On His Way Home

No, this is not another hundred year old photograph finding its way home, but it is about a stage being set for a picture-perfect reunion. As I've mentioned before, sometimes while we're so busy writing about the history of family long gone, we neglect telling the story of family as it is currently unfolding. Sometimes, we recoil from telling that story because the event is too painful to record. But this time, the event is joyful, something that can't simply be contained.

Ever since the post I wrote on "Not Finding Alta"—the Barnes daughter from Oklahoma whose set of five photographs I still haven't been able to return to family—there's been something different about my own everyday family life: if I want to talk to my husband, I first have to do some mental calculations on the time difference that separates us. You see, if I call him in the middle of my day, I would wake him up in the middle of his night. As he likes to joke, he is in my future.

But not any more. Today, after teaching at a college in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for the past five weeks, he is beginning the long trip back home.

I couldn't be more excited.

Of course, if he is in a place which is eleven hours ahead of me, that means the return trip won't happen in the blink of an eye. That would be in my future. Between early airport arrivals and flight connections with long layovers, the journey is one of nearly thirty hours, door to door.

There isn't much which can tear me away from my pet genealogical research projects, but I assure you, this is one of those rare exceptions. I won't be thinking much of family history for those thirty hours.

I think you'll understand.  

Not Too Early — But Not Too Late

Exploring the history of land grants in the British North American colony of Virginia has been an interesting side trip on my route to discover what prompted my Massachusetts ancestors to move to the wilderness surrounding the Holston River. I knew that my William Tilson had served in the French and Indian War before marrying his bride in 1762 and moving to southwestern Virginia. But it has taken a lot of digging to determine just how the land in the area might have gotten doled out to willing settlers.

One of the first land grants I found information on was issued in 1745. That year, of course, predates my Tilsons' arrival in the Virginia colony by a considerable amount. Still, to explore the mechanisms of how colonists obtained land in that era, I decided to follow the paper trail.

The 1745 grant was made by the Virginia governor and Council of State to a gentleman by the name of James Patton. His was not a modest receipt of property: the grant entailed a swath of land totaling one hundred thousand acres. The only stipulations, apparently, were that he could not select lands within the boundaries of claims of three other grantees: Lord Fairfax, Benjamin Borden and William Beverley.

In the ensuing years, there has been much interest in the land grants of that same James Patton. Records of a subsequent—1749—land grant he received are housed at the Library of Virginia. An interesting assessment of the longstanding—and possibly suspect—business dealings of James Patton and William Beverley has been offered in the bulletin of a local historical society.

James Patton was not the only one surveying large grants of land received from the Virginia government. Just a few years later, another explorer, Thomas Walker, joined with several others to form a company which received land grants, as well. That company was known as the Loyal Company, and among its founders were men with surnames which make up part of my own heritage: Gilmer, Harvie, Lewis and Meriwether.

Those land grants—of 1745 and 1748—were too early to include my Tilsons' arrival in southwestern Virginia, of course. But in looking at a meandering report I've mentioned previously, an online reprint from a 1937 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly, I noticed author Ralph M. Brown observed,

From the conclusion of the French and Indian War in 1764, until 1768, nothing of importance occurred in Southwest Virginia beyond the visits of the Long Hunters and the surveyors for the land companies, few settlements being made.

And,

The great influx of settlers into Southwestern Virginia and Kentucky did not begin until after 1794.

While 1745 was too early a process to include my Tilson settlers in the area, that date of 1794 for a "great influx" of settlers was definitely too late. I needed to find something in the middle to help me understand just what it was that inspired a newlywed William Tilson to opt to leave home and extended family to set up housekeeping with his bride in the wilderness of southwest Virginia.

Fortunately, other "current events" of the time period pointed me to some possibilities. Part of the business woes of the Loyal Company involved fallout from the politics of the era. Once source mentioned "the crown rejected further extension of the grant" held by the Loyal Company as part of a ban on western settlement in 1763.

For those astute history buffs among us, that date of 1763 may have rung a bell—but not for me, unfortunately, as I had to slog through pages and pages before I even realized that date sounded familiar.

And it should have sounded familiar to me, if for nothing else than that William Tilson—who had served with the British in the French and Indian War—was by that year free to marry, to travel, and to relocate his residence, simply on account of the end of his military duties during war time. In other words, with the war now over, the obligatory treaty had to be drawn up. To the victors went the land of the defeated, so Britain now held claim to lands once under French control.

In addition to that, other agreements fell into place. Among them was the provision in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 forbidding all settlement west of a line drawn along the Appalachians. Bottom line: that suddenly rendered void any land grants which had been given by the British government to those American colonists who had fought in the war.

This opens up two additional points to pursue. One: that there were land grants issued by the Crown to colonists for military service before 1763. Second, if that were so, and if that was what instigated the Tilsons' move to Virginia, how was it that he remained there on that now-not-legally-granted property? For William and Mary Tilson remained in southwest Virginia at least through the dates of birth of the seven children I've been able to locate—a stretch of time from 1763 through 1776, and possibly much longer.

Every time I've pried open the answer to one question, all that pops out is yet another question.     

 

Daniel Boone Was Here

Oftentimes, I've run into beginning genealogical researchers who get jazzed at the thought their ancestors might be related to someone famous. Kings come to mind here, but also generals or explorers. Once the possibility enters their mind of a connection to greatness, it unfortunately seems to nudge the research work in the wrong direction.

Perhaps as a counter-move in the hope of avoiding such weakness, I've automatically been dismissing any notion of a connection to well-known names of American history. You might have noticed that I glossed over some references, in links last week, to folk hero Daniel Boone.

The more I delve into the history of the Wilderness Road and the land in southwestern Virginia where my Tilson ancestors decided to settle, I can't help but acknowledge that that very place was one in which Daniel Boone used to roam.

In the region around the three forks of the Holston River in Virginia—the place where William and Mary Marcie Tilson settled and where all of their children were born—the way was made possible by adventurers, explorers and land surveyors who passed that way before the Tilsons arrived in 1762 or 1763.

Since this is such a new area of research for me, I've been absorbing an immense amount of material to get up to speed on the necessary background details. Swamped with information overload, perhaps that's why I gravitated to a website with the kind of simple terms best suited for younger students. Sometimes, it's just easier to learn new material by reverting to the simple, concise explanations presented in books intended for grade school students.

In reading one entry at a website called Tennessee4Me, after getting the lay of the land, information-wise, I scanned the article for names of people and geographic locations to help provide keywords for further searching.

That's where I saw the mention of Daniel Boone. Only one year after William and Mary Marcie Tilson's oldest child was born in 1763, Daniel Boone was somewhere in the same area, exploring the Holston valley for a land speculator.

Of course, by the time Daniel Boone was covering the area, the Tilsons had already settled there. Though the name introduces that bright-shiny aspect to the research, what I really needed was a clue as to how land was being distributed before Daniel Boone got there to check it all out.

The same article gave me a few more leads from earlier years. The one name which caught my eye was that of Virginia "adventurer" Thomas Walker, who arrived in the region in 1748 and returned again in 1750. He was key in an entity known as the Loyal Company—a detail I thought might be worth following up on. 
 

Getting Lost in the Details

Can you understand your ancestors without understanding the times in which they were living?

In trying to determine not only why but how my Tilson ancestors left their home in Massachusetts colony after their marriage in 1762 to end up in southwest Virginia, I'm having to absorb a lot of Virginia history. And, not being a speed reader, I'm learning a lot of detail I hadn't anticipated including in my pursuit of family history.

Virginia, like the Florida of my McClellan ancestors, is one of those locations in which I have family roots, but have never traveled through, myself. Thus, it makes the research that much harder, for the place names don't evoke any memories of spatial relationships. I have no idea which two town names might constitute a short trip of a few hours, and which represent distant journeys. Geographic identifiers, such as the Blue Ridge mountains or the Piedmont, the James River or the Shenandoah Valley, mean nothing to me. I have to slog through corollary material like maps and documents to guide me through the explanatory texts I hope will answer the question initiating this search.

What, indeed, made these crazy ancestors travel all that way? And what made them think this was the way to get there?

And so, as I try to retrace my ancestors' steps, I'm wandering down detours of my own, reading summaries of a history so intricate yet seemingly so disconnected from the roots I thought I had.

Take this website found on colonial Virginian expansion, courtesy of Google, explaining the several treaties drawn up in the 1700s which opened the way for westward expansion of the colonies. (Did you know Virginia claimed land rights all the way across the continent to the Pacific Ocean?)

Even as the article meanders through details I once hoped would easily provide me with an answer, I feel as if I'm coming up short when the immigrant pathways outlined in the text mention Scots-Irish traveling on foot to the destinations I thought were the communities formed by my Mayflower English settlers. Somehow, these details don't seem to mix.

And yet, I read on, somehow hoping these recitations of history will lead me to some slight clue producing the answer I'm seeking.

If Not Why, Perhaps How

As I'm struggling with the brick wall in my family history research, I've wanted to learn just why it was that the descendants of my Mayflower ancestors would have left their by-then-established settlement in Massachusetts to move to the backwoods of Virginia in 1763—and then pick up once again and relocate in northeastern Tennessee.

Just because I want to know the answer doesn't necessarily mean I will find the answer. After the journey I've been on to seek out that answer, the corresponding trip through local history of that era has convinced me that perhaps a more helpful question might be how those ancestors moved beyond their Virginia settlement to their stopping place in Washington County, Tennessee.

Googling and then following my nose has unearthed several helpful sites in this information gathering stage. I already knew that the area in question was once part of a place in the state of North Carolina dubbed the Washington District. After Tennessee statehood, that same location became the "mother county"—the oldest county—of the new state.

I've located lists that serve as finding aids to guide me to further resources as I try to sift through the details and determine just why—and how—my ancestors from Massachusetts eventually ended up in Washington County, Tennessee. Of course, the FamilySearch wiki for Washington County genealogical resources provides many links. Interestingly, so does the Tennessee Secretary of State's website, with two pages providing a list of resources and a more detailed bibliography.

Shifting my focus—rather than looking at what I could find about my ancestors' destination, checking what is available about the land they left—I found a website explaining the history of the old Washington County region of Virginia which contained the Holston River area where my Tilsons once lived.

Better yet, I located a page which explained why settlement in these far-west locations was urged: the government of colonial Virginia saw it as a great scheme for creating a "buffer zone" between more-established immigrant communities in the eastern portion of the colony and the ancient wilderness domain of native populations. To that end, by the 1740s, the government was authorizing land grants, such as the Patton Grant and the Loyal Company Grant.

Having located those resources, I began adding to my reading list. I've found a couple other online articles to read about the westward settlement, back in that era—one of which focuses on southwestern Virginia, the other on a more general review of settlement west of the Blue Ridge mountains.

But this was back in the 1740s. When I think of what must have been available to settlers back then, that's when my mind demands to know just how they managed to do what they did. How did they get to their destination? How did they even decide on that destination? For my Tilson, Davis, and Broyles ancestors, what brought them down the path they selected? In fact, what was the path?

Wondering about "how" led me to seek out articles on the way those ancestors got to their new home. That's when I started circling the details on one particular route, known by various names, but generally called the Wilderness Road. I decided it might be worth my while to see if that Wilderness Road was the route that might have led my wandering ancestors to the promise of better land that they might have been seeking. 

Clues of Family Close By

I'm always curious, in examining the stories of brave immigrants who left home—and all else, apparently—to travel great distances at considerable risk, just to have a fresh start in life.

In the case of Marshall Jackson, he left the place of his birth—Ontario, Canada—as a young adult headed for Dakota Territory. Best I can tell, he married after his arrival there, to a young woman named Hester Jane Harvey.

But did he come west on his own?

It was thanks to those archived newspapers that I discovered he was not alone in that immense journey. For at least part of the way, he had the company of family. While I don't yet have all the details, one brief newspaper mention in The Pioneer Express on June 1, 1894—for which scant detail I'm certainly grateful—opened up the picture for me. Under the headline, "Died," was found this brief entry:

JACKSON.—At Lake City, Iowa, May 11th. Mrs. Astor Jackson, aged 52 years. Mrs. Jackson was the mother of Marshall Jackson of Walhalla and sister of Wm. Rose, of Ernest, in this county.

Part helpful and yet part not helpful—I have yet to find the town called Ernest on a map, and more to the point, anyone named William Rose in that county—it does tell me a few things. First of all, that Marshall had family who had also left Canada and headed west in the United States. Second, it provided the name of his mother, and—especially valuable—her maiden name. Then, too, if she hadn't been coy about revealing her real age, it gave me the reference point to extrapolate the year of her birth. Coupling that with an educated guess that she might also have been born in Ontario, it held out the hope I could trace Marshall's own documentation to his birthplace in Ontario, as well.

Given the precise date of death and the location, it wasn't difficult to confirm that record in Lake City, Iowa. The location, in Calhoun County, was a railroad town founded in 1856 whose population peaked at the turn of the century—just a few years after Mrs. Jackson's passing—and has gone steadily down from that high of 2,703 ever since.

As it turns out, the newspaper got one detail wrong, though: her name wasn't Astor, but Esther—although throughout the many years of documentation in which her record was captured, her given name suffered the predictable spelling permutations, so "Astor" is forgivable. She, her husband, two sons and a daughter had apparently lived in Lake City since at least the 1885 state census, giving us a snapshot of Marshall Jackson's immediate family. Perhaps he, too, had once lived there before venturing further westward to the Dakota Territory.

Esther Rose Jackson, who predeceased her husband, was buried at the cemetery in town. At least that's what I gleaned from her memorial on Find A Grave. I can safely say that's a record I would never have stumbled upon, had it not been for that brief mention in the North Dakota newspaper linking her with her son, Marshall Jackson.

That, however, was not the only nearby family connection for Marshall's family. A few hints in property records made me wonder whether Marshall's wife might also have had connections in town.

Marshall had married a young woman with a name similar to his mother's. In the case of his wife, most documents listed her name with the spelling Hester. Her maiden name was Harvey, and her own mother's maiden name had been Burnett—thus providing the explanation for the given name of Hester and Marshall's eldest son: Burnett Harvey Marshall.

There did happen to be, in Pembina County, several entries in the 1885 Territorial census for the surname Harvey. Although I don't know yet which ones were related to Hester, it was interesting to learn that there were some Harvey family members named in relation to the original land grant Marshall Jackson had obtained in 1891.

If Marshall and Hester both had family which had moved west with them, what was prompting them to leave home once again? Were they going it alone, this time? Or was this move back to Canada also going to be done in the company of others?

Getting Personal

In retracing the steps on the timeline of constable Marshall Jackson's life, not all was newspaper coverage of his career in law enforcement. There were a few glimpses on the personal side in those Dakota Territory newspaper reports, as well, helping to paint a portrait of the man and his family.

The newspaper from the county in which he settled, after leaving his home in Canada, captured this moment in time on March 1, 1889, in The Pioneer Express:

Marshall Jackson, wife and family, have returned from the east. Their little boy was sick with the chicken pox when they left and he has been very sick since their return but is now slowly convalescing.

Given the date of 1889, it was impossible to tell whether the "little boy" the paper was designating was Marshall's oldest son, Burnett—who would, by then, have been five years of age—or their younger son, whose name turned out to be Earl, after all.

Still, one valuable clue in that brief insert showed us that the Jackson family had reason to visit someone—or something—back east. The trick in finding utility in that "back east" idea depends on the frame of reference of those choosing that descriptor. For those of us originating on the eastern seaboard, the phrase could only mean one thing: an east coast destination. But for those accustomed to midwestern ways, the term could simply mean a trip to, say, Iowa.

Wherever it was, though, chances were good that Marshall had not made his previous trek westward as a young, single man, alone. The possibility of family nearby—instead of far away, back in Ontario—increased ever so slightly with this detail from the local newspaper.

Second son Earl became the mention of the next clue found in newspaper reports of Marshall's personal life in North Dakota. Once again, it was The Pioneer Express providing the details, this time on October 4, 1901, in a section labeled "County News" under a subheading for Glasston:

Marshall Jackson of Neche visited his son Earl, Sunday.

As brief as that line was, it also provoked some questions. By 1901, young Earl would have been about fifteen years of age. Considering he was living back in Neche at the time of the 1900 census—just over one year previous to this news mention—what caused the change? There was little more in Glasston—then as well as now—than farmland and a stop along the Great Northern Railroad. Could he have moved the twenty five miles from Neche, simply to get a job?

Actually, hold that thought on the railroad. The Great Northern Railroad may well have been the very vehicle which brought Marshall Jackson to this part of the Dakota Territory in the first place. After all, the Great Northern had branches that ran northward to Canada from Dakota Territory and, like the Northern Pacific Railway—another company with early train service to Dakota with a northern line headed to Winnipeg—heavily promoted their service westward to immigrants and others seeking new opportunity as land in this territory opened up in the 1870s onwards.

Whether it was the Great Northern or the Northern Pacific that brought Marshall Jackson all the way from Ontario, Canada, to Pembina County in Dakota Territory in the early 1880s, one thing is sure: it was the easiest way to move back out again. And that is apparently what Marshall and his family did, in the early 1900s.

An entry in the April 3, 1903, edition of The Pioneer Express gave the first indication:

W. A. Murphy purchased the residence of Marshall Jackson, of Neche, recently. The latter will remove to the Northwest.

Well, take that last line with a strong dose of skepticism. You know those editorial foibles. As we already know, by the time of Canada's 1906 census, Marshall and Hester Jackson and at least their two daughters were in Winnipeg, listing their date of arrival in the Dominion of Canada as 1903.

Above: An undated photograph, circa 1909, of Osborne Street in Fort Rouge, the section of Winnipeg in which Marshall Jackson and his family eventually moved, upon their return from North Dakota. This intersection was less than one kilometer from the Jackson home. From the Rob McInnes Postcard Collection, one of the collections featured at PastForward, Winnipeg's Digital Public History. Used by permission, with thanks to the Winnipeg Public Library. 

Letters: A Peek Into Your Family's Past

Hardly anyone writes letters anymore. That's a sad fact, considering the most likely candidates for personal communication today—and how easily those records can be deleted. From what I've observed in researching the various lines in my family's history, letters not only gave us a glimpse into our family's past, but were items that often were stored and cherished for decades.

I often became jealous of other researchers who had such stashes of family letters—until, that is, I discovered a second resource for capturing the sentiments shared in those letters: local (especially genealogical) history books.

The first time I read through the books on the Gordon family I mentioned the other day, I'd say I turned a brilliant shade of green. I wanted letters like those in my own family line! It took me this long hiatus, and a return (with an attitude check, apparently) to realize it was solely because of these books that I get to know those precious, privately-shared sentiments about the Gordon family.

These are the types of tidbits that paint a clearer picture of just who our ancestors really were. Take the patriarch of my husband's Gordon line. John Gordon was a hard-working, determined man, judging by the biographical sketches in the books I've found. But anyone can say that sort of stuff about anyone; it doesn't take much to wax eloquent in print. It's when the choice wording in private letters paints the word picture that allows the reader to decide for herself just what a man's character is—now, that's priceless.

Letters collected by the researchers who wrote the genealogy books of a century ago provided glimpses of everything from personal appearance to religious preference to pet peeves. I recalled several quotes from letters used in The Gordons of Greene County Pennsylvania.

Hardly bolstering the "from Scotland" side of the family argument about their patriarch's origin, one Gordon descendant wrote in a letter on October 27, 1889, (presumably to the book's author) quoted in the footnotes on page 19:

I have heard that up to this time [referring to the date 1789] the Gordons were a black-eyed, dark-complected people.

From various family letters, the author assembled several descriptions of the Gordons as "stout, active and healthy...a little rough," being of "above the average size," and "at least some of them were of the Catholic faith." Despite that strong faith, several of the Gordon men were known for their "backwoods fighting"—"'a great fighter,' so the older generation used to boast."

It's interesting to find a book which not only catalogs one's general genealogy, but focuses on the exact individuals which comprise one's own line. This particular book did so with my husband's fourth great grandfather William, son of the patriarch John Gordon. Of this man, the researcher remarked,

William Gordon seems to have been the family leader. He was a man of fine character, keen humor, and the soundest common sense. Though having nineteen children of his own, he fathered nearly as many more among his nephews and nieces. When the children of his brother, John Adam Gordon I, were cut off in their maternal grandfather's will, it was "old Uncle Billy" who must post off to Morgantown and see that justice was done.

It was this same William Gordon who, having moved from John Gordon's original Maryland property to the old Virginia region of Monongalia County (near Morgantown), and later to Greene County, Pennsylvania, convinced his extended family to move once again. This time, the move was to the central Ohio location of Perry County—site of the first Catholic church in what was then a sparsely populated state.

Tracking Family Immigration Patterns

Behind all the patter here on A Family Tapestry this past week, I've been working on my mother-in-law's lines. You may recall that's the family that made the move to what eventually became Perry County, Ohio, sometime after they staked their claim to territory there.

Though the immediate Flowers, Gordon, Snider and Metzger lines of our family seemed to stay put in Perry County for generations, that wasn't the case with the entire extended family.

Now that I'm tracing all the descendants of each earliest Perry County ancestor, I'm finding one interesting trend from observing both of our families: those who headed south kept heading further south; those who headed north kept heading further north.

In the case of the Sniders, it was a story of the northerners heading further north.

Fortunately, these families tended to move in groups and settle in the same community. Not only that, but when they decided to pick up and move yet another time, the whole bunch of them made the move as a community. Again.

That made for some easy tracking—at least on my part. Perhaps they all decided to scout out better farm land, settled on an area where the extended family could all buy a sizeable portion, and plotted their move that way. For the genealogist, that simply meant when the family disappeared from Perry County, Ohio, they showed up in Winneshiek County, Iowa. And when they were through with Iowa, they picked up and moved on to Fillmore County, Minnesota.

Right now, I'm following a genealogical paper trail through various counties in Minnesota. Personally, having never been there in my life—well, once, when our Christmas flight home from Ohio was cancelled due to a snow storm and we were re-routed through, of all places to avoid in the snow, Minneapolis—I've had to depend on maps to let me know about all the places these people were tromping through.

Using maps in new genealogical territory is a no-brainer. How else could you get a sense of exactly where your ancestors were moving? Once the Snider descendants made their move from Iowa to Minnesota, it seemed they kept zooming from one county to another—until I looked on the map and saw each move was actually quite incremental. Even the move from Iowa to Minnesota was merely a hop across the county line.

Life in Iowa and Minnesota must have treated these people well, for as all good Catholics were supposed to do, they took to heart that Biblical injunction to "be fruitful and multiply." However, unlike past generations, it seemed many iterations of the Snider line, there in Iowa and Minnesota, lived to see all their children survive to adulthood.

Yet, there were some other throwbacks to prior generations in their tendency to intermarry. I saw several Snider marriages to people from a Gossman surname—then a couple generations later, a Gossman descendant might, again, end up marrying a Snider. I can't wait to see how this cousin amplification will hit the DNA test analysis process.

Meanwhile, as my mother-in-law's extended family headed further and further north, my own maternal line began the long trek southward after the Revolutionary War, moving first from Virginia to South Carolina and Georgia, then to Alabama and Mississippi, and eventually to Texas—and some even to New Mexico—the southerners heading even further south.

Is it just techniques of farming particular to certain weather patterns that inspires people to seek out similar terrain and climate? I can understand snowbirds of our current era ditching the rigors of winter in Minnesota for some fun in the sun in Arizona's January—but then, that doesn't involve the hard work of farming. But I also didn't see any Nebraskan farmers forsaking their annual livelihood for easier plowing, planting and harvesting in, say, Louisiana.

Once again, I suspect that pursuing the story of our family history will lead to revelations along the lines of the hazards of daily living, 1800s style and even in pre-war 1900s. Learning our family history is so much more than just entering names, dates and places on the pedigree chart's blank lines. It becomes a whirlwind tour of the minutiae of daily living—the stuff of everyday life that we all take for granted because everyone knows it, until a new era dawns and it suddenly becomes forgotten.

Above: "Country Road in Front of a Wood," by Flemish painter Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625); courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Trouble on the Matrilineal Line

Though there hasn't been much sharing of specific family history reports on A Family Tapestry lately, that doesn't mean I haven't been churning through pages upon pages of records lately. On the contrary, I have, despite not sharing much of what I've been finding. Perhaps it's just that some interesting stories are more equal than others. Or perhaps the silence has been designed to spare you from enduring some genealogical sausage-making.

However, just the other day, I ran across a document which may have turned all that around. Though not on my direct line, it's a story worth a pause to consider.

When I first pulled up the document—it was a simple border crossing report found on Ancestry.com—nothing of note caught my eye. Actually, the digitized image was blurry, making it hard to take it all in. I had to slow down and decipher the entry in each box on the card.

I had been working on my matrilineal line, cranking out some "reverse genealogy" in hopes of finding that nexus with my DNA exact-match mystery cousin. Despite the mtDNA test implying I should look solely at those women descended from my mother's-mother's-mother's line, it just irked me to leave off the task of a generation's documentation without also attending to all the other children in a family.

Thus, over the last several months, I had worked my way back from my maternal grandmother's mother, Sara Broyles, to her mother Mary Rainey, to her mother Mary Taliaferro, to her mother Mary Meriwether Gilmer. For each of those mothers, I had then reversed direction and researched each of their children—and then moved down each child's line, working my way back toward the present as far as I could reach with documentation.

Still, no connection with my mystery cousin's line. So I pushed back yet another generation in the matrilineal line—to Elizabeth Lewis—to repeat the process. Then to her mother, Jane Strother, and to her mother, Margaret Watts.

Then, once again, for each woman on that matrilineal line, the long slide back down to the present.

It was there, tracing the children of Margaret Watts, wife of William Strother, that I found one line's descendant with this unusual border crossing report.

The report was concerning a man named John Hogue. He had popped up on my Ancestry.com tree as a possible hint for the man I was researching—John Syme Hogue. Not entirely sure this man's record fit my John Syme Hogue's profile—he was, after all, a descendant of an old Virginia family which included the nation's fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall—I wanted to study this bit of evidence carefully. After all, while there might not be that many men named John Syme Hogue, there were doubtless many more claiming the much simpler form, John Hogue.

The card—an immigration report—was drawn up on February 14, 1926, upon the man's entry into the United States from Canada at Detroit. Although the man clearly was reported to have been born in the United States—in Charleston, West Virginia—the card seemed to have dealt with him as if he were not a native. The form asked if he had ever been in the U.S.—yes, of course—then, when and where. Seeing that this forty year old man had been in Charleston, West Virginia, from 1885 through 1914, would seem enough to indicate he was a resident of that country, likely from birth.

But forms never assume anything.

Despite this man's claim to have been born and raised in West Virginia, when it came to the question, "Name and address of nearest relative," the answer provided was, "Do not know where relatives."

What was this? A case of amnesia? Why would this traveling man not even recall his own family members?

Apparently, from about 1914 to the 1926 date when this card was completed, this man had been a resident of Canada, with a last known address in—I found this out later, since the handwriting was impossible to read—Kingston, Ontario.

It was lumpy details like these that made me start looking more closely at all the other blurry answers on the immigration card. The man was headed for Battle Creek, Michigan, for instance—conveniently, not far from Detroit—but when it came to the entry for "Going to join relative or friend," the response was "Going to Battle Creek in custody of Sheriff." The entry for "occupation" read "Convict." His purpose for coming? "Stand trial."

So, this John Hogue had been extradited from Kingston, Ontario, to Battle Creek, Michigan.

Of course, my first question had to be, "Is this my John Hogue?" But then, no matter who he was, I couldn't resist it; I had to learn the back story. You know my next question was going to be: Why?

Above: Manifest of the United States Department of Labor Immigration Service card for John Hogue, courtesy of Ancestry.com.
   

Tracing Those Immigrant Steps

In wondering what might have become of our mystery Margaret Tully—born in Ballina, County Tipperary, in 1844, and last seen at home at the time of the Canada West census in 1861—it vaguely crossed my mind that perhaps understanding how people immigrated to Canada might help sort out this puzzle. After all, immigration is nothing more than people moving from one place to another. Over vast distances, granted, but moving somewhere else. And that, often, was accommodated in groups. You didn't, for instance, see any brave sorts, back at the height of the Irish famine, bragging about solo trips sailing across the northern Atlantic. Most people headed across the ocean with people they already knew. Once they arrived in their New World, they tended to settle with those same people they knew.

Not that this was the first time I had considered this issue. Actually, our family had gone through the throes of tackling it through the summer months, as our daughter was designing a research proposal for a study in Canada on immigrants' remittances to their homeland—a useful pursuit for an inquisitive economics student of Irish immigrant descent.

As it turned out, upon querying a professor in Ontario for advice on her research design, it would be near impossible for her to zero in on her immigrant population; the bulk of the source documents she would have needed for her data is no longer existent—something we in the genealogical community have been bemoaning for decades.

And yet, she uncovered some pointers that could still be useful for our present brick wall quandary. First, that some Irish may have come over to Canada in large groups—not just their own families, but possibly immigrant groups sharing the same home town. Some of them might have been spearheaded by local leaders whose task it was to assemble a shipload of people for a given voyage. Some may have been organized for a specific purpose—to settle and farm a large tract of agricultural land, or to take on a specific project like building canals or laying down railroad tracks. In cases like these, my hunch of trying to find where Margaret went by following not only her siblings but her larger community would still ring true.

Then, the corollary would be that, upon arrival, these immigrants would tend to cluster in self-reinforcing communities, rather than freely intermingling with the population at large. Although, in the case of the Irish, they would not be as hampered by language barriers as other immigrants to the New World, our newly-arrived ancestors would likely seek out familiar signposts of what they considered important back home. One pillar of the traditional would likely be symbolized by their Church—and seeing the early establishment of the Catholic Church in Paris, the town where our Tully family settled, rings true there. In a land more hospitable to Protestant than Catholic traditions, there may not have been as many choices for places to settle in Canada for our Catholic Irish ancestors; this establishment would be important for an immigrant community.

It was for this reason that, in considering the suggestion that maybe Margaret Tully had married and moved to nearby Saint Columban in Huron County, Ontario, I realized there might be more to such a suggestion. Apparently, in the area was an "Irishtown" settlement—a telltale sign that, en masse, the Irish immigrants had felt a welcome bidding them head to Huron County.

Whether this was where our Margaret Tully ended up or not, it is this sort of background information that might help determine that immigrant flow—first from County Tipperary to Brant County in Ontario, and then onward to wherever the family, in all its branches, ended up. While it is possible each sibling went his own separate way, that generation-long tendency to stick with the extended family or larger group may still have held sway. It would help to spend some time familiarizing ourselves with the currents that pulled these Irish families across the ocean—and see where it would send them, after arrival in Canada. We'll take a further peek at what can be gleaned on this, tomorrow.

Above: "Eastern Point Light," 1880 watercolor over graphite on wove paper by American landscape painter, Winslow Homer; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Extracting Clues About Nancy

The difficulty with identifying family connections in the early 1800s is that documents from that time period don't share, outright, the information we are seeking. Reconstructing our family history earlier than 1850 is an entirely different process than the post-1840 process of checking census records, or availing ourselves of post-1860 marriage records, or even the more detailed death records of the early 1900s. Sometimes, we have to infer the details we are seeking.

That's pretty much what I'm doing, in piecing together the life history for Nancy Ann Jackson Snider. I can tell from her death record in Perry County, Ohio, that she was born in nearby Fairfield County, because someone thought to record that detail in the November 23, 1905, record. Because the record gave the exact length of her life—down to the number of months and days—I can conclude that her birth was on or about February 5, 1823.

Furthermore, I know that Nancy Ann married Simon Snider in 1841 because that detail is included in the index to marriages in Perry County—and, as long as the surname discrepancy doesn't cause us to wince too badly, we can presume that it was their wedding that occurred on October 25.

We can track the names and approximate life spans of all fourteen of the Snider children by following the records of the 1850 census, the 1860 census, and—even though Nancy Ann became a widow on April 3, 1867—even in the 1870 census.

Though it took other means to determine Nancy Ann's parents' names, I can't help but notice that her father and step-mother lived next door to the Snider household, according to the 1860 census—and that they stayed close at hand through at least the 1870 census, as well.

"J. J." Jackson—John Jay—had been in the area of Perry County for years. Even though his daughter Nancy Ann had been born the next county over, there are reports of the Jackson family being in Perry County from an early point.

Actually, some of those stories seem to be conflicting reports—seeming to repeat the difficulty I had had in tracing John Jay Jackson's whereabouts, ever since he and Sarah Howard Ijams had been married, sometime after his service up river from Saint Louis during the War of 1812. This is a story that will do us well to revisit, tomorrow, as we retrace the soldier's steps as he returned to civilian life, raised a family, lost a wife, and moved from one county in Ohio to another—a task made all the more difficult because it occurred during an era not obsessed with leaving a paper trail.

Retracing Those Steps

Imagine with me, for a moment, a hypothetical instance one hundred years from now, in which a descendant who never had the pleasure of meeting you decides to try his or her hand at the genealogical inquiry of your grandparents' whereabouts. Think of all the twists and turns that this future researcher might encounter.

In the case of my own maternal grandparents, I know that if the only tool I had to track their whereabouts was the decennial census record, I would have had great doubts about what I was finding. That family would surface, once every ten years, in places as far flung as Maryland, Florida, Michigan, and Colorado—even though their address of record was, for over forty years, in Columbus, Ohio.

Of course, I know the reason why: a desperate father during the Depression, fighting to find a job adequate enough to support his family, went to great lengths to attend to his duties.

But I only know that because my mother told me so. What about those future researchers who never would have known my grandparents? Who might never have had the opportunity to hear the family stories? The shreds of documents available to them might only offer disjointed slivers of the big picture. How can these researchers put the story back together again?

If you've followed me as I retraced the possible route of distant branches of my ancestral line through Georgia to Kentucky and then Missouri, you might be realizing that my situation has not been much different than the hypothetical future researcher we've just been considering. Left with nothing more than the "road map" of census records—and even hampered in my research by "burned counties" destitute of even the documentation normally considered in such a pursuit of family history—I've been faced with a puzzle as to how family whose members typically headed in one direction would suddenly show up somewhere else.

As I've belabored the minutiae of old migratory patterns in the early United States this past week, you may have wondered, "Why go through all this trouble?" After all, the exercise didn't really help me break through any brick walls. I'm still as puzzled about the nexus between my "exact match" mtDNA cousin and my own branch of our mutual matrilineal line as ever.

The exercise, however, is one I would categorize as a research investment. It provided me the confirmation I needed to see that such a different route was plausible. And it gave me an idea which branch of the family might be the one yielding the most answers if I look at it more closely. After all, I'm pushing back, generation by generation, testing each female descendant to see which one is the possible link. Though the families did tend to intermarry—and repeat that tendency, generation after generation—I may well have a viable target to research with this Gilmer branch of the extended line.

Besides, the exercise broadens our understanding of what our ancestors went through, in their quest to find yet a better homeland. If family history seeks to broaden our understanding of what those ancestors peopling our genealogy once faced, knowing the routes they took and the reasons why they did so adds so much more to the story of our heritage.

I'm not alone in that assumption. In an informative blog post outlining several of the early American migratory pathways—and who was most likely to use each one—genealogist Amie Bowser Tennant concluded,

Learning about migration routes can help you overcome obstacles in your research, uncover previously untapped resources, and lead you to your ancestors’ homeland.

As for my own foray into the possible routes that led one branch of my extended family away from the deep South—and hopefully toward a connection with the line from which my mystery cousin descended—I'll use that as a springboard to examine who else might have traveled with the family of John Thornton Gilmer from Kentucky to Missouri. After all, if travel conditions to this wilderness called for the safety of numbers, there may have been other family members in the company. I need to examine those families, as well.

While it still means researching a sizeable number of possible relationships, at least it provides the focus to hone in on one family line. Tightening the parameters is certainly a welcomed option.

The One Less Traveled By

Though the movers and shakers from the Broad River settlement all seemed to prefer Alabama as their destination after departing from Georgia, there was apparently one small faction that chose another route. While the Taliaferros and Meriwethers among my ancestors' relatives became part of the primary economic and political force in the new state of Alabama, one member of the extended Gilmer family—at least, one that I've been able to find—favored a road less traveled.

Routes throughout Georgia were beginning to develop via railroad since the 1830s, making travel across the state to its western border with Alabama quite feasible. Likewise—although somewhat later on the timeline—routes from Georgia headed north to some trade centers in Tennessee.

It was unlikely, though, that the route taken by the family of John Thornton Gilmer was as well-trod. That, however, was not enough to stop families from the eastern seaboard from attempting migration through the wilderness of western lands. Just as earlier settlers had utilized such oft-traveled native pathways as the Great Wagon Road and even the ominously-dubbed Great Indian Warpath to arrive in places like Georgia, later migration was aided by the Wilderness Road, leading into central Kentucky.

Due to their more rustic nature, these original Native American footpaths which had been broadened—in the case of the Wilderness Road, famously by Daniel Boone and his men—to accommodate travel with wagons and livestock meant more challenging travel.

In some cases, the route was considered quite dangerous. That treacherous aspect meant that those choosing to travel to points west on the Wilderness road often traveled in large groups. It was not uncommon for entire communities or church congregations to move en masse along this route to a new settlement further west. It was a matter of mutual protection.

So, when I came upon the biographical sketch of one branch of the Gilmer family which had opted for Kentucky instead of Alabama, I perked up at that mention of a road less traveled:

The subject of this sketch removed with his parents from the place of his birth to Christian County, Kentucky, when he was but a youth.

This "sketch" was an entry in the book, The Gilmers in America, written and privately distributed in 1897 by John Gilmer Speed. The "subject" to which the author referred was Frederick George Gilmer, son of John Thornton Gilmer and his wife, the former Martha Gaines Harvie. This son also happened to be the brother of the Sarah Gilmer whose memorial on Find A Grave was the accidental discovery that turned my research attention to a different direction. 

If you recall the research challenge I'm currently struggling with—that of locating the nexus between my matrilineal line and that of the mystery cousin whose mtDNA test shows him to be an "exact match" to my own test—you may recall that our research had stalled, not in Kentucky, but in Missouri. What, you might be wondering, brought this branch of the Gilmer family from Kentucky further westward, again, to Missouri?

It turns out this Gilmers in America book partially provides an explanation—at least for this family, if not for the family of my distant cousin. The route, again, turned out to be one of meandering progress:

In a few years, [Frederick George Gilmer] removed to Lewiston, Fulton County, Illinois. Later he purchased, from Henry Clay, land in Lincoln County, Missouri, situated fifty miles north of St. Louis, near the Mississippi River.

At least part of these travel details match those we've already uncovered for the line of my mystery cousin: a family settling in Lincoln County, Missouri—then one of the sons marrying a woman who had been born in Kentucky.

While I have yet to discover how this woman from Kentucky—the Sarah Kinslow Stinebaugh we've already discussed—arrived, herself, in Missouri, there are some encouraging signs from the story we now know about this Gilmer line.

• Any family opting to travel west to Kentucky—and then onward through the wilderness to Missouri—was likely to do so in the company of a large group of people they already knew.
• There was apparently a mechanism in place to obtain large swaths of land in Missouri—witness the mention of Kentucky senator Henry Clay's land speculation—and then subdivide and sell parcels to many others.
• However Sarah Kinslow Stinebaugh and my line connect, it will by necessity be through a mother's mother's mother's progression. This Gilmer line, linked with the Harvie—and thus Taliaferro line—coupled with the possibility of emigration with other family members, may mean a connection via the tendency for intermarriages we've already seen in this social cluster from Georgia.

While I can't yet come to any conclusions, of course—it's way too soon—it's at least heartening to see indications that, indeed, someone did choose that road less traveled, and instead of opting for the society of family in Alabama, headed to the relative wilds of Kentucky and Missouri.

Above: Aquatint by Swiss lithographer and illustrator Karl Bodmer, from the book, "Maximilian, Prince of Wied's Travels in the Interior of North America During the Years 1832-1834." Courtesy Old Book Art Image Gallery via Wikipedia; in the public domain.

The Way They Went

[T]hese settlers formed the most intimate friendly social union ever known among the same number of persons; how exceedingly active they were in business; economical in their expenditures; honest in their business dealings, and how they prospered beyond example.

Almost mournfully in his book, George Rockingham Gilmer reflected on the demise of the Broad River settlement—though peopled with friends and relatives he was quite comfortable in portraying in as realistic a light as possible, situated in a position he unapologetically lavished with praise.

In the introduction to Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia, it was noted the author

hopes that though now scattered widely apart through the southern and southwestern States, his book may unite them together once more in the kind feelings of kinsfolk.

Whatever led to the domino effect of one family after another choosing to leave their Georgian paradise behind—and note here, this decision was not one arrived at, understandably following the turmoil of the war in the 1860s, but well before the 1850 census records—one by one, many of my Taliaferro family had edged westward through Georgia, then across the Chattahoochee River into Alabama.

Some of them may have eyed this move as a shrewd investor's move, as the federal government was offering large tracts of land for sale in the newly-opened territory. Though following not many years after the original emigration from Virginia to the Broad River settlement in Georgia, this next move may have been made in relatively modern comfort, thanks to the progressive development in Georgia of a thorough network of rail lines between the 1830s and the 1850s.

Since I have, as one of my research goals, the outlining of the descendants of each of my maternal ancestral lines—thus my focus on surnames like Taliaferro, Harvie, Gilmer and Meriwether—I began to see a pattern as one family after another seemed to disappear from Georgia census records and re-appear in the rolls of Alabama cities like Montgomery.

Seeing the considerable emphasis placed by author Gilmer upon the industry and prosperity of the social milieu in the Broad River settlement, it was easy to recognize echoes of those characteristics in the next generation in their own selected residences. It would be interesting to examine the social networks formed in the next generation by these families of the Broad River settlement—not only from the genealogical aspect of their intermarriages, but from a sociological viewpoint, as well.

Though not in a particularly flattering way, that very point was picked up by a book in the 1970s, examining the socio-political underpinnings of their apparently elite, cohesive subculture. The book had coined the term, "Broad River Group," to refer to the Alabama settlers emigrating from that Broad River settlement of former Virginians who had, only a generation prior to this, claimed their new homes in Georgia.

One reviewer of that book later rehearsed the very migratory history of the Taliaferros, et al, that I've already mentioned, and described the "Broad River Group" as

an alliance of relatives and friends who dominated Alabama politics in the territorial and early statehood period.

It is not surprising to learn that the families of this group were considered to have been the early movers and shakers who established both Huntsville and Montgomery as two of Alabama's financial and business centers. As I had, independently, followed the family history of these lines, from the 1850s onward, it was quite obvious that these were people who had experienced a great deal of success.

All this was not without the turmoil that so often accompanies political maneuvers. As an entity, the Broad River Group of Alabama saw its demise with the loss of key candidates and rejection of unpopular policies, even in the state's formative territorial days. Whether my Taliaferros and Meriwethers were in the thick of these battles, I haven't yet uncovered—though I can certainly see that, as individuals, they had a fair number of successful attorneys, judges, and physicians in their ranks.

Examining whatever personal and business qualities had been bred into them during their earlier years in the families' residence back at the Broad River settlement in Georgia would be an interesting study. These traits likely stood them in good stead, even after moving to the recently-opened "frontiers" of the lands that were to become the states we now know as Alabama and Mississippi.

Above: "In the Arbour," 1882 oil on canvas by Polish artist Aleksander Gierymski; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Vectors and Migrations

If one had just arrived in paradise, what could possibly induce a soul to want to leave again?

The move to the Broad River area of Georgia seemed just the thing for the party of Virginians joined by my Taliaferro ancestors, just after the Revolutionary War. The land held out promise of productivity. The river provided convenient access to markets via Augusta to Savannah. What more could anyone desire?

Within one short generation, however, the promise of this new land had begun to fade. And with that fading went the prosperity of the people called there by that very hope.

For one thing, living near a river in a temperate climate can have its down side. A first clue to such difficulties was one I found in a biographical sketch of Nicholas Louis Meriwether—doubtless a distant relation—who had become one of the many who sadly bid goodbye to his Broad River home. The entry noted, "He spent most of his time attending the sick of the Broad River settlement."

The possible cause of such illness might be inferred from a history of nearby Augusta, Georgia—similarly situated upon a river. What was once dubbed "Stranger's Fever" periodically made its appearance in Augusta over the years following the nearby establishment of the Broad River settlement. According to Charles C. Jones' Memorial History of Augusta, Georgia, what later became known as Yellow Fever was documented in an outbreak there in 1839 in which one third of the entire Augusta population suffered an attack. Another such episode followed in 1854.

Members of the local Medical Society set themselves to the task of evaluating possible causes of this devastating illness. Opinions vacillated between conjectures that the disease was not contagious and that it was—and if so, how it was spread.

Eventually in the Society's investigations, it was noticed that "an unusual quantity of animal and vegetable putrefaction" had been found in "a number of small ponds and marshes." (Jones, page 258-259.)

In a stellar example of public policy that might have seemed like a good idea at the time, it turned out that the city fathers, some time before this, had decided that

there be constructed a slide or platform on the river bank for the purpose of throwing the dirt and rubbish collected by the street officer clear of the bank into the river.

As it turned out, their plan worked quite well, as many in the city availed themselves of this dumping-off point—so much so that the heap had swelled into a mountain of its own. Once the local officials realized what they had done to themselves, the next task—a similarly huge assignment—was to dismantle the hazard.

While that entire debacle occurred not in the Broad River settlement, but down river in Augusta, it serves to demonstrate the then-current view of rivers and their usefulness. It also revealed lack of understanding, at the time, of vectors of diseases—including the oft-found mosquitos of such low-lying "small ponds and marshes" as had been noticed in the physicians' inquiry into the Yellow Fever causes. Apparently, the good people of places like the Broad River settlement were all but hanging out welcome signs for the very visitors who bred the disease that was killing them.

I doubt very many of those choosing to leave the Broad River settlement realized, at the time, what it was that convinced them to pack up and move. Perhaps they once again convinced themselves that that periodic wearing out of the land was upon them.

Then again, the rise and fall of fortunes seemed pegged to more local causes, such as the fate of the nearby town of Petersburg—the down river inspection stop for shipments of tobacco headed to Augusta, then Savannah, then across the ocean for international trade. A shift in cash crops from tobacco to cotton and a change in transportation modes from "Petersburg boats" to roads and railroads routed elsewhere had a devastating impact on the economic well-being of the region.

Or maybe the Broad River families succumbed to a new kind of fever—western fever, for which the only known relief was to forsake all and move out West.

Begin at the Beginning

Though genealogy is a craft that starts at the end and works its way back toward the beginning of a family's history, in the case of our hunt for the nexus between two matrilineal lines—mine and that of my mystery cousin, the adoptee whose mtDNA test results are an exact match to mine—I'm going to reverse direction and examine possible migratory routes of this family from their original home in the colony of Virginia.

First, of course, comes the caveat that not only does my adoptee cousin not know his matrilineal line for sure, but I don't know mine, either. Remember, in tracing backwards in time from my mother to her mother to her mother, I'm stalled at my second great grandmother's origin, for she, too, was said to be adopted.

"Adopted" back then, however, was not the closed case it would be in our time. Likely, before her marriage to Thomas Taliaferro Broyles in 1871, Mary Rainey was orphaned in her teen years and taken in by relatives willing to do their duty, as good family members of that age were expected to do. (Think Pollyanna moving in with her spinster aunt after the death of her parents.)

With that in mind, we need to remember that I am still assuming who my second great grandmother's parents were. With every step backwards through the generations, I'm working on the hypothesis that Mary Rainey's mother was Mary (possibly Nancy) Taliaferro, daughter of Warren Taliaferro and Mary Meriwether Gilmer of Rockingham County, Virginia.

So for our task of examining the migratory pattern of this family line, we'll reverse the usual research direction and start at that beginning—that jumping off place in Virginia from which some of the Taliaferro family and some from the Gilmer line left their ancestral Virginia property for the promise of a better life elsewhere.

The earliest influences on the Gilmer and Taliaferro families, in considering the question of moving from Virginia, may have been a result of the Revolutionary War. According to George Gilman Smith's The Story of Georgia and the Georgia People, General George Mathews, having served during the Revolution with Virginia troops in Georgia, decided to return there after the war (see page 112).

He was a shrewd speculator, and he bought at a bargain a claim to a large body of land known as the Goose Pond tract on Broad river and decided to move to it. He brought in the famous Broad river settlers....

Then, too, the agricultural practices back in Virginia had impoverished the land, and in combination with land grants following the war, became attractive incentives for many Virginians to forsake their previous land holdings. Again, according to Smith (page 139),

the prospect of finding good tobacco land in Georgia drew large colonies from all the central and tide-water counties of that State. 

Georgia governor George R. Gilmer, writing his own understanding of the migration of the company of Virginians to Goose Pond, gave the date for General Mathews' move to the Broad River area as 1784. Another survey of the history of the area listed, among the many Virginians following General Mathews' lead and relocating in this Broad River settlement, the Taliaferros, the Harvies, the Meriwethers and the Lewises.

Just the people we'll be looking for.

 

 

Moving On

What makes people move?

More to the point for our current genealogical pursuit, what convinced the ancestors of my matrilineal line to decide to leave one settlement, in favor of the struggle of carving out a new home in a new wilderness of a New World?

Chasing my matrilineal line backwards through time has been relatively easy, as long as specific names and family constellations showed up predictably in census records and other governmental documents. Coming to roadblocks in that documentation, however—say, a gap in time in which no further records appear in one locale—introduces a signal to look elsewhere for those ancestors' residency. A family, once giving every signs of being established in a community, no longer appears in the local records. Now what?

Census records and other online resources can help us determine where our ancestors were. But in order to discover where those ancestors went, you often need to delve into books to find your answers. You need to uncover the reasons for the change, and the likely rationales and routes for the change of residence.

There are reasons for my conjecture that the best answer to this question will be found via books.

First, while providing proof of residency in a specific place at a specific time, documentation such as census records or the certification of vital records provides merely a snapshot in time. Those are papers that confirm that, yes, this person was at this place at this time.

But when "this place" changes, that paper trail can fail us. That paper gift does not come to us, wrapped as a package deal, revealing the rationale for how the person arrived, how long they had been here, or how long they intended to continue at this specific address. Unlike that documentation, a narrative—as often provided in collections of letters, journals or written histories of families or places—would supply the continuity of the story: what made the family decide to move from one place to another. Unless you are fortunate to stumble upon such a cache in an archive or other private repository, the most likely place to access such narratives would be in books.

Second, though we now see a resurgence in keen interest in family history, prior periods of such interest arose during times in which the common medium for storage and exchange of these stories was publications. Admittedly, more and more material has been digitized and uploaded to websites of interest to genealogists, and the search is certainly made more bearable through computerized capabilities. But to access the repositories of the thoughts and recollections of prior generations, we often have to return to the medium in which they communicated: the written word.

Granted, much of that written word is now finding its way onto the Internet, as well. Witness the Google Books project and other online efforts to convert out-of-print public domain books to searchable online properties. But the bottleneck in that process is the question of choice: the choice of the gatekeeper. And that choice will tend toward those projects that hold the most interest for the broadest percentage of users. If your interest is in the history of one obscure county in the far reaches of the hinterland, your only answer may be to locate such a book via WorldCat at a library as close in proximity to your home as possible.

Thankfully, in the case of this specific pursuit—locating the whys and wherefores of the migratory choices of various branches of my matrilineal line in hopes of locating the nexus with my mtDNA-matching mystery cousin—I am finding possible hypotheses addressed via several books that have been digitized and placed online.

Yes, though indeed they are accessible online, these are books from which I am building my case on the likely answer for why one branch of the family chose to go against the grain and, instead of following the migration pattern of the rest of the family, head west instead of south.

In the next few days, I'll be laying out the various reasons for what urged the family on, first from their colonial homes in Virginia to their settlement in upper Georgia. Then, we'll take a look at what causes might have goaded the families onward, and examine which path became the preferred choice among family members. And finally, in hopes of finding that nexus, we'll look at the branch that took the road less traveled, heading west from Georgia through Kentucky to Missouri—and why they might have chosen that very different direction.

Getting From Hither to Yon

It's one big problem in genealogical research: an ancestor you've been studiously following, tracking backwards in time over years of life's twists and turns, suddenly disappears. The paper trail goes cold.

Sometimes, that big change comes at you with clues: census records warn you that the man who settled in Missouri was, many years before, born in Kentucky. Sometimes, the disappearance comes with no trace: a married woman for whom no maiden name has been supplied leaves no confirming documents.

It's helpful to understand general migratory patterns when desperate for direction on those missing-in-action ancestors.

Of course, some patterns are more obvious than others—witness the immense draw of the beautiful woman standing in New York harbor whom we've dubbed the Statue of Liberty; legions of immigrants have followed the siren call, forsaking destitute situations across the Atlantic Ocean in war-torn countries of Europe for her welcoming greeting in a New World.

Other patterns only become obvious to the genealogical researcher after laying aside the ancestor treasure hunt for a refresher course in local history. In seeking answers about the family of my mystery cousin—the one tracing the matrilineal line stalled at the 1860s point of Sarah Kinslow Stinebaugh in Dallas County, Missouri—it was indeed confirming to find neighboring immigrant settlers following the very pattern I was seeking.

I needed to find a company of immigrants who started in Georgia, moved through Kentucky, and ultimately settled in the region near Dallas County, Missouri. I found a possibility—and one conveniently also related to my own maternal lines—in the family of one Frederick George Gilmer.

Gilmer is one of those early American colonial names that comes in handy in genealogical research. If you have the good fortune of uncovering that surname in your family's history, you can tap into a wealth of other people's research and documentation via an assortment of published material of the late nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century.

Not only that, but like many of those early colonial families, in the case of the Gilmers, there was much intermarriage between surnames. The Gilmer line includes a number of related names also in my family tree, such as Taliaferro, Harvie and Meriwether. Likewise, each of those other families have a number of genealogies published regarding their heritage—offering possibilities to cross-check one author's research against the other manuscripts.

The target person I had stumbled upon, late last Sunday evening when I should have been putting my research to bed for the night, was a woman by the name of Sarah Harvie Gilmer. Don't let that name fool you into thinking she was married with children; according to her Find A Grave memorial, she died childless. Hers was not a misapplied (and misspelled) masculine middle name. Nor a kept maiden name. The surname-as-middle-name device, customary among some of my Southern ancestors, provided the hint that this Gilmer descendant was related to the Harvie family—a good sign, indeed, for me.

Sarah's entry first caught my eye because, well, she was named Sarah. Also, conveniently, she was born in Kentucky but had migrated to Lincoln County, Missouri. I had, out of desperation in grappling with my mystery cousin's Sarah Kinslow Stinebaugh, tried an experiment on Find A Grave: search for all Sarahs within a birth time frame who were mentioned as living in Missouri. (I still am not satisfied that our mystery Sarah was indeed a Kinslow.) That's how I had spotted this Sarah.

Sarah Harvie Gilmer turned out to be a daughter of Frederick George Gilmer, who in turn was a son of John Thornton Gilmer and Martha Gaines Harvie.

That, as you now see, is where Sarah's middle name Harvie came in: from her paternal grandmother. And that Harvie and Gilmer family had come from Wilkes County, Georgia, that huge post-colonial county from which was later carved, among others, Oglethorpe County where some of my Taliaferro kin once lived.

Though there is not even any glimmer of a connection between the one Sarah (Kinslow) and the other (Gilmer), the existence of that family—who, conveniently, along the way, stopped long enough in Kentucky to birth some of their children—gives me not only the idea but the hope that this was a potential line of travel not only for this Gilmer line, but for the family from which this other Sarah originated. And, given the proclivity for intermarriage among my family lines, perhaps a chance for this Kinslow daughter to have somehow been intertwined with that Gilmer and Harvie line as well.

After all, something had to move our mystery Sarah from her birthplace in Kentucky to her married home in Missouri. Not only that, but there had to be a nexus, somewhere in the mystery Sarah's ancestry, connecting her matrilineal line with that of mine.

Before I could uncover that link, though, I needed to discover just how these families left Georgia for Kentucky—and ended up in Missouri.

With a Little Help From Some Friends

Sometimes, it takes a village—of fellow genealogical researchers—to help solve a family history mystery. That's what it was beginning to feel like, when I muddled through the Ryan family in 1900 Walsh County, North Dakota.

Later in life, Edward Ryan and his wife—the former Johanna Tully, sister of my husband's great grandfather, John Tully—had immigrated to what was then the Territory of Dakota. At least, that's what I presume. It was easy to find their one son, James, who was listed in the 1900 census in which the new state of North Dakota made its first appearance. It was also fairly uncomplicated to discover that their other son, Dennis, had already passed away, leaving a wife (Mary) and four children.

Unfortunately—and isn't this always the case when researching the unmarried female relatives in a family—it was not as easy to determine what had become of Edward and Johanna Ryan's two daughters, Margaret and Mary. For one thing, their dates of birth were close: Margaret, born approximately 1858 in Ontario, Canada, was two years older than Mary. The main issue, though, was the difficulty of tracking possible marriages in the face of such common names, coupled with the magnitude of the move from eastern Canada to the territorial outreaches of the western United States.

True, one or both of the sisters could have married and remained in their home in Huron County, Ontario, left behind by their aging parents and older (and, at that point, still unmarried) brothers. Also—though hardly as likely—one or both of them could have remained in Canada as spinsters, while the rest of their family embarked on this wild adventure in a distant locale where the more hands available would help make the work lighter and more successful.

While I can say that it's my hunch that each of them accompanied the rest of the Ryan family in their move westward, I know you'll be hesitant to buy that. Having a "hunch" just doesn't cut it, when it comes to serious genealogical research. We want to see proof.

Sometimes, however, proof is not forthcoming. After all, I'm a denizen of the West Coast of the United States. It's unlikely that I'll just hop a jet and zoom over to Ontario, just to thumb through old marriage records that haven't yet made their appearance online. And I love the thrill of the hunt too much to cave and shell out the bucks to hire a professional to answer those questions for me.

So, I did the next best thing: I turned to my genealogy friends online—those denizens of the genealogy forums which were still in their heyday when I struggled with this research dilemma almost ten years ago. Focusing on the 1906 Canadian census clue I had found in Saskatchewan, in which a William Guinan had reported step-children by the name of Ryan—Chester Ryan, in particular—I went looking for any other researchers working on the same line.

Because I had done some exploratory work on the Guinan line—the surname of that step-dad who had apparently married widow Mary McMartin Ryan in Winnipeg in 1900—I knew some of the other surnames associated with that family. Through a search in an online forum, I found someone from a related line who could answer my questions.

Since I do so much research besides the classic name-date-place documentation of strict genealogical pursuit, over the years, I've assembled pages of records on obituaries, news clippings, and other records on several of the people I've researched. All those find a home in the notes section of my family history database. Dated and cross-referenced with the provider's contact information, each entry helps lead me back to the person who first directed me on any given question I've studied.

In the case of this William Guinan and second wife, Mary McMartin Ryan, I ran into a genealogy forum respondent who happened to have corresponded with someone from another branch known to be part of this family. Now that I look back on her notes, I'm so grateful I saved them, verbatim.

Basically, thanks to this forum contact, I now benefited from the notes of yet another researcher. Here's what the note told me:

Firstly it [the note from the other family researcher] indicates...he [William Guinan] remarried in 1900 to Mary McMartin Ryan "the widow of his brother-in-law" (sorry it didn't say which bro-in-law, but Dennis could be right) who had children of her own. William homesteaded in Sask [Saskatchewan] with 11 people in his household. He died in a car accident near Saskatoon in 1919, and was taken for burial with his first wife in North Dakota by "James Ryan and wife from Winnipeg." William was "survived by his wife, three sons and two dgts."

 
Of course, that fit nicely with the scenario I was beginning to see unfold with the 1900 U.S. census and the November, 1900, marriage record I mentioned yesterday. If you've been absorbing this tangle of names and dates, you'll recognize the name James Ryan as belonging to our Ryan family, being Dennis' only brother.

You will also see this as confirmation that William's first wife—whoever she was—had passed off the scene before his November, 1900, marriage to second wife Mary McMartin Ryan, widow of Dennis Ryan. The email also tells us that that first wife—whoever she was—was buried not in Canada, but back in North Dakota, likely near where the Guinans had formerly lived.

That, of course, brings us full circle back to the 1900 census and its enigmatic write-over, showing William's first wife to be named either Mary or Margaret. One way to resolve that enigma would be to locate death records for any of her children—but, as we'll soon discover, all her children moved with the family to their new home in Canada, making online access to such records not impossible, but a bit trickier.

It would have been helpful if one of those volunteer websites such as Find A Grave had included a listing for William Guinan's thirty-eight-year-old wife, wherever she was buried in North Dakota. Unfortunately, at this point, only three Guinans are listed in the entire state. While they are undoubtedly relatives of William, none was his unfortunate young wife.

There is, however, another interesting point about the quoted portion this forum participant had passed along to me from the other family researcher: the mention that after his passing, William's remains had been taken back to North Dakota to be buried next to his first wife. The sad duties fell to the brother of William's second wife's first husband.

Doesn't that sound a bit convoluted to you? While that is very kind of him, why was it the lot of James Ryan to bury his former sister-in-law's current husband? Besides, as you can tell from the note, James himself had also moved away from North Dakota and was residing, not in Saskatchewan, the current home of the Guinans, but in Winnipeg, in the province of Manitoba. This "favor" to a former in-law was beginning to take him far out of his way.

As you've likely suspected, there was another reason for such a kind-hearted gesture. James' own wife, Annie, was a Guinan, too. While I've yet to determine her relationship to William, it is close (either sibling or first cousin).

However, I'm also positing that there was a second family connection between James Ryan and William Guinan: that that burial next to William's first wife would put him side by side with James' own sister.

I had some hunches about this possibility—but no solid proof. One nice touch was to look at the 1900 census record and realize how nicely the pattern of their children's names fit within the traditional Irish naming pattern. The first daughter—for whom the lot fell to be named after the mother's mother—the given name was Johanna. The second son—in this case, traditionally the namesake of the mother's father—was named Edward.

Short of finding any death record—and granted, with a death as early as 1900, it would be unlikely that any such record would indicate the name of the deceased's parents—I couldn't say for sure that this was the case. However, enclosed with this forum respondent's email was some additional helpful information. In mentioning that William Guinan's first wife had died in 1899 in North Dakota, my helpful forum contact explained:

William Henry Guinan had married twice, first to Mary Ryan (dgt of Edward and Johanna Tully) with whom he had 7 children.

Granted, being provided with this information does not make it so. Witness the many online trees which label William's one and only wife as Mary McMartin Ryan—disregarding the messy detail that their 1900 marriage would preclude her maternal link to his children born before that date, or the fact that he had Ryan stepchildren in his 1906 household. Documentation of these details would be a nice touch.

On the other hand, if William's first wife was indeed a Ryan, that would provide part of the answer to my question about the reason for James Ryan taking such care to deliver William to his final resting place so far from his home. That she was a Ryan named Mary would provide an additional answer—although, having answered the question instigated by that sloppy census enumerator's 1900 write-over, "Mary or Margaret," now launching us on a second quest to determine what had become of the Ryans' other daughter.

At this point, however, it gives me a rough sketch to go on. Barring any further documentation to the contrary, I'll use this as my working premise for the time being. It certainly provides a better fit than the assumption that the post-1900 wife was mother to all the children in both parts of that blended family.