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. 

About Jane

 

While it is a snap to realize not much can be learned about a woman of colonial Virginia by Googling her surname, we have a lot we can infer from the resources which discussed the men in her life. Such is the case of learning about Jane Strother, my sixth great-grandmother.

Turning to the memories of one of her grandsons, collected and published in 1855 as Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia, we learn that Jane was said to be the oldest of thirteen children—all daughters—of William Strother "of Stafford" and his wife, Margaret Watts. What George Rockingham Gilmer, the book's author, learned about his grandparents' ancestry was likely gleaned by listening to family stories. Those stories held that the Strothers had emigrated from England to Virginia in the earliest days of the colony.

However long the Strother family had to make a new life for themselves in North America, by the time of Jane's marriage to Thomas Lewis in 1749, it was said that she came from an "established family." When she and Thomas married, likely in Stafford County, they moved north of Thomas' father's home in Augusta County to an area close to current-day Port Republic, Virginia. There, they settled near the Shenandoah River, calling their new home "Lynnwood."

Barring the discovery of any church records about her life, the only other token of Jane's existence was in her name etched into an imposing monument in the Lewis Family Cemetery. While the Find A Grave memorial indicates Jane's dates as 1732 through 1820, the stone's etching itself gives only her name.

Those dates, however, call into question some details from the Gilmer book. If Jane was born in 1732, once we look to the Find A Grave memorial for her father, William Strother, and see his year of death—that same 1732 as the year of her birth—it becomes a problem when we realize that Jane was said to be the oldest of his thirteen daughters.

While granted, there are no supporting documents provided for the dates added to Find A Grave memorials for these two ancestors, the discrepancy may be a case of far more than over-zealous volunteers. In a volume of genealogies gleaned from The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, one author noted his doubt of the oft-repeated "thirteen blooming daughters." Turning to court records following the death of William Strother to support his contention, the author observed details which seem to indicate there were six daughters, not thirteen. Yes, it is possible that some may have predeceased their father, but the more likely story—if, that is, there were more daughters—is that Jane's mother remarried and had children by her second husband.

If Jane's mother did indeed have children from that subsequent marriage, they would have been half-siblings to Jane. Still, I'd be interested to discover their identity as well, for one reason. While Jane's mother Margaret Watts, as my seventh great-grandmother, would be an ancestor beyond the likely detection of autosomal DNA testing, because she is on my matriline, all her female descendants could be on the matriline of my mtDNA matches. Besides Jane Strother and her known Strother sisters—if only five others rather than the fabled thirteen—any of her possible half-sisters from her mother's subsequent marriage will need to be on my radar, too.

With that, as we move on to Jane's mother, we'll need to learn more about this second husband. 

Googling Surnames

 

While it was tempting to follow the family trail of my fifth great-grandmother Elizabeth's father, Thomas Lewis, to the hardly believable story of his father John Lewis, we need to reel back the family fishing line to Elizabeth's mother's side of the story. My goal this month, after all, is to keep pursuing my matriline, so that is the direction we need to take for the remainder of this month.

To tell the truth, at this juncture, it seemed challenging to pursue that task, given that the next surname we will be examining is one I considered to be rather unusual: Strother. To disabuse myself of that intimidating notion, I decided to dive in to an introductory tour of surname possibilities: I Googled the surname "Strother."

I was surprised to see how many results turned up. From Ancestry.com, I learned that the Strother surname could be found not only in the United States, but in Canada, as well as England and Scotland. It likely originated as a habitational name, though the precise location of that suspected "wooded marshland" from which the Strother surname was supposedly derived has yet to be discovered. More to our purposes, the Ancestry.com article noted that by 1840, there were forty two Strother families living in Virginia, exactly where my sixth great-grandmother Jane Strother had been born about 1732.

Fortunately for me, the Strother family apparently was keenly interested in their own family history. I found several published records online, everything from a thirteen-page typewritten article from the collection of the Orange County California Genealogical Society to a September 1903 journal article in the Register of Kentucky State Historical Society. Better than that were the discoveries of specific Strother descendants' papers, including their own genealogical pursuits, archived in the holdings of the Atlanta History Center, the University of North Carolina, and the Digital Library of Georgia.

More interesting than that, at least to me, was stumbling upon the online existence of The William Strother Society, Inc.

Granted, all these discoveries are premature, given the fact that all I know, so far, is the least smattering of details about one member of the Strother family in colonial Virginia. And that is this: that Thomas Lewis, son of "Irish John" Lewis, married someone named Jane Strother, said to be daughter of William Strother and Margaret Watts.

And all I thought would happen with this project, given how searches for women in colonial Virginia can go, would be to run into a brick wall.

Irish John

 

It was likely in the early years of Augusta County, Virginia, when my seventh great-grandfather John Lewis acquired the nickname, Irish John Lewis. According to his headstone, he did claim to have been born in Ireland—County Donegal, specifically—but with a name like Lewis, it could easily have been assumed he was more Welsh than Irish. According to family reports, though, his roots may actually have been French.

It was what prompted John Lewis' arrival in colonial Virginia about which I am more curious, however. Explaining the setting of the Lewis family's arrival, one genealogy paints his newly-adopted home as "a dense and unexplored forest" which only years later became Virginia's Augusta County. Upon his arrival there, John Lewis became one of its pioneers.

There was a reason why John Lewis left his comfortable home in Ireland. The 1906 Genealogies of the Lewis and Kindred Families gave hints about the episode which ousted him from his Irish home. Lewis was apparently "compelled to flee the country" on account of "having to slay his Irish landlord." Author John Meriwether McAllister speculated that in the far western reaches of the Virginia colony, the Lewis family would be "too far removed from royalty to be any longer the victim of tyranny."

While that may sound like rhetoric fitting for a colonial settler leading up to the American Revolution, John Lewis supposedly arrived in Virginia much earlier than that—in 1732. Of course, I wanted to learn more about that story. Through some stroke of serendipity, I discovered there actually is a Wikipedia entry on John Lewis, which provided a succinct recap of Lewis' escape from Ireland. Better than that, the article also included footnotes, leading me to further sources.

One such account of the event—though painted in the prose of a much earlier era—was the 1845 book by Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Virginia. Howe's painting of the encounter which prompted Lewis' decision to emigrate was as "the result of one of those bloody affrays" in which "a nobleman of profligate habits and ungovernable passions" had decided to repossess the Lewis property under "an alleged breach of condition." The nobleman with his posse surrounded the Lewis home, made his demands—which were rebuffed by Lewis—and fired a shot into the house. This killed Lewis' brother and injured his wife, enraging Lewis, who then rushed out to fight his assailant. In the end, Lewis had killed both the nobleman and one of his assistants, prompting those witnesses and Lewis sympathizers to advise him to "fly the country."

Whether that incident actually happened as the 1845 account painted it will be hard to determine. The Wikipedia article on John Lewis noted that two of three historical writers disputed the narrative. Indeed, a supposed diary of John Lewis' wife Margaret which provided a recounting of the incident, first appearing in a magazine version in 1869, was only in 1976 revealed to actually be a hoax. 

With such a rocky road leading to Lewis reality, how is one to determine the truth of the matter? It hardly seems likely that I'd find a contemporaneous newspaper account of the crime from one of the least-populated counties in Ireland.

What I can do, however, is look for documentation of what became of Irish John Lewis, once he arrived in Virginia, through to his death near Staunton in 1762. And, having achieved such a goal, I'll be satisfied with my progress.

What's in a Story?

 

As I work my way back through the generations on my by-now colonial Virginia Lewis family, I encounter few verifying documents but, out of the blue, stumble upon a remarkable story. When family stories come to us from the early 1700s—or even earlier than that—how do we go about verifying the tale? More to the point, what, exactly, goes into the making of a family story? How does one's history turn into family legend?

I'm not sure I'll ever find the answer to such a question, but I have found one such story. Before we dive into the story, though, I need to set the stage with some genealogical orientation.

Right now, I'm edging my way backwards in time from the generation of my fifth great-grandmother, Elizabeth Lewis, wife of Thomas Meriwether Gilmer, to her parents. Fortunately, one of Elizabeth's sons wrote a book in 1855 sharing stories he recalled from his family's ancestry. It was there in George Gilmer's  Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia that we learned the names of Elizabeth's parents: Thomas Lewis and Jane Strother.

It wasn't long until I found another book specifically on the Lewis family and zeroed in on Elizabeth's father Thomas Lewis. There in John Meriwether McAllister's 1906 book, Genealogies of the Lewis and Kindred Families, the author identifies Thomas Lewis as the second son of John Lewis and Margaret Lynn.

The book goes on to list each of Thomas' thirteen children, including the names of their spouses. However, not long after that discovery, I learned that the author had gotten one of those spouses' names wrong—at least, according to the files of the Daughters of the American Revolution. For the record, D.A.R. had flagged the entry for Patriot Thomas Lewis, noting that "problems have been discovered with at least one previously verified paper." Checking the notes on their website, it appears that the problem involves that very spouse—Thomas McClanahan—who had apparently married a different Margaret than the same-named sister of our Thomas Lewis. 

Taking that discovery as a token of the fallibility of genealogy books, no matter how well-intentioned the author, you can be sure I now proceed with due caution. Still, my curiosity was captured by the mention in more than one place about the circumstances behind the arrival in America of Thomas and his immigrant parents. In almost understated tones, the Lewis book explained that "after the departure of John Lewis from Ireland, on account of having slain his Irish landlord," he arrived in the colony of Virginia in 1732.

Say what?! Now, that's got to be a story. A family story, undoubtedly, but did it really happen? If so, how am I to document an event like that? And if it didn't really happen, how do I go about deciphering the truth of the matter to get the slightest inkling of what might really have happened?

Whether I can find the answer to any of those questions, at least I have two written versions of the event, albeit contained in those unsourced hundred year old genealogy books. For the sake of the story itself—whether it turns out to be true or not—tomorrow, let's take a look at what the Lewis family said had happened to bring them to America.

Genealogy by Wikipedia, Part II

 

Whenever I stumble upon a promising old genealogy book on one of my family lines, I already know to contain my exuberance until I've verified the key assertions by documentation. Still, finding yet another old family history tome, this time on my Lewis line, I couldn't help but feel cheery about it. Despite the rather pedestrian title, Genealogies of the Lewis and Kindred Families, the book's author claimed a name which I could relate to: John Meriwether McAllister. This line has some of those Meriwethers, too.

However, finding the 1906 near-posthumous publication was eclipsed by another discovery. Forget dusty old books on library shelves—or even in digitized collections. It turns out I can now actually research my old family lines by simply looking up their names on Wikipedia. Yes, genealogy by Wikipedia—a concept I never expected to consider, at least until my ancestral early arrivals in North America had roots digging deep enough into colonial business.

It was back in the pages of George R. Gilmer's 1855 Sketches book that I discovered the names of my fifth great-grandmother's parents: Thomas Lewis and Jane Strother. Because Elizabeth Lewis was born to them in the 1760s, I was fairly sure the only document which I could turn to for verification would be her father's will, so I was quite fortunate to have the guidance of these tentative names.

It didn't take long to discover that Elizabeth's father Thomas had had a hand in politics in his colonial Virginia home. I'm not even sure what prompted me to try my hand at finding his name listed in Wikipedia, but there it was: a brief entry on Thomas Lewis, billed as a Virginia politician. Like all Wikipedia posts, the article included several references which I'll be checking out. Better yet, the Wikipedia article on Thomas included mention of his father, John Lewis—imagine searching for a name as common as that—and led to a separate Wikipedia entry on the patriarch and apparent founding immigrant in that Lewis line. You can be sure I'll be harvesting that entry for reference leads, as well.

With even more names to search for in those old Virginia wills, I consider it fortunate that FamilySearch Labs has recently come out with their Full Text search. I will certainly be putting that innovation through its paces as I work to confirm the entries in this newly-discovered old Lewis genealogy book this week.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

 

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.

 

The Kid (Almost) Next Door

 

We probably give little thought to the childhood acquaintances from the neighborhood in which we spent our earliest years. Chances are that seldom did any of our elementary school chums grow up to be someone famous (although it does, rarely, happen).

As we explore the connections who might reveal something more about the life of King Stockton—the former slave on the McClellan plantation in Wellborn, Florida, whose story ignited my own childhood curiosity—it turns out that there was a "kid next door" who grew up to be someone whose name became part of the state's history.

Even so, that man, judge James Dean, is someone whose history had been hidden due to the unfortunate injustices which befell him at the height of his career. There are, however, a few articles written about his life from which we can glean the basic facts of his life. The earliest resource—which I do not own, owing to its eye-popping price tag—was a 760 page tome published by a Howard University law professor in 1999 entitled Emancipation: the Making of the Black Lawyer 1844-1944. Within that volume, James Dean merited mention on a mere two pages.

Though one would think such scant coverage would have buried the story of James Dean, apparently someone, reading his Howard University professor's book, learned that James Dean was the first black judge elected anywhere in the South after Reconstruction. That someone was attorney Calvin Allen, whose goal became to have the unjustly disgraced name of James Dean restored to honor.

As one would suspect, the backlash to Reconstruction had many impacts, one of which was a wrongful accusation against the recently-elected judge, James Dean, which had him removed from office within a year of his election. Well over one hundred years later, attorney Calvin Allen mounted a campaign of his own to have James Dean's record cleared, and in 2002, then-governor Jeb Bush signed a proclamation to posthumously reinstate Judge James Dean to the bench.

James Dean, who in 1884 graduated first in his law class at Howard University, had served in Monroe County, deep in the southwestern tip of Florida. There, in 1888, he won the election to the position of judge against two white candidates. Within the year, an unsubstantiated accusation led to his removal from that position without benefit of the required senate hearing prior to being removed from office.

As prominently as he had risen in his chosen field up to that point, it is James Dean's early years that I am most interested in. Apparently, James Dean was born in 1858 in the recently-established Florida city of Ocala, where many plantations dependent on slave labor were located. However, by the time of emancipation, the Dean family was living near the McClellan plantation in Wellborn, the same place where King Stockton was once enslaved.

By the time of the first census after emancipation, the Dean household was recorded only five households removed from that of King Stockton, and three from other members of the extended Stockton family. Whether the Dean family moved from Ocala after the Civil War, or were sold as slaves prior to that time, I can't tell. However, keep in mind that King Stockton's wife, though taking the surname Lewis, actually had a father who had the surname Dean. Could it be that James Dean's family made the move to be closer to family?

By the time of the 1885 Florida state census, the Dean household showed only Kelly and Minta; their son James had by then completed his studies at Howard University and was likely living in Monroe County, though I can't find any entry for him there. Much of the detail of James Dean's life and career are best recounted in the Summer 2008 Florida Historical Quarterly, in the article by Canter Brown and Larry E. Rivers, "The Pioneer African American Jurist who Almost Became a Bishop: Florida's Judge James Dean, 1858-1914." 

That, as it turned out, was the resource in which I had found the footnote revealing the connection King Stockton had had with James Dean who was, at that time, literally the kid next door. In the Brown and Rivers article, King Stockton was portrayed as "a local AME minister who filled Wellborn-area religious needs in the absence of a regularly organized church and who lived in close proximity to the Deans."

Before James Dean went to Howard University, though, he had left the rural setting of Wellborn to seek educational opportunities in nearby Jacksonville. There, I was interested to learn, he attended Mount Zion AME Church. I quickly checked to see if that was where paths crossed with Dr. A. L. Lewis, but as it turned out, the latter man's church was called Mount Olive—not to mention, A. L. Lewis would have been a much younger man.

Following the name-dropping in the lengthy article on James Dean's life in the Florida Historical Quarterly, while I could see he had again returned to Jacksonville later in life, at no time did I spot among the many names that of A. L. Lewis. The only connection I could see was in the closing comment, quoting from a funeral notice, that Judge Dean's remains were to be transported back to Wellborn, where he would be buried "by the side of relatives in the family burial ground."

Other than the early mention of King Stockton, nothing I could find in articles on James Dean's life led me to determine any family connection. However, there is one more research attempt I'd like to make, though it will step outside the bounds of all the usual places where genealogists tend to look.

Crossing Paths

 

It is sometimes difficult to determine just how two people met. Take, for instance, King Stockton, current subject of our search, and the man—successful Florida businessman A. L. Lewis—who took up the project to record details of this former enslaved person's life. An entire generation—thirty six years—separated them. King Stockton was likely born in Georgia in 1830, while A. L. Lewis began life in Madison County, Florida, in 1865.

Their life's path also separated them. King Stockton was born in humble circumstances, the son of two enslaved people, one of whom we know very little about. While A. L. Lewis was also born to enslaved parents, the start of his life coincided with emancipation and eventually opened up for him opportunities, combined with his natural talents, that the previous generation certainly couldn't enjoy.

As much as I've searched for the answer on just how their paths crossed, this wealthy businessman and this humble farmer, perhaps the clearest explanation comes from the very booklet which A. L. Lewis prepared on the life of King Stockton. In his preface, Lewis explained how many "men and women have lived and died without very much thought being given to what an inspiration their life might be to future generations."

Thus, A. L. Lewis' goal "to have the beautiful characters of the men and women of their race held up before them as examples worthy of emulation" was achieved through publication of a booklet like the one focused on the story of King Stockton.

That, of course, makes me wonder whether Dr. Lewis had written any other such biographies, perhaps in a series dedicated to the same purpose. In that case, it would have made more sense that King Stockton's was just one more name among several suggested to the author. As of yet, though, I have not found any such indication.

That original booklet, as well, embeds some history in the Stockton story, making me wonder whether the nexus between the two men was not by business connections, not even by family relationships, but because of the denomination to which they both belonged: the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. After all, for sixty years, A. L. Lewis had served as Sunday School Superintendent of the Mount Olive AME Church in Jacksonville, Florida. While King Stockton spent the last of his years in the small agricultural community of Hastings in Saint Johns County, now about an hour's drive south of Jacksonville, it is possible that their earlier paths might have crossed in church affairs.

Noted in the small booklet of King Stockton's life was the detail that he grew up attending church services at the plantation where he lived, memorizing many of the scriptures that he heard repeatedly. He received an "exhorter's license" in 1853, and the narrative of the booklet explains that when "Bishop Wayman came to Florida in 1867" to organize the AME Church in Tallahassee, King Stockton was one of the members at that first conference.

That detail prompted me to see who Bishop Wayman might have been. Seeking details on the formation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, I discovered its roots long pre-dated the Civil War. The church grew out of another organization, the Free African Society, established in Philadelphia in 1787. Bishop Alexander Walker Wayman, born a free man in 1821 on his family's farm in Maryland, became the seventh bishop of the AME Church.

In his own writings, Bishop Wayman mentioned traveling to Florida in 1867 for the formation of the Florida church, including description of the uncomfortable "car" he rode in from Georgia to the station at Live Oak, Florida—not far from where King Stockton lived at the time in Suwannee County. Though the Wayman travel account mentions the key people he met when he arrived for the conference at Tallahassee, nowhere in the book was there any mention of King Stockton nor, at that early date, any of the Lewis family.

Yet, A. L. Lewis indicated that his subject, eventually coming to be called "Father Stockton," was a preacher at the elder man's local church, well into the latter part of his life. Though re-reading the booklet did help bring some details into focus, it still doesn't enlighten me as to the connection between writer and subject of the story. While my gut take on it is that the connection is more likely to have been one of family, the more logical explanation is probably through church association. Still, no solid details to confirm which would be the answer.

Still, having reviewed the bigger picture of the history behind some of the key names mentioned, it serves to provide an understanding of the time and situation in which the no-longer enslaved found themselves during King Stockton's lifetime. For more detail on that aspect, we'll turn next to the life story of another associate of King Stockton, a man in Florida politics who started life as the kid down the street from King Stockton's home in Wellborn. Perhaps, in once again reviewing that man's history, next time we can find much more than merely a footnote.     

 

Extraordinary Man, Common Surname

 

When we seek to learn more about the lives of our ancestors, it is sometimes an exciting discovery to find that an ancestor's life attracted enough interest to merit being written up in publications lasting far beyond their own lifetime. That, at least, was how I felt, even though it wasn't concerning one of my own relatives, when I discovered the book about the man known as King Stockton. The nine-page booklet, though sharing stories of King Stockton's early life in territorial Florida, still left me with one question: just how did it come to be that a millionaire would choose to make an obscure preacher the focus of the booklet he had written?

At first, I assumed the connection between King Stockton and A. L. Lewis, his biographer, was through a business association. After all, Abraham Lincoln Lewis was involved in establishing a number of successful ventures, and was also known for his humanitarian efforts in the Jacksonville area. Though quite a bit was written up about A. L. Lewis' accomplishments—even his obituary appeared in newspapers from Florida up to the New York City metro area—I couldn't discern any place where his path might have crossed with that of King Stockton.

From that point, having learned that King Stockton's mother-in-law was also a Lewis, I thought perhaps there was a family connection, and decided to pursue his biographer's own family history.

Though much has been written about A. L. Lewis—even his entry at Find A Grave is informative—besides the usual accolades for his business acumen, the only family relationships mentioned were those of the relatives involved in key positions in his business, the Afro-American Life Insurance Company.

As it turns out, there were a number of trees on Ancestry.com which included a Florida-born man by the name of Abraham Lincoln Lewis, but almost all of them labeled A. L. Lewis' parents as Author and Mary Lewis. Indeed, there was an 1880 census entry for a family of three with those names listed for the adults, plus their nineteen year old son Abraham.

Only problem with this Columbia County record: that Abraham would have been born about five years before the Abraham we are seeking. According to A. L. Lewis' burial information, he was born in 1865, not 1860.

Though I couldn't find another family with a promising entry for a son by that name in 1880, I could find an "Abram" Lewis in a family in the 1870 census for Madison County. That family, headed by South Carolina natives Robert and Judy Lewis, included children Frances, Luellen, Eliza, and, of course, Abram. A promising corroboration of that listing came from the other end of A. L. Lewis' life with one of the many obituaries published at his passing. According to the obituary published in the Pittsburgh Courier on March 15, 1947, besides his widow and sons, he was survived by one sister, Eliza Dixon of New York City.

Sure enough, Eliza's entry at Find A Grave also listed her parents as Robert and Judy Lewis. That confirmation, however, still did not help me connect A. L. Lewis' family with that of King Stockton's wife Louvenia. Louvenia's death certificate had listed her mother as Melissa Lewis, and a mis-labeled census entry for the 1885 Florida state census included King Stockton's mother-in-law under the same given name.

So how did they relate? At this point, I can't tell. Perhaps the fact that both families claimed the same last name was merely coincidence—the artifact of a fairly common surname. The question now becomes: if not by blood, how exactly might King Stockton have been connected to a man like A. L. Lewis? Though it is doubtful that it would be by business, there is another avenue to consider, which we'll explore on Monday.

Considering Kin

 

There is something quite aggravating about the concept of kin. Somehow imprecise, "kin" is nevertheless the word family historians gravitate to when no other term can convey the notion: not exactly related but, somehow, related just the same. It's a word convenient when nothing else quite fits as a descriptor, but we can't somehow contort the family tree to reveal the complex connection.

Southern relationships are sometimes like that. I suspect, in the one particular case we've lately been considering, that word may have often come in handy in sorting family ties.

In the question of just how a successful businessman like A. L. Lewis might have come to not only make the acquaintance of an old preacher like King Stockton but actually decide to write a book about his life story, I couldn't quite discover the nexus. But when I consider the little bit I've been able to determine of King Stockton's family, there may be an explanation: he and A. L. Lewis might have been "kin."

Since I know you won't let me get off so easily with such an explanation, let me lay out my case. It begins early in the life of King Stockton and his wife, Louvenia. I'll let the words of biographer A. L. Lewis explain:

It was in his early childhood that he met little Louvenia Ann Lewis, the youngest of five sisters, and at that time, they pledged themselves to each other.

Yes, admittedly, Lewis is a fairly common surname. It is quite possible that there was no connection between the two Lewis names. On the other hand, what are the possibilities that, in addition to the five Lewis sisters, there might have also been at least one brother?

Before we get ahead of ourselves with conjectures about connections, let's consider one other twist. While that may have been the report of the early years of King Stockton and his wife-to-be, let's take a look at what we can discover at the other end of life: those possibly error-ridden reports of parents' names in death certificates.

While not living quite as long as her near-centenarian husband, Louvenia Lewis Stockton died in 1925 after having lived ninety three years. What was interesting about her death certificate, though, was that it was her mother's name which was given as Lewis. Her father was listed as a Dean.

This small revelation gives pause to consider the connections lying beneath that serendipitous mention in that history journal's footnote about King Stockton in an article concerning Florida jurist (and Stockton neighbor) James Dean.

Perhaps once again, a person whom I considered a member of King Stockton's "FAN Club" may turn out to be much more than just a friend; Dean, Lewis, and Stockton may all have been kin. And if we can't discover the connection through Louvenia's own genealogy, perhaps we can learn something by exploring the family trees of those two more well-known men from Florida's history. 

What Our Ancestors' Friends Can Tell us

 

Do you ever stop to think what unspoken messages you send by the friends you choose? We have quips to remind us that people are sometimes assessed by the company they keep—"birds of a feather" comes to mind here—and that operative can become a device to use to our research advantage.

Those of us who have researched our family tree long enough to get stuck on what we've dubbed "brick wall ancestors" have probably stumbled upon the acronym regarding our ancestors' "F.A.N. Club." The term was coined by master researcher Elizabeth Shown Mills, signifying the usefulness of following a brick wall ancestor's Friends, Associates, and Neighbors.

As I pursue the story of the man I now know was called King Stockton, I've found there was very little recorded about his life. Thankfully—and this was the tale that first piqued my interest when I heard it as a child—King Stockton had an acquaintance who thought it a worthwhile project to publish a booklet about his life.

That booklet, as I discovered only recently, was a simple seven page pamphlet with the generic title, "Biography of King Stockton: Born a Slave, Living 100 Years." That, as it turned out, was the "book" mentioned in the stories passed down through my family—the one which I could never find in my grandmother's belongings, but which, thankfully, I was able to read, thanks to the rare books and manuscripts collection at the Rose Library at Emory University.

Not much can be discerned about one hundred years of a life from the text on a mere seven pages, let alone a life lived spanning such tumultuous times as were seen from the early years of territorial Florida through the end of slavery and the contentious times beyond that era. But we may be able to extract some inferences about King Stockton based on what we can learn about his friends and associates.

It was from his contact with one associate—Florida's pioneer African-American jurist, James Dean—that I gleaned my first clue to clinch the answer to a lifelong search for King Stockton's "book"; that was where I found the book's title in the footnotes in a history journal article about James Dean.

Impressive friend.

But the friend I was now in search of was the very one who was inspired to tell King Stockton's story: a man by the name of A. L. Lewis. Who was he?

Fortunately, unlike James Dean and his many accomplishments buried in history, A. L. Lewis was a man whose trail was a bit easier to trace. It was helpful to discover what was hidden behind those enigmatic initials: A. L. signified Abraham Lincoln Lewis. A brief entry in Wikipedia let me know that he was the state of Florida's first African-American millionaire. His success came from many ventures, most of which were owing to his ability to spot needs within his community during a time of great upheaval, and his talent for forming cooperative ventures with other astute community leaders.

Since A. L. Lewis was a businessman and chairman of the board of a life insurance company, I wondered just what it might have been that he and a minister like King Stockton held in common. What was it about their friendship? What connected them? And can we infer anything from the relationship? By the time A. L. Lewis had been born in Madison, Florida, in 1865, King Stockton was well into his thirties.

Though they both lived in the same region of northern Florida, there had to be something more that connected them. I was curious to see if I could find the nexus between the two men. I noticed that A. L. Lewis had founded what eventually was called the Afro-American Life Insurance Company in 1901, and wondered whether that detail would reveal the source of any connection. However, a fortieth anniversary publication of the company didn't provide any clues, though it did introduce me to the founding members of the board—possibly more names to add to King Stockton's FAN Club.

What I discovered by leafing through the company publication was an operation designed and maintained by a dedicated core of talented men and women, working from an early start in a new century to years after King Stockton's own passing in 1929. The chairman of the board of that company—that very same A. L. Lewis—was somehow the acquaintance of King Stockton to such a degree that he chose to publish a booklet sharing details of the elder man's life. Surely, such an acquaintance says something about the man we are hoping to learn more about.

What I couldn't find tucked between the pages of the fortieth anniversary yearbook, besides any mention of King Stockton, himself, was any way to figure out the connection between the two men. It's fairly obvious that one doesn't engage in writing someone's story without knowing at least something about that person. So how did the two get to know each other?

There was one possible clue in all this, one obliterated by the apparent success of the author's businesses: his very name, Lewis. While Lewis is a common surname, perhaps there was a connection between the author's surname and some details I had stumbled upon while researching King Stockton's family tree. As it turned out, King Stockton was connected to a Lewis family through his own wife. Perhaps the Lewis connection wasn't owing to friends or associates, after all, but to a connection with kin.