport location ninety miles away from Havana for their return flight home.

It wasn't until I found the story retold in his own obituary that I began wondering whether Carroll Latimer had decided, once on the ground in Havana, to trade his pilot's skill for his attorney's training in negotiations. As his family shared in his obituary, 

Once on the ground, he refused to leave his passengers and after much deliberation with the Cuban Government, became the first pilot to fly a hijacked plane, with all its passengers, out of Cuba and back to the United States.

I'm not sure why discovering stories like this helps me appreciate my distant cousins as the real human beings they are. But they do. They've convinced me to become a fan of searching the Internet for family names, checking newspaper archives in hopes of finding tidbits like these, looking in unexpected places for the kinds of details which range far from the traditional Birth-Marriage-Death routine we regularly document. Yes, that framework is important—after all, we need to make sure we've identified the right ancestor—but the joy of genealogy, in my opinion, still finds its spark in discovering the stories.

    

Daughtered Out

 

The line of Zachariah Taliaferro included four descendants, all of whom were daughters. Obviously, familiarity with that surname in subsequent generations was not owing to Zachariah's line, for he had no son to carry his name forward. In other words, as some in the world of genetic genealogy might put it, Zachariah Taliaferro "daughtered out."

Despite that misfortune in an age when sons were important for many reasons, we still need to get to know each of Zachariah's daughters, for in an era in which families often intermarried, we may see those names appear in future generations. We'll take a tour today of each of those four daughters of Zachariah Taliaferro and his wife Margaret Chew Carter, and include a brief note concerning the surnames each of the daughters adopted upon their own marriage.

The oldest of the four daughters was my direct line, my third great-grandmother Sarah Ann Taliaferro, whom we introduced yesterday. Following her 1803 birth in South Carolina was the 1805 arrival of her sister Lucy Hannah Taliaferro. After a brief break from the customary stairstep fashion, the next Taliaferro daughter, Mary Margaret, made her appearance in 1808. The youngest, Caroline Virginia Taliaferro, arrived another three and a half years later. If there were more children of this couple, I have yet to find them.

While we already are familiar with the name of Sarah's husband—we just spent the past month researching Ozey Robert Broyles' ancestry—it might be helpful to list the spouses of Sarah's sisters. While it is true that some of these southern lines from that earlier era did end up intermarrying over the generations, I have another reason for wanting to list these spouses' names: some of them turn up in local history anecdotes. Of course, during that time period, it is sometimes difficult to research a woman without keeping her in the context of family names.

Sarah's next-younger sister Lucy married a man in 1826 by the name of David Sloan Taylor, son of Joseph and Nancy Sloan Taylor of Pendleton. Theirs was a large family which grew to twelve children, though some which I cannot trace may have died in childhood. While David was said to have accumulated a large fortune before the Civil War, not only his fortunes but his health turned, shortly after the close of the war. He apparently died intestate.

Sarah's second sister, Mary Margaret, married a local attorney destined to be not only a local office holder, but also a three-term American congressman prior to the Civil War. Richard Franklin Simpson's interest in local history likely was passed down to his son, Richard Wright Simpson, whose History of Old Pendleton District provides some guidance on the families he was closely related to in that region.

The youngest daughter of Zachariah Taliaferro and Margaret Chew Carter was Caroline Virginia Taliaferro. Like her older sisters, Caroline married and spent the rest of her life in the Pendleton area of South Carolina's upcountry, where she raised at least four children. Her husband, Henry Campbell Miller, was said in all the census records from 1850 through 1880—the last enumeration before his 1899 death—to have been a farmer, but according to his wife's obituary, he was listed as Dr. H. C. Miller. Caroline predeceased him by several years, dying in 1877 by what her obituary referred to as a "painful accident."

It is interesting to note, in examining the record of American Revolutionary War patriot Zachariah Taliaferro, these four sisters' paternal grandfather, that three of the sisters were named in the genealogical listings in applications for membership to the Daughters of the American Revolution. For some reason, descendants of Lucy Hannah Taliaferro, wife of David Sloan Taylor, do not show among the DAR applications for membership, at least that I can find.

No matter. Even if they couldn't pass down the specific surname of their father, every one of these daughters passed down a Taliaferro legacy to their descendants.

That, however, is not what we are pursuing this month. We want to continue our research journey by pressing further into the past. With that, our next step in the process will be to examine the daughters' father, Zachariah, and what we know about his own siblings.  

 

 

Starting With Sarah

 

Our research goal this month is to explore what can be found about my family's connection with the Taliaferros of colonial Virginia. The best way to get started on that goal is simply to begin with what we know. Today, we'll discuss a brief overview of my third great-grandmother, Sarah Ann Taliaferro.

We first crossed her path while finishing up our research project for last month, exploring my connection with the Broyles family of the second Germanna settlement in colonial Virginia, of which Sarah's husband was a descendant. Of course, Sarah's husband was far removed from that 1717 immigrant arrival, not only in time but in generations. Her husband, Ozey Robert Broyles, would have been a great-great-grandchild of the founding immigrant, John Broyles.

Sarah, herself, had deep roots reaching far into our nation's past, thanks to her Taliaferro connections. I already know that in a general way; this month is my opportunity to clean up those inferences with the appropriate documentation.

Sarah lived a life spanning most of the nineteenth century, from her birth in 1803 until her death in 1888. That lifetime was interrupted by a war which ruptured a unique political union forged barely one generation before her birth, when the role which many of her immediate relatives played in birthing that new republic combined with the efforts of so many others. 

Despite her family's traditional Virginia roots, Sarah was born, raised, married, and died in South Carolina. Her family lived in the "up country" around what was once called the Pendleton District, now part of Anderson County. Married to physician Ozey Robert Broyles barely a year after her mother's death in 1822, Sarah was a teenaged bride who eventually bore ten children, eight of whom survived long past their childhood.

Sarah's mother was Margaret Chew Carter, part of the extensive Carter family of colonial Virginia. That family, in and of itself, deserves a month of study, perhaps something to save for next year's Twelve Most Wanted. Margaret likely married Sarah's father, Zachariah Taliaferro, before the two moved from Virginia to South Carolina. Together, Margaret and Zachariah had four daughters, of whom Sarah was the firstborn.

In exploring this Taliaferro line, we'll begin tomorrow with the four daughter of Margaret Chew Carter and Zachariah Taliaferro.

A Faithful Heart : A Second Look

 

The publication of Emmala Reed's Civil War era journal may be appreciated for the glimpse it affords of post-war Reconstruction in South Carolina, but I have another reason to take a second look at this book. Even the title affixed to the 2004 publication, A Faithful Heart, takes on a different meaning, once we take a step back and look through the multi-generational lens of family history.

When Emmala agonized over the lost love she once shared with the son named after my third great-grandfather, Dr. Ozey Robert Broyles, her diary didn't offer any explanation for why her former beau returned from war with a changed heart. Though the book's editor, Robert T. Oliver, mentioned in his notes that Emmala's prominent father, Judge Jacob Pinckney Reed, had been an illegitimate son of a woman named Sally Reed White, the introductory biographical sketch inaccurately described the relationship between the judge and his next door neighbors, the family of Ozey Robert Broyles.

When I first read the book, I could not find documentation to piece together the story of how the families might have been connected. Now, however, with the addition of Cathi Clore Frost's recently published The Broyles Family: The First Four Generations, I see the connection.

In the biographical sketch leading up to the opening pages of Emmala's journal, editor Robert Oliver stated that Dr. Broyles' brother Aaron was father of Jacob Pinckney Reed, providing the possible wrinkle in the relationship between the doctor's son and the judge's daughter. While Robert Oliver had slated Dr. Broyles and Aaron Broyles as brothers, that is not the case. Since Aaron Broyles died intestate in 1845, we don't have a will to use to confirm names of his children, but from other research, it seems fairly clear that he had no son whom he named after himself. It would have been Ozey's father Aaron who was also father of J. P. Reed.

Cathi Clore Frost is more blunt about the delicate situation. She stated that, in addition to the nine children borne to Aaron Broyles and his wife Frances Reed, he had one more—if not two—by his wife's sister Sallie. That one other child she referred to was Jacob Pinckney Reed, born in 1814, and possibly named after his maternal grandfather.

Thus, if tracing a family tree based on the descendants of the two Reed sisters, the doctor and the judge would have been first cousins, making their respective, lovelorn children second cousins—not an unusual marriage situation in that era. However, considering that Aaron himself was father of both lines, that would make the doctor and the judge half-brothers, thus rendering their children half first cousins.

Likely, neither parent wanted to divulge to the community at large their true relationship, nor perhaps even admit to their own children their ancestors' indiscretions. In whatever way the two sets of parents ultimately diffused the situation, young Ozey Robert junior, grandson of Aaron, eventually married Ella Wilkinson Keith, and poor Emmala went on to find a faithful heart in George Washington Miller, whom she married not long after the close of her diary.

In turn, those two had descendants several generations later who eventually decided to test their DNA. Just out of curiosity, yes, I did look to see whether I had any matches with her line, and I do: two, so far. Now I can say that, despite unrequited love, Emmala did turn out to be someone to whom I'm actually related, making the reading of her story even more of a treasure to me than when I first found it.