The Mess We're Left With

 

It's been a month filled with large court files regarding the intestate estates of Rainey men and their related families—not to mention name twins who couldn't possibly be father and son. In other words: following the line of Thomas Firth Rainey and his extended family has left me with more of a mess than when we started.

My goal for the third of my Twelve Most Wanted for this year was to find the identity of Thomas Firth Rainey's parents. That I did, and then some. The only problem was that this search has led me to more questions than answers.

I again reviewed those lengthy court cases, seeing if now, in retrospect, those many names mentioned in the files would make more sense. I've saved the links to specific letters in the estate files, entering them in the profile pages of each named ancestor or collateral relative. Yet only a few more details popped up.

For instance, I noticed that Isham Rainey's grandchildren from his daughter Sarah and her husband George Mealer were listed in two separate letters to the court where he died in Monroe County, Mississippi. Isham R. Mealer and his sister Martha together sent their letter regarding their grandfather's estate, identifying their residence as Murray County, Georgia. In that letter, tantalizingly, was a third grandchild mentioned: John Hammock. Do I have any idea which Rainey parent that third grandchild claims? Of course not. I can find absolutely no sign to connect him to his supposed grandfather, Isham Rainey.

Another letter to Monroe County, Mississippi, with the same purpose was signed by the remaining Mealer grandchildren of Isham Rainey. Why in a separate letter? Other than the fact that that letter was sent from the court in Oglethorpe County, I have no idea why the family was represented from two different Georgia counties.

As for the children of Isham Rainey's daughter Sarah, I can trace some of her descendants, but not all. This will need to wait for another year's examination. Full Text Search at FamilySearch.org has helped immensely to locate these big, messy court cases, but it hasn't found everything that I might need to answer the remaining questions. Nor have I been able to trace Sarah's sister Elizabeth, who in the same intestate case had represented herself as Elizabeth Arnold.

Repeating this same process next time for the children descended from Isham Rainey may reveal more court records—hopefully not of the intestate estate variety—but that effort will need far more time to complete than the brief day we have left to us in this month. It's time to pack away this month full of discoveries on both the Rainey and Firth families, be grateful for what can now be found much easier than in past years, and move on to April's focus from my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026.

Good Bedtime Reading for the Insomniac

 

One last time this month—at least for this puzzle regarding my fourth great-grandfather Isham Rainey—I've headed back to those DNA matches that Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool has hypothesized are my cousins from that same line. This means, too, that I'll need to revisit the probate records concerning the estate Isham left behind for his family to resolve.

Did I mention messy? As in perfect bedtime reading for the insomniac? 

As if sorting through the intestate Isham Rainey's belongings weren't sleep-inducing enough, there is the question of George Mealer. George, it appears from some records, was Isham's son-in-law, through marriage to his daughter Sarah Rainey. And yet, when I read through the 1845 court records in Monroe County, Mississippi, about the administration of Isham's estate there, the mention of someone named George Mealer pops up.

But wait! The George Mealer married to Isham's daughter was back in Georgia, where Isham himself once lived. In fact, it appeared that George Mealer died there, perhaps late in 1831—intestate, what else?—in Oglethorpe County, himself. So who was this other George Mealer? And were court listings of Mealer relatives reliable indicators of our Rainey kin? Or not?

Through the wearying catalog of legal documents contained in the two various cases, it was possible to glean a listing of the children of George Mealer, son-in-law of Isham Rainey—enough to launch me into a more recent time period where it might be possible to trace those Mealer children and their descendants through to a time period known for more well-documented records. That, in turn, may help determine how some mystery DNA cousins are related to me. All that stands between me and at least the discovery of one set of Isham Rainey's grandchildren is a huge stack of reading material in the form of mind-numbing legalese.

I'll let you know how it goes, tomorrow morning.

Overextending

 

Having hopes of discovering whatever became of the siblings of a fourth great-grandfather, even if his name was as unusual as Isham, may have been a bit overextending. There is, after all, only so much that can be found about an average resident of late 1700s Virginia.

There is, however, a number of loose ends to tie up regarding this Rainey family before the month comes to a close. Grateful to have achieved my goal of discovering not only my third great-grandfather Thomas Firth Rainey's parents, but grandparents as well, I'd like to see which of his siblings may have left a genealogical paper trail. After all, though Thomas' sisters had likely married in the early 1800s, they had at least made their appearance in court documentation owing to the fact that their father had died intestate. This is a record source that could be useful to revisit.

At the time of Isham Rainey's 1843 death in Mississippi, both his daughters had spoken up to make sure they were included in the distributions of their father's estate, should there have been a residue. One daughter, Sarah, had married someone in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, by the name of George Mealer. The other daughter, Elizabeth, had identified herself in letters to the probate court in Mississippi as Elizabeth Arnold.

Returning to FamilySearch.org's Full Text Search, it may be possible to discover more about the family of George and Sarah Mealer. From that point, if any other indicators surface, we may also be able to wrap up this month's research project with information on the identity of Sarah's sister Elizabeth Arnold and her unnamed husband.

The end game here will be to identify whether either sister had children for one purpose: to locate any DNA matches for these lines that might have been descendants of this Rainey line.

Who Got the Money?

 

Now that we've figured out the parents of my third great-grandfather Thomas Firth Rainey and seen him labeled as the son of Isham Rainey and Sarah Firth, it's time to revisit that pile of legal papers assembled in Monroe County, Mississippi, at the time of Isham's passing. 

Normally, a will would clearly spell out the surviving descendants, but we don't have such a convenience, as Isham apparently died intestate. What we do have is a file of court records, complete with scraps of paper containing handwritten notes by all the men who felt that Isham's estate owed them money. In other words, what we now have to sort through is a mess. And the only reason I'd be sorting through this file, page by scribbled page, is to determine just who got the money. I want to know who his children were.

There are a few clearly labeled documents in the file, thankfully—such as this letter to the court by one woman named Elizabeth Arnold. According to her letter, she was appointing Uriah Duncan as her attorney, to ensure that she received the "proportionable share" of her father's estate.

Back in Oglethorpe County in Georgia, where Isham's son Thomas once lived, three people jointly sent a letter to the court in Mississippi. They were James A. Mealer, John M. Mealer, and Mary Ann Mealer, who together were appointing George Mealer of Lowndes County, Mississippi, to serve as their attorney in representing their rights as the grandchildren of the deceased Isham Rainey.

There were, of course, numerous others sending notes to the court to make sure that money owed to them from the Rainey estate did indeed make its way to its creditors. All that takes time to follow.

Though there were many lining up to claim their due from the administrators of the estate, the ones I'm interested in will be the ones who could demonstrate their legal right to an inheritance from that same pot of money—if any was left after that long line of inquiring creditors received their due. Perhaps it is a good thing that I have a weekend ahead of me to read through all those statements.

Revisiting Virginia

 

Over fifty years after the fact, Thomas F. Rainey reported that he had been born in the state of Virginia. While the sole location of any documents I had been able to find for this third great-grandfather of mine had been the state of Georgia, where he had married his wife and raised his family, I've now been able to connect him to someone who had died in Mississippi. But Virginia? What were my chances for finding Thomas by searching through an entire state?

The 1850 census showed that Georgia resident Thomas Rainey had reported his age to have been fifty three at that time. Hence, a birth year of approximately 1797, right? At that point, Virginia's population would have been around eight hundred thousand. What were my chances of finding him in a crowd that size?

I decided to look, anyhow. But not for Thomas, himself. Instead, I tried my hand at searching for his father whose gift—at least to me—was the more unusual name Isham.

One item that stood out for me in that quixotic search was a marriage entry in a Virginia ledger preserved from Brunswick County. Dated July 31, 1794, it named Isham "Raney" as the groom. Granted, I still had my doubts that he would be the only person with that name among eight hundred thousand residents. But seeing the name of the bride made all the difference.

Her name? Sarah Firth. The very name represented by the middle initial "F" in Thomas Rainey's own name.

Image above: Line item entry from the Brunswick County, Virginia, marriage ledger as transcribed by The Virginia State Library; image courtesy of FamilySearch.org.   

Isham in Mississippi

 

If, in 1844, the Coweta County, Georgia, court appointed resident Thomas F. Rainey as administrator of the estate of a deceased man named Isham Rainey, what connection between the two would make such an appointment reasonable? Considering that this Isham Rainey had died not in Georgia but in Mississippi, there must have been a significant link between these two men.

I decided to check the records available for Mississippi during that time period to look for anyone by that same name, Isham Rainey. Whether I found the right one will apparently take quite a bit more reading, but I did locate one document regarding the administrators for the estate of one Isham Rainey in Monroe County, Mississippi.

Granted, Monroe County in the 1840s boasted a population of under ten thousand people, but its population, based on census returns, was more than doubling every ten years. The appearance of this Isham Rainey in court records could be a case of a name twin.

The trouble with this document was in the listing of the named administrators. Just like the record we had found yesterday from the Georgia county court, it named more than one man as administrator. There was, however, a problem. While the Georgia appointment named Thomas Rainey as administrator along with a man named Jonathan Lee, the Mississippi record identified someone named H. W. Allen heading up an unnamed group.

In opening up the first pages of the file, though, I barely needed to look farther before spotting one detail: the heading on the next page included the name Thomas F. Rainey. One page beyond that, complete with ink blots and crossed out letters, included the unclear entry, "Isham Rainey paid the above account for Thos. F. Rainey his son."

The complete file—which I have yet to finish reading—contained an accounting of the then-current estate of the man said to be Thomas Rainey's father. If this Isham Rainey in Mississippi was indeed the father of the Thomas F. Rainey then living in Coweta County, Georgia, this little slip of paper was indeed a fortunate find.

Still, I'm unable to quell the doubt, "What if this was a different Isham Rainey who also just happened to name his son Thomas?" Since our Thomas had, years later, reported his birthplace to have been in yet another state—Virginia—the next reasonable stop in checking out this wandering Isham would be to rewind the clock and see if he could be found listed in any records back in Virginia.

Above: Handwritten note inserted into the file including the estate records of Isham Rainey of Monroe County, Mississippi; courtesy of Ancestry.com. 

Is Isham the One?

Finding a name like Isham Rainey in the 1830 census, right in the same Georgia county where my third great-grandfather Thomas Rainey had settled, was encouraging. As rare a name as Isham might have been, though, that was no guarantee that Thomas' neighbor by the same surname was his father. I had to wonder, is this Isham the one? Or was he a brother, a cousin, or even someone totally unrelated?

Granted, Oglethorpe County in 1830 had thirteen thousand residents. I suppose there could have been a name twin in the mix of a crowd that size. But Isham was indeed a less common name. Though an infographic from Ancestry.com—not surprisingly, the genealogy company features details on many given names—attributes an Arabic origin to the name Isham, it also mentioned that according to their data, the country with the most men named Isham is the United States. But don't assume that's today's details; according to that same infographic, the year in which the U.S. had the most people born with that name was 1840—just about ten years after this census record helped me spot that Rainey name.

So, where did such a name come from? One quick detail from Wikipedia noted that Isham is actually the name of a village and civil parish in Northamptonshire, England. It apparently became a surname, also from England. Eventually, as names sometimes do, that surname became a given name; third U.S. president Thomas Jefferson, for instance, had a maternal grandfather named Isham Randolph (though his own mother's maiden name was Isham). In fact, I found a genealogy book filled with details on eight hundred years of family history for one line claiming that surname.

Does that make this Isham Rainey kin to the famous families of colonial America? I doubt it. But I did find an interesting document, filed in 1844 in the Georgia county where Thomas Rainey had, by that time, moved, naming him and another man as administrators of the estate of the late Isham Rainey, senior, of Mississippi.

While that document doesn't necessarily explain the connection between Isham Rainey and Thomas Rainey, the five hundred dollars bond posted by the two named administrators certainly infers more than a passing acquaintance in the old neighborhood.    

While We're Still in the Neighborhood

 

Last week, I had speculated that a thorough search through records from the late 1700s or early 1800s in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, might help tell the tale of just who else migrated from Virginia to Georgia after the American Revolution. That, I already knew, was the story behind my Taliaferro fourth great-grandparents' migration south to the area around the Broad River valley. I had wondered whether the same would hold true for this month's focus from my Twelve Most Wanted, my third great-grandfather Thomas F. Rainey. After all, that's where he met up with his future bride, Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro.

While working on records from this neighborhood, I thought I'd delve into this possibility further. Since the couple married in 1818, I tried my hand at the digitized copy of the subsequent 1820 census first. I could barely make out the name Thomas F. "Raney" toward the bottom of one page, but have struggled to read through the rest of the listings. No other possible family members' names have jumped out at me so far.

When I moved ahead to the 1830 census in Oglethorpe County, however, I found a different scenario.

In the same neighborhood as Thomas "Raney," I spotted a few other possibilities. One was the name of Nicholas Powers. He, you may remember, was the minister who had performed the wedding ceremony for Thomas and his bride, Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro—after having just married Mary Elizabeth's widowed mother, himself.

As my squinting eyes searched farther down the list, I spotted another name of interest. This other person, like Thomas, also was surnamed "Raney" and went by the first name Isham. That unusual name I had seen elsewhere: Thomas Rainey had given one of his younger children that same name. 

There was one problem with that discovery. Thomas' son Isham Rainey was born about 1840. And this name I had found in the 1830 census.

Something worth following up on? You bet.

Above image: excerpt from the 1830 U.S. Census for Oglethorpe County, Georgia, containing the names of heads of household for two Raney families; courtesy of Ancestry.com.

Getting to Georgia

 

If the goal this month is to research a family which had originally lived in Virginia, how did they get to Georgia?

Though we are barely into the month of March and the third of my Twelve Most Wanted research topics—Thomas Firth Rainey—I can already see that while this third great-grandfather may have spent his adult life raising a family in Georgia, he claimed to have been born in Virginia. What made a young resident of one of the leading locations of the nascent United States decide to move elsewhere?

On the surface, the reason might seem to do with Thomas Rainey's choice of a bride, for he married a Georgia-born woman by the name of Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro. But even her maiden name told me that this, too, was a family name known for its roots in Virginia.

As it turns out, that connection between the Raineys and the Taliaferros may have revealed only a small part of a larger circle of Virginians who all decided to head south to Georgia. That migration may have reached back to the days of the American Revolutionary War, when support for colonial military action was weaker in Georgia than in the other American colonies. Some of the early recruits sent to serve in Georgia were actually from Virginia. The second Georgia regiment formed in 1776, for instance, was comprised of eight companies of men from Virginia.

Whether any men from the Rainey family were among those recruits, I can't yet say, though I do know that a Taliaferro relative of Thomas' future wife did serve in Georgia. After the war, though, a small group of Virginian Continental soldiers returned to Georgia, remembering that they liked what they had seen there. They petitioned the legislature for a grant of 200,000 acres, which was provided upon the condition that two hundred families would be brought into the settlement.

That group of settlers arrived and claimed land in the Broad River valley, a location which, before 1790, was part of Wilkes County. Beginning in 1790, Wilkes County was divided to form a number of smaller counties. Among those newer counties was Oglethorpe County, the same county where, in 1818, Thomas Rainey took Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro as his bride.

Was the Rainey family part of that migration of two hundred Virginia families to Georgia after the Revolution? I can't yet say, but I do know that Mary Elizabeth's extended Taliaferro family was among those Broad River settlers. It may be possible that that was the same reason that drew Thomas Rainey's family to the area as well. If I can find census records, land records, or even tax records for that area during that time period, it may help to locate any families there claiming that same Rainey surname.

When There Isn't Much to Go By

 

Beggars can't be choosers, as the saying goes. When there isn't much to go by, we must take what we can get. In the case of my fourth great-grandfather Thomas Rainey, he didn't leave much of a paper trail. That, however, is understandable; this pre-Civil War resident of Georgia may likely have been one of the many southern residents whose records subsequent to his death were destroyed by fire, flood, or even wartime casualties.

There are a few clues we can go by, however—weak leads, but possibilities, nonetheless. Keeping in mind my role as the Genealogy Guinea Pig, I'm willing to test any theory.

After searching hopelessly for more documentation—side note: reading court records can put you to sleep at any time of day—I decided to take a cue from some of the names in Thomas Rainey's own family.

First on my list was the patriarch, himself. Written in the records I found as "Thomas F. Rainey," I wondered what the "F." could mean. Though none of the documents I already located divulged the answer to that question, I did notice two clues. One was the fact that his namesake son was called Thomas Firth Rainey, as was that man's son after him. The other was that, apparently, other family members among Find a Grave volunteers had inserted that information on Thomas' own memorial on that website. Firth might be a clue worth keeping in mind.

If I couldn't find anything from that first clue, I could take a more indirect route and trace Thomas' wife. After all, the two of them would have met up somewhere. What was their connection? Finding the history of Thomas' wife Mary might give us a more well-rounded picture.

However, relying on the marriage record itself to guide us in finding Thomas' in-laws would not be a wise move. The minister, Nicholas Powers, had entered Mary's maiden name as "Talafero." Her real family name, as it turned out, was Taliaferro—as we have already seen from her baby daughter's impossibly long name, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey. Why the minister couldn't get Mary's maiden name right is beyond me; at about the same time as Reverend Powers performed the ceremony for the young Rainey couple, he himself married the new Mrs. Rainey's widowed mother, Mrs. Mary Taliaferro.

If that detail doesn't sound complicating enough, it is important to know that the young Rainey couple named their first son Warren Taliaferro Rainey, after Mary Taliaferro Rainey's father. And when that son died young in his twenties, the couple must have decided to name a subsequent child by that same name in order to honor Mrs. Rainey's deceased father. The only problem was that that next child turned out to be a daughter, not a son.

With all of that family detail—even if much of it was about the in-laws—we may have enough to search for the nexus between the two families. And that nexus might lie buried in the details of what convinced a number of colonial Virginia families to move the distance to the borderlands of Georgia. 

Beginning at the End

 

It is interesting to read family history assertions noted by other researchers who evidently had missed the details of one or more pertinent documents. Such may have been the case, yesterday, when I mentioned a July, 1988, query from a Rainey researcher who had provided a list of "all" Thomas Rainey's children. As it happened, there was at least one family name missing—that of my second great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey. 

Beginning our search at the end of Thomas Rainey's life helps to fill in the picture, for there in his will, he specifically records his youngest daughter's full—and unusually long—name. Drawn up in October of 1857, the document was not entered into the record in the county of his last residence—according to the 1850 census, that would have been Coweta County, Georgia—but in the now-extinct Campbell County.

The 1850 census itself wouldn't have provided the full picture of Thomas Rainey's family, for Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey had not yet been born. Not until her father's death could I find any confirmation of her birth—and that, only from inferences based on those two documents. Orphaned at a young age, then dying shortly after her own marriage, Mary Elizabeth was for a long time the missing link who kept me from connecting her to Thomas' Rainey family line.

Now, Thomas apparently has become the next pivot point in the Rainey generations. We can move from the point of his last testament filed in Campbell County, to his 1850 residence in Coweta County, and then jump to his possible residence, according to the 1820 census, in Oglethorpe County, the same Georgia location where he had married only two years earlier. But then what?

Pushing Thomas back to his origin in Virginia—his reported state of birth, according to the 1850 census—would be a different matter. No steady procession of documents could easily point the way to the late 1700s. There were, however, a few clues we could consider from what we already know. Those hints are certainly worth the try to follow.

Chasing Unanswered Questions

 

Back in July of 1988, someone from Texas posted a query in a genealogical publication called Rainey Times.

That researcher basically asked the same question I'm chasing after, nearly thirty eight years later: Who were the parents of Thomas F. Rainey? Perhaps that curious researcher back in Texas might have found the answer to that question by now, but I certainly haven't. This will be my month to see if I can.

I have some ideas about this third great-grandfather of mine, but so far, I've failed to produce satisfactory documentation linking him to his past. I did manage to discover that his middle initial—F.—likely stands for Firth. And I've also realized that the very child who is missing from that 1988 listing happened to be my own second great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey (yes, that was indeed her full name).

There has been a lot of time invested in learning more about this family over the years. Tracing back to those roots leading to the Rainey line has been information hard won. But I can't let that brick wall remain standing; I selected Thomas Firth Rainey as the third of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026 in hopes of pressing back at least one more generation to his past.

While I know that Thomas Firth Rainey spent most of his adult life in the state of Georgia—marrying in Oglethorpe County in 1818 and dying in Coweta County in 1858—there is a possibility that his origin was in Virginia. At least, that's what he reported for his entry in the 1850 U.S. Census. This month will hopefully tell more of that tale.

Image of query from Rainey Times above is courtesy of the actual insertion, as shown at Ancestry.com; the image of the publication's July 1988 cover is courtesy of FamilySearch.org where the entire Volume 8 is available to view.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

 

The start of each month has me facing forward, looking at the plans from this year's Twelve Most Wanted for the upcoming month. When that starting date falls on a Sunday of my biweekly count, it also has me looking backwards at what I've accomplished in family history pursuits for the past two weeks.

Since February had me examining colonial records to see what could be discovered about my fourth great-grandfather Job Tyson—hint: it wasn't much—I didn't think I had made much progress on my family tree. Surprise: the numbers told a story that was a bit more encouraging.

Though progress wasn't galloping forward at my usual two-hundred-plus rate of the past few reports this year, in the past two weeks, I did manage to round up records for an additional 148 ancestors and their collateral lines.

Much of this was thanks to examining DNA matches linked to the Tyson line of descent, as I brought several lines down to the present time through solid documentation. There is much more work to be done on these Tyson descendants, despite my inability to identify Job's parents yet. Hopefully, in a future year, I'll narrow the possibilities from the three locations which were under consideration this month, possibly through inferences, as actual documentation has, so far, eluded me.

Bottom line in looking back is that I now have 41,722 documented individuals in my family tree. It's growing slowly but steadily. Research attempts like this month's quest to find Job Tyson's origin may have gone especially slowly, but future months may fare better.

For this upcoming month, we'll turn our attention from the coastal Georgia home where Job Tyson spent his adult years to another southern ancestor. For March, that featured research project will involve finding the roots of yet another Georgian ancestor, my third great-grandfather Thomas Firth Rainey. Again, this will be a man whose adult life can be documented through records in Georgia, but his connection to the past will involve finding colonial connections, this time possibly in Virginia.

Tomorrow, we'll take a closer look at what has already been found concerning Thomas Firth Rainey. 

Certainty Without Documentation

 

It's the end of another month, and I'm ready to grumble. My goal for this month was to break through the brick wall keeping me from discovering my fourth great-grandfather Job Tyson's parents. Though I've become weary with reading the scribbled handwriting in court records, I've yet to find any documentation to confirm what others have asserted in either today's online resources or the published reports of past generations. 

That tour of the documents has brought me through Pitt County in North Carolina, Beaufort County in South Carolina, and Wayne and Glynn Counties in Georgia—not to mention that detour to follow his wife's genealogy back to her Sheffield grandfather in Duplin County, North Carolina. Though it was not lost upon me that Pitt County was once known as Beaufort County, North Carolina—a possible source of confusion for researchers—I have not unearthed one document on Job Tyson's related family lines which could point me backwards in time, with the possible exception of his father-in-law West Sheffield's 1830 will.

Yet, in reviewing genealogies which include this family, I notice how certain those reports sound about their assertions concerning Job's roots. How do so many people seem to know this? If they have found a source to support that published information, it would help to be able to review such records. 

With the last day of this short month drawing closer, I doubt I'll find any success in continuing the search in such a limited time. As we complete this week, we'll lay aside this research goal and check in on a few other projects which I've been working on, behind the scenes, from earlier this year.

Looking Every Which Way

 

It's official: I'm stuck—at least on my goal to find the parents and origin of my fourth great-grandfather Job Tyson. I'm beginning to wonder whether he used an alias. Or spontaneously appeared out of thin air. Or contrived a way to make all his tell-tale documents self-combust. He simply isn't there to find.

Not being able to look backwards in time on this brick wall ancestor, I've turned to looking every which way. If I can't find him in his earlier years in life, perhaps looking at his children's history—and then expanding to collateral lines—might reveal some secrets.

With that in mind, I turned back to my DNA matches. At Ancestry.com, at least, I've got thirty eight DNA cousins who connect with me through that Tyson line. I figured this weekend might be a good time to catch up on that task.

As it turns out, I haven't yet made any revolutionary discoveries, but I did notice one detail: at least for the Tyson descendants in my match list, it seemed they followed the same path from Georgia to northern Florida. In fact, as I looked at the documents for these grandchildren and beyond, I spotted some of the same towns mentioned in my McClellan family history. This extended family did seem to stick together. Signs of F.A.N. Club cohesion seem to be everywhere, at least in some Tyson lines. 

Perhaps this is a good sign. It is a reminder, at least as I seek Job Tyson's roots, that perhaps he did travel to Georgia in the company of others. His descendants certainly stuck to that rule of thumb as they moved onward from Georgia.

It will be quite some time before I finish documenting each of those DNA cousins' lines of descent. Hopefully, as I move through the list, there will be other encouraging signs. A big plus would be connecting with a DNA cousin who inherited the family Bible, or family letters, or any other personal guidance pointing back to Job's origin before his arrival in Glynn County, Georgia.

At least, one can hope.

When Two Families Collide

 

It was at a local genealogical society meeting when, just for fun, several of those in attendance pulled out their phones, logged in to the FamilySearch app, and fired up "Relatives Around Me." The goal was to see whether—at least, according to the universal tree at FamilySearch.org—anyone in the meeting room that day was sitting near a distant cousin. You never know when, generations past, two families' ancestral lines might have collided.

It turned out that one woman in the meeting just happened to get a result indicating that she and I were distant cousins. Her ancestor? Someone surnamed Hardee. Mine? My brick wall fourth great-grandfather, Job Tyson. Supposed shared origin for those two? Pitt County, North Carolina.

Now, I know that sometimes the universal tree at FamilySearch.org can contain mistakes. I didn't get too excited about that discovery back then—and even now, I'm struggling to find documentation to cement the connection. But I didn't ignore it, either. My newfound cousin and I have been collaborating, as time permits, to seek out the explanation for how those two lines are related.

But Hardee. And Pitt County. While I'm stuck with that designation of Pitt County, North Carolina, for the origin of my Tyson ancestors, I did remember that Relatives Around Me readout pointed to that other surname, Hardee or Hardy. I kept looking for an explanation that might make sense. This weekend's discovery of a Hardee family history manuscript, a copy of which I found posted at Ancestry.com, reminds me that this is a worthwhile route to re-examine.

Sure enough, pushing the line back far enough—starting from Job Tyson's son William Tison, to William's wife Mary Ellis Hardee—I then continued the Hardee line, according to what was written in the David Hardy manuscript. Mary's father, Thomas Ellis Hardee, was said to have been son of John Hardee and Sarah Ellis.

Following the family line upwards from there two additional generations, the Tyson surname once again popped up in this Hardee manuscript. This time, the manuscript contained a mention of the wife of another John Hardee: he had married someone named Susannah Tyson. The line entry for this couple noted they were in Pitt County, North Carolina.

With that brief outline, I now had another possible connection between the two families. More importantly, the line brought the Hardee family from Camden County in Georgia—not far from where Job Tyson lived in Glynn County, and the same county where the witness to Job's will, another ancestor named Charles McClellan, also lived at that time.

With connections seemingly pointing in the right direction, it was time to check out this assertion with actual documentation, a task on my to-do list for this week. 

A Detour Through the Sidelines

 

Sometimes, when I'm stumped with a collateral line, I go wandering. This time, still puzzling over the origin of my fourth great-grandfather Job Tyson, I started looking at DNA matches while exploring what became of Job's many children. Yes, I took a detour. Since I couldn't advance the record to Job's parents (or even siblings), I went exploring the sidelines of this Tyson family.

Reviewing the records I had already assembled about the children of Job Tyson and his wife, Sidnah Sheffield, my eye settled on one of their sons, William. There, I spotted one detail which stopped me: William had married a woman whose maiden name was Hardee.

That Hardee surname, I had learned when I first decided to make this Tyson project my Twelve Most Wanted focus for February, was the surname which my newly-discovered kazillionth cousin—thanks to FamilySearch's Relatives Around Me—had focused on. She was a Hardee descendant, and she knew exactly where, deep within their history, the family had once lived: in Pitt County, North Carolina, the same location where I simply cannot place our Job Tison.

Nearly holding my breath, I tried to draw up a quick and dirty sketch of that family line. Starting from William Tison, himself, his declaration for a passport provided his date and location of birth: August 6, 1812 in Glynn County, Georgia. I had already recorded that William had been married twice. As often happened in that time period, his first wife had apparently died young before 1850, making discovery of her family blurred in that time period of invisible women. However, as I spotted in a summary publication of D.A.R. members, this woman's surname was Hardee.

Hardee? In Georgia? How might she fit into the larger picture, and explain Job Tison's connection with the Hardee line—not to mention, tie him back in North Carolina? This woman, Mary Ellis Hardee, was apparently daughter of Thomas Ellis Hardee and his wife, Mary Ann Berrie.

This, though, was merely from a typewritten genealogy, The Hardy-Hardee Family, compiled by David L. Hardy (according to the source for the Ancestry.com collection from which this was drawn; but possibly David Lyddall Hardee, as noted in this manuscript collection). And how often we find errors in such collections.

No matter. Any published or unpublished genealogy can serve as a trailblazer, helping to find otherwise hidden details, if we only take a disciplined approach to verifying—or rejecting with support—the assertions made in the manuscript. That, in fact, is what I'll be doing next week, seeing what assertions can be corroborated in this case with actual documentation. If the genealogy turns out to be accurate, perhaps it will lead us to an explanation of just how our Job Tison was said to have originated in Pitt County, North Carolina, after all.

Catch Them if you Can

 

Perhaps this is just my unlucky day. I was hoping to catch a glimpse of my missing ancestor, Job Tyson, back in what was supposed to be his old stomping grounds. The tip was that he might have been seen in the old Beaufort District of South Carolina, since my attempt at snagging him in Pitt County, North Carolina, had left me empty-handed.

Granted, that last sighting would have been sometime between 1790 and the early years of the 1800s, when Job Tyson settled down in Glynn County, Georgia. But even though I could find mention of someone by that name in North Carolina, the dates and circumstances just didn't line up. I had to follow the lead of some clues, no matter how weak they might have been. When it comes to chasing brick wall ancestors, you try to catch them—wherever—if you can.

First, I tried searching for Job Tyson in Beaufort District, South Carolina. I selected as wide a date range as possible, just in case he needed to return home to clear up any legal business, long after his departure for Georgia. Though I performed my search on the FamilySearch Full Text Search, I found no results.

Yes, I also needed to try my search using the alternate spelling for his surname: Tison. Again, no results.

Then, remembering the disjointed history of the Beaufort District—first it was, then it wasn't, a geopolitical division—I tried changing the label on the specific location to see if I could get any better results. According to one website, the designation of the Beaufort District—actually, all Districts in South Carolina—was abolished in 1800, and replaced by its four underlying counties: Granville, Hilton, Lincoln, and Shrewsbury. 

Back to the Full Text Search I went, this time searching for Job Tyson—or Tison—using each of the four new county designations, just in case. Nothing.

As a last-ditch effort, I also tried searching in each of those South Carolina locations for Charles McClellan, who eventually became a witness to Job Tyson's will in Georgia. Again, nothing.

My only consolation could be that not everyone faithfully remains in the same location for over ten years, so as to ensure their appearance in the subsequent decennial census enumeration. Perhaps our Job Tyson was one of those people, continually on the road until he finally found a place he could call home.

Juggling and Genealogy

 

Genealogy can be a juggling act, and my current obsession with the roots of Job Tyson has put me squarely in that category. I've been searching for my fourth great-grandfather's parents and birthplace, bouncing back and forth between several resources. Behind the scenes, I'm still grinding my way through a long list of DNA matches from the Tyson line. I've tapped the supercharged capabilities of FamilySearch's Full Text Search to find legal records. And I've relinquished hopes of finding Job, as supposed by others, in Pitt County, North Carolina and I've begun looking elsewhere.

I've also been hopping between online genealogy resources. And that's where I discovered something: depending on deciphering capabilities, one company's search engine might not snag the same details from handwritten documents as another company might.

Case in point (conveniently for me, involving our Job Tyson's story): the 1790 census. As you likely presumed, any forms used by enumerators for the first-ever United States census had to be hand-drawn as well as completed by hand. So searching for details on what information was included in such a tally might make the example from the National Archives seem deceiving. You'd have to scroll to the bottom of the census form posted on their website to read, "The U.S. Government did not furnish uniform printed schedules until 1830."

More pertinent to our situation was this information provided on the FamilySearch blog, stating the main categories covered in the nation's first population survey. The most glaring detail was the very length of the list: only six categories. Put simply, the 1790 census sought to gather data on who was eligible for military duty, should the need arise again. Questions included:

• Name of head of household
• Household's count of free white males 16 years of age or older
• Household's free white males under 16
• Household's free white females
• Any other free persons in the household
• Number of enslaved persons in the household

Of course, one of the hazards of preserving historic content over the centuries has been to keep it preserved, no matter how long it has been in existence. Every family historian has encountered those groan-worthy moments when we discover that some records simply haven't made it through the ravages of time.

Such has been the case with the 1790 census with returns of some states, some of which the United States Census Bureau has noted were destroyed by fires during the War of 1812. Happily, two states of interest in our pursuit of Job Tyson were not among those listed as lost by the Census Bureau.

One of those states, of course, was North Carolina, where some researchers had posited that Job Tyson once lived in Pitt County. And while I've found mention of many men with that surname—or its variant spelling, Tison—in Pitt County records, I've recently been exploring records from a second state: South Carolina.

Remembering last week's exploration of the friends and associates of Job Tison in his later years when he lived and died in Glynn County, Georgia, I'm just now beginning to connect the dots between Job and a man whose name had appeared on the Tison will, Charles McClellan. While my McClellan line also has me stumped as to their origins, I have verified that this was the Charles McClellan who was in my direct line. And I can see that there was a good possibility that the McClellans once lived in South Carolina. Might they have met up with Job at that location before they all moved to Georgia?

While I was unable to find Job Tyson in the 1790 census when I searched for him at Ancestry.com, checking FamilySearch.org yielded a surprising result: there was a Job Tison listed in the Beaufort District of South Carolina. That was the same location I've seen attributed to my McClellan line, as well.

The census entries seemed to be roughly alphabetized, and just a few lines below Job's entry was another Tison entry for someone named Aaron. Both heads of household had the same numerical entries listed next to their name: one male sixteen or over, one female member of the household, and one enslaved person. Whether Job and Aaron were brothers or cousins, I don't yet know, but at least this gives me some guidance as to where else to seek my Tyson line in those earlier years. I now have another category to add to my genealogy juggling act. 

Image above: 1790 U.S. Census entry for two Tison households in Beaufort District, South Carolina, courtesy of FamilySearch.org.

Cheering for Team Tison

 

What a ghost town our city became yesterday as we drew closer to the evening's kickoff. Four o'clock began the pre-game ritual on this side of the football nation, and six-lane streets here, usually packed with Sunday travelers, became empty enough for us to scoot across town without any trouble. Our day? After spending a delightful, almost-spring afternoon overlooking the river delta while sharing a pre-season ice cream, we returned home—my husband to some online games of a different kind, and I to cheer on the team for my current Tison puzzle.

That meant beginning the matching game for a long string of DNA cousins. All of them share one significant detail: relationship to my fourth great-grandfather Job Tison. Along the way, I've already encountered some incognito test-taking cousins, disguised by enigmatic monikers—but I've also met up with some dedicated researchers, including one distant cousin whose ample provisions on Find A Grave provided a thorough family history of at least one branch of the Tison descendants.

I can be grateful for such efforts. This particular researcher went so far as to include footnoted reports on individual members of the family—not to mention photos of numerous family members. These may be my fifth cousins, but after reading these thorough and carefully-crafted articles, I feel like I almost know them. I'd cheer for a team like that.

With only four of the first batch of ThruLines cousins reviewed—I'm starting with Job's son Aaron, for whom there are seven more matches to go—it will be a grind to work through all thirty four Tison DNA matches. So far, it seems this family line moved to the northern part of Florida, not far from the old Tison family home in Georgia, and stayed there for generations.

Hopefully, the process will lead to helpful clues enabling me to return to this month's research question concerning Job's parents and origin. If I encounter any more researchers as thorough as the one just found among Aaron Tison's descendants, that might indeed be a possibility.