Rabbit Trail Redux

 

From the looks of it, one could presume that "rabbit trails" have a bad reputation among family history researchers. I'd like to propose we reconsider that viewpoint. After all, what is a researcher, if not one embued with inquisitiveness and the willingness to check out possibilities. If nothing else, our pursuit of that Bright Shiny Object beckoning us to confirm—or reject—a possibility can lead us to an answer. Yes. Or no. Possibly even maybe. That should be sufficient to reduce the myriad options down to a manageable few research directions.

Even though our wild chase after a possible Guseman relationship caused our crash into a null set, we are not quite finished exploring the Guseman connections to my mother-in-law's third great-grandmother, Mary Carroll Gordon. As it turns out, there is another Guseman hypothesis out there, proposed by the writer of one of those nineteenth-century county history publications.

You know those tomes: the books with such imaginative titles as History of Monongalia County, most of them published any time between the late 1880s and the early 1910s. They were also called by some, "mug books," for their flattering vignettes of the leading members of the town, occasionally embellished with their likeness.

We've talked about one such book before: The Tenmile Country and Its Pioneer Families, by Howard Leckey. Never mind that that 1950 book focused on a somewhat different region—Tenmile Creek of southwestern Pennsylvania—it happens to contain several entries on the Gordon family, among many others, including one Guseman we'd be particularly interested in following.

As much as I've researched the many lines of the Gordon family, how could I have missed this? But there it was, on page 435—I told you this was a tome—the eldest daughter of John Gordon and Mary Duke, Elizabeth, marrying a Guseman.

According to researcher Howard Leckey, Elizabeth Gordon was born in 1761, just to provide some perspective. Her marriage was back at the location of the Gordon's previous family home in Frederick County, Maryland, though by the time of the birth of her second child, her family was living in Monongalia County, Virginia.

Elizabeth, by the way, was older sister to William Gordon, who eventually become husband of Mary Carroll, that third great-grandmother of my mother-in-law. And now that we've entangled ourselves in the intertwining lines of the Gordons and the Carrolls, let me add yet another knot: Elizabeth Gordon and her husband Christopher Guseman—at least, according to the Leckey book—were parents of Godfrey Guseman, the man who eventually became husband of Mary Carroll's supposed sister Margaret.

At least, that's according to one of those history books. And presuming that Anthony Carroll was indeed the father of both Margaret and Mary. I'm not quite sure of that Guseman-Gordon connection, even at this point. But wandering down these rabbit trails certainly has opened my mind to more possibilities to explore. After all, in seeking to cement further family connections, we may need to revisit Anthony Carroll's own will to see if we can detect the identity of one more person he mentioned among his children: the Carroll heir named James Walls.

Uncle Dave and Aunt Nancy

Why is it that some of the most horrific stories can start out so innocuously? When things are "going well," there is apparently no guarantee that they will stay the course. That's the case with the story I alluded to yesterday: a horrible event befalling a family well respected in the community.

Unlike the novelist, a family history researcher won't likely begin the tale with the gut-wrenching opener one would expect in a thriller, of course. Looking at the tale of the Gordon family from a genealogical vantage point broadens the perspective and amplifies the contrast, yet allows us to explore the elements which contributed to the cascade of events.

The story I mentioned yesterday was one I stumbled upon as I worked through my goal of documenting each of the descendants of John and Mary Duke Gordon. I've touched on the various research challenges in tracing the history of the immigrant, John Gordon, who was born in 1739—but where, as various reports insist it was Scotland while others said Germany.

Meeting and marrying Mary Helen Duke in Maryland in 1760, John and his bride eventually settled in Greene County, Pennsylvania. Among their many children was son William B. Gordon, who along with his first wife Mary Carroll became my mother in law's direct ancestors through their eldest son James—and with his second wife, Mary Cain, became another of her direct ancestors through their eldest son, William H. Gordon.

Though John and Mary Gordon ended their westward journey with their passing in Greene County, their son William B. Gordon was smitten with that same wanderlust about a decade after his father's death. All but one of William B. Gordon's children chose to move to Ohio with him when he left Pennsylvania. That one child was their daughter Nancy.

Nancy Gordon, born and raised in Greene County, was already married by the time her father and the rest of her siblings decided to make the move to Ohio. By then, she had been married to David Spragg for ten years, and had given birth to three children, with a fourth one due any minute, at the point at which the rest of the extended Gordon family left Greene County.

While it may have been hard for Nancy to bid goodbye to so many of her family members—after all, in 1836, travel was difficult and the likelihood of future visits quite dim—she and her husband were already well established in the community they called home. An 1888 entry in the Samuel P. Bates History of Greene County Pennsylvania indicated their five children eventually married well and enjoyed successful lives and vibrant families, close to the place they always had called home.

Nancy's husband David Spragg, though not well educated, was noted to have been "engaged in land speculations and farming" from an early age. He must have been quite successful, as his biographical entry in the Bates volume painted him as having "good social qualities" and being known as "a great philanthropist."

Of course, such community "histories" often served as brag pieces for those whose biographical entries were inserted into the publication. And yet, the couple apparently came by those flattering terms quite honestly. Considered "a blessing to the community," this memorial entry noted,

His wife was of a kind disposition, and their home was one of the most attractive in the neighborhood. He and his wife lived a long and happy life together, and were known to every one in that neighborhood as "Uncle Dave" and "Aunt Nancy Spragg."

The Spragg name was well known in Greene County, as was the Gordon name—well, until their removal to Perry County, Ohio, in 1836—and that good name bestowed favor upon the next generation, just as it had for those aunts and uncles and grandparents before the marriage of David Spragg and Nancy Gordon.

In that inexplicable twist of fate, however, things can turn out so differently for those descending from this good name, a generation or two beyond the present setting. While looking closely at the children of David and Nancy reveals nothing of a hint of trouble to come, it helps allow the story to unfold, to find a place on a timeline, and familiarize us with the players—and what might have set the stage for changes and choices. We'll meet that next generation tomorrow.

Above: Illustration of a man named David Spragg—although not included in the same section as featured his biographical sketch—appeared on page 145 in the 1888 History of Greene County, Pennsylvania by Samuel P. Bates
 

When the Family's Story Doesn't End Happily Ever After

There are times, when we follow the ancestral trails of our family's history, that we encounter some stories that don't turn out as well as we'd hoped. That "happily ever after" can't possibly ring true in every case of family history, but in some episodes we stumble across, the account might even be chilling.

As I've worked through my project to catalog all the descendants of my mother in law's ancestors, John and Mary Duke Gordon, the other day I ran across an account so horrific, I hardly could bring myself to even acknowledge its place in the family tree. This is the kind of thing that surely only happens to others. But what do you do when the story does, in fact, belong to your own people?

Every family faces some hardships. Sometimes, it is in how families overcome their adversities that they become strengthened. For those stories, there is that redeeming feature that allows the family to be brave enough to divulge those initial difficulties. Those difficulties become a prelude leading up to a better resolution.

This, however, is not the kind of problem I'm talking about here. An episode like this, when it does happen, causes a shocked response. It's something people won't forget.

Long before acts of terrorism became part of our lexicon, these were the type of activity that one hoped would never occur—but once they did occur, could never be forgotten. An example of such a memory from my own childhood years would be the tower shooting at the University of Texas at Austin.

When tragic events such as this occurred, people clung to every news report, not only to hear who had fallen—and who had survived—but, in the aftermath, to hear some consolation that this devastation would never happen again. That this was not simply some sub-human monster who perpetrated all this, but that there was a reason why things went wrong.

I'm sure that was the type of response people had when they opened their newspapers, from New York to Missouri, as the year of 1894 drew to a close. Surely, in the news report they faced, this was a "madman" who had just perpetrated a heinous crime. That's how the newspapers portrayed him. And yet, only a few hours earlier, he was the gentlest of fathers whose only complaint was a nagging headache.

What do you do when you find such a story—and then realize it fits right into a slot in your own family tree? Do you doubt it and search for the "real" story to replace the family's "myth"? Do you keep looking for the reason why it really wasn't that way? Do you ignore the whole episode, and simply plug in name, dates of birth, marriage and death, and hope the rest gets forgotten in time? Or do you let your quest to uncover roots lead you to uncover the roots of what happened here, as well as what happened in the constant litany of generations? It is, after all, part of the family history. And sometimes, we just have to let history be history. And let it be told.

Above: "The Bay," 1901 oil on canvas by Swedish painter, Carl Wilhelmson; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Gordon and Company

Exploring the contents of my old file cabinet with the collection of twenty-year-old family history notes seemed much akin to opening up grandma's old trunk. There were all sorts of surprises tucked away inside.

Entering into that domain I hadn't checked for decades, I was rediscovering surnames I hadn't worked on for ages. Even better, I got to re-familiarize myself with gems I had once found—and had once promised myself to include in the bigger picture, once I got around to weaving it into my database.

Of course, in the avalanche of further genealogical data, that "around to it" never got here. Maybe it's a good thing I've stumbled upon this research question.

After pulling out the files on the Gordon surname and the geographic area where they once lived—Greene County, Pennsylvania—I remembered there were related surnames with just as many goodies stashed in their respective folders, as well.

I had to take a closer look in that other far corner of the "old trunk."

The first related surname to re-check was that of John Gordon's own wife, Mary Hellen Duke. I have no records on her parents, but just revisiting this research project has shown me that there was quite a bit written on her relations, as well. It's time to lay out more detail in my own file, based on the remembrances shared in those Greene County records I mentioned yesterday.

The next step will be to examine the resources stashed away in folders on John and Mary's son William, my husband's fourth great-grandfather. William, according to notes, was born in Frederick County, Maryland, but moved with the family, first to Monongalia County in what was then still Virginia, and onward to Greene County—all in the late 1700s.

It was William's first wife who introduced the second related surname I want to explore: that of Carroll, a name full of interesting possibilities from that era of our country's history.

William was also the one who introduced another element into our family history: the addition of a second wife who bore to him just about as many children as had his first wife, Mary Carroll, before her death in 1812. While large families were certainly not the exception in those days, and while migrating westward with the whole bunch of them was not uncommon either, to have a descendant of one wife's children end up marrying the descendant of the other wife's children creates that messy status of becoming one's own distant cousin.

Life in the western far reaches of states like Virginia and Pennsylvania introduced their own wild possibilities into the family history, as well. I remember treasuring some of the anecdotes I found tucked between the covers of the history books I mentioned yesterday. Hopefully, now that I'm revisiting this entire section of the family history, I'll remember to flag those stories, share them here—and be sure to include them in the final cut of my genealogical saga.