Revisiting Those "Notes to Self"

 

The pursuit of family history, despite now being so heavily digitized, can still leave an enormous paper trail in its wake. Let's just say my second-most active pursuit is cleaning up the scraps of paper upon which I jot down reminders of research revelations as they occur to me.

When those notes have passed their prime, it's into the trash they go. Except...I can't help re-reading what I'm about to rid myself of—and then decide the note really needs just a little bit more work.

Take the scratch paper upon which I had noted several details about an upcoming meeting—a to-do list which, now two years later, is well-qualified to have become a "done" list. It would easily have landed in the recycle bin, except what should catch my eye as it wafted its way downward but a different note added in the margin. In a different color ink, it was a clear spot of paper upon which to hurriedly jot—before I forgot, no doubt—yet one more thing that I absolutely could not neglect to follow up on.

The terse note said only 

Drucilla—died March 3, 1866

Mary A. McLeran's sister

This was the family line descended from the Florida pioneer, ferryman Ruben Charles, father of that Mary-of-the-Red-Scarf legend who, at least as far as I could tell, did not die the tragic death in her youth romanticized in local lore. Here was a note reminding me that I had found mention of her—married, no less—in some of the court proceedings surrounding her husband's sudden death.

Mary's husband, as I recalled once I returned to look this up, was a northern Florida man by the name of William T. McLeran. And William's parents were a North Carolina couple of the early 1800s by the name of Nevin and Rebecca.

Oh. And Rebecca's maiden name was Tison.

That fact had never been lost on me. Let's just say I sort of forgot that little detail this year until I ran across that bit of torn paper now flitting from my fingertips into the trash can. Now, after having spent a month searching high and low for any signs of another Tison's origins in North Carolina—and watching some of his progeny leap the border to settle in territorial Florida—can anyone walk away from this other research temptation and not wonder whether there is yet another, though unseen, connection to ferret out from all this early American era's scant personal records?

Let's just say I'm not exactly walking away from it. I'll just reconstitute that shredded note and fold it in with the file containing my to-list for the next time we ponder those mystery Tisons from North Carolina. The books must remain closed on that case for now. We've got another task to tackle for our February research challenge. 

When Sorrows Multiply

 

When, in wandering the path leading backwards through the generations, we encounter an impassible roadblock, it sometimes works to step to the side, rather than stubbornly press against the immovable. Thus, when I couldn't make any research progress on Delaney Townsend, wife of Andrew Charles of Madison County, Florida, I searched for a bigger picture.

Perhaps this can be dubbed genealogy-by-poking-around. Collateral lines may provide an escape route by enabling the researcher to do an end-run around the point of no answers. But it seems so very uncertain. Nondescript. Vague. Perhaps even mis-directed.

Call it what you may, I started looking at all the siblings I could find for the Charles couple. Of course, in Delaney's case, I have yet to determine who she might have been related to among the many Townsend families in Madison County. But I did already know quite a few details about Andrew Charles' side of the family, so that's where I began my exploration.

Andrew likely had many more siblings than I've been able to find, but that was no problem: I started with what I did know. Andrew, son of Reuben and Rebecca Charles, had at least two sisters of interest for our purposes today: Drucilla and Mary Ann.

Drucilla was the sister who eventually took in her brother Andrew's orphaned children Benjamin, Fanny, and Emma. We can see that was so, at least in 1860, from her household's entry in that year's census, under her husband's name, Melburn Odum. What also became clear from that enumeration: the household was home to children with three different surnames. There was Drucilla's daughter Mabel Odum, apparently a newborn at the time the census was taken. Then, the three Charles children of Drucilla's brother Andrew. And a set of Hines children: Emma and Mary.

As it turns out, Drucilla was mother of the Hines children, as well, whose father was Thomas Hughs Hines. Though the 1860 census gave daughter Mary's age as five, the 1870 census indicated she was likely born in 1858, not 1855—helping to pin an estimated date for her father's passing before her mother's subsequent marriage to Melburn Odum by 1859.

As for the other Charles sibling, we've discussed Mary Ann Charles in the past. She was the one who may have been the subject of the Charles legend of the red scarf. Hers, too, was a life story of multiplied sorrows. She had married William McLeran of neighboring Suwannee County and, no sooner than giving birth to their daughter Fannie, lost both husband and daughter within months of each other.

It was in reviewing these sad details that the ton of bricks finally hit me: why were all these people dying around the same time? Drucilla Charles' first husband Thomas Hines had to have died barely two years before 1860. Mary Ann's husband died at the end of May, 1860. Though I can find no burial information for their daughter, she died less than a month after her father, according to Mary Ann's appeal to the Suwannee County court requesting appointment as administratrix of her daughter's inherited property.

Although the best I can do in estimating the dates of death of my original research focus, Delaney Townsend and her husband Andrew Charles, is to circle a span of time stretching nearly a decade—after 1850 but before 1860—I'm beginning to wonder what might have been going on in northern Florida, leading up to those several deaths in the extended family in such a brief time period. Could there have been a widespread cause resulting in many deaths—especially deaths not documented in a readily-available form?

Taking that question to the search engines, I ran across one list of epidemics in the United States, but it didn't include any details involving the decade leading up to 1860. Although one article indicated the nineteenth century was a transformational period in medical history, we do need to remember that Florida, unlike the rest of the eastern seaboard of that time period, was still very much a frontier. In addition, Florida's near-tropical weather combined with ample water sources could have yielded conditions ripe for illnesses such as malaria.

There was, however, one other list of epidemics which seemed to provide an answer. A worldwide timeline of epidemics indicated an influenza epidemic in both Europe and the Americas from 1857 through 1859. Could that have been the cause of the family's many losses?

Whatever the case, besides Mary McLaren's husband and daughter, plus Drucilla's first husband, Delaney and Andrew Charles disappeared from view without a sign that I can find—so far. Of course, understanding the possible turmoil swirling around these families may help me understand the risks they faced, but it doesn't tell me the answer to my research goal of discovering Delaney's parents. We'll have to turn to yet another consideration in our continuing exploration.

Yanking a Few More Bricks Out of the Proverbial Brick Wall

Sometimes, a research journey can unearth momentous discoveries. Other times, well, a few more chinks chipped out of the genealogical brick wall still help.

This time, the chips are falling from around the brick labeled Mary Charles McLeran. I've been stuck on the details of her life. I don't have a date of death for her, a dilemma since she was also the subject of a local legend, that of Mary of the Red Scarf.

Granted, she may not be one and the same as Ruben and Rebecca Charles' daughter Mary, reputedly shot by angered Native Americans who mistakenly took her for yet another one of those settlers encroaching upon their land. Still, red scarf or not, I have been able to locate a Mary, daughter of Ruben and Rebecca, who was very much alive, well into adulthood.

While this Mary outlasted not only her pioneer parents in the early days of northern Florida settlement but also her husband and only daughter, I still lacked some details about her life. Mainly, I wanted to know what became of her in her later years. Since I couldn't find any trace of her after the 1880 census—and even that entry I had doubts about—I needed to examine records to see if perhaps she had remarried.

This past week's visit to Suwannee County put some of my doubts to rest. Not entirely, of course, but I'm closer to gaining a resolution on her life's story.

Mary's story is not a happy one. With her father dying young by about 1835, and her mother in the 1850s—both meeting a violent end, according to local legends—Mary had married William T. McLeran, member of another local family whose surname subsequently had become well known in the area. Even Mary's marriage date is in doubt, because I have yet to find any documentation of that event; with some counties in the area lacking local records until long after that date, I may never find such a document.

I'm fairly sure the date of her marriage was before 1859, for that was the date of birth for her first and only child, a daughter she named Fannie. The second reason I feel that was a reasonable guess for date of her marriage was that her husband unexpectedly died the very next year, on May 29, 1860.

William McLeran's death in May was quickly followed by Fannie's, in June of that same year. After that, we can find the bereft Mary subsequently losing her sister Drucilla and caring for Drucilla's two surviving daughters, as well as temporarily caring for the children of her deceased brother Andrew.

I managed to find, among the records I thumbed through in the basement of the Suwannee County courthouse last week, a petition by the widow Mary McLeran to have her two nieces apprenticed to her for training in "housewifery."

From the date of that petition—though entered farther down the page, it was hard to read, possibly stating February 28, 1861—until the next time I found mention of Mary, it was far beyond the entry in the 1870 census which was the last date of which I had been most certain.

Now, it turns out, there were several letters written concerning the estate of Mary McLeran. While I can't yet determine the exact date of her passing, what I could glean from the various messages was that when Mary died, she had been left in a destitute state. I'm not sure why the nieces she had raised were not in a position to assist her, nor any of the few remaining more distant relatives. It just made me sad, in my visit to the courthouse two days ago, to discover the letter from an attorney to the local sheriff about her property.

Dear Sir:-
     Replying to your letter reference to the condemnation proceedings against the old of house of Mrs. McLeran, now deceased. The house is absolutely worthless and I suppose the best thing that can be done is to let any one tear it down who will do it for the wood, or let the city do it. I am working on the matter I spoke to you about the day that I came to Live Oak.
       Yours truly,
       [signed] M. M. Scarborough, Jr.

The date on the letter—a clue I could have used to determine Mary's actual date of death—was rather enigmatic: October 24 of what year? I checked another letter regarding the same issue—what to do with the "worthless" property the widow McLaren had left behind. The date there on an "Administrator's Notice" was given as July 11, 1899. Poor Mary had undoubtedly passed away before that point, but a reasonable approximation could be given as the year of 1899, or possibly early in the winter of the preceding year.

Staking my claim on a few extra numbers in an ancestor's vital stats is hardly satisfactory in the wake of a story as intriguing—and yet so tragic—as Mary's must have been. Just in these scant details, I feel for her in the continual plight of her life's story. While hers seems to be a life lived in the gaps—before documentation was widespread in the pioneer settlements of territorial Florida, at the establishment of a new county, or resident in other counties with less carefully-held records—surely, there was much more that could have been told, if anyone had valued the story that would have been her life's tale.


Above pictures of documents retrieved and photographed by the author on February 6, 2019, at the Suwannee County Courthouse, Live Oak, Florida. 

The Definition of Kin

"We may be related," the woman just inside the door to the Suwannee Valley Genealogical Society library announced to me as I stepped in to wrap up my second day's research in the vicinity of my McClellan roots in northern Florida. "I think we are cousins."

A cousin I had never before met—let alone been aware of—was the stranger who had received my online query about the society's library holdings. (Frankly, I was quite jealous that a place as small as the vicinity surrounding Wellborn could boast not only their own library, but the building in which to house their collection, as well.)

In preparation for my visit, I had sent in my questions ahead of time, just in case there was any chance that the books I was seeking might be in their holdings. There have been a number of history books published on the county as well as the town of Wellborn, and though I am aware of them—and the tidbits they hold about my family's history—that doesn't make them any more easy to access. Most were privately published or done locally in a short run, with nary a copy still available for sale, new or used. Not even on Amazon.

Naturally, in my email preceding my visit, I mentioned the surnames I was seeking—not only McClellan, but McLaren, Tison, Townsend, and Charles. Especially Charles. The society had notebooks prepared by members on their research findings on a wide variety of surnames, including some of the ones of interest to me. Thus, before she ever met me, this society volunteer knew we'd be related. We both, as it turns out, descend from McClellans.

Just how, we didn't know, right away. It took some sketching out. A bit of double checking on two different genealogy database programs to make sure. After comparing notes on both our lines—it turns out her line, in my records, is a complete black hole after the patriarch of her McClellan line in early, territorial Florida—we decided on the verdict: fifth cousins.

Well, howdy. It's always nice to meet another cousin.

When I took the Advanced Southern Research course at SLIG last January, one of our instructors had explained the real definition of the term, "kin"—at least the way you'll find it used in the South. You may know the word as a synonym simply to explain that two people are related. Our SLIG instructors took it farther than that. According to our intrepid southern research experts, using the word "kin" means "yep, we're related, but we can't explain just how right now."

In other words, it's too complicated.

The entire South, according to these instructors, is so interrelated as to reduce the explanation of how anyone is connected to anyone else to one word: kin.

You from the South? Great. Me, too. We must be kin.

A Research Intermission

It's been a while since I last puzzled over my Florida ancestors—almost a week, it turns out, thanks to an intermission to attend the FGS Conference in Fort Wayne. What better place, though, to seek answers to my genealogical brick walls. Considering that Fort Wayne is home to the country's largest public collection of genealogical material, I couldn't just go there to spend my days in a convention center; I made sure to walk across the street to the site of that treasure trove during the evenings.

Of course, I planned ahead. No sense spending time while on location to look up research material. I wanted to hit the ground running when I arrived in Fort Wayne. My secret strategy: locate the call numbers ahead of time, using the Allen County Public Library's online catalog.

I had noticed that another researcher had found an entry on the potential father of my George Edmund McClellan, thanks to a hint announcing that fact at Ancestry. Another researcher had taken the time to transcribe an entry from a book, regarding a man named Charles McClellan of the Barnwell District in South Carolina, who had moved to Georgia, and then to territorial Florida.

Not one to simply copy what others have shared, I wanted to take a look at the source of that transcription, which, in this case, was a book originally published in 1957. A date that late, unfortunately, eliminated any possibility of finding the digitized text at a public domain resource like Internet Archive. While WorldCat told me a copy of the multi-volume set could be had for a mere fifty mile drive to the California Genealogical Society and Library in Oakland, I knew once I arrived in Fort Wayne, it would be even more accessible with a simple walk across the street from my hotel room.

What I was looking for was volume three of the collection known as Pioneers of Wiregrass Georgia by Folks Huxford. There, on page 225, was a brief biography of the Reverend Charles McClellan. Though it was barely a page in length, the entry covered a listing of his children, as well as the mention of his origin and his occupation. This, perhaps, will help link me to documentation to support an old family story that one of my maternal grandmother's ancestors was a Methodist circuit rider; lacking the man's name, I was at a loss as to whose name to search in what I understand is a robust collection housed somewhere on behalf of the Methodist Church. It would be a thrill, indeed, to discover a journal kept by such a trailblazing preacher.

While I was in the neighborhood—both figuratively, in researching my South Carolina, Georgia and Florida roots, as well as literally, in the second-floor genealogical department of the Allen County Public Library—I took the liberty of researching all the associated surnames to the McClellan family constellation. After all, there was a whole library shelf of material related to that county in Georgia where I first located mention of Charles McClellan. I looked for the Tisons and the Charles family, and the Sheffields, finding mention of Revolutionary War soldiers to keep me busy with supplemental DAR applications for months.

That, as exciting as it sounds, was not my purpose in perusing those pages in Allen County's genealogy center. My goal, remember, was to figure out just how my Tison line came from Pitt County, North Carolina, and settled, eventually, in Florida—and how, having discovered my Mary Ann Charles who married William McLeran, she somehow had a mother-in-law who turned out to be a Tison.

Like a bowl of tangled spaghetti, these surnames seem to have twisted together with each other. My Tisons from North Carolina somehow connected with my Charleses from Florida and my McClellans from South Carolina and Georgia. They are so intertwined that I can't figure out how they actually made the connection. Perhaps they were not related lines, after all. But something tells me to keep looking further, thus leading me down a very long path of discovery of the bigger story of each family.

Hopefully, at some point, I'll discover the actual connection.

How They Connected

Finding that little McLeran detail tucked away in the digitized probate files of Suwannee County helped push me one step closer to uncovering the connection between the McLeran line and my Tison family. True, in a small town, it should come as no surprise that families have intermarried, but I was frustrated to not be able to find the explanation for how the two families did, indeed, relate.

Mary McLeran' note in her husband's file moved me beyond that mystery. Now I knew his name: William T. McLeran. And since he died intestate and the court had named both Mary, his wife, and Jesse, his brother, as administrators of the estate, it was fairly easy, from that point on, to piece together that McLeran family tree.

The litany goes something like this: Jesse and William were sons of Nevin McLeran of North Carolina who died in nearby Columbia County, Florida, in 1852. Nevin McLeran's wife was Rebecca Tison, who died only a few years after he did, in the same Florida County.

Granted, I have yet to find out just who Rebecca's parents were. That, most likely, will take more of that slow and tedious exercise of reading through probate files—if, indeed, there are any digitized copies made available online, as I'm still hampered by geographic location from just stopping in at the local courthouse. But it does illustrate one reality about doing family history research: you do it one step at a time. Each step reveals just enough of a clue to advance your progress one move closer to the next question.

And so we proceed from there. Next quest: to find Rebecca McLeran's connection to the Tison family. My hunch is that it will be somehow connected to my Tison ancestor in the same county, George Edmund McClellan's first wife, Sidnah Tison. It's just a matter of determining how close a connection that will be.

One Last Document . . . For Now

It's been a slow mosey through the probate records of Suwannee County in search of details concerning my Florida roots. Reading every single page of a hundred-page-long probate file, if not expeditious, can at least be informative. Because the place in question—the town of Wellborn—was a small and, apparently, close-knit community, I couldn't help but stumble over names I knew from family history while I was reading the file for someone else.

It always helps to tie up loose ends. While it was gratifying—though disappointing—to learn of the root of the rift between my McClellan ancestors and the family of their step-mother, I had entered into this search with other questions, too.

Remember Mary of the Red Scarf? While I can safely say that my Charles family brick wall has tumbled down and admitted me to the secrets of another two generations, I still have been left with some questions. Prime among them is just how the Charles family—or was it the McLeran family?—connected with another line of mine from Suwannee County: the Tisons.

If you remember, I had been searching through local cemeteries to discover the identity of one Mary who kept showing up in records having to do with my Charles family descendants. I was able to confirm that she was Mrs. Mary McLeran, but what was her maiden name? True, I eventually discovered she was the missing Mary Charles—of the family of the stagecoach legend—but then, that created a new question: who was Mary's husband? And, being a McLeran, could his identity help me determine how the McLeran line connected with the Tison line?

Page by page, scrolling through the digitized Suwannee County probate records, my eyes happened to take in the details from a rather perfunctory letter. At the bottom of the one-page note was affixed the now-familiar signature of Mary A. McLeran.

It was the text of the letter that allowed me to proceed with finding my answer.

To the Hon. Joshua Caraway, Judge of Probates for the County of Suwannee and State of Florida.
Sir
You will please take notice that as widow of William T. McLaren deceased, I have elected to take a child's part of the estate of my deceased husband, the said William T. McLaren, deceased, in lieu of dower, as authorized by the provisions of the Act of February 8th, 1838, and desire that this my election be filed and entered of record in your court.
May 10th 1861
        Mary A. McLeran

Image of Mary A. McLeran's letter to the probate judge of Suwannee County, Florida, courtesy Ancestry.com. 

Celestia, In Haste

A probate file can be full of all sorts of unexpected details. Mostly, in the case of the deceased George Edmund McClellan, details on the value and sales of his various northern Florida properties were the items most disputed, along with complaints by his various heirs about how George's executrix—his now-remarried widow, Celestia R. Grant—was going about the business of settling his debts.

Besides the rumor that the executrix was planning to skip town with the estate's proceeds undistributed, the letters in the McClellan file revealed insinuations that Celestia was indulging in pleasure trips to various Florida cities, for instance, and billing the cost to the estate.

All told, the entire situation of having someone's unfinished business dumped in her lap must have been a trying experience. The constant complaining by family members surely did not help.

Celestia seemed always to be in a rush, breezing in and out of the picture, leaving whirlwinds of complaints in her wake. In one undated letter, for instance, she began with,

Hon. Judge Rice, I am in great haste and cannot wait your return. Mrs.[?] told me I would find the list of articles desired to be sold at your office and...

Somewhere in the timeline between George's passing in 1866 and the settling of his case years later, Celestia's husband, Dr. John Grant, must also have died. I can find no record of that, nor location of his burial, but letters from George McClellan's probate file lead me to make that conclusion.

Among many other receipts in the McClellan file was one from W. M. Ives, attorney for the plaintiff, acknowledging receipt of "payment in part" in a suit against Celestia. The plaintiff, incidentally, was Mary A. McLeran—the Mary of the Red Scarf—who, as a widow in her own right, had had George McClellan provide appraisal services in the settling of her own husband's estate, back in 1860. This, once again, cements the concept of the intertwined relationships evident in the small community of Wellborn, Florida.

Attached with that receipt from attorney Ives was a note from Celestia. Once again, it was written in a hurry, undated, and opening with a curt salutation,

Judge J. W. Rice,
Sir. I arranged the Mrs. McLeran debt with Col. Ives. I enclose you the receipt...

After adding several mundane details, the letter, seeming to have been written on a mere scrap of paper, continued on the reverse:

I will leave this in Live Oak as I pass through en route to Indiana, Please send me a copy of all this year's returns as soon as you get them fixed up. Also make out your fees when you know what they are,
     In haste,
          Celestia R. Grant.

Images from the Suwannee County, Florida, probate file of George Edmund McClellan, courtesy Ancestry.com.

In the Name of the State

It may have been four years from the passing of George Edmund McClellan to the point, on December 30, 1870, in which his heirs decided to make official complaint about the delay in settlement of his will, but it took only one day for the Honorable John W. Rice, Suwannee County Judge addressed by the heirs, to answer. His response was decisive and emphatic.

"In the name of the State of Florida and by Authority of the Same," the heading proclaimed, then continued to address, specifically, Celestia R. Grant, widow and executrix of George McClellan's will.

It was only one day after Philip Lowe had written his letter of complaint on behalf of his wife and sister-in-law, daughters of the deceased George McClellan. They were still waiting, after four years, for the settlement of their father's business and properties, and it not only seemed that progress was not being made, but that their step-mother was rumored to have made plans to leave the state without distributing proceeds from the McClellan estate.

The judge, replying within twenty four hours, ordered the executrix to appear in court right after the new year, on January 6, 1871, "under penalty of the law."

This order would, of course, cause Celestia McClellan Grant to incur further expenses, as she surely would not appear in front of the judge without legal counsel, which expense would then, of course, be charged to the estate.

After all the pages and pages of account records, receipts, notes claimed and honored, letters from attorneys and other representatives—including old promissory notes with receipts attached, including some recording the payment in full in Confederate currency—once again, more review and inspection would have to be made. Reading through the hundred-plus pages of the McClellan probate case was indeed an eye opener into just what life was like for a busy man in the small town of Wellborn, Florida.

The review also provided an indicator of how intertwined the people in that town really were. Remember the mysterious M. A. McLeran, whom I suspected to be the Mary of the Legend of the Red Scarf? Apparently, George McClellan served as appraiser for several other probate cases of residents of Suwannee County who had died intestate, among them Mary Ann Charles McLeran's husband. Reference to George's work on the McLeran account was made, buried deep within the text of a letter I found in the McClellan folder.

And that will for George's first wife, Sidnah Tison, which the Ancestry shaky-leaf hints had promised was at the beginning of George's will? Nope, it was at the back of the folder, perhaps as an afterthought in the legal wrangling with executrix Celestia Grant. As if to say, see, this was originally our mother's property, given to us, not to be counted as part of George's estate, the several pages from Sidnah McClellan's 1860 passing were tucked in as an afterthought at the end of George's folder.

Not to say there wasn't anything about Celestia in the file. In fact, several items involved correspondence between Celestia's attorneys and the court—or Celestia, herself, and the judge—all, however, seeming to keep running in circles. Property was being put up for sale. No, that property shouldn't be sold. Why wasn't that property being sold? The court is ordering that it be sold to satisfy debts. And on and on.

Meanwhile, there was one little detail still to be seen: was it true that Celestia was planning on getting away from Florida? And if so, where was she going? 

In the name of the State of Florida and by Authority of the Same,
State of Florida, Suwannee County, County Court at Chambers,
To: Celestia R. Grant
Executrix of the last Will and Testament of George E. McClellan, late of said County, deceased.
     Whereas Phillip E. Lowe and his wife Jennie T. Lowe and Belle S. McClellan heirs of the Estate of said George E. McClellan, have complained to the Court, that you are disposing of the property belonging to said Estate, contrary to the tenor and meaning of said last Will and Testament: These are therefore to cite and require you to be and appear before said Court at Live Oak Fla. on Friday the 6th day of January A.D. 1871, by 11 o'clock and to answer the charges made in said complaint. And this you will in no wise omit, under the penalty of the law.
     Given under my hand and seal of office, at Live Oak this Decr. 31st A.D. 1870
          John W. Rice
          County Judge

Image from Suwannee County, Florida, Probate File no. 29-34, 1853-1885, image number 75, courtesy Ancestry.com.

DRUcilla, not LUcilla!

It might seem a reasonable question to ask: why didn't you just look up Drucilla's own probate file? If you've been researching your genealogy for long, you already know the answer: things never go as simply as we'd expect.

Such was the case with Drucilla Charles, widowed wife of Thomas Hughs Hines and mother of his two daughters whom we last saw after her second marriage to Melburn Odum and birth of his daughter Mabel. Even though Drucilla was only sister of my third great grandfather, she was of particular interest to me because she was my key to lead to the previous generation of that pioneer Charles family in northern territorial Florida. Other than Drucilla—well, at least until after the 1860 census—all the other members of my Charles family seemed to have met with untimely deaths.

Those Charles family siblings included another sister—one with the rather plain name of Mary A.—who had become legendary because of her supposed demise after having run out of the house without wearing the stipulated red scarf which would be the signal for the neighboring tribesmen to refrain from shooting her. And yet, when I went looking for Drucilla's family after her most recent appearance in the 1860 census, all I could find was Drucilla's children and a woman named Mary A. McLeran.

And then, yesterday, I accidentally stumbled upon Drucilla's probate file—and the small detail that the administratrix of her case was none other than this same Mary A. McLeran. That was the detail I spotted on the last page of the probate folder. I had a lot of reading ahead of me. (Well, technically, behind me, because the first page I read was the last page of the file...got that?)

It would have been simple to just do a search for Drucilla in the Ancestry collection labeled Florida Wills and Probate Records, except for one thing: the very first page in the folder was labeled "Lucilla Odum," not Drucilla Odum. And, computers being the literal entities that they are, they search, well, literally. Whoever had indexed that file never looked inside to see whether that detail was accurate—and how would I have known it was mislabeled?

I didn't discover that until I had finished reading most of the folder. I discovered, for one thing, that Drucilla had died on March 3, 1866, in Suwannee County, Florida. I also learned that she died without a will, which turned out to be an advantageous event for me, though it probably made life difficult for the guardian of her orphaned daughters. It was on account of this very detail that someone had to go before the local judge and declare that Drucilla had passed intestate, and indicate willingness to serve as administrator of the estate.

Appointment of such a person is not done haphazardly, of course, and in Drucilla's case, this particular person needed to state the reason why she should be considered an appropriate candidate for this position. That detail I found buried about midway through the stack, as I worked my way back through the file from that last page referring to Mary A. McLeran as administratrix.

It can be wearying work, reading through the boring repetition of a legal document. In this case, though, it was well worth the tedium, for this is what I found:

Probate Court, Suwannee County: 
In the matter of the Estate of Drusilla Odum deceased - 
On the application of Mary Ann McLeran who applies as sister and next of kin for letters of administration on the estate of said deceased...

There, in one sentence, buried in the midst of pages and pages of inventories, notes of debts, requests for money for the orphaned daughters, and administrative difficulties, was the smoking gun telling me that Drucilla's sister, Mary A. Charles of the legendary red scarf, had become one and the same with the Mary A. McLeran who served as guardian of Drucilla's children after her passing.

While it makes sense that she was indeed tied to Drucilla's family, Mary leaves us with more unanswered questions. For one thing, I can't find any record of her marriage to the unidentified McLeran. Nor can I find any trace of Mary, herself, after Drucilla's children have grown.

Furthermore, in those few records in which I can find Mary A. McLeran, she is tagged with a birth year of 1834, not the 1828 of the unmarried Mary A. Charles in her mother's household in 1850. Yet, the timing doesn't seem possible to allow a scenario of a first Mary A. Charles dying young, as the legend of the red scarf has it, then being replaced by a second daughter born after the demise of the first. If it were so, it would have been the second Mary A. Charles who would have shown up in that 1850 census, the one with the 1834 birth, not the 1828 birth.

I'm still on the search to find any traces of Mary A. McLeran, of course, and also to figure out how she ties in with the McLeran family. Remember, too, that the oldest McLeran burial in the local cemetery had led me to a connection with the Tison family, another surname in this family group in Suwannee County, so I'm going to keep drilling away at these surname connections in that small town of Wellborn, Florida.

In the meantime, it wouldn't hurt to take a detour to touch on the story of that other administratrix who, not long after Drucilla died, tried to skip town with the money of her husband's estate. I'll be prowling around in the hundred-plus pages of George Edmund McClellan's probate file to see just what it was that triggered a family's resentment which echoed down through the next one hundred years, even to the mid 1960s.


Above: Image from the files of Drucilla Charles Odum's probate case in Suwannee County, Florida, courtesy Ancestry.com.

A Wild Ride Through the Probate Files

I don't know what your opinion is of those ubiquitous shaky-leaf hints at Ancestry, but for the most part, the ones I've seen are usually spot on—except for the one I want to tell you about today. It was wrong—totally wrong in that it pinpointed the word "wife" in a document and assumed the word referred to the woman I was seeking. That woman—Sidnah Tison, somehow related to the Tison family connected with the Mary A. McLeran I was trying to find—was the recently deceased wife of George Edmund McClellan of Wellborn, Florida, and, according to that shaky-leaf hint, supposedly the one mentioned in George's probate records.

About one hundred pages into his probate file, I realized the wife referred to in the records was not Sidnah—she predeceased George by about six years—but George's second wife. This second wife—her name was Celestia—had been appointed administratrix of George's estate, but before completing her duty had remarried and was in the process of skipping town with the money from George's estate, hence the reason for such a large probate file. That, however, is a story for another day.

All that to say, shaky-leaf hint or not, the wife referred to in George's files—at least in the first hundred pages—was not Sidnah Tison McClellan.

To say I was somewhat annoyed at being led down such a verbose path is an understatement, and I'd like to say it didn't affect me in the least, but...well, yes, I took out my frustration by grumbling about the insignificant detail of page one of the McClellan file starting with what looked like a continuation page of the appraisal.

Where was the actual will?

The Ancestry file was clearly marked to show that that was the first page of the McClellan file, but it also was obvious that the first page was not the beginning of the story. Admittedly, I was a bit obsessive about insisting that I find the first page of George's file, but that not only powered my way through those first hundred pages of dull, dry reading; it was what made me decide to look in the other files nearby to try and find what was not, obviously, filed in its proper place.

So I flipped back one page to the preceding file and started scanning for anything that would tie in with my missing McClellan paper. It didn't take long for my eyes to light on a name that made me stop in my tracks.

Remember, I'm looking through one-hundred-fifty year old records from a small town in the early years of Florida statehood. What I found seems only to reconfirm my hunch that this town was a place where everyone not only knew everyone else, but might have been—or become—related to everyone else. The name that popped up in the file preceding George McClellan's was that of Drucilla Charles.

Drucilla, if you remember from last week, was part of the pioneering Charles family in that region, predating Florida statehood—the family of Reuben and Rebecca Charles, traders with the native tribes west of Saint Augustine since the days of Spanish rule in the region. Drucilla was also sister of the disappearing Mary A. Charles, the young girl of the legend of the red scarf. It was supposedly this Mary A. Charles who impetuously ran out to meet an arriving stagecoach while forgetting to don her signature red scarf which would protect her from attack by the neighboring natives. Learning that Drucilla, my ancestor Emma McClellan's dad Andrew, and this impetuous Mary A. Charles were siblings was what helped me connect my line to that of Suwannee County's pioneering Charles family in the first place.

While I have yet to buy in to the legend of Mary of the Red Scarf, the story of Drucilla's own life has a few pegs on which to hang the truth of her story. Drucilla was the Charles daughter who was widowed in the early years of her first marriage. Within ten years of that first marriage, this mother of two had married a second time and had a daughter by that second husband. All of that, however, is inferred by details left in the 1860 census. Other than Drucilla's first marriage, I have so far been unable to locate any documents confirming her second marriage, the birth of her three children, or the death of either of her husbands—or of Drucilla, for that matter.

Since then, though, I have had a hard time trying to piece together all these loose ends of the Charles family's story. Although I find Drucilla's daughters, along with the orphaned children of her brother Andrew, together under the care of someone named Mary A. McLeran—the Mary A. obviously catching my eye—in the 1870 census, it seems there are no further traces of these Charles siblings.

And then I get stuck researching an entirely different family line from the same small town in north Florida—that of my McClellans—and in struggling over lost paperwork there, I stumble upon Drucilla once again.

This particular record I stumble upon happens to be in regards to Drucilla's own probate file. At least now I have an approximate date of her death. But what I see in this last page of her probate file gives me an idea I might find out much more about Drucilla if I take the time to review her entire case folder. Above the line which explains that the page is in regards to the estate of "Drucilla Odom, deceased," is the note naming the administratrix: Mary A. McLeran.

Mary A. McLeran Administratrix

In Acct: with Est. of Drucilla Odom deceased

Above: Entry on last page of probate file of Drucilla (Charles) Odom from Suwannee County, Florida; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

From One Clue to Another Question

Life in the early days of settlement in territorial Florida must have had its challenges. I have no factual basis to bolster that assumption, just those little details like ancestors suddenly disappearing or dying young.

While puzzling over my Charles family ancestors—my third great grandparents Andrew and Delaney Townsend Charles each disappearing sometime before 1860, leaving their three orphaned (or abandoned?) children in the care of Andrew's widowed-and-remarried sister Drucilla—I am grasping for any straws to piece this story together. Every lead I stumble upon, though, seems to open up another puzzling detail. So when, by the time of the 1870 census, I find Drucilla's girls in the care of yet another woman—this time, someone named Mary A. McLeran—I'm stumped once again with that person's identity and relationship to the extended family. (Not to mention, I still suspect this Mary to be the Mary of the Red Scarf legend.)

In the process of trying to answer the question of just who Mary McLeran was, I uncover the fact that the McLerans were somehow tied to the Tison family, another one of my ancestral surnames. But how were they connected? I'm stumped by that.

In order to answer that question, I have two possible approaches. First, I can work my way back through my family lines to my Tison ancestor and press beyond that individual to see what sibling might have connected with this McLeran line. Or, secondly, I could take this individual who tied the McLerans and the Tisons together—Rebecca Tison, wife of Nevin McLeran—and trace her family line to see where the connection might be with both Mary McLeran and my direct line Tison ancestor.

I want to take these approaches in order, but I already can see there's a problem with the first approach. Like the Charles family, my Tison ancestor—third great grandmother Sidnah Tison who married George Edmund McClellan—seemed to come from a magically disappearing family line, herself. Curiously, she, too, died in 1860, making me wonder whether there was some sort of viral outbreak or other hazard that, at about the same time, felled so many of my ancestors in the region where they lived in northern Florida. But I know very little about her parents that I can find documented.

What little I do know about this Tison ancestor is that she was born in Pitt County, North Carolina, in 1806, and that her parents—Job Tison and Sidnah Sheffield—eventually moved the family to Glynn County, Georgia, where they established a profitable inn along the post road between two of the local county seats.

It's been a bear to locate any reliable material on the roots of my Sidnah Tison McClellan, but I've been piecing together the documentation in that excruciatingly slow way that doesn't make for exciting narrative. Following one misdirected lead, in searching for any names of Sidnah's Tison siblings, I ran across some telltale signs in, of all places, the probate file of her husband, George Edmund McClellan, pointing up once again how intertwined these families were in northern Florida.

Remember, I'm still looking for a connection to the Rebecca Tison who married Nevil McLeran in hopes of then finding the nexus with the Mary A. McLeran, guardian of the missing Drucilla Charles Odum's children. Yet, looking where I didn't expect to find the answer to that question, I stumbled upon what I'd call a smoking gun. In someone else's file. I'm beginning to wonder whether they all were related to each other. Or whether this was 1860s Florida's version of a soap opera.

A Thought About "Searches"

When we are wrestling with those recalcitrant ancestors in our tree, we think what we are doing to turn around those brick-wall-worthy roadblocks is research. In reality, what we are doing is typing in a name or a keyword phrase and then pointing our cursor to click on a rectangular button containing the word "search."

But it isn't really a search. It's a point-and-click.

To search is to do what I haven't done for a really long time. The last time I found myself prostrated on the floor in front of the bottom row of books at a library—or the lowest drawer in a card catalog—was probably pre-dawn of (Internet) history. Since the advent of online genealogical resources, I have seldom had the need to return to that dusty archive floor. Yet.

Sometimes, though, there is a need to get back to that up-close-and-personal position. There is no way that everything we ever hoped to find via an Internet search will be there, at that click of the mouse. Granted, a lot of genealogy-worthy material is already digitized, but even of that monumental collection, not everything is indexed—prepared for the online hunt-and-peck process. But there are mountains of papers, records, manuscripts, books, photo collections, journals, and just plain stuff that has yet to be added to that wait list of material to be digitized.

Sometimes, we can't bring that mountain of material to us. Sometimes, we need to go to the mountain. And when we get there, what? Are we so handicapped in confining our research capabilities to point and click that we lose our ability to sort through those mountains of reference material? It is in that kind of effort that we begin to experience the literalness of the meaning of the word: search.

Read and discard. Read more and eliminate more possibilities. Read somewhere else and toss that, too. And finally—perhaps fifteen minutes before the close of the business hours on the last day of our research trip—we pull up the collection which holds the answer to our research question. That's searching.

I'm working on my southern roots right now. I'm a long way from Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee, so I'm confined to what I can unearth from online resources. But even here, I need to go beyond mere point and click genealogy. Even if nothing comes up when I type in a name and click the magic "search" button. I need to read, evaluate, learn and move on, better informed about the background and cultural setting of the people I'm researching. And I need to better handle those frustrating drawbacks of clicking to the end of the line of an online repository's collection with nary a promising lead.

Even in something as simple as exhausting all the possibilities of what befell our Mary of the Red Scarf, I find myself remembering to search beyond the realm of "search." I mentioned, yesterday, running across another Mary A. who was included in a census record for part of my family. Could that have been the missing Mary A. Charles?

This woman's name was Mary A. McLeran, and she was alone in a household with two girls who would have been Mary A. Charles' nieces. That was in 1870. After that, it seemed everyone went their separate ways. I could find the girls—by then grown up and married—but what became of Mary?

Looking in the listing for the extended-family cemetery in Wellborn, Florida, I could find several McLerans, but not any mention of Mary, guardian of the Charles girls. Neither could I figure out the connection between the McLeran line and that of the main family, the McClellans on whose property the cemetery was housed.

I started reviewing each of the McLeran burials listed in that McClellan cemetery. There were eight included in the cemetery listing, but I clicked through to each one to view it individually. That way, if a Find A Grave volunteer had been helpful, I might see some links to relatives of each McLeran and then follow those to see where they might lead.

Sure enough, one of the oldest of the McLeran memorials on Find A Grave did reveal a connection—not Mary McLeran, but a McLeran buried in another cemetery entirely! I had chosen to look at the oldest McLeran burials in the McClellan cemetery, and pulled up the memorial for Jesse Taylor McLeran. Jesse, born in North Carolina in 1832, had died in Suwannee County, Florida, in 1868.

The gem in reviewing Jesse Taylor McLeran's Find A Grave memorial was that it listed his parents: Nevin and Rebecca Tison McLeran. Nevin McLeran? I had seen mention of that name when I searched, line by line, through the county's 1850 census in search of any other members of the ill-fated Mary A. Charles' family. Not far from George Edmund McClellan's entry in the census, and close to the Charles household where George's future daughter-in-law Emma was living, was an entry for a Nevin and Rebecca McLeran.

What was interesting about this Nevin and Rebecca was the family which had married into the McLeran line. While I still am not sure just who Mary A. McLeran was—remember, she wasn't included in the burials at the McClellan cemetery along with those eight McLerans there—I now know how the McLerans tie into my family line: Rebecca McLeran was born a Tison.

Emma Charles, George McClellan's future daughter-in-law, was not part of the Tison line, herself...but her mother-in-law was. George's wife Sidnah was a Tison.

Of course, it will take more digging to figure out how this Mary A. McLeran was related to the Tison line. Perhaps such tangled relationships come from a small group of people living together in a small town over decades. I may find these surnames are related to each other in multiple directions. But I need to at least find a first mention of a connection between the Tisons and the McLerans. And that will require more searching.

I'm still not finding any further information on poor Mary Charles of the Red Scarf, but I have stumbled upon a lot of other Marys who have led me to previously-unknown connections in my family tree.

Finding Another Mary

I'm still checking to see if I can locate any sign of the unfortunate Mary A. Charles, whom legend had dying in her own front yard at the hand of a native who didn't spot the agreed-upon sign of the red scarf. That, of course, means every time I spot a Mary A. anyone associated with the Charles family's relatives after 1850, I wonder if that Mary might be the right Mary.

We saw yesterday that, while the Mary in question didn't turn out to be Mary A. Charles of the red scarf, she did lead me to an entirely new branch of my ancestors' line. I can handle stumbling across a mistaken identity like that.

Besides yesterday's Mary, there was another Mary I ran across who also caused me to wonder. If you'll remember Drucilla Charles, the sister of my direct line's Andrew Jackson Charles, for a period of time, she needed to leave her daughters in the care of others. While I have yet to discover the reason for this, during the time of the 1870 census, she had left her surviving daughter from her first marriage—also named Mary—and her daughter Mabel from her second marriage in the care of someone else near home in Suwannee County, Florida.

Normally, I would have been more concerned about what happened to Drucilla than to the person with whom her girls were boarding—except for one thing: the woman's name happened to be Mary A.

With a clue like that, it merits immediately putting on the research brakes and bringing all other progress to a screeching halt. Never mind that this woman was not named Mary A. Charles but Mary A. McLeran. Disregard the fact that her age wasn't quite old enough to qualify her as our Mary A. Charles—besides, what woman of that era told the truth about her age?

This was a lead I definitely had to check out.

There was something else arresting about this discovery. Something in the back of my mind told me there was a McLeran in my family tree already. But when I went to search my research database, nothing came up. The memory was taunting me—insisting that surname was part of my family history—but the tools I had at hand wouldn't let me figure out how.

I decided to take a different approach to seeing how this Mary A. McLeran connected to my family. In the area near where the Charles family once operated their ferry and trading post in territorial Florida—a place called Luraville—there was also the property of another related family, that of George Edmund McClellan. It so happens that the McClellan property includes the family burial grounds, which, thankfully, are still well-kept. I decided to take a look at the McClellan cemetery entry on Find A Grave.

Sure enough, once I pulled up the listing for all the memorials associated with that cemetery on Find A Grave—there are, by the way, 213 of them added so far, with ninety eight percent photographed—there were several McLerans buried there.

Only problem: of the eight McLerans buried at the McClellan family cemetery, none of them was named Mary A.

Who was this woman? Obviously, this is going to take a bit more research than serendipitously scoring a find at the family's own cemetery. After the year in which she took care of Drucilla Charles' two daughters, she seemed to have vanished from the family connections—if she was family at all.

Somehow, though, there was a connection between the McLerans, the Charleses and the McClellans. The cemetery on the McClellan property shows that clearly. It's just the paperwork which isn't supporting my contention.

If it weren't for my quest to confirm whether Mary A. Charles had indeed died, just as the legend had it, I probably would just scratch my head and go back to building my pedigree. She isn't, after all, part of my direct line; that honor goes to her brother Andrew. I don't suppose, however, that a family history researcher who has stayed on the trail this long can bear to just walk away from a mystery, even if it isn't part of the direct line. We are just too curious to set such things aside and stick to the main points.