Not All Daughters Lead to Matrilines

 

It seemed like such a straightforward, streamlined solution: to determine which of John Carter's children belonged to which of his wives, start with the daughters. Then, since my fifth great-grandfather John Carter lived and died in Virginia in the 1700s, trace the descendancy of his many daughters, seeking to focus specifically on the daughters' daughters' daughters, on down to the present time, at which point we could find willing Carter descendants of those matrilines to take a mitochondrial DNA test and help us compare results.

There's a problem with such an approach. Yes, of course, there is that one issue of finding eligible descendants who would be willing to participate in such a DNA project. But that is not the problem which concerns me. Where I'm stuck is this: not all ancestral daughters would eventually lead to matrilines. Somewhere in that long line of generations, John Carter's descendants could experience the exact opposite of what genetic genealogists call "daughtering out."

While I'm still stymied with actually documenting the genealogies of all of John's children, I did find one way to do a quick and dirty assessment of such a situation. I turned to the ThruLines tool at Ancestry to see whether, even at the level of fifth great-granddaughter, my autosomal DNA test could reveal genetic connections to this distant Carter ancestor.

At the level of fifth great-grandparent, that is the most distant level the ThruLines readout will extend. Sure enough, there in my results was an entry for my own DNA matches who join me in linking back to John Carter. 

There were seventeen of those Carter DNA matches. The closest of them shared a puny nineteen centiMorgans with me—an understandable amount, considering the distance of the relationship—and the smallest shared amount registered at only six cMs, hardly a measure generating confidence.

Still, my purpose was to do a quick assessment of my theory that finding matrilines direct from the current generation back to the Carter wives might be a challenge. Looking at the proposed lines according to ThruLines, here is what I found: 

• One match to Mary Beverley Carter, through her son Richard C. Stevens
• Five matches to Margaret Carter (half sister), all through her son Carter Marshall
• Six matches to Sarah Carter (half sister), four through son John Sutton, two through son Norborne Sutton

As you can see, none of those matches came strictly through a matrilineal line of descent, foiling our project's purpose. 

Looking even further, checking the ThruLines entries specifically for the wife of John Carter from whom I'm descended, Hannah Chew, there are a total of fifty nine DNA matches currently entered in this category. For one of them, Carter daughter Judith showed six matches to me, but three come through Judith's son Joseph Sutton, two from son Stephen Sutton, and one more from son John Sutton. Not even among these can I find lines of descent from any of John Carter's granddaughters. I, myself, am such an example, as the matriline leading from Hannah Chew to me stops with my second great-grandfather, Thomas Taliaferro Broyles.

In a general exploration of all of John Carter's grandchildren, I spotted further problems from documentation. Some daughters did have daughters of their own—but of those I've found so far, some died young, or, having survived and married, had only sons. I did find one daughter who had a daughter—but I find no record that she even married, let alone had daughters of her own.

Granted, ThruLines relies on the trees of those who tested their DNA at Ancestry. There can be mistakes. But even the old published genealogies some people rely on contain errors, too. Seeking actual documentation, as we've already discovered, can reveal details not included in some genealogies.

To complicate matters, researching ancestors from the 1700s is far easier when we are looking for ancestral grandfathers than when we are looking for their wives. Women from earlier centuries seemed almost invisible, adding this one challenge to our quest to trace the matrilineal descent of John Carter's wives. Still, if someone doesn't build the tree, we'll never arrive at the answer we're seeking.

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.

The Road Ahead

 

Sometimes, piecing together a family's story involves not only the immediate relatives, or what some people call the direct line. I've found many cases which I could not solve without branching out to siblings—sometimes siblings over several generations. In the case of our Carters, though, those collateral lines (and the records of their property) are leading us on a merry chase through many counties in colonial Virginia. At this point, I need a plan for sorting out each iteration of the research road ahead.

With this month's research puzzle, the closing days have brought me to a point in which I wonder whether my fifth great-grandfather John Carter ever had a wife named Elizabeth Armistead at all. There is no record that I can find of a marriage between the two in colonial Virginia where they lived. 

Logically, there would be no mention of Elizabeth in John Carter's will, simply because she predeceased him—if, that is, she was ever his wife. That has concerned me, ever since we learned that there was another woman named Sarah Kenyon who had been John Carter's wife before his final marriage to Hannah Chew, but who was not mentioned in genealogy books focused on the Carter line. Why no mention of the one, yet no documentation for the other? The only way I can see out of this tangle is to reach further among extended family members for any sign of Elizabeth or other members of her Armistead family.

That prospect brings me to the point of expanding this search far and wide beyond the simple task I originally thought it would involve. Let's take a look at the research road ahead, to see what this effort might require.

First of all, if the possible marriage between John Carter and Elizabeth Armistead ever did happen as the Carter genealogy book asserted, any record of the event might have been filed in a county other than John's final residence in Spotsylvania County. Looking for signs of the Armistead family yesterday, I realized that trail would lead us to search court documents in at least four counties. Besides Spotsylvania, we saw yesterday that a likely father for Elizabeth filed his will in Richmond County. Then, too, John Carter had property in Caroline County, another possibility for a marriage arrangement. Even farther-fetched than that, Elizabeth's young widowed mother Sarah had remarried, bringing her—and possibly her two young Armistead children—to her second husband Joseph Russell's home in the colony of Maryland, giving us yet another location for records regarding a marriage.

Besides that direct search for any indication of a marriage between Elizabeth Armistead and John Carter, we will likely need to find records affiliated with each branch of the respective families to locate any mention of others in the extended family—particularly any additional mentions of Elizabeth, herself. It may be a long, winding trail that leads us to the answer of when—and whether—Elizabeth and John Carter were married.

As these multiple documents become part of our search, it will be even more important to draw up a timeline to help track the dates of each occurrence in the extended family's story. I already find my head swimming as I consider the events in Elizabeth's family history; melding hers with her brother's and with other members of the blended Russell family—not to mention the multiple people on the Carter side of the family—will take some timeline work.

That said, hopefully the court documents which will provide the answers are still in existence and digitized for our benefit. Beyond that, hopefully they will make their appearance before the month runs out at the end of this coming week.

Before Hannah

Sometimes, it seems as if ancestors disappear into thin air. Though we may find assertions about their lives, these are the ones who leave no trace of their existence. Such may be the case with one wife of my fifth great-grandfather John Carter—the one whom he supposedly married before taking my ancestor Hannah Chew as his bride.

Before Hannah—at least according to the 1912 Carter genealogy by Joseph Lyon Miller, The Descendants of Capt. Thomas Carter of "Barford"—John Carter was married to a woman named Elizabeth Armistead. Elizabeth was the daughter of Francis and Sarah Armistead. Author Miller gave as his source for this information a Carter manuscript dated 1858. Miller explains this manuscript further in the introductory pages of his book: written by yet another John Carter, this one of "The Nest" in Lancaster County, the text was derived from the oral reports of that man's aunt, Fanny Carter, who was born in 1738. Presumably, if that John Carter's report of Aunt Fanny's stories held true, we could assume she got it right about this first wife preceding my Hannah Chew's marriage to my ancestor John Carter.

Joseph Miller gave Elizabeth Armistead's date of birth as March 28, 1716, born to Francis and Sarah Armistead of Richmond County. This information becomes helpful, not only for tracing Elizabeth's family line, but because it points us to a different location in the colony of Virginia than John Carter's residence in Spotsylvania County.

Indeed, thanks to transcriptions and abstracts of crumbling colonial records, we can find mention of Elizabeth's birth in Richmond County—entered as July 12, 1716 instead of Miller's March 28 of the same year—as well as that of her brother John nearly two years later, and their father's passing in 1719. Thankfully, in the same county, an abstraction of the will for Francis "Armstead" that year lists his two young children and his widow Sarah, including the helpful mention that young Elizabeth inherited eighty five acres of her father's land in Richmond County, a detail which might help us trace her later associations.

Complicating matters, we also learn from a document many years later that Elizabeth's mother Sarah had remarried. Regarding a will presented in court in Richmond County concerning a Joseph Russell "of the province of Maryland," the record's transcriber noted that Joseph's "beloved wife Sarah" had previously been the widow of Francis Armistead. At the date of Russell's 1748 will, Sarah was living in Maryland, but if she didn't accept and move to the property Joseph Russell was leaving her in Virginia "within three months" of his death, the bequest would be revoked.

This brings up the question of what became of the two young children left fatherless at Francis Armistead's passing. The transcriber's note to the Russell will indicated that Joseph married Sarah by November of 1722. By then, her daughter Elizabeth would have been barely six years of age. At some point, both Elizabeth and her younger brother John should have been appointed a guardian, providing yet another court record to check. Depending on whether Elizabeth remained in her mother's household—and where her mother eventually moved upon the subsequent marriage to Joseph Russell—that location will likely reveal which county's marriage records would provide the missing detail we are seeking: documentation of Elizabeth Armistead's marriage to John Carter.   

On Hog Island

 

Sometimes, our family history discoveries may put us in hog heaven. At other times, we may run across histories which seem to have gone hog wild. But when I see a narrative which states that my Chew ancestors first lived in a place called Hog Island, I remind myself that this researcher is not hog tied; I can let my fingers do the walking through all those online resources to examine the records.

If we wind our way backwards through time, from my seventh great-grandfather Larkin Chew to his father, Joseph Chew, we see that the family which in more recent times had lived in Colonial Virginia was now in neighboring Maryland. Yet, before Joseph Chew's supposed 1716 death in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, his family had come to Maryland from York County, Virginia. That, in fact, was Joseph Chew's likely birthplace.

According to the Joseph Lyon Miller book, The Descendants of Capt. Thomas Carter of "Barford," the founding ancestor of this Chew family line was John Chew, Joseph's father. The Miller book states that John Chew came to Virginia about 1620 and "settled first at Hog Island."

Unfamiliar with Virginia geography, I had to look up that reference to Hog Island. I like to use Wikipedia entries for a quick, thumbnail sketch of a location as I do family history research, just to get a general idea of what the place was like, its history and neighboring cities and counties. But looking at the Wikipedia entry for Hog Island showed me right away that someone got something wrong in this narrative. According to the Wikipedia entry, Hog Island was first settled in 1672 by a small group of English colonists.

Oh oh. That 1672 date far exceeds the Miller claim of John Chew's arrival in 1620. And yet, the book also mentions that John Chew served in the House of Burgesses, representing Hog Island in 1623, 1624, and later in 1629. This discrepancy calls for additional verification.

A quick check indicated that the colonial Virginian government established in 1619 as a precursor to the House of Burgesses was known as the General Assembly. A list of those first representatives and the settlements which they represented in 1619 shows, of course, no mention of John Chew yet—but it also reveals there was no mention of anyone representing Hog Island. On the other hand, an alphabetical listing of all representatives to the House of Burgesses from that first year through 1775 included someone by the name of John Chew (and also someone named Larkin Chew), so it is likely John was part of that governing body. At least the Miller book explains that John Chew also served as representative of York County in the House of Burgesses at a much later date.

Regardless of this discrepancy in times and locations, another book echoed the same history. A genealogy written by a Chew descendant, Frank Chew Osburn, and printed posthumously by his estate in 1945 affirms that same Hog Island location with an early settlement date of 1621.

With that tale of the immigrant ancestor John Chew, we move from those whose lives can be at least partially documented on this continent to conjecture about which parents came before, and from which homeland location—Somerset? or Worcestershire? The latter is not one of my goals for this month's Twelve Most Wanted research, nor, I think, will it ever be. Though I never expected the Chew line in this country to have extended so far, it was certainly satisfying to have trailed it all this way.

From this point, we'll wind our way back to John Chew's descendants to check what else might be learned about the spouses associated with this line in the next few days. And then, there's one more detail I need to examine, back at the point at which we started with Hannah Chew and her husband John Carter: just how it is, if at all, that John Carter was related to the famed colonial Virginian dubbed King Carter.

Worth his Weight in . . . Tobacco?

 

Reaching back through time to view the court records of my seventh great-grandfather Larkin Chew, I realize how different than ours that time period had been. Rather than rush through the document chase, that realization caused me to slow down and savor the contrast. Life was so very different back then, not only for manner of dress or speech, but in day to day interactions that comprised the social fabric of the Colonial Virginia community.

In a spate of financial transactions in Spotsylvania County in 1723, for instance, Larkin Chew was mentioned several times in those court records. Most were deeds recording the exchange of property ownership, and one would expect—just as it is now—that such sales would involve the trading of money for title to a specific parcel of land in the county. Not always so; apparently Larkin Chew was worth his weight in, um, tobacco? If that was what the abbreviation "tob" meant in one 1723 entry, that was apparently the medium for at least two business transactions I found concerning this ancestor.

Recorded in Spotsylvania County court records on April 2, 1723, for instance, the exchange of one hundred fifty acres in Saint George's Parish was consummated, if I am right here, with a payout of 2,100 pounds of tobacco. Of course, there were many other deeds bearing Larkin Chew's name which were facilitated by an exchange of money—specifically, so many pounds of sterling silver. But, pushing back far enough in the records, I saw another such exchange involving tobacco show up, linked to Larkin Chew's name.

Moving back in time another twenty years or so, in nearby Essex County on April 11, 1701, a document was drawn up specifying an exchange of Larkin Chew's contracting services for a payout "in the sume [sic] of one hundred and ten thousand pounds of good sound merchantable tobo." This payout was for "certaine proposicons" regarding the building of a new courthouse with "ye exact dementions" as that of the King and Queen County courthouse, which apparently had also been built under the supervision of Larkin Chew. 

That was how the transcription put the exchange: for his services, a certain weight of "tobo." Tobacco? I needed to verify that. The only reason I had found the information regarding that court document was thanks to a transcription posted in the notes section of an entry for Larkin Chew's genealogy found at a website which had been shared in his blog by Patrick Jones of Frequent Traveler Ancestry. I have yet to see the handwritten document itself.

While an abstract of Essex County court records is available in digitized format on some genealogy websites, the earliest date in that collection at Ancestry.com is two years after this business exchange was recorded. However, in the specifications for the original contract in 1701 was a stipulation that the work was to be finished in 1703—the first year of the court records abstracts.

I looked to see what I could find. There, on an entry bearing Larkin Chew's name in 1706, was an entry for a judgment regarding an unpaid debt owed to Larkin Chew. The amount owed? Once again couched in the same terms, the amount was two thousand pounds "tobo." 

So what was "tobo"? I sometimes saw the term coupled with another: "tobo & cask." I took my question to Google, but even then the question stumped the Answer guru...until I found this readout on the first century of interactions between British settlers and the Native population in the region around Jamestown. In a spreadsheet of abstracts of colonial papers, I used the "find" mechanism to look for the abbreviation, "tobo." 

There were 128 instances of that term. And yes, I clicked through them all. Finally, at entry number 67, I located a line which not only included the abbreviation, but then spelled it out as tobacco.

Tobacco as a form of money in the early days of the colonies? I hadn't thought of it that way. That gives an idea of just how many other details about everyday transactions in colonial Virginia we might have missed, as we sift through those old court records, trying to imagine what life was like for our seventh great-grandparents. 

A Speedy Overview

Mostly, family trees are assembled step by step. After all, each new entry from the previous generation needs to be carefully inspected by comparison with documentation on the specific individual in question. Perhaps, in following the work of genealogical trailblazers in my pursuit of my sixth great-grandfather John Chew's parents, I hadn't expected to run into such a speedy overview. But that is indeed what I've stumbled upon.

In exploring some old genealogical publications of the previous century yesterday, we discovered that John Chew's parents were Larkin Chew and his wife, Hannah Roy. From those same resources viewed yesterday, it was easy to see the trail moved quickly from Larkin Chew to his father, Joseph, and then onward to yet another generation—all still in the British colonies in North America.

Here's the overview, as found in a few resources posted online. First, from last month's research into another of my mother's colonial lines, John Carter, I discovered a brief overview of the Chew family in the 1912 Joseph Lyon Miller book, The Descendants of Capt. Thomas Carter of "Barford." While the section began with the founding immigrant, we'll continue our exploration by connecting with the generation immediately preceding Larkin Chew.

According to the Miller book, Larkin Chew was the only child of Joseph Chew and the unnamed daughter of a "Mr. Larkin of Annapolis." With the mention of Annapolis, we immediately recognize that we are no longer researching ancestors living in colonial Virginia, but from neighboring Maryland. In fact, though Larkin may have lived his adult life in Virginia, he was likely born in Maryland. Joseph Miller speculated that Larkin's father Joseph, though born in Virginia, had moved to Maryland sometime after 1659.

Joseph Chew, whom Miller pinpoints as having been born in 1641 and dying in Anne Arundel County in 1716—though I have yet to find support for that—was apparently born a colonist, despite the early date of his birth. According to Miller, it was Joseph's father, another Chew man named John, who was the founding immigrant. This pushes the timeline of the family's arrival in the New World to a fairly early date. 

John, the immigrant ancestor, was said to have been born in England in 1598 and arrived in Virginia "about 1620," according to Joseph Miller. Putting that date in perspective, the passengers on the Mayflower reached land in that same year. England first established the Jamestown settlement in 1607 in Virginia. So whenever it was that John Chew arrived in the New World, he was among some of the earliest arrivals to the continent.

That, of course, depends on whether that information was all correct. While the Miller book may be fascinating to follow (at least for those readers who can claim the book's subjects as their ancestors), I can find very little in the way of notes regarding sources. And yet, I can find other publications which echo that same information—some, more or less similar though not entirely agreeing with the specifics. A wry thought sometimes passes my mind that this seems not entirely unlike our modern avocational researcher's tendency to copy other people's online trees. More repetition does not necessarily make a statement become truth.

Fortunately for us, our Chew ancestor's point person—Larkin Chew, whom I'm currently researching—had ample mentions of his name in court records, back in Spotsylvania County and elsewhere. Thanks to a tip from fellow blogger Patrick Jones of Frequent Traveler Ancestry, one website he shared includes a running catalog of several of those court records for Larkin Chew, along with abstracts of the legal issues in which he was mentioned. That, at least, can give us a jump start on the tedious process of sifting through the details of one man's life in colonial Virginia.

First, Check the Road Map

 

When you don't know where you're going—when you haven't traveled this way before—it's important to first check the road map. The same goes for moving into new territory on our family history journey. We're heading into new research terrain as we move backwards in time from my sixth great-grandfather John Chew to his parents' generation. To prepare for the journey, let's first check what those trailblazers might have found.

Yes, I know: we've already seen that some of those genealogical trailblazers have made mistakes. And that can be disconcerting in research, just as it is in travel—ask me about the time our phone's brand new map app turned us in the opposite direction on one trip out in the middle of nowhere. It happens. We'll watch for that as we move through those century-old genealogy tomes.

For instance, I've already spotted one problem in a genealogy book from 1883, Lawrence Buckley Thomas' Pedigrees of Thomas, Chew, and Lawrance. The author, in an entry about our John Chew, identifies the father of John's wife Margaret as Robert Beverley, when we've already found that her father was Harry Beverley. But what about the rest of that entry? I've also found information in that book which can certainly be verified before accepting it.

If this book is correct, our John Chew was the second son of a man by the name of Larkin Chew and his wife, Hannah Roy. Immediately, if this is so, we can see that my fifth great-grandmother Hannah Chew, John's daughter who married John Carter, was namesake of her paternal grandmother.

Above the entry for John Chew in this book, we find the entry for his father, Larkin Chew. If that name bears out, I will be quite pleased. One would think that searching for a name like Larkin would be far less prone to name twins than would be a name like John. From Larkin's own entry in the Thomas genealogy, we learn that he, in turn, was son of a man by the name of Joseph Chew. Joseph's wife's name was apparently unknown to that author, except for her maiden name—Larkin—which explains how their son came upon such an unusual given name.

The note in this entry stated that Larkin Chew was in Virginia before 1700, and that his wife Hannah was daughter of a man from Port Royal, Virginia, by the name of John Roy. We are now pushing back even farther into the colonial period, as Port Royal was one of the earlier colonial settlements, established along the Rappahannock River in 1652.

Fortunately, the place in Virginia where Larkin Chew had settled—whenever it was before 1700 that he arrived there—was the same Spotsylvania County we have been studying for my Carter ancestors, as well. I know that only because, once having gathered this tentative information from one (admittedly faulty) published genealogy, I used Larkin Chew's name to search through abstractions of the county's court records. 

According to information from Spotsylvania County Will Book A, a will for Larkin Chew was proved on April 1, 1729. Named in the document was Larkin's wife Hannah, their sons Larkin, Thomas, and John (my ancestor), and their married daughter Nan, wife of William Johnson. So far, the information first discovered in that genealogy book is holding out for Larkin Chew. And while the book didn't seem to know the given name of Larkin's mother, the abstract of Larkin's own will seemed to hint that his mother's name was Ruth—and that she was still alive at his passing in 1729.

Whether that was indeed so—it is possible that, as we saw with John Carter's will last month, the reference could have been to someone considered a mother figure, such as a step-mother—we will need to wait until we push back yet another generation. We'll follow this trailblazer's route for one more generation to Larkin's father, supposedly Joseph Chew, tomorrow.

Flummoxed — But Still Moving Onward

 

Among my teacher friends, there is an observation about the littlest learners, those first through third graders among whom the brightest seem to race through their lessons in those earliest grades. Reading assignments? Done. Math lessons, a breeze. If you let them, the brightest of these students seem like they'd be unstoppable, even if they could charge ahead all the way to high school level work.

And then, they hit a brick wall. Regardless of their previous prowess with words or numbers, something about the fourth grade seems to flummox them. It's a whole new world of learning. The rules have changed.

The same has seemed to happen for me, as I enter a whole new world of genealogical research. There is something to be said for tromping through collections of old court records: not as many ancient relatives get quickly added to the family tree when it is such a struggle to even find documentation confirming their connection. Not to mention, the bleary-eyed struggle to comprehend faded copies of impossible-to-read handwriting is real.

Still, at some point—at least for DNA matching reasons—after confirming an ancestor's place in the family tree, we then begin that long steep descent back to the present. The goal? To confirm by paper trail the evidence provided by DNA testing that a particular match is indeed related to me through a specific familial pathway.

At that point, the distant cousins start adding their weight to that family tree. Granted, the rapid pace of the additions has slowed, now that I'm on to my sixth great-grandfather John Chew. Though I may be finding signs in court records that he did indeed live in Spotsylvania County in colonial Virginia, reversing directions and following all his progeny back through the centuries to our present time can be difficult for those lines other than his daughter Hannah, who was in my direct line. It's all a challenge—but a different type of challenge now.

I say that as I still manage to pat myself on the back for having verified numerous descendants of that line and likewise for the previous task for John Carter's line earlier this month. After all, I did locate documentation on an additional 240 relatives in the past two weeks. That means my tree is now up to 37,742 documented individuals, thanks to these latest discoveries in my mother's colonial heritage.

In addition to that, judging from the increase in DNA matches over the past month, it looks like processed results are finally showing from all those who had received DNA test kits for holiday presents. Granted, these numbers are nowhere near the increases seen in previous years, but I'd say ten new DNA matches in the last two weeks is a good number for me. A month ago, I was only gaining about one to two new DNA matches per biweekly period, if even that many.

The challenge to trace all these descendants of my colonial ancestors John and Margaret Chew may be hampered by access to legible court records, but ever so gradually, the path becomes clearer. Thankfully, in Virginia, there are several online resources to consult. We'll be looking at some of them this coming week as we continue our search for the Chew line even earlier than John's own generation.

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.

The Problem With Good Advice

 

...is that it doesn't always work in every situation.

Take the advice given to those of us who are just starting out on the adventure of discovering our family history: start with yourself, then move backwards through the generations, step by step. Granted, that is good advice, a solid recommendation. It works great in this age of decennial census records, birth and death records linked to names and birthplaces of parents.

When we slip past that era of government obsession with records built to identify people, things begin to change for the family researcher. Precious few documents before 1850 are there to identify the names of an ancestor's previous generation. Baptismal records might help, if one's ancestors were of the church-going type whose denomination believed in baptizing infants—and keeping written records of such sacraments. Other than that, before the 1850 census, the world of records research becomes a very different place.

There are still resources, of course. Wills come to mind as an excellent way to reconstruct an ancestor's family constellation—but in this case, it is far harder to find a son in an unknown father's will than it is to verify the names of children in the will of a known father. Most wills I've seen were drawn up by a parent seeking to bestow support upon those left behind—children and grandchildren for the most part, seldom siblings or members of any previous generation.

This suggests to me the idea that, when working on research problems pre-dating 1850 in American genealogy, it would be far easier to start with the founding immigrant ancestor, then take the long slide forward to the present—a "descendants of" approach—exactly the opposite of the "ancestors of" advice given to beginners today. And yet, if we don't know an ancestor's father's name, how are we to find that ancestor in his father's will?

Thankfully, those organizations which specialize in digitizing centuries-old records for online access have finally gotten the clue that indexing a will to make searchable all the names mentioned in the document would be the immense help that it is. The problem is that not all microfilmed wills are yet indexed—set up in such a way as to be all-names searchable—and those that are microfilmed represent the subset that hadn't yet been lost to extreme age, courthouse fires, or rampages of nature or other approaching enemies.

As it turns out, some of the courthouse records for Spotsylvania County, Virginia, home of the Carter family I researched last month and the Chew family I'm beginning work on this month, may have suffered such a fate. A move of the courthouse in 1839 resulted in many missing loose papers prior to that date. Of the wills still available, the torn-and-taped condition of brittle pages plus the cross-hatched effect of ink bleeding through pages from the opposite side yield nearly illegible text, as we saw in the search for John Carter's will last month.

Transcriptions—or even abstracts—can help quicken the pace of discovery, and I've lately been doing searches through such more recently-published finding aids. Once I locate a reference to a possible ancestor—or part of that person's family—I can quickly review the entire constellation of family names to see whether it is worthwhile to locate a scan of the original will. It spares my eyes as well as speeding up the process. But better yet is that such a process offers the ability to short-circuit that oft-repeated advice to start with yourself and move backwards, by jumping ahead to the unknown generation and examining the forward-looking list of the deceased's progeny, which includes the names I do know.

While it is true that old genealogy books published in the last century may also serve as capable research guides, it is also possible that the text contains mistakes. Better to check out that information ourselves. Using a volume of abstracted court documents—if searchable online—can surely speed up that process for those counties in which the records are still not available in a searchable format. As we go through the books on the Chew and Beverley lines this month, I'll also be exploring what can be found by some alternate resources online.

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.

Forty Seven Matches and One Will

 

This week, I've been speed-reading through the forty seven DNA matches who, like me, descend from John Carter's daughter, Margaret Chew Carter. After looking over the one match descending from her sister Mary Beverley Carter, or the five from the other sister, Judith, working to verify forty seven was definitely a big gulp to swallow.

Unlike when I researched John and Hannah Chew Carter's other children, knowing I have DNA relatives tracing back to Margaret Chew Carter really doesn't tell me much. After all, many of those lines actually connect to mine at a closer generational level. It's just that we all share Margaret Chew Carter as our distant ancestor. I actually consider the descendants of the half-siblings, the children of John by his first wife, to be more helpful matches. After all, the only genetic material we could share in that scenario would be from my fifth great-grandfather John, himself.

Which brings me back to one point which stumped me early in this month's research project: where was John Carter's will? I needed to find some way to document his children, since his lifespan existed long before handy government records like the 1850 census were there to tell all about the family.

While I spent more time than I care to recall, going page by page through the unindexed digitized copy of the Spotsylvania County, Virginia, court records—coming up empty-handed, as you might have surmised after that long stretch of silence—thankfully, someone came to my rescue.

Actually, it was two different readers here who were kind enough to share that information with me. First was an email I received from blogger Charlie Purvis of Carolina Family Roots, who first sent me a link to a finding aid at the Library of Virginia. Though he mentioned that there seemed to be quite a few John Carters out there in Virginia—my sentiments, exactly!—this was apparently a problem which he couldn't just put down. Pretty soon, he sent me a link to John Carter's will at FamilySearch. And then, another link: the same will, this time at Ancestry.com.

The second reader contact I received was likewise a pleasant surprise. It was a set of comments from Patrick Jones of Frequent Traveler Ancestry, who has been blogging almost as long as I have. While Patrick likewise sent me the link to John Carter's will at Ancestry, he also shared an unexpected connection.

Though in the past, we've joked about the challenges involved in researching such a surname as Jones—yes, I have some Joneses in my line, as well—Patrick mentioned that years ago, he had done some research on the same John Carter as I'm studying now. Since his blog features a blending of his penchant (and work requirements) for travel with his genealogical research, he had actually acquired a copy of the Carter will straight from the Spotsylvania County courthouse in Virginia. It was while he was pondering just how to go about shrinking down the large photocopy to scan that he discovered the will on Ancestry.

And now, we find we are cousins. Very distant cousins, but kin, nonetheless. You know we'll be comparing notes.