From Third to Eighth

 

Well, it might not seem as impressive as going from zero to sixty in less than five, but I did make it from third to eighth (great-grandmothers) in less than five—weeks, that is. And that was my research goal for this month. You can tell I'm satisfied, I'm sure.

The idea, at the beginning of this month, was to pursue documentation while piecing together the lineup on my matriline—that line of generations from mother to maternal grandmother to her mother and onward to each subsequent generation's mother. Thus I moved from third great-grandmother Mary Taliaferro to fourth great-grandmother Mary Gilmer, then to her mother Elizabeth Lewis, and her mother Jane Strother, followed by Margaret Watts. And then, onward once again to the woman I so far only know as Mary, wife of Richard Watts.

I had even noted, in my post starting this month, that we "may even land as far back as the beginning of the eighteenth century in colonial Virginia." We did a bit better than that: my newfound eighth great-grandmother, whom I so far only know by her given name Mary, was a woman whose daughter was born in 1700.

The real game changer for me was the FamilySearch Labs development of their Full Text search capability. That made working my way through those colonial wills with their fancy handwriting and extra curlicues less burdensome on my eyes—to say nothing of my patience. I can't help but think of all the other lines in my mother's tree which could benefit from such a review in upcoming months.

In addition, I was able to solidly confirm one of my mtDNA matches, based on what I was able to add to my records with the help of those newly-found wills and deeds. The other three of my "exact matches" are still a mystery, but a task to save for another day.

There are some months, as I work on my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors for each year, when the month closes without much of a sense of satisfaction. There is always work to go back to, the next time I pass that way in the family tree. The same can be said for this month's project. If eighth great-grandmother Mary was born in Virginia, there is certainly a good chance that I'll be able to identify her maiden name—perhaps, even, the name of her mother, as well. But I'll save that for another year's goals.

Somehow, in the cracks between the progress I'll be making on next month's Twelve Most Wanted research goal, I'll be able to squeeze in visits to the FamilySearch Labs site again to confirm more members of this extended family tree through wills and other legal documents stashed away in colonial court records. While research sometimes seems like progress moving ahead in mere inches at a time, it's the conscious, continuous addition of small victories that add up.

With the beginning of the next month—and next week—we'll turn from working on my mother's ancestry to spending three months working on my mother-in-law's tree. And that means, instead of wandering through the handwritten court records of colonial Virginia, in April we'll pick up on a research project from last year to review the family records of neighboring colony Maryland.  

Exploring That Genetic Heritage

 

The other day, I was reading an article on using DNA for genealogy when a term the author used stopped me in my tracks. The term referred to a "genetic heir" being each of us who receives a portion of our ancestors' genetic makeup. That genetic inheritance could be quite tiny, but it is that same pattern, replicated with others of our distant cousins, which allows us to consider ourselves mutual "matches" through that heritage.

While on face value, yeah, I suppose that explains what we are doing when we use DNA to help build out our family tree—especially the parts where we have doubts or untold stories or other unexplained puzzles. It's just that calling it a genetic heritage sounds so much more poetic.

Now that I'm pushing back to the farthest reaches of autosomal testing—looking at my fifth great-grandparents, Elizabeth Lewis and Thomas Meriwether Gilmer—the expectation that I'd see any smattering of a genetic inheritance from them is rather slim. Actually, there's a small chance it could be as good as zero.

However, taking a look at my ThruLines reading for Thomas and Elizabeth, I currently show fifty nine DNA matches through Elizabeth and sixty two leading back to Thomas. Whether those are all correct is a different matter. I'm far from being done with the process of going over each DNA match to verify the connection—and some I've seen already do look tenuous. But for those who check out by paper trail as well as genetics, I still stand in awe of the thought: I've inherited something passed down to me from 1765.

Granted, what Thomas and Elizabeth received at their birth in 1765 had to come from somewhere. Some of their forebears became the lucky ones to have that genetic expression passed down through Thomas and Elizabeth. And what has made it to this current generation so obviously varies: I've seen Gilmer matches who share one single segment of DNA measuring twenty five centiMorgans, while other matches barely squeak by with ten—or less. That may not be much of a heritage, but the fact that any of it is there to measure at all still impresses me.

I'll continue pursuing this tedious task of inspecting each of these distant DNA cousins through the rest of the month. All the while, I'll be pondering the incredible: how that one tiny strand of DNA we share connects us back to a couple whose lives began during our country's colonial days. 

From a Mother of Mothers

 

This month, I've been taking my research cue from a mother of mothers—my fifth great-grandmother on my matriline, that is. Elizabeth Lewis, wife of Thomas Meriwether Gilmer, has been my focus mainly in the hope of pushing back through the generations even further to determine just how I match four "exact matches" on my mitochondrial DNA test.

The mtDNA test, you may recall, is the specialized DNA test which can confirm deeper ancestral roots than can the commonly-taken autosomal DNA test. Not only can it reveal our ancestors' geographic wanderings and ethnic heritage of that one specific branch of our family tree, but it can also tie us together with other matches reaching far back in time. The reason? The slower mutation rate for mitochondrial DNA allows us to "see" farther back in time.

Still, taking the mtDNA test does not mean we are handed answers to our genealogical questions on the proverbial silver platter. In my case, I have only four matches who are considered "exact matches"—in other words, there is no mutation evident in comparing our tests. While that may sound precise, an exact match can mean I share a common ancestor on my matriline with my match which might reach back two hundred years—or even farther back in time.

Of my four matches, only one had posted a tree which reached back to our ancestral nexus. That shared ancestor was born about 1700, not a bad stretch for a DNA test. As for the other matches, our mutual connection might be years beyond that three hundred year mark.

Still, I keep pushing back on the matriline—as well as mapping out all descendant lines connected to each mother of mothers. Now that I'm up to my matrilineal fifth great-grandmother, and since that can still be a genetically reachable ancestor for the autosomal test, I've also been keeping an eye on my ThruLines matches linked to Elizabeth Lewis, as well as her husband, Thomas Gilmer. Right now, that readout shows sixty two autosomal DNA matches with other descendants of Thomas Gilmer, and fifty nine matches linked to Elizabeth herself.

As I work my way through those ThruLines matches, confirming connections for each entry, adding those matches to my tree becomes another way that family tree keeps growing. Right now, I have 38,196 people in my family tree. With an increase of 169 over the past two weeks, the rate of increase has slowed from previous biweekly advances. However, I can safely say the reduced research speed can be attributed to having to resort to records of the 1700s and early 1800s to confirm family connections. And reading those handwritten documents can certainly put the brakes on research speed—even with the help of AI innovations at FamilySearch.org.

As I continue my biweekly progress checks, the route I am now taking becomes more challenging. My next step will be to move to Elizabeth's own parents, focusing especially on her mother. From there, I'll repeat that same process for another generation—and keep going, as long as I can find supporting documentation available.

Incredibly, at this point, that document source is still housed in North America, though by this point, we will begin edging into the British colonial era. Fortunately for my purposes, Virginia—both state and colony—serves as a fascinating repository of historical documents, which may allow us to push further back in time than we could otherwise have hoped.

Off the Shelf: They Were Her Property

 

As I explore farther into my family's past, especially as I follow my matriline deeper into the South and eventually into its colonial era, it is an inescapable fact that the details I am pulling up in wills include an ever-increasing involvement with the American—and British-American—convention of slavery. At such a juncture, I thought this might be a fitting time to pull a book off my library shelf which addresses the issue I am witnessing: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers' They Were Her Property.

Because pre-1850 family history research must rely on different record sets than what we'd normally pursue for later years in the United States, I've been reading many wills. The main reason for that choice of document was to find a father's inclusion of each child by name—including married names for daughters—to verify I was following the right family.

In that line of pursuit, it became quite obvious that, while the sons might inherit land and farming equipment or become the new recipient of bonds or other financial instruments due the estate, daughters were sometimes bequeathed with a different kind of "property"—the enslaved people whose work sustained the land's production.

That became crystal clear, for instance, when I found Elizabeth Lewis Gilmer's own will far from the state where she raised her family. Dying in 1855 in Alabama at the home of her son-in-law, Elizabeth's recorded last wishes made clear one detail: there were many names to be found in that document, and not all of them were names of her family members. 

Seeing mention of phrases like "a negro boy named Bryant" or "a negro girl named Louisa, daughter of my negro woman Nancy," I realize I am witnessing an example of what author Stephanie Jones-Rogers is referring to in her book. Part of me wants simply to volunteer to add this multitude of other names I'm finding to the website project, Beyond Kin, but another part of me wants to let someone else do the heavy research lifting and spell out for me this phenomenon of women inheriting other people and passing them along to grandchildren at their "owner's" death.

Granted, I realize while this text will not be riveting reading, it will indeed be eye-opening. Other than portraying slavery as the awful institution we now realize it was, our typical history reviews seldom delve very deeply into the day-to-day unfolding of its impact. At this juncture in my family history research, I need to open this book's pages and let them inform me of details omitted by a cursory high school—or college—lecture on the subject.

On the other hand, this book's focus on the complicity of women in continuance of the institution of slavery may be a bit overreaching, as a very few readers had brought up in one bookseller's website. To single out white women as if they were the sole driving force behind the perpetuation, one reader observed, was to be "disingenuous." Another critiques the writer who "judges history by the sensitivities of our own time."

These thoughts become the two pillars through which I pass as I consider this author's thesis. But to read the book—to have the experience of living through its pages—is one task which needs to be faced.

As for the other—transcribing the names of the unfortunate strangers captured and enmeshed in a life not of their choosing (nor even of their immigrant ancestor's choosing)—I hope to contribute my part in gleaning these names so that those researching their own family's roots can find the answers they are seeking, as well.

Above: Cover art for the 2019 book by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South; image courtesy Amazon.com.

Elizabeth's Early Years

 

More than Thomas and his Gilmer family line, it was his wife Elizabeth about whose early years I was most curious. Elizabeth, my fifth great-grandmother, was also significantly placed in my family tree as someone belonging on my matriline—that DNA-significant line reaching far back into the deep ancestral story of one's mother's mother's mother. Since the mitochondrial DNA test I took revealed somewhat of Elizabeth's matrilineal ancestry buried deep within mine, I wanted to trace that line on paper as far back as I could.

Though I'm thankful for the trailblazers who had published pertinent family histories on lines such as the ones we've examined this year, I was not surprised to see the cursory review provided in George Rockingham Gilmer's 1855 book, despite Elizabeth being his own mother. In Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia, he devoted all the space of two paragraphs to her story.

What I've learned so far: Elizabeth married Thomas Gilmer at a rather young age, somewhere in Virginia where their respective families had lived. Oh, and before the young couple left for Georgia to raise their rather robust family, she had lived with her parents, Thomas Lewis and Jane Strother. Of her siblings—especially the oldest three brothers, whose military service was noted—the author spent a few more words of description.

In his younger years, Elizabeth's father Thomas Lewis had been plagued with poor eyesight and thus could not follow the calling of his brothers into military service. He instead resorted to the study of law, and learned the surveyor's skills. Apparently, he played a role in early Virginia political matters as well, as I am learning through the discovery of other resources, including another book published in the early 1900s specifically on this same Lewis family. Of course, the main question is whether the assertions in that Lewis genealogy can be verified through documentation, a question I ask myself with each genealogy book I find on the lines in my family's ancestry.

Next week, we'll take a closer look at that book, and learn how far back we can trace that Lewis family in colonial Virginia and beyond. After that, it will be to my matriline and Jane Strother that we will turn our attention.

A "Rosetta Stone" of Family Relationships

 

I don't know how I could accurately piece together any family tree without learning as much as possible about the entire family constellation. Sisters, brothers, in-laws, grandchildren: these all paint a clear picture enabling me to increase my certainty that I am pursuing the right family line. That dependence on collateral lines certainly spared me from tossing out a research hit which turned out to become the "Rosetta Stone" of my Gilmer family's many relationships. At first glance, I thought it didn't fit my family.

It all started when I couldn't find any will to link my fourth great-grandmother Mary with her father, Thomas Meriwether Gilmer. Though I had the anecdotal accounts of her family, thanks to the 1855 book, Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia, despite its author being her brother, George Rockingham Gilmer, we all know how family legends and outright bragging can get out of hand. If nothing else, such works may serve as trailblazers, but certainly not as replacement for documentation.

Since FamilySearch Labs had recently announced their Full Text search tool, I grabbed the tutorial written by longstanding genealogy writer Kimberly Powell and jumped on the trail. I was looking for anything that could lead me to Thomas Meriwether Gilmer's will. Since I have noticed some men using initials or nicknames rather than full names in documents—not to mention the compounding problem of liberal license to "creatively" spell names—I thought I'd begin with simply searching for the surname. However, since Gilmer produced too many search results, I narrowed the spectrum to a reasonable time period, as well. I wasn't willing to specify one state, though, seeing how Mary's own family had moved from state to state.

It was a good idea to leave that search range as broad as possible, but it did yield too many hits for someone as impatient as me. Back to the drawing board I went to reformulate my search terms. This time, I came up with the brainy idea to use Mary's brother's name as an additional keyword, simply because it was such an unusual name. In the extended Gilmer family, there were several namesakes for Thomas' father, whose given name was a family name passed through generations: Peachy. Searching for Peachy, I reasoned, should cut short my overabundance of search possibilities to a manageable level.

Right away, a result rose to the top of the list, but the location took me by surprise: Arkansas. That certainly wasn't on my radar—yet. And though FamilySearch Labs limits the collections they are currently testing to two record sets—Mexico Notary Records and U.S. Land and Probate Records—the court procedure which introduced the records with that singular Gilmer name, Peachy, didn't seem quite right to me.

The record appeared to be part of a series of appearances in court, with one document leading to a separate one, then another, then more. Adding to the confusion, though the record was indicated to have been filed in Hempstead County, Arkansas, the document was a petition being addressed to the judge of probate in Chambers County, Alabama. 

The petition was being made by someone named William M. Marks, not a name I was familiar with—my first inkling that perhaps FamilySearch Labs' experiment had gone awry. The petition was concerning one recently deceased man by the name of William B. S. Gilmer—inducing a sigh of relief once I spotted a familiar surname in this unusual record.

The petition went on and on. Despite the faint handwriting and the fact that the FamilySearch Labs project not only is testing their Full Text search but their AI capabilities at transcribing handwritten documents, I chose the route of reading the handwritten version to better glean the context. The several pages contained name after name of Gilmer family relatives. The more I read, the more I realized the knowledge I already had of the collateral lines in my Mary's generation were coming in handy, even if they were derived solely from the good governor's snarky text.

In the end—several pages later—I realized the gist of the tale was that the court seemed to require contact of all living relatives of this William Gilmer to attend to the reading of his will. As I read through the pages—thankfully—I had pen and paper in hand to jot down the name and relationship of each Gilmer relative mentioned in the series of documents.

There were plenty of names to write. Niece after niece, nephew after nephew, the list went on. Thankfully, many of the names were followed by the identification of each person by their spouse or parent, as well as the location where each one was currently living. For those who were still minors, they were mentioned within age groupings.

As I considered the long list I was assembling, I did spot names which seemed to belong to Mary's family. Once I spotted the date at which the will was drawn up—in June of 1863—and then discovered the February 1865 date at which the validity of the will was tried, that provided the final orienting point for me.

The will represented the final wishes of William Benjamin Strother Gilmer, who was indeed a brother of my fourth great-grandmother, Mary Meriwether Gilmer. William's wife, incidentally, was the former Elizabeth Marks, providing us a clue as to why someone named William Marks had presented the petition which started me on this exploration. Though I have yet to confirm this, William Marks was likely a brother of William Gilmer's wife.

I certainly couldn't have hoped for a better outline of the extended Gilmer family of Georgia and Alabama—and I certainly couldn't have predicted that it would come from an entry in the court records of Hempstead County, Arkansas. This discovery will certainly guide me for several more days in putting each name in proper place in the extended family tree of Mary, her siblings, and all their descendants.  

To Again Move a Great Distance

 

Early in her married life, my fifth great-grandmother Elizabeth Lewis may have followed her husband from Virginia to Georgia, but in her later years and widowhood, it was her children who induced her to once again move a great distance to settle in a new home.

For the mother of at least eleven children, making a choice like that might have been difficult. After all, her most well-known son, George Rockingham Gilmer, served twice as governor of Georgia, and was certainly not going to move from the home state which he had represented in Congress. Besides that, her eldest daughter—my fourth great-grandmother, the twice widowed Mary Meriwether Gilmer Taliaferro Powers—also remained in Georgia.

However, by the time of the 1850 census, the first United States enumeration to include the names of each person resident in a household, Elizabeth's name showed up in the household of one "Benaga" S. Bibb in Montgomery County, Alabama. The reason? He was apparently her son-in-law. Along with Elizabeth's daughter Sophia, Benajah Bibb's wife, several others of Elizabeth's now-adult children had also moved to Montgomery County—or, if not, had taken up land in nearby Mississippi, or even moved to Texas. 

Finding her most recent residence so far from the place where she had raised her family back in Georgia was—to me at least—helpful, because that is what leads us to her will, and a listing of some members of her extended family. With that document, once again, we see another example of a product of her era, for some of the "property" which she bequeathed to her granddaughters named enslaved persons at the time of her residence in Alabama leading up to her 1855 death, opening our eyes as researchers to the up-close details of what life was like in that time period.

A brief entry in the local newspaper in September of that year gave Elizabeth's age as ninety two. The obituary also provided the names of several of her surviving children, as well as notice of the loss of her son Charles. Apparently, her son George must have recently published Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia, for Elizabeth's obituary quoted a passage from the former governor's book.

While George Gilmer's book certainly wouldn't serve as genealogical documentation, per se, the names listed in his mother's will certainly helped place several of her children in her family tree, and inform us as to the descendants of those children—in particular, those of her married daughters. That becomes useful to me in trying to place my DNA cousins in their correct place in our family tree. 

Beyond the help gleaned from Elizabeth's own will, my latest discovery—thanks to the FamilySearch "labs" whole-text project—unearthed another family will which is now taking its place as my "Rosetta Stone" of Gilmer family relations.

And to think that, at first, I assumed it wasn't even what I was searching for.... 

"Ceaseless Industry and Untiring Care"

 

While the above words may seem suited to the description of a saint, it was actually in honor of his own mother that George Rockingham Gilmer wrote those words in his 1855 book, Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia. I, for one, am glad he went beyond platitudes to describe this woman further.

Elizabeth Lewis, of whom the author had remarked regarding her "ceaseless industry and untiring care," was a young bride of Thomas Meriwether Gilmer, who was himself not quite twenty one when the couple married. Within the year, the newlyweds moved from their home in Virginia to a new settlement on the Broad River in Georgia.

Fortunately for my research purposes this month, the Gilmer book provides details on Elizabeth's own family. This helps move me one step further in tracing my own matriline, for that is the part of my genealogy where Elizabeth Lewis stands. According to the author, Elizabeth was daughter of Thomas Lewis and his wife, Jane Strother. This couple both belonged to Virginia families whose surnames I had spotted while researching my Carter and Chew lines in the past two months, so I'm eager to step backwards another generation and explore what can be found there.

Though the Gilmer book included even more accolades for Elizabeth Lewis, there were at least a few details which I can use as springboards to launch into researching this next generation on my matriline. For one, the author mentioned that, as of his writing, she had turned eighty nine—and had been a widow for thirty five years. Following the mention of her many qualities, the book did go on to describe each of her children and their families, which makes for a helpful guide as I build this branch in my family tree.

As for Elizabeth Lewis, though, I'd like to learn far more than how her "pleasant relish" for the good things of life illustrated her lifestyle, or her "unfailing patience" balanced that good life with a note of the challenges of pioneer settlement. I'm curious to push further back in time and see what can be discovered about her native Virginia and the family which first claimed her as their daughter. But first, as far as documentation goes, thanks to her long life, there are records we can pull up to paint a clearer picture of her last days. 

Sketches of the Family

 

Mary Meriwether Gilmer, my fourth great-grandmother, was someone whose family came alive to me thanks to the biographical sketches drawn up by her brother, George Rockingham Gilmer. It was the 1855 Gilmer book, Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia, in which we first learned to appreciate the plainspoken writing style of the former Georgia governor. Right away, in finding her brother's description of Mary, we had gleaned the author's opinion about her two husbands.

In those same pages, we can read the author's personal opinion about each of his siblings, as well as his description of their parents. There, the author paints quite the picture of his father, Thomas Meriwether Gilmer. "His frame of body was small, and his limbs of proper proportions and much muscular strength," the author starts out, innocently enough, but then can't seem to keep his blunt self from making additional comments.

Despite small hands and feet, "regular" features—even noting "his teeth good"—the author divulged that his dad had been "very fat from childhood." As a student in Virginia, Thomas Gilmer discovered he could float on water "without any effort" and made his preferred route home from school the nearby Shenandoah River, upon which current he found he could "easily outstrip the usual speed of his school companions."

As amusing (and yet enlightening) as those vignettes about family quirks and personalities might have been, George Gilmer folded in a few family legends which didn't quite seem to hold water. One was the author's comment that his father, in his younger days, had served "a tour of militia duty under the Marquis La Fayette." However, if that military service had been performed at all, it couldn't have been during the American Revolutionary War. For one, Thomas Gilmer's date of birth would have made him too young to participate at the beginning of that struggle. In addition, as the records of the Daughters of the American Revolution now indicate, there is "no service found in any acceptable sources."

Sometimes, family stories can be enlightening, even entertaining. At other times, perhaps they are just...stories.

Solving for the Unknown

 

Genealogy, as I've always seen it, can be quite like an algebra equation: you need to separate the known values to one side of the equation to solve for the unknown entity isolated on the other side. 

Right now, I've been grappling with an unknown: the names and identities of the children of my fourth great-grandmother Mary Meriwether Gilmer and her second husband, Nicholas Powers.

Unfortunately, Nicholas Powers did not leave a will—at least, not one I could find anywhere in the state of Georgia, the Powers family's residence, during the mid 1800s when he most likely died. However, I was able to find a court document indicating that someone named Nicholas F. Powers had been appointed administrator over the estate of "Nicholas Powers late of Oglethorpe County." The catch? The document only identified three children: Nicholas, Sarah, and Thomas.

It occurred to me that I did have a way to isolate the unknown entity in this genealogical equation to learn more about the family of Mary and Nicholas: DNA testing. While the relationship would be distant, it was still within reach. I decided to take a look.

Since my ancestor Mary Meriwether Gilmer had been previously married to a man who was my own direct line ancestor, Warren Taliaferro, I first looked up how many matches I shared with people who descended from Warren. According to Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool, I currently have sixty four DNA matches who share a genetic connection to Warren. 

Normally, you'd expect about the same number of matches to also connect with Warren's wife, Mary. But in this case, because the young widow had married Nicholas after Warren's death, descendants of those Powers children—however many there actually were—increased Mary's match count to seventy seven.

Sure enough, when I clicked through to see who made up the difference in the two counts, there were descendants of three Powers children in the mix. However, don't count on that easily solving my genealogical algebra problem. The three Powers ancestors were listed by these DNA matches as George, Mary Caroline, and Thomas. 

Well, Thomas I've already found in documentation, but Mary Caroline? And George is on the borderline, as I haven't found him in any records so far, either, though links to his Find A Grave memorial display family names which sound like Powers and Gilmer namesakes to me. 

I've begun checking each of the seven DNA matches descending from Thomas Powers, as at least I have documentation confirming his descent from my fourth great-grandmother. Surprisingly, the closest match shares twenty six centiMorgans with me, all in one segment, when it could have been quite possible that we would share absolutely no genetic material at all. The paper trail confirmed the connection, encouraging me to review the rest of the list, too. As for George and Mary Caroline, though there is a slight smidgeon of DNA that could tie us to the same ancestor, it is a very weak link. Better to look first for positive signs in the paper trail, before trying to solve for that unknown.

Getting to Know the Neighbors

 

There is a concept in genealogical research known by its snappy moniker, the F.A.N. Club. Depending on whom you ask, that acronym could stand for "Family, Associates, and Neighbors" or "Friends, Associates, and Neighbors." In my ancestor's case—Mary Meriwether Gilmer and her brothers in early 1800s Georgia—apparently, that F.A.N. Club could signify both at the same time.

Yesterday, while trying to discover whatever happened to Mary's second husband, Nicholas Powers, I ran across a census record for 1840. When I saw that hint posted to Nicholas Powers' profile page on my tree at Ancestry.com, I was pretty sure that was my ancestor's family. However, I wasn't in much of a rush to view the document, because I already knew my fourth great-grandmother's name would not appear in that listing. For that enumeration, only heads of household were listed by name. Besides that, Mary's husband Nicholas was not one of my direct ancestors; it was her first husband Warren Taliaferro who claimed that designation.

Still, I had to take a peek at that 1840 census page. Though my main purpose in looking it up was to narrow the possible date range for when Nicholas actually died, I was curious to see who else was living in the neighborhood. I guess you could say I was looking for the "N" in the F.A.N. Club for Mary and Nicholas.

Almost immediately, I spotted another name I recognized from my family tree: Hay T. Landrum. Hay's name was listed right above Nicholas Powers' entry. Not only were they neighbors in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, but they were—at least, according to my calculations—family in the same neighborhood. Hay's wife Sarah was daughter of Nicholas' wife Mary. In fact, since Nicholas was likely the only father Sarah really knew—he stepped in as step-dad only a few years after she was born—it is not surprising to discover that she and Hay named one of their sons after her step-father Nicholas Powers.

It is when I cannot find any documentation for the key points in an ancestor's life that I begin resorting to that F.A.N. Club again. In hopes that some familiar names would be repeated enough times in my ancestor's life story to lead me to the details I am missing, I trace every possible clue. There is certainly an abundance of those F.A.N. Club clues in Nicholas Powers' case, even if I haven't been able to find a will for him.

The Other Husband

 

If George Gilmer had disparaging remarks to make about his sister's husband, Warren Taliaferro, with that commentary he was only warming up. When it came to the other husband, George's sister Mary's second marriage, he likely had far more reason to be critical. While Warren Taliaferro at least had a will, second husband Nicholas Powers apparently did not.

I found that detail—or rather, noticed its absence—when repeating yesterday's search routine using the FamilySearch Labs Full Text search feature. This time, I was on a mission to find the will of Nicholas Powers. There were two reasons I wanted to find this. First, of course, was to confirm the approximate date at which he had passed. The second reason was to get a more accurate listing of Nicholas' children, since I was concerned the count for the Powers children was not correct in George Gilmer's book.

Despite my success yesterday with the search for Warren Taliaferro's will, no will came up for second husband Nicholas Powers. Instead, there were multiple entries for deeds which included the Powers name. To narrow the search, I added his wife Mary's name, which helped reveal part of the story.

From that attempt, I have been able to glean a few indications. The first was that someone named Nicholas F. Powers served as administrator for "Nicholas Powers late of Oglethorpe County" in a document dated May 3, 1853. An earlier indenture, drawn up in April of the same year, identified Mary M. Powers as wife of Nicholas Powers, and listed their children as Nicholas, Sarah, and Thomas—three children hardly being the "six from her last" husband that her brother had reported in his book.

The third discovery I found was somewhat curious. Entered toward the end of a deed recorded in Oglethorpe County, a specific parcel of land was sold "excepting forty feet square in the North west corner of my Garden where my Eldest Child and Nicholas Powers deceased is buried." The document was signed by a W. T. Williams on August 31, 1849.

Our Mary's Nicholas? Hard to say, though in a county of twelve thousand residents, it might have been doubtful that there were two couples by the same names. Without a will, the only way to determine the names of all their children would be to search through the many other deeds listing Nicholas' name in hopes there were further provisions for the fatherless children. As for Mary, herself, we may learn more by focusing on her own siblings—especially the brothers who had been named as executors in her first husband's will.   

What Others Were Saying

 

If it seems odd to us to find a centuries-old document dating the marriage of a teenager as young as Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro, I wonder what the people of that fourteen-year-old's community might have thought at the time. Apparently, we don't need to wonder for long what others were saying, for one local man was quite willing to make public his take on Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro's father—and step-father.

That man was George Rockingham Gilmer, maternal uncle to my third great-grandmother Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro. After serving two terms as governor of the state of Georgia, as well as several terms in the United States House of Representatives, George Gilmer settled down to write his recollections of several Georgia pioneers he knew personally. He published that collection in 1855 in a book he called, in typical run-on fashion of the era, Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia, of the Cherokees, and the Author.

Of his sister, Mary Meriwether Gilmer, he styled her as "a woman of good capacity," but of her choices of spouses, he was less approving: "She married successively two very indolent, inefficient men, whom by her industry she saved from poverty."

The first of those two men, as we've already surmised, was Warren Taliaferro (alternately recorded in some editions of the book—as well as in other records—as Warner). Mary's second husband, according to George Gilmer, was the Reverend Nicholas Powers, "a handsome Irishman." 

While that might have seemed a curious observation—and one so public, as well—it was the author's next comment which was more to the point of my pursuit. What about their children? 

Unfortunately, Tell-All Gilmer did not provide names, though he did say that his sister had ten children, "four by her first husband, and six by her last." As to any further details, we will have to resort to the usual means to detect the specifics. With that, I resort to another report that everyone's been talking about—though it is buzz generated by a far more modern crowd.

After RootsTech, I noticed several blog posts detailing a document search development powered by AI. A "game changer," as it has been acclaimed by one blogger, Judy Russell. Longtime genealogy writer Kimberly Powell detailed the step-by-step process to use the experimental full-text search feature being tested at FamilySearch. I paid close attention, and then popped over to Randy Seaver's blog to read about his experience putting the feature through its paces.

I wanted to test this tool for myself, and looking for Warren Taliaferro's will seemed the perfect starting point. For one, despite his given name being so variable—Warren in some cases, Warner in others—I wasn't sure what result I'd find. I knew that Taliaferro was a surname unusual enough to keep me from facing the wearying possibility of multiple false leads.

Fortunately, when I tried using the FamilySearch Labs tool, I didn't limit the search to one location, for Warren Taliaferro's will was not where I expected it to be filed. Though the family lived in Georgia when I found them, Warren also had another residence in South Carolina. Now that I think it over, that makes great sense, as he was brother to another direct-line ancestor of mine, Zachariah Taliaferro, who I knew also lived in South Carolina.

The FamilySearch Labs experimental Full Text search brought me to two different copies of Warren Taliaferro's will—one handwritten, the other a later, typewritten version. Each of the wills was transcribed and that transcription appeared in a sidebar alongside the digitized image of the document itself. I chose to examine each one and compare it with its displayed original, as it seemed from the results that the AI either stuttered or had a slight case of dyslexia at times.

If I had wondered yesterday whether my Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro was really part of Warren's family, the will laid those concerns to rest. If we can believe what George Gilmer said about his sister and brother-in-law, the couple did indeed have four children—or, at least, those were all who were named in the document. Warren identified his two sons, Zacharias and Charles, as well as two daughters. Along with mention of Lucy "Gilmore" Taliaferro, we can all be relieved that the other daughter's name was listed as Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro. So she was part of this family, after all.

That, however, calls into question the Oglethorpe County, Georgia, guardianship bond we reviewed yesterday, naming all the "orphans and minors" of Warren Taliaferro, a list which went on far longer than the four named in Warren's October 1815 will in Pendleton District, South Carolina. It is observations like this which make me want to take far more literally comments in wills such as Warren's directive to divide his property "into as many equal parts as I shall have children alive at that time" of his death.

George Gilmer, incidentally, was one of two brothers of Warren's wife Mary whom Warren had appointed as executors of his will. Perhaps George wryly spoke from personal experience.

A Package Deal?

 

To figure out just how it was that Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro ended up named in a marriage license dated the same day as that of her widowed mother would take some searching for old, old documents. On the face of it, the situation gave the appearance of a package deal: I marry you, if I can also marry off your daughter.

The only problem with that hypothesis was that Mary Elizabeth was not the youngest of her parents' children. That might have been the case for her own future daughter, my second great-grandmother, the orphaned Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey. But we now have found indications that the mother, Mary Elizabeth, was likely a daughter of Mary Meriwether Gilmer and Warren—or Warner, as he was alternately called—Taliaferro. Thus, the reason why the baby of the Rainey family ended up bearing the name of her older—and tragically deceased—brother, who had been named after his maternal grandfather.

Looking through court records to find any explanation for what happened leading up to her mother's second marriage—and her surprisingly early marriage as well—didn't seem to produce any satisfactory explanation, but I did learn more about the entire family in the process.

In the court proceedings in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, one transaction recorded September 24, 1818, served the purpose of posting bond as security for the appointment of one Peachy R. Gilmer as guardian of the children of the deceased Warren Taliaferro. The Taliaferro children named in the document were Lucy G., Zachariah T., Sarah H., Charles, and Sophie, identified specifically as "orphans and minors of Warran [sic] Taliaferro, deceased."

Note the absence of any mention of older daughter Mary Elizabeth. There is a clear reason for that: Mary Elizabeth had already gotten married to Thomas Rainey in June of that same year.

Or was that the reason? After all, in looking at that document designating the guardian of Warren Taliaferro's orphaned children, another possible reason Mary Elizabeth's name wasn't mentioned could have been that this was not even her family. We need more information to confirm that assumption.

To find any further details regarding the deceased Warren Taliaferro, I wanted first to look for his will. And that became my perfect excuse to try out a new search tool which, it seems, everyone is talking about. We'll check out that new way to see what we can find, tomorrow.   

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.

Taking a Ride on the Matriline

 

It isn't often that my family history explorations follow a straight path, but for this month's focus, that is the route we will take. Don't think this will be an easy ride, though. The route we'll take runs straight back through history on my matriline, that one descending line on the pedigree chart that leads from mother to maternal grandmother, to her mother, ever changing surnames as we make the flying leap from generation to generation.

Our springboard will be the mother of my orphaned second great-grandmother with the impossibly long name: Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey. Her brief life had to do double duty on the family history namesake post, carrying the name not only of her own mother, but that of an older brother whose untimely death the family never wanted to remain forgotten.

Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey suffered a similar fate, herself, dying after the birth of her fourth child and only son. Fast forward several generations and I found this woman shrouded in mystery, almost forgotten by her daughter, my great-grandmother, who, at barely three years of age, was raised by a step-mother. Any oral tradition of passing along the family stories was interrupted at these two points: the loss of the younger Mary Elizabeth and that of her mother.

For this month's focus on my Twelve Most Wanted this year, I want to retrace that matriline. Especially now that, thanks to mitochondrial DNA testing and a match who has accurate tree-building skills, I have been able to identify that earlier ancestor—Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro, wife of Thomas Firth Rainey—I  have the springboard to launch into deeper exploration of that elder Mary's roots. And it's about time.

We'll have plenty to keep us busy this month, as her matriline moves us back from pre-Civil War Georgia to again visit roots in Virginia. As we continue down that line, this time we'll take a closer look at what can be found on family names such as Gilmer, Lewis, and Strother, pushing back as far in time as we can with documentation searches. If we are exceedingly fortunate, we may even land as far back as the beginning of the eighteenth century in colonial Virginia.

Before we get lost in such research daydreams, though, we need to start with what we know. Come this Monday, we'll meet at the station to begin this ride along the matriline toward our first stop: an introductory meeting with my third great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro.

Ancestor #3: Farther Down the Line

 

When cousins marry cousins, reading that family's history can become confusing to an outsider. Hang on to your hats, then, as we press farther down the family line while jumping from one third great-grandmother's Taliaferro family roots to that of another.

For the first two of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2024, I chose my third great-grandmother Sarah Taliaferro's maternal lines of the Carters and the Chews. For this final selection from my mother's family for this year's Twelve Most Wanted, I'm going to add another cousin to the mix by jumping from Sarah to her cousin, Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro.

It was Mary Elizabeth's youngest daughter—also named Mary—who, orphaned, was married to her cousin, Sarah's son Thomas Taliaferro Broyles. We worked on his family for last year's Twelve Most Wanted. This year, though, I need to jump tracks and review what I don't know about his wife's matriline. After all, her matriline is also mine, making this a good chance to review some of my mtDNA matches a bit more closely.

Another opportunity for research success comes blended into this goal for March: Mary Elizabeth's roots connect to some historic names from colonial America, including the Gilmers, the Lewis family, and the Meriwethers.

I realize March may seem like a long month—at least comparing those thirty one days to the shorter month of February—but I admit I may be over-reaching for this one month's research goal. Let's just say we'll start in March with Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro's mother, Mary Meriwether Gilmer, and see where that research trail leads us.

Another Name Question: Warner or Warren?

 

Perhaps it may be owing to sloppy handwriting scarcely preserved by the faded ink of two passing centuries, but I've discovered yet another Taliaferro son called by two names. Unlike the Burton versus Burkenhead puzzle we encountered yesterday, this one is far less confusing: Warner or Warren.

I had already taken the name of this son of my fifth great-grandfather, Zachariah Taliaferro, to be Warren. After all, though the ink was indeed faded and the handwriting somewhat challenging to read on their father Zachariah Taliaferro's will, the entry did look more like Warren than Warner.

But when I kept seeing writers refer to the name as Warner, I had to take another look. Take, for instance, the Historical Sketches of the Campbell, Pilcher and Kindred Families, written in 1911. In one compressed paragraph, author Margaret Campbell Pilcher dispatched the tale of his life, his wife, and their four children. All this, while opening the explanation with his name listed as Warner.

Taking a different angle to examine just who this Warren—or Warner—might have been, a listing from his wife's point of view confirmed the name as Warren, but added the complication of including other incorrect information. Ancestry.com's database drawn from volume three of Mrs. Howard H. McCall's book, Roster of Revolutionary Soldiers in Georgia, shows that Mary, daughter of Thomas Meriwether Gilmer, married Warren Taliaferro. At the same time, the text conflated father and son named Zachariah Taliaferro, providing as date and place of death for the father that of his namesake son, my fourth great-grandfather.

Still, if we can confidently rely on the rest of the information in that paragraph, we now know that Warren Taliaferro married the sister of the Georgia governor, George Rockingham Gilmer, who also claimed as his parents Thomas Meriwether Gilmer and Elizabeth Lewis. In his own book, Gilmer called Warren his brother-in-law, and—you knew this was coming—shared his description of Warren just as he had done for the rest of the Taliaferro siblings.

The governor's assessment of Warren:

...tall, muscular, good-tempered, very indolent and inefficient. He constantly reminded those who listened to his conversation of his Italian descent.

Lest that sound a bit too snarky, Gilmer did add a forgiving observation that his brother-in-law was "a fond husband and father."

Found within the listing of those children who called Warren Taliaferro their father was a reminder that I am not yet done weaving together the strands of this Taliaferro story. It turns out that Warren Taliaferro was not only my fourth great-granduncle, as were the younger Zachariah's other brothers, but he was also my fourth great-grandfather. We'll take some time next week to explore how a mitochondrial DNA test helped confirm my connection to Warren's bride and her line.

 

Finding More About Frances

 

We've been on a genealogical journey, trying to piece together the family constellation of my fourth great-grandfather, Zachariah Taliaferro. So far, we've found mention in his will of one Richard Taliaferro, whom he named as one of his executors. Chasing that clue, we found in Richard's own will—at least, we think it's our Richard's will—the naming of his sister Frances Penn and her two children, Richard and Mary.

As it turns out, it is a good thing that Richard Taliaferro specifically documented the name of Frances' two children. Where one would think to find such a listing, there is none. If I've found the right will for the Penn family, Frances' husband mentions her by name, but doesn't provide any detail concerning their children other than mentioning them generically as "our children."

Frances' husband Wilson Penn drew up his will on the nineteenth day of May in 1811. The document was filed at Elbert County in Georgia, the state where some of our Zachariah Taliaferro's siblings had settled. We already noticed yesterday that Richard had also made that decision to migrate from Virginia to Georgia before drawing up his own will.

Wilson Penn's will was fairly brief. Despite leaving us no clue as to his children's names, he did help us by appointing executors whose names will aid our research. Along with his wife Frances, whom he named as executrix, Wilson appointed Benjamin Taliaferro, Dr. John T. Gilmer, and "Thomson" Watkins.

While Benjamin Taliaferro is most likely brother to our Zachariah as well as to Richard and Frances, the other two names provide us assurance that we have found the will for the right Penn family. While we don't yet recognize who Dr. Gilmer might be, that surname interestingly is the same as that of the outspoken biographical author we mentioned yesterday. And the note inserted with the passage quoted yesterday from the Gilmer book mentioned a neighbor by the name of Thomas Watkins, who was said to be a brother-in-law of the lifelong confirmed bachelor, Richard Taliaferro.

So far, we've identified as siblings of my fourth great-grandfather Zachariah: Richard, possibly Benjamin, Frances Penn, and the wife of Thomas Watkins. Thankfully, we can now turn to the will of their father, also named Zachariah, to see who else should belong in this family tree. We'll begin that exploration at the beginning of the coming week.

Local Former Governor Tells All

 

If you ever wanted to know the details on, say, a Hollywood celebrity, leave it to the society columnists and social media "influencers" to dig up all the dirt. But our Richard Taliaferro, possible subject of two conflicting documents we've found, lived in the mid-1700s—and in a place unlikely to have many newspapers published with gossip columns.

Not to worry. There was another way to find all the snark a nosy family historian might desire: the tell-all book published by a former governor of the state of Georgia, George Rockingham Gilmer.

Governor George just happened to be born in Georgia to parents whose lines reached way back into colonial Virginia times: Thomas Gilmer and Elizabeth Lewis. The fourth of nine children, our George grew up with eight other opportunities to intermarry with descendants of early American family lines. 

He also, perhaps owing to his upbringing in what was then "frontier" territory of his home state, developed a habit of bluntly saying what he thought. Maybe it was his training as an attorney, or perhaps the years he spent serving in the Georgia state legislature, or the United States Congress, or his terms as governor, but those who have read his book, Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia, have noticed a high snark factor in his writing.

I am not sure we can call ourselves "lucky" that Governor Gilmer happened to be related to the Taliaferros in question for my research project this month, but he did have something to say about all the elder Zachariah Taliaferro's children. In particular, he mentioned the son we've been wondering about yesterday, Richard T.

The governor's commentary seems to confirm that Richard was son of the senior Zachariah and brother of my fourth great-grandfather, the junior Zachariah. Note how his assessment shows us that Richard did not seem to have a wife, let alone any children. In the governor's words:

Richard Taliaferro was deformed—his legs and thighs being only a span or two long, whilst his body was of ordinary length and size, and his head unusually large. His mind was of good capacity, but his deformity so soured his temper, and mortified his pride, as to drive him from society. He never married, became very penurious, and died without ever having enjoyed the love or commiseration of any but his nearest kin.

Whether that commentary was actually mean-spirited or simply the bluntness of a self-appointed social critic, it does provide us with some further hints about this Richard Taliaferro. For one, it rules out the guardianship document we found concerning two children orphaned about the same time someone by the same name as Richard died in Coweta County, Georgia. Since the passage was inserted in pages devoted to listing remembrances of the Taliaferro siblings, it makes for interesting reading—though not guaranteed to be accurate reporting. 

A note inserted by the author along with that text mentioned that Richard lived near his brother-in-law, Thomas Watkins. With the will we found yesterday—seeming all the more likely to be our Richard's document—we now have two sibling leads to follow up on. Besides Frances Penn and her family, mentioned in Richard's will, we now also need to find other explanations of how Thomas Watkins might have been related to our Taliaferros.