Another Grandson Named Lyman

Much as I had suspected, Lyman Jackson would have more than one grandson named after him. While I'm building out the family tree for my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather, I've been noticing how many of his grandsons seemed to have shared this man's story. I've also spotted a few of those descendants sporting this grandfather's given name, so as I moved on through Lyman's ten sons to Obadiah Jackson, I wasn't surprised to find another namesake grandson.

Obadiah, the sixth son and seventh child of Lyman Jackson, was born in 1794, likely after the family had moved to upstate New York. Judging from the census return for 1830, Obadiah had moved once again with his father and older siblings to Erie County, Pennsylvania. But by 1850, he was far from that latest Jackson home in Pennsylvania.

The 1850 census revealed Obadiah's new residence in Knox County, Illinois, where he claimed the value of his real estate to be six hundred dollars. There with him were his wife, Mary, and several children. All but the oldest—Lyman—were born in Illinois.

In 1850, Lyman was listed as a nineteen year old harness maker in his father's household. Though I haven't yet located him in the 1860 census, before the following enumeration, Lyman was married and raising a family of his own.

Looking back to Lyman's father, I searched for a copy of Obadiah's will, to see a listing of all his children, but to no avail. While I did find a will, it was brief—far too short to confirm the names of any of his children. The document basically gave everything of Obadiah's property to his wife, Mary Ann, also appointing her as his executor. If there were any other legal instruments used to transfer property to his children, I'll need to revisit FamilySearch.org's Full Text Search to find any deeds mentioning Obadiah's name.

Lyman, in turn, remained for the rest of his life in Knox County, Illinois, marrying and raising a family of his own. As with all the other grandchildren of the senior Lyman Jackson, I'll revisit the children of Obadiah and continue documenting their lines of descent for guidance as I work through the DNA matches who turn out to be descendants of the Jackson lines. With many of the elder Lyman Jackson's ten sons and three daughters marrying and having large families of their own, there will be plenty to keep me busy for the remainder of this month.

Not Looking for Names Alone

 

Whether names alone can provide a clue to guide me backwards in time as I research the roots of my third great-grandfather Thomas Firth Rainey, coupling that detail with DNA matches can give this search added insurance.

While behind the scenes, I've been scouring numerous court documents related to possible Rainey family members, I thought I'd pop over to check out how many DNA matches on Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool might reveal a connection.

One standout echoed what I was hoping for yesterday: a namesake who clearly was related to my Thomas Firth Rainey. No surprise with this discovery: the category with the most DNA matches in this family, according to ThruLines, belonged to the son who was named after his own father. 

The junior Thomas Firth Rainey gives me twenty out of twenty seven DNA matches linked to the Rainey surname. That far supersedes the number of DNA matches connected to my own direct line ancestor, Thomas senior's daughter with the impossibly long name, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey.

I suspect there may be more Rainey matches who have not yet been pointed out by Ancestry's ThruLines tool. One way to check will be to explore the ProTools' "Shared Matches" function to see whether I can spot any more results. After all, since Thomas and his wife had at least ten children, there should be more Rainey DNA matches out there to find. Right now, ThruLines only spotted descendants of four children—so far.

In hopes of discovering more DNA matches connected to this Rainey patriarch, I'll be adding that task to those behind-the-scenes explorations to do as this month unfolds.

There Was Another Clue

 

I wasn't kidding when I recently mentioned that reading court records can put you to sleep any time of day. I was on the hunt for a document which might combine my third great-grandfather Thomas Rainey's name with any other family member from his past. Apparently, there are several such possible records—it's just that they all seem to involve complicated situations.

Before I forget to mention one thing, though—trawling through piles of court records can also make you forget things—there may be another way to power our way through to an answer to this month's research question: who were the parents of Thomas F. Rainey?

Not that the Rainey family had a traditional naming pattern that they adhered to—if there was such a detail, I've failed to notice it—but there were some interesting details in the family's choice of names which could turn out to help us.

One example of these naming idiosyncrasies was that of their youngest daughter, my direct ancestor whose full name was Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey. Almost as if they already knew she would be their last child, her parents had made good on their intention to memorialize her older, now deceased, brother Warren Taliaferro Rainey.

Warren, in turn, had been named for his paternal grandfather, who had died some time before the baby's own birth. Who knows? Mary Elizabeth's older brother Charles and sister Sarah may well have been named for their mother's own brother and sister by those names. And, of course, her own next-older brother Thomas Firth Rainey was obviously named for their father.

While I don't yet know enough about the family to realize whether the other Rainey children were namesakes for aunts, uncles, or older relatives, I'll surely keep an eye out to see if the names of Mary Elizabeth's older sisters Martha and Mildred, plus older brothers Isham and Richard, may have been echoes of other ancestors. Perhaps these can provide clues about the Rainey family from which my third great-grandfather Thomas descended.   

When There Isn't Much to Go By

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stepping Sideways: Sarah's Sister

 

In some ways, I can be a chicken when it comes to genealogical research. I like to move from what I know in incremental steps. And those sideways steps in this search for Simon Rinehart's children will stop first with Sarah's sister, Martha. 

Looking at those "sideways" steps—or in more accurate vernacular, collateral lines—can sometimes reveal information that couldn't be found by focusing only on a specific, direct-line ancestor. In Simon Rinehart's case, I've discovered a number of details that need to be, ahem, clarified. In hopes of stumbling upon such details, I'm planning to poke around in the lines of all his children, not just his daughter Sarah, who was my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother. 

Now that I've reviewed all that I know about Sarah Rinehart Gordon, the next step is to examine each of Simon's children by his first wife. My initial attempt, over the weekend, didn't prove successful, so I adapted a new policy: when offered additional information about a child's spouse, take that route first. Finding two people in the same household can be a far more successful venture than looking for whatever became of one single individual. Thus, the search for Sarah's married sisters.

According to the court records from Perry County, Ohio, where Simon Rinehart had died, we have a listing of each of his descendants, separated into two groups: those from his first wife, then those from his second wife. In addition, the list provided the name of the surviving husband in the case of three of Simon's children: two daughters from his first wife, one from his second.

Since we'll begin with the children of Simon's first wife, that leaves me two options—and one of those options involves searching for someone named Mary who married a man named Smith. Since I'm such a research chicken, guess which research route I didn't opt for first?

That leaves us with Simon's daughter Martha, who remained in Greene County, Pennsylvania, after her father left for Ohio. According to the court records, Martha married Jacob Fordyce, whom I easily found in Greene County records, including the 1850 census, which listed eight children in their household—though a news clipping posted on Martha's memorial on Find A Grave indicated that she had "given birth to ten children, nine of whom she reared to adult years."

It was easy to see family resonance in the names selected for two of Martha's sons—the two sons Jacob later appointed as his executors. The elder, Jesse, was likely named for an ancestor in the Rinehart family, which ancestral name had also been chosen by Simon himself in naming another son from his second marriage. The second son named as Jacob's executor was listed in his will as "S. R." Fordyce, the initials standing for "Simon Rinehart," the name of Martha's own father.

Beyond that family resonance in Rinehart namesakes among Martha's sons, though, I learned very little about Simon through this daughter—and gained no clue whatsoever to guide me in ascertaining who Martha's mother had been. However, it was encouraging to see two DNA matches from among Martha's descendants—with hopefully more to come, now that I'm building out Martha's Fordyce line of descent in my mother-in-law's own tree.

Noticing Name Twins

 

In a town as small as Żerków, one wouldn't expect to run into name twins, but it seemed that my Polish great-grandfather Anton Laskowski had one. 

As I worked on my latest project—harvesting all the documentation I could find on births, marriages, and deaths of Żerków residents named Laskowski—I kept seeing the name Anton Laskowski pop up. Remembering that even now, Żerków has barely over two thousand residents, I thought I'd be immune to the research trouble caused by following the wrong name twin backwards in time.

Seeing documents mentioning that other Anton Laskowski seemed wrong. This other Anton had a wife named Elizabeth—surely, the rendering of that woman's name in Latin church records, for Polish would have given it as Elżbieta—whereas my Anton had a mother named Elżbieta. Considering my Anton's father was Mateusz, not Anton, details were not adding up.

Since my project has involved checking each Laskowski record for the entire century of the 1800s at the Polish website BaSIA, of course the missing detail was to identify each Anton's dates. As I moved toward the end of the century, one death record provided that missing information. This duplicate Anton, dying in 1888, was listed as the son of Martin Laskowski and his wife Marie. Sadly, no maiden name for Anton's mother was provided. But the entry did inform me that this Anton's wife was born Elizabeth Roszak. And since he was said to have been eighty six years of age—often an inaccurate estimate—that would place his birth around 1802.

Because my Anton Laskowski was much younger—he was born about 1844, if the age given on his marriage record was correct—I'd guess that, rather than a name twin, my Anton might have been named after the elder Anton. When it comes to namesakes in the Polish tradition, though, I have yet to find guidance on any naming patterns or other family traditions in that earlier century, with the exception of the Catholic adherence to naming children born close to a saint's feast day by the name of that specific honored saint.

Perhaps, considering that, my Anton may not have been named after this older Anton after all. Though I find it hard to fathom in a town of such a small size, perhaps the elder Anton Laskowski knew nothing of the younger Anton Laskowski at all. Is there room for a name coincidence in a town of barely two thousand people? Hopefully, more work on my Laskowski document-gathering project will eventually provide that answer.

Where's John?

 

Digging into naturalization records, then looking further back to corresponding passenger records, can be a chore. That's the process I need to tackle next for the siblings of Theresa Blaising, third wife of John Kelly Stevens, and the only grandmother my father-in-law ever knew.

There is, however, one problem I faced before jumping into that task. When I listed the reported dates of immigration for Theresa and her siblings last week, I noted what I found on her brothers Henry, Lawrence, Phillip, Louis, and August, but where was John? He was clearly part of widow Mary Blaising's family in the 1870 census, but disappeared from enumerations after that point.

I could have assumed that, like many children during that time period, he died young, but there was one detail standing in the way of such an easy answer: his mother's obituary. There, in that June 13, 1907, entry in the Fort Wayne Evening Sentinel, included among Mary's seven surviving children was "John, of this city."

So he didn't die young—not, at least, before his fifty first birthday. Where was he during all those years since the 1870 census?

In a connect-the-dots moment, I found the answer. Using a different approach, I thought I'd go back to records I had found on John Kelly Stevens, Theresa Blaising's husband, to see if there were any mention of her relatives. It is unfortunate that John Kelly Stevens and Theresa Blaising never had any children in common, for I'd be curious to see who they might have named as godparents, which could have yielded a clue. But it turned out there was another document which provided some help: their marriage license.

Thankfully, preceding John and Theresa's June 14, 1887, wedding in Allen County, Indiana, their marriage license indicated that, upon "being duly sworn," another man stated that he was acquainted with both John K. Stevens and "Tresia" Blaising, the couple about to be married. That man was named John B. Blaising.

Even better, looking through the other marriage licenses in that register, the very next one listed the information for another couple married on that same day: none other than John B. Blaising and his bride, Mary Fisher. Reciprocally, John K. Stevens vouched for them.

So why, if John Blaising was there in Allen County all along, did I miss him in other records? I suspect confusion about the Blaising brothers may have been owing to a French naming tradition. While some research guides indicate that at that time, the French might give a child multiple given names, only one of those names would be used in daily life. Also, during that era in the mid-1800s when the Blaising children were born, names were typically drawn from the Roman Catholic Church, making each child the namesake of a Catholic saint. In some cases, those names took the form of compound names, such as Jean-Baptiste (John the Baptist).

I have often spotted examples of compound names as well as multiple given names, especially those beginning with Jean, or in English, John. This may have been the case for the Blaising family, for I've found indications that some of John's brothers actually were listed with an initial "J" in some American records. While that initial "J" would never have been found in the French tradition, I noted, for instance, John's brother Louis' death certificate and headstone listing him as "Louis J. Blaising," and brother Phillip Blaising showing in the 1930 census in Crestline, Ohio, as "John P. Blaising." Could each of these be revealing an original French version as Jean Louis or Jean Phillipe?

If this were the case, perhaps it is no wonder that, awash in a multitude of sons named Jean—or John in English—the American governmental record keepers became confused. And John B.—whatever that initial "B" might have stood for—became lost in the multitude of French given names.

But now, however, he's found, thanks to his inclusion in his brother-in-law's marriage license.

Finding Yet Another Generation

 

No matter how much family history research I've done, it always seems incredible to me to realize I'm looking at a document drawn up by an ancestor who lived in the early 1700s. In today's case, that ancestor was named William Ijams, the sixth great-grandfather of my mother-in-law. Said to have been born in colonial Maryland about 1670, William drew up his will in "Ann Arundell" County (as the clerk put it) in 1734.

For our purposes almost three hundred years later, William Ijams' will serves to help us find the names populating another generation in the Ijams line. While we will look at the names of the siblings of John Ijams, William's son in my mother-in-law's direct line, first we need to recall the spelling challenges of researching such a surname as his. Ijams, as it turns out, was not always spelled in the same manner as we've found it in more recent documents. In the case of this particular will, the surname was actually written "Jiams," similar to how we found the name written for William's son John in his will nearly fifty years later.

So who was mentioned in this 1734 will? The first mention went to William's wife Elizabeth, who was to receive much of his personal estate—if she chose to remain unmarried after his passing. Then, in order of mention, William designated legacies for his son John, his son Plummer, and his daughter Ann. Later in William's will, he also mentioned another son, William, plus his sons Richard and Thomas. Included in the mention of names were three additional daughters, Elizabeth, Mary, and Charity—with that last daughter's name a guess on my part, due to the faded nature of the digitized record.

Equipped with that list of names of the children of William and Elizabeth, we can see how those same given names made a fair showing in the generations to follow. We can take our cue from that, now aware of how easily one William Ijams could be confused for a cousin. The same will likely be true for the names Plummer, Elizabeth, and Ann. As we dig further into researching descendants of that extended Ijams family, we will likely find those names echoing through subsequent generations, as well.

As surprised as I was to discover the Ijams line remaining in colonial Maryland to such an early date, this William did not turn out to be the founding Ijams ancestor. That designation was apparently to go to William's father. And, seeing how the family had such a penchant for namesakes, you will find it unsurprising to learn that my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandfather was the son of yet another man by the name of William Ijams.

What to Name the Baby — Southern Style

 

Descending the long line of generations which stretch from my fifth great-grandfather, John Carter of colonial Virginia, all the way to current-day DNA matches can be a dizzying experience. Along the way, I witnessed enough examples of naming traditions to remind me of something: figuring out what to name the baby can be far different, Southern style, than the traditions I've become acquainted with in my more northern lifestyle.

It was those singular naming quirks that reminded me of questions I've had in the past—but for which I've never received a satisfying answer. Why, for instance, do baby namesakes become encumbered not with great-grandma's given name alone, but her entire name—a name, by the way, which could go on for more than one middle name plus the woman's maiden (and maybe even married) surname. The same could go for a brand new son, now weighed down with a name heavier than his very being.

A more common tradition among these Carter descendants I'm researching might be to include a family surname as a middle name. Take, for instance, Stephen Carter Sutton, whose middle name gave a nod to the roots of his paternal grandmother, John Carter's daughter Judith. That seems to be a naming tradition not solely reserved for the Southern branches of our country's early residents, thankfully, and has been a naming device which has provided clues at several research decision points.

Even more common than that, though, is what seems to me to be a Southern tradition: people who are colloquially known by their middle names, not their first names. Why?

I get the scenario when a father names his son after himself: having two people in the same household answering to the same given name can become confusing. In many situations I've seen, the son will have his father's full name, but everyone who knows him will know he goes by his middle name, informally.

When we run across the case in which, family member after family member, everyone goes by her middle name, what about that? Over the years of researching my grandparents' Southern roots, I've seen that tendency multiple times. I have two aunts from different branches of my family who followed that same pattern. I want to know: where did that tradition come from?

This week, after running across several Carter family members in Virginia over the generations whose own situations repeated that same pattern, I decided it was time to look for some answers. While I can't say these are scientifically validated responses, at least someone else has considered the same question—and looked to find a satisfactory answer.

First of all, it was helpful to see someone else note that this naming tendency is a Southern thing. Writing for Country Living in 2017, Maria Carter confessed that she was, as she calls it, a "middle name-ite" herself, and explored the possible roots of the tradition. After outlining some of the details I've mentioned here, she pointed out one other possibility. Since the Southern way seems to be enamored with the style of two given names—Mary Beth or Sarah Ann, for instance (although if you heard both names together in the same breath from a parent, you might be in trouble)—perhaps the shortened form dropped the first name, rather than the second. Thus, Mary Beth would become Beth, and Sarah Ann simply Ann.

But where did that custom come from? Maria Carter cites one psychologist who pinned the source at a "mass migration of the Scots and Irish into the South." Upon seeing that explanation, I felt vindicated, as I had often wondered whether the habit came from early roots in another culture. Better yet, a more recent article in Southern Living examining the same phenomenon added yet another cultural source, early French immigrants, onto the list. And here I was, thinking all the time that the source might have been my eighteenth century German ancestors, whose naming traditions sometimes deferred to giving an honorary first name of, say, a saint—a name no one ever intended to actually use—before appending the working name the child became known by for the rest of his or her life.

With traditional American governmental insistence on using a first name for documents, it sometimes becomes tricky to trace these identities hiding behind their middle names. But at least now I know. I'm not the only one who noticed, digging through those Virginia documents on the Carters, that that was a Southern style when it came time to name that new baby.

Exploring Namesakes

 

Somewhere deep in the tangled branches of my Tilson collateral lines, I ran across a descendant whose given names called to mind a popular singer of the 1950s. I had wondered whether this umpteenth-cousin had been named for a musician popular when he was born.

And why not? After all, my own mother was named after the given names of an actress popular in movies during the decade of my mother's birth. Patsy Ruth Miller had appeared in no less than eighteen films before my mom was born, and eight more films during the year of her namesake's birth. It was inevitable, when my mother finished high school, that her first goal would be to attend acting school and become an actress, herself.

I have seen several relatives in my family tree sporting names of past presidents. For instance, my tree has four men with the given names William Harrison, and one with the full name of America's ninth president, William Henry Harrison, "Old Tippecanoe." Considering Harrison served for only thirty one days after his 1841 inauguration, that's a significant number of namesakes. I sometimes wonder what inspires some parents to reach so deep into history for the names they choose.

It's not just presidents who claim so many namesakes among our family members. For instance, I took a look at my tree for any distant relatives with the given name of Benjamin Franklin. While the real Ben Franklin was never a president, he did figure prominently in politics of America's formative years, as well as being respected as a writer and scientist. No less than eight families in my tree chose to name their sons after this American icon.

And it wasn't just the star-studded among our country's best and brightest who can claim namesakes among my family's many branches. I was working on a collateral line last week, and discovered someone's marriage into a family with a name quite similar to Pascal. Though this in-law was most likely not of a French heritage, his surname's similarity was too tempting for this dad to pass up: he named one of his sons Blaise.

What a fascinating story it would be to discover why parents decided to name their child by a specific name. Who was important to these ancestors—and why? The answer to that question could paint another dynamic into the flat, two-dimensional sketch we often have of our ancestors. The names our ancestors chose for their children were important to them. In their own way, those namesakes bear witness to another facet of our family's past.