Perfectly Clear — and Inscrutable

 

How can handwriting be so perfectly clear, and yet not communicate the information we need? That's what had me stuck last week as I puzzled over Rachel Riley Boothe's application for a widow's pension.

Granted, there were some rough spots in the several pages of her application, like the place recording her answer about her husband Alexander Boothe's place of birth. Nancyman? Perhaps that meant Nansemond, a county in Virginia at the time of her 1906 application.

But when it came to a series of questions about her own background, I was both excited to glean more information and equally stymied by the content of her response. The official completing the form used the clearest handwriting for question number three: "When and where were you born and what was your maiden name?" And yet, for the answer about her place of birth, I am at a loss to find the designated location.

While it is obvious that the answer was entered piecemeal, as each section of the information was added. The handwriting for the date of birth and Rachel's maiden name, for instance, seems different—more compressed and smaller than the handwriting that provided the beginning of the answer.

For one thing, while the state name seemed to be misspelled, it is obvious that the answer was South Carolina. However, in retrospect now that we have the resources to view each decennial census, I can't say I am confident of even that answer. For one thing, the earlier census records—1850 and 1860—reported Rachel's place of birth as North Carolina. While anyone's guess is good for the enigmatic entry in the 1870 census, the answer "South Carolina" didn't appear until the 1880 census.

Perhaps it was Alexander himself who provided the answer about his wife's place of birth for those earliest records. An answer like North Carolina would make sense for those living in the northeastern edge of Tennessee, where North Carolina was just over the mountain range. But with the answer Rachel provided on her pension application leading me to a dead end, I wondered whether perhaps even she had gotten the two states mixed up.

The handwriting was so clear on her answer. I enlarged the copy to make sure I was seeing it correctly, though I already knew what I was seeing.

The trouble was, there was no such county by that name in either South Carolina or North Carolina. Remembering that Virginia had some "extinct" counties—after all, that's the case with Alexander's own place of birth, Nansemond County in Virginia—I tried looking for historic names. Remembering "Nancyman," I tried imagining how a county's name might have been spelled phonetically. Still, no clue as to what she meant by her answer. Tobarrass County? Lobarrass? Fobarrass?

Over the weekend, I chatted back and forth with fellow blogger, Charles Purvis of Carolina Family Roots, who offered to help figure out the South Carolina location. Charlie has been experimenting with Artificial Intelligence, and offered to run a few questions through two different systems: Perplexity.AI and ChatGPT.

Based on input regarding the possibility of phonetic spelling coupled with variances in regional accents plus challenges with literacy levels, Perplexity read the entry as "Starrass" and offered a possible answer of Starr, South Carolina. ChatGPT, taking a different approach, noted that the optical character recognition result was distorted but managed to read the entry as "Spartansburg," which obviously would refer to present-day county of Spartanburg.

While further input and refinements would make AI assistance more helpful—not to mention, it's likely a tool which we all could develop skill in using—I can't help but go back to the original document and stare at that crystal clear handwriting, just wondering what the clerk meant when his impeccable handwriting penned that entry. 

Do the Homeless Have Family Trees?

 

Yeah, I know: strange question.

I've just returned from visiting family back east—a week, incidentally, in which I completed very little genealogical research, despite best intentions. Now that I'm back in my modestly-sized home city of a mere three hundred thousand people, I can't help but compare the differences between, say, California and Connecticut.

One detail that stood out: the complete absence of homeless encampments seen where I was visiting, compared to an entirely different scene near home. Perhaps it is the sunny California weather which makes such differences likely.

No matter the cause, the differences prompted me to wonder what the real stories were that brought such people to their current desperate plight—but more than that, where were their families? After all, at some point, you'd presume someone from the family would intervene by offering that gesture which could prevent stepping over the brink into the downward spiral of homelessness.

Do homeless people have family trees?

Of course they do. Somewhere there has to be a relative. People do not simply spontaneously generate. We are all connected somehow—if by nothing more than our genes, as we've learned from DNA testing. A family tree equals a symbol of our connectedness with specific others.

That is not to say that helping a starving person build a pedigree chart will make life better for him. Of course not. There are far greater needs to be met much sooner. I can't help but wonder, though, whether re-connection might offer a healing balm for those who seem the least connected in our culture.

I have, from time to time, stumbled across a tale of a family member who seemed to disappear—and then, after diligent searching, I've discovered the rest of the story. In some cases, those stories are quite sad, such as the one I shared about a Riley descendant who, dying destitute, was buried on New York City's Hart Island. Why was she no longer connected with family?

Granted, building a family tree which includes each generation's collateral lines leads me to far more chances to stumble upon such stories. After all, I now have 26,556 individuals in the same tree as that lone Riley cousin—growing by ninety five more names in the past two weeks—so that means a lot of connections to be made, at least on paper. Disappearing people have also been a puzzle on my in-laws' tree—no surprise after compiling data on 23,638 family members there, with forty nine in the past two weeks.

It took a lot of looking to piece together those stories. People who disconnect from life as we know it can be very difficult to trace. It sometimes makes me wonder: does no one want to find relatives like that? If they could be found—before it was too late—would it have helped rebuild lost connections?

O, Where Did the O Go?

 

When you trace the lines of descent of an ancestor through multiple generations, be prepared to observe the evolution of the family's surname. In the case of Johanna Falvey, American immigrant from County Kerry, Ireland, to Chicopee, Massachusetts, that is indeed what became of her married name.

With Johanna's 1875 marriage in Chicopee, the local registrar chose to record her husband's name as O'Reiley. True, we've already learned from subsequent census records that Johanna could neither read nor write, and it's almost certain that her husband-to-be, an Irish immigrant laborer, could do no more, so it's unlikely that either of them would speak up to correct a spelling "error."

This, however, was an era in which the spelling of surnames was far more in the control of the record keepers than the information givers, so I was quite prepared to see the surname morph, at least to the "common" spelling variation used at the time.

That was, indeed, what happened, come time for the 1880 census, where we found Johanna and her young son Frank listed with the more usual spelling as O'Reilly.

If I hadn't noticed any examples of the next aberration in my previous wanderings through the various Sullivan lines connected with this extended family, I might not have been prepared for the next variation in Johanna's married name. Searching online for any sign of the roots of these extended families, I had noticed the Irish vacillating between names with the "O" prefix and the same surname, minus the "O." I'd see Sullivan as the mother's maiden name in one baptismal record, and a couple years later in the same County Kerry parish, encounter everything the same, except now that same mom had become an O'Sullivan. Methinks the Irish see that "O" prefix quite differently than their Irish-American descendants do.

My first clue that this might be the case for our Johanna was in viewing her brother's obituary. Mark Falvey had died in 1912, long after his sister Bridget, but quite a few years before Johanna's passing. Thus, we have a record of Johanna's mention in Mark's obituary.

Clue: the "O" was missing.

Though Mark's funeral notice included his nephew Frank "Reilly" as one of the pallbearers, his actual obituary also reported Frank's mother's name in an entirely different rendition: as "Mrs. Patrick Riley." Indeed she was, albeit merely phonetically—though she wouldn't have known any differently.

Gone, by the 1910 census, was that arbitrary "O." Indeed, Johanna's entry then was already being listed as Riley, not Reilly, same as in the 1920 census. 

At that point, there were no further entries that could be found in census records for Johanna. Her obituary in the December 15, 1927, edition of the Springfield Republican was perfunctory, stating the date of her death, her address, and details on the funeral and burial. The address given for the late Mrs. Riley agreed with the record we had found in the 1920 census, ruling out any possibility—a rather likely one, given the common surname—that it was announcing the passing of another woman by the same name.

Though the sole announcement of her passing listed no survivors, we already know that Johanna had a son. What had become of him? It was once again because we had traced the evolution of that family's surname that I could locate any record of Frank, who himself had a paper trail strewn with variations on his given name as well as his surname.

As it turned out, to insure I followed the trail of the right Frank Riley, there was another constant to guide my path: Frank's occupation. Frank Riley was apparently a lifelong employee of the postal service, so every time I found a document with that very common name, I checked to see where that Frank Riley worked. Following the trail of Frank Riley, postal clerk, I could piece together the story of his own life, as well.

Though Frank remained single, living at home with his mother through the 1920 census, after her passing, Frank did get married. One simple photo of their headstone at Find A Grave told almost the whole story, listing Johanna Riley's dates, followed by those for "Frank P." and then "wife Helen." Frank's date of death led me to his own obituary in 1941, which, in its one paragraph, provided not much more information than I had gleaned in his mother's notice and through the other records I found concerning him.

One item I noticed missing from that entry answered my final question: did he have descendants? If Frank Riley and Helen Shea Riley had any children, they did not survive him, for Helen was the only family member listed in Frank's obituary.

Despite the wild ride to persevere in tracing this Falvey line of descent through its various name permutations, in the space of one additional generation, that genetic signature disappeared from the ranks of future generations. 

 

Finding Eloise

She was a fourth cousin of mine, so I never really would have known her, myself. I would not even have encountered her name, if it hadn't been for this strange hobby of pursuing ancestors and their kin. Eloise Marie Lyon was a second great-granddaughter of the brother of my own second great-grandmother—a distant trail of relationships only a genealogist could follow. It was because I was having challenges researching William F. Riley that led me to her story.

I've already recounted what I learned about Eloise and her family—their early years in rural Indiana and subsequent move, before the start of the Great Depression, to Detroit, Michigan. Although I could trace what became of her three siblings and her parents, the trail went cold for Eloise after she obtained her Social Security card in 1951—until, that is, I stumbled upon a possible indication of her death.

It was a stark entry in Find A Grave which filled in the sparse details. None of the customary photographs or other volunteer-provided records accompanied Eloise's memorial. In fact, the entry did not even provide a date of birth—just the word, "unknown." Date of death was simply "Jul 1982."

The only thing that kept me from bypassing this doubtful match was the detail filled in below that date of death. According to the memorial, this Eloise—whether she was mine or not—was buried at a place listed as "Potters Field." Below that entry, someone had provided the location as "Hart Island, Bronx County, New York."

Having grown up in the New York metropolitan area, one thing I knew was that if New York was anything, it was a place made up of islands. Manhattan is an island. So is Staten Island. Some of the famous places all Americans recall are islands in and around New York City—think everything from Ellis Island to Liberty Island, the ground upon which the Statue of Liberty is perched. So where was Hart Island? I had never heard of it.

As it turns out, the island could possibly be seen by anyone driving northward over the Throgs Neck Bridge—at least on a clear day, if the bridge's barriers did not block a driver's view. And yet, I had never noticed this island with such a strange history. Over time, Hart Island had served as a military training ground, a prisoner-of-war camp, a quarantine station during the 1870 yellow fever epidemic, a psychiatric hospital, and a tubercularium. It later also housed a workhouse for the indigent and, eventually, a prison.

Hart Island became New York City's catch-all for all sorts of unpleasant duties of government, and, not surprisingly in the face of various epidemics, it became the site chosen for mass burials. It could, indeed, be considered a "potters field." Over its long history, not all records were carefully kept—indeed, in some cases, that would be impossible for the remains of those not even identified at the point of their death—but adding to that lack was the incidence of arson, occurring in 1977, which destroyed many burial records there.

Somehow, someone found a record detailing the 1982 burial of a woman in New York City named Eloise Lyon. Whether that was thanks to the nearly single-handed campaign by artist Melinda Hunt and the Hart Island Project, I can't say. But the effort to bring the Hart Island tragedy to light has been shared by a number of others publicizing its plight. A 2016 photojournalism piece in Medium gave the world a glimpse of Hart Island's current abandoned situation and the history that led to this point. A more recent account, appearing last month in National Geographic, gained additional attention upon the news that, in the course of composing the piece, the journalist's drone was seized by New York City police, just as New Yorkers were waking up to the fact that the city was again using Hart Island for burials—this time, to dispose of victims of the current coronavirus epidemic.

Far from any limelight—even if of a notorious cast—was the burial of Eloise Lyon. Could she have been my family's Eloise? It is hard to say. The Social Security account gives this woman a birth date of March 11, 1920—matching the record issued in Indiana at the time of Eloise Marie Lyon's birth. It further mentions that this woman obtained her Social Security account in Michigan, which would have been correct for our Eloise, as well. But it is not outside the realm of possibility that there would have been two women by the same name and similar story.

Given the sad history of Hart Island, it is entirely likely that this Eloise found herself an unfortunate indigent who, at the end of life, would have been buried in such a desolate location. Trying to find any record of her life's story in New York through newspapers would be a challenge, if she were one of the near-anonymous homeless of the area. I've tried, of course, to find any mention of her—and will keep trying. It's hard not to know—but near impossible to know.

So often, we pass people living on the streets who are down on their "luck"—but never imagine one of them could be our own kin. And yet, there we find an example of how, yes, this could indeed happen. I suppose only a genealogist would know anything about someone as distantly related as a fourth cousin. But for this fourth cousin—wherever she was abandoned under the rocky turf at Hart Island—I can't help but mourn her forgotten end.

Before Eloise Disappeared

Given all indications provided us by the pedestrian records genealogists typically rely upon, Eloise Lyon had a fairly routine childhood, growing up in rural Indiana. Sure, hers was a lifetime spanning the Great Depression and a world war, but other than that, indications—at least on paper—were that she had a stable household, growing up in an average American community.

Eloise's dad, Waldo Emerson Lyon, had been born a few years before the turn of the century, and until the time of his marriage to Bessie Mullennix—William F. Riley's great-granddaughter—he had lived in the same place where he had been born, Blackford County, Indiana. After their 1913 wedding in Muncie, the newlyweds settled in New Castle, then a small town of fourteen thousand residents, where Waldo obtained work as a machinist, and Bessie gave birth to their firstborn in 1918, a son they called Harry.

By the time Eloise arrived, two months after the 1920 census was taken, the Lyon family was still in New Castle. Likewise during the arrival of Eloise's younger brother Robert and, apparently, a child who did not survive, who had been born in between those two births. It was only upon the 1926 arrival of the Lyon family's youngest—a daughter they named Nina Lucille—that we have any reference point upon which to pin the family's move from Indiana to Detroit, Michigan.

Perhaps it was for the sake of a job for Waldo that the family moved from their native Indiana to the rapidly growing Detroit. How the family fared, once the effects of the depression became severe, is hard to tell, though the 1940 census showed that they had moved by then to a suburb of Detroit. Waldo was employed as a tool and die maker, and his oldest son joined him as an apprentice in the same line of work.

There, the regular snapshot of life in the Lyon family ended, except for the occasional digitized record of marriages and moves. Soon after that 1940 census, apprentice Harry felt confident enough in his success at work to marry Doris Renshaw, who had moved to the Detroit area with her mother and stepfather from Ohio. Eloise's younger brother Robert was of an age to serve in the military during World War II, and set aside his opportunity to marry and have a family until long after the end of the war—long after even their baby sister Nina had married.

By that point—perhaps because the family had followed Robert west during his military service?—almost everyone in the Lyon family had moved to California. Robert had settled there, and his two sons were born there. Though older brother Harry had married in Michigan, he and his wife eventually settled in California, as well. Baby sister Nina was married there. And nine years after her husband had died, Bessie, the mother of them all, passed away in 1969 in southern California.

For each of these events, documentation was available to substantiate each location. I have found records for Waldo, for Bessie, and for their children Harry, Robert, and Nina. But what about Eloise? The Lyon child who was born two years before the ill-fated infant whose untimely death hit the family seemed to have disappeared from the record after her mention in the 1940 census, back in Michigan.

If it weren't for the fact that Eloise had applied for Social Security benefits, I wouldn't have guessed that she had moved from Michigan. I certainly wouldn't have guessed that she moved in the opposite direction from the rest of her California-bound family.

But if I have the right Eloise Lyon, her Social Security record showed her last benefit was mailed to a location in the zip code 10025. If zip codes are basically the same now as they were in the 1980s at the point of her passing, hers would lead us to the west side of the northern reaches of Central Park, almost up to West 111th Street and Morningside Park on the island of Manhattan.

How did Eloise end up in New York City?

Why You May Never Find that Missing Ancestor

There are some people on your family's tree whom you're never going to fully trace. Just take that for granted. It's not because you haven't learned all the latest techniques for flushing out those mystery relatives, or that you haven't searched diligently enough. It's simply that, well, some people just...disappear.

That is the conclusion I've reached lately, when searching for the descendants of my second great-grandmother's brother, William F. Riley. You know my drill: because I'm working on identifying just where my thousands of DNA matches actually belong on my family tree, I've started this enormous project to identify all the descendants of all my ancestors. But in William's case, the going has been unexpectedly rough. And yes, one of those descendants did actually disappear—almost.

If it weren't for the phenomenal virtual assists researchers can access nowadays, I'm sure I would never have found this person's whereabouts. I still don't know the backstory on how this distant cousin of mine got from her birthplace in Indiana to the location where she died sixty-two years later. Though the distance between those two points amounted to only eight hundred miles, the site of the end of her life was worlds away from the rural setting where her days began.

There are some specific hints researchers look for when following an ancestor's life trajectory, step by step. Even moves of many miles can usually be explained by life circumstances, such as military enlistment resulting in cross-country relocation. Yet there are some life episodes which, even happening within the same city, can cause the trail to grow cold for a researcher piecing the story together, decades later. There is only so much research magic that can be conjured up, using the ten-year spacing of census records, or the happenstance of birth, marriage, or death records. Without a story line to fill in the blanks between these vital records, our ancestors sometimes take us by surprise.

Thus it was that I was able to trace the family line of Eloise Marie Lyon from her mother, Bessie Mullennix, granddaughter of the Mary Riley whose name was flagged by the Greencastle Press as complainant in a paternity suit back in 1871, and thus from Mary's father, William. But I sure wouldn't, not in a million years, have thought to look for Eloise's ill-fated future in New York City. Not, at least, when I had already established that her parents, two brothers and sister had moved in the opposite direction, to southern California.

Even if I had figured that Eloise had moved east, it is doubtful that I could have discovered her story in secretive New York, resistant as that domain has historically been to open sharing of public records. And despite Reclaim the Records' victories (which are much appreciated by this researcher), Eloise had evidently fallen into a black hole of municipal record-keeping which exists even to this day.

When I think of instances such as this, I realize that, yes, there are some ancestors whom even the most diligent researchers are going to fail to locate. Not because their efforts were misapplied, but because of the disastrous condition of the records they are seeking to find. As you'll see this week, Eloise's story is just one of thousands of examples—a story I'd never even have suspected, had I not stumbled upon a clue, thanks to a genealogy volunteer's efforts to shine some light.

Dispensing Justice

According to the Greencastle, Indiana, Press, Esquire Parker had "dispensed justice" on two cases in the week leading up to the newspaper's March 15, 1871, edition. The second of those cases may be of interest to us, as we determine just what became of William F. Riley's children.

Taking an almost jocular editorial tone, the clipping from the Press went on to explain,

An unmarried woman named Mary Riley added to the last census to the amount of about nine pounds. The paternity of said filius mulieratus being charged to Richard Bugg, a widower of considerable family, he was entreated to shell out a few hundred as a compensation for wounded honor; but "Dick" obstinately refused, whereupon he was arrested and brought before Squire Parker. Col. Matson appeared for the State, and after a long and tedious trial, Bugg was recognized to the Court of Common Pleas, in the sum of two hundred dollars.

While the editorial tone may have struck some in Greencastle as amusing, there are a few problems with this report. Let's set aside the possibility that the Mary Riley in this newspaper insertion may have been someone other than our Mary Riley, daughter of William F. Riley, and focus on these other issues.

First, let's tackle the Latin term, filius mulieratus. Not being a lawyer—and not even playing one on television—I had to look that one up. Never mind that our friend Google produced two different definitions; the gist of the term is that a couple had a son—legitimately—even though they might have had other children prior to the official date of their marriage.

There is a problem with the usage of this term, given the editorial intent of the article. This article was printed in 1871, referring to a birth which would have been included in the previous census in 1870.

By the time of the next census in 1880, our Mary was married, all right—but to a different man. I can find no indication that she ever married the man named in the lawsuit—Richard Bugg—either before or after the complaint was brought to court. By 1880, Mary had been the wife of John Shellenbarger long enough to have had a seven year old daughter. My guess would be that a reasonable date for a Shellenbarger marriage might have been 1882.

Furthermore, it is unlikely that the daughter born to the Shellenbargers in 1883 would even have been the child fathered by Richard Bugg, the defendant in that paternity suit. For one thing, the age given missed the mark by too long a time. But what became of the Bugg-Riley child? No child is named, and though the "filius" infers a son, the not-quite-correct application of the term in the one instance might hint about sloppy editorial usage also blurring other aspects of that precise phrase.

Looking for the culprit himself—Richard Bugg—it was not hard to locate him in the Putnam County census in 1870. As the newspaper entry had suggested, the Bugg household was indeed without a wife. A thirty three year old man headed up a household with three children, ages twelve, nine, and six. No sign of any infant.

Nor was there an infant in Mary Riley's parents' home. The June census showed a sixteen year old Mary, along with her younger sister and brother, but no baby.

Since the reason for our curiosity was merely to determine whether, decades later, that same infant from the early 1870s would turn out to be the unexplained Bettie Taylor to whom notification of William Riley's death was sent in Tennessee, we still are not one step closer to forming a hypothesis about her identity. Even considering one of my long-term research goals—building out a tree which includes descendants of all my ancestors for genetic genealogy purposes—I'm left with unfinished business.

For now, given the resources I'd need to access in person to get any further answers to my questions about the Rileys, I'll have to set aside this research goal for a later date.

There is, however, one other discovery I made while trying to complete the "reverse genealogy" project for William Riley's family. Though it provides not one solid clue to this research goal, it does help explain another research dilemma that I'm sure you've faced as well as I have: relatives who simply "disappeared."

How Many Trees Does it Take?

In the course of researching a family's ancestry, it may not be unusual to build more than one family tree. In some cases—such as adoptions or undocumented paternity—a researcher may build many more than one tree. Most will be test cases, of course, but in order to line up an organized way to examine hypotheses, it helps to use the format we genealogists have become most comfortable with visualizing: the pedigree chart.

Thus, in the case of the William F. Riley who showed up again in the same county he had left as a young married man—Washington County, Tennessee—I need to confirm that we do, indeed, have the right man. It is quite possible that there were more than one man of that age in the same county, so we take the clues we've already gained, and work with those to move forward in answering our questions.

In our case, the William F. Riley who showed up at the Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers in that same Washington County might have been the same as the man we'd already traced from his Tennessee home to a new residence in Indiana, where he raised his family. Or, he might have been an entirely different person. The records at the Home, however, provided names of two women who were to be notified at his death—and they apparently weren't the same as his "widow and daughter" who were also noted in the record, without any names provided. Those two were called Mary M. Riley and Bettie Taylor, and the record specifically stated that each of them lived in "Jonesboro"—the old spelling once used for the name of the county seat, Jonesborough.

Of those two women, I could only find a census entry from the preceding enumeration in 1900 for one of them: Bettie Taylor, wife of Samuel D. Taylor. What we can glean from that record about Bettie's identity was that she was born in September of 1871, and that she had been married for eleven years.

The difficulty with this search for connections to verify the identity of our William F. Riley is that we already know that he had a daughter, named Mary, who had evidently been implicated in a paternity suit, back in 1871. The only record I could find of that was when I accidentally stumbled upon a transcribed article posted at Ancestry.com by another subscriber. I can't access the actual news article, nor have I yet been able to get a copy of any other reports or court records on this case. However, one would presume that, had suit been brought against the alleged father of the child of this unmarried woman at the time of this March 1871 newspaper report, the child's birth might have been imminent.

One wonders what the usual response was for a family who discovered their unmarried teenaged daughter was about to give birth. In different time periods, we've heard of "shotgun weddings," or shipping the "unwed mother" off to a remote location to give birth (and then releasing the child for adoption). In other time periods, the mother might have been made to raise the child by herself, poverty-stricken. In yet other times, perhaps the grandparents would have taken in the grandchild and raised him or her as their own.

Mary's grandparents, of course, would have been back in Tennessee. Could this Bettie Taylor have been Mary's firstborn child, sent to Tennessee to be raised by her grandparents? Thus, the need to build a tree for this Bettie who married Samuel D. Taylor.

Thankfully, it took little effort to assemble enough documentation to reach a conclusion. First of all, though Bettie reported in 1900 that she had been born in Tennessee, that issue could easily have been answered by the possibility that her mother simply traveled to that state of her grandparents to give birth, away from prying eyes of gossips back in her hometown.

But what else can we find on this Bettie? For one thing, her burial information—gleaned from the Find A Grave entry from a cemetery which was indeed in Jonesborough—showed it was more likely that she was born in 1870. Furthermore, her death certificate indicated not only the exact date of her birth—September 18, 1870—but revealed that her parents' names were Elijah Leach and Louise "Tayler." Further confirming that 1900 census report of eleven years of marriage, an 1889 Washington County marriage register confirmed a marriage license was issued to S. D. Taylor to wed Miss Bettie Leach.

If that was the only Bettie Taylor in Washington County at the time of William F. Riley's 1906 death, we're left with an unclear signal as to why it was so important that she be notified of his passing—if, of course, we have both the right Bettie Taylor and William F. Riley. Ascertaining details any more closely may require either traveling to Tennessee to review documents in person or finding another way to access original records, as they aren't provided online.

In the meantime—since not too many people are traveling at the moment—we do have one other recourse: to see what can be discovered concerning the hapless gentleman whose name had been besmirched by legal action, back in Putnam County, Indiana.   

Let's Just Assume . . .

Setting aside all those comments which can be made about the risks of assuming, let's recall for a moment the scientific necessity of the willingness to formulate hypotheses. If we can't test an educated guess, how will we ever know whether it's true—or false?

In order to figure out who these other Rileys were, whose names were swirling around the one-page document drawn up at the end of our William F. Riley's life in 1906, means we need to formulate a reasonable hypothesis of who they might be, then devise a way to test it. It seems possible that one might have been a grandchild—possibly even a married grandchild, thus doubly hiding the Riley surname in her roots. Thus, our task is to figure out just how that Mary Riley and Bettie Taylor, mentioned in the Soldiers Home records, might be related to William F. Riley—if at all.

To test that hypothesis means we need to build a tree, starting from the Riley child we know, and moving forward in time to her children, thus William Riley's grandchildren. If any scenarios match—or, conversely, do not match—the names we have listed in William's Tennessee Soldiers' Home records, then we have our answer.

To start, let's revisit what we know about William's daughter Mary. She it was for whom a newspaper transcription was attached to her Ancestry.com record by another subscriber, claiming she was involved in a paternity suit. Whether that was, indeed, our Mary Riley, we may have to ferret out. But for now, let's just stick to what we can find about this Mary.

Finding records on the right Mary Riley can be a challenge, considering such a common name, so I'll stick close to the record trail, especially from the start, when connections with the parents we already know are more apparent. Thus, we start with her father William's first census record after his 1852 marriage to Eliza Jane Thompson in Washington County, Tennessee. In 1860, that was the Riley household in nearby Greene County, where daughter "Mary E." was now six years of age.

By the time of the 1870 census, Mary was predictably ten years older, but her family had moved from Tennessee to Putnam County, Indiana.

It was in March of 1871 that the news article appeared in a Greencastle, Indiana, newspaper, alleging Mary was the claimant in a paternity suit, but until I can verify that report by accessing it myself, my only recourse is to fast forward to the next census record and see if there was a child in Mary's household who was born around that time. However, when we access the 1880 census, we find Mary in a home with two daughters—yet neither of them was born in 1871.

Mary, by this time, has married local shoemaker John Shellenbarger—on June 1, 1872, the same day as her sister Rachel married William Taylor Froggett—and continued to live in Indiana at least through her appearance in the 1930 census. Even if she did return to Tennessee to be with her mother at the passing of her father William, she would not have been referred to as Mary Riley; her name by that point would have been Mary Shellenbarger.

If both of William's daughters—Mary and Rachel—were out of the running for being the true identity of either the Mary Riley or Bettie Taylor named in the Tennessee document, who could those two Tennessee entities be? Neither of Mary Shellenbarger's daughters would fit; their names were wrong. And Mary's sister Rachel didn't seem to have any daughters to fill the parameters for the identity of Bettie Taylor, either.

There was one tantalizing other bit of evidence, however: that only Bettie Taylor in the 1900 census, back in Washington County, Tennessee, just happened to be born in 1871, herself.

Perhaps It's Time to Backtrack

Sometimes, the answers to those burning genealogical questions seem to remain just one step beyond reach. That has been the case with those third great-grandparents of mine, William Riley and his wife, Cassandra Fincher. All I had hoped for, when I started this journey, was to locate something a bit more specific than just the name of the state in which they were born.

In the meantime, I've traced their son—also named William, but with the handy delineating middle initial "F," which I suspect might have stood for his mother's maiden name—from his home in Washington County, Tennessee, westward through the state and eventually on to Putnam County, Indiana. And yet, after all was told—including a tempting rabbit trail in the form of a gossipy newspaper report of a paternity suit—I stuck to my research purpose (well, almost entirely) and followed the junior William all the way back to Tennessee.

Wait. What?

To tell the truth, my genea-spidey sense tells me the William F. Riley who showed up, back in Washington County, Tennessee, might not necessarily be one and the same as the William F. Riley who disappeared from Indiana around the time of that same 1900 census. If for nothing else but confirmation, I decided to persevere and see if I could locate the other names mentioned in the final records of the man's stay at the Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers.

That meant I had to locate a document explaining who Bettie Taylor and Mary M. Riley of "Jonesboro," Tennessee were. Besides the unnamed "widow and daughter" who were present at the time of William Riley's death, these two women were mentioned specifically by name and location. Chances were good that they could be relatives of some sort. But how?

As it turned out, there was one Bettie Taylor living in the whole of Washington County, according to the 1900 census. Whether she was one and the same with the woman named specifically in the Soldiers' Home records, I can't be sure. But I have yet to figure out her connection—if, indeed, this is the right Bettie Taylor. With a name like that, chances could be really good that it wasn't.

It would have been helpful to find a Mary M. Riley living nearby, but that was not the case, though I leafed through the pages of the 1900 census where Bettie was found. And yet, Eliza herself—soon to be a widow after the time of that census—appeared along with William in that same census, and yet not anywhere close to either of those two named women.

What could have happened? Was it possible that Eliza's daughter came from Indiana to be with her mom only at the point at which the end appeared near for William? If so, that might explain no other Riley connections appearing in the Washington County census records, six years before this man's death.

The next step, of course, would be to find out what became of that daughter. Her maiden name, tantalizingly enough, was Mary Riley, as well—but that was a name she had long before forsaken. It would have been handy, had she married a Taylor, as her middle initial was "E," possibly for Elizabeth, which could be shortened to Bettie. A beguiling narrative, to be sure. But incorrect.

To trace this possibility more closely, however, means we need to backtrack to visit this younger Mary's story. Which means, also, that it might just suit our purposes, at this point, to revisit that odd mention of a paternity suit, back in Greencastle, Indiana, where Mary and her parents had once lived.

When Goals Get Messy

You know how family history research goes. Sometimes, we race ahead, finding ourselves still at the computer far past midnight, only because we can't bring ourselves to stop when we are finding so much great material. Other times...

This is one of those other times. True, I had delineated a solid, easily expressed research goal: find the birth locations for my third great-grandparents, William Riley and Cassandra Fincher. I knew they had come from North Carolina, according to their youngest daughter's 1915 death certificate. But attempting to cross reference that one assertion by finding corroborating evidence in the records of any of their other children proved fruitless.

Well, almost. There was this one son. William F. Riley, named after his dad with the one exception of that prominently-displayed middle initial—what did it stand for?—had married Eliza Jane Thompson in 1852 and soon after left their temporary Tennessee home for Indiana.

At least, I thought it was them. All to eventually retrieve a death certificate, I followed a Tennessee family with those details from Washington County to Greene County, before they—or some family which looked suspiciously like theirs—removed to Putnam County, Indiana, by 1870.

Following them from decade to decade, I watched their family grow up, marry, and have children of their own, all—with one notable exception—remaining in Indiana. And then, poof! No sign of William F. Riley and Eliza Jane in Indiana, but by 1906, someone by that very name—William F. Riley, including that specific middle initial—showed up, back in Tennessee. Was it the right Riley?

The document I found him in didn't help relieve any doubt. It was a ledger from the United States National Homes for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, in the "Mountain Branch" located in Johnson City, Tennessee, right where the saga of my third great-grandparents had left off. While the one-page entry in this ledger had the name emblazoned on the top of the ledger—William F. Riley—the various scribbles across the paper didn't add to my confidence.

For instance, the William F. Riley in this document had been born in North Carolina, same as my William F. Riley. He was listed as married. He was also listed as a carpenter, although that would be hard to ascertain, because some previous census records had listed him with another trade, or simply as a "laborer."

The root of my doubt traces back to some other entries on this same page. The record indicated that this William F. Riley died on February 16, 1906, while still at the Home. While the document indicated that William was, at the time, still married, it only noted that, at the time of his death, his "widow and daughter" were present, but never named them specifically. The record detailed his personal effects at the time of his death, and how they were disposed—"Sent to Mary M. Riley, Jonesboro, Tenn., by express"—and that a "Bettie Taylor, Jonesboro, Tenn., notified by letter" on the day of William's death.

Other than another entry on the same page, under the heading, "Name and Address of Nearest Relative," Bettie Taylor was an individual whose connection was never explained. If William were still married, why was this other woman—with a different surname—mentioned as "nearest relative" instead of Eliza Jane? This, especially considering the "wife and daughter" were present at the time of William's passing, is confusing.

More to the point than the confusion of seeing these other people named—but not linked—in the document, was the fact of the document's existence in the first place. According to the ledger, the only reason William was eligible to be residing at this veterans' home was on account of his service in the Mexican War.

Keep in mind, though, that William F. Riley consistently reported the year of his birth in every census enumeration before 1900 as being 1830. This man enlisted in his infantry company in Tennessee on February 10, 1846. Anyone born in 1830 would have been about sixteen years of age in 1846. Would that have been our William, enlisting that young? Or another Riley man with the same name and similar circumstances?

Perhaps easing the doubt is the fact that there was an entry for a William Riley in the 1900 census, living in Johnson City, Tennessee, the same location as the Mountain Branch Soldiers' Home. Believe me, I searched every detail in that census entry with high hopes. If that were our William, this would have been the only census in which he gave his year of birth as 1827 instead of his usual 1830—but perhaps, as have so many boys hoping to see some action in the military in times of war, he knew he had originally fudged on his age, and now had to bring current reports into alignment with past transgressions.

While that may be debatable—and who's there to ask at this point, anyhow?—what was reassuring to me was to flip the page from William's bottom line entry on that 1900 census and see the name of his wife. And yes, it was Eliza J. Added bonus, her year and place of birth agreed with previous reports, and the length given for her marriage was just right for a marriage license dated 1852.

Still, the possibility was too messy for my liking. Those other names—Mary M. Riley and Bettie Taylor—being obviously excluded from being the widow or daughter made me wonder why it was any business of theirs to be notified of this William F. Riley's passing. Would identifying these two women from Jonesboro clear things up? Or make them even messier?

Oh, believe me...I have yet to figure that out, myself.

Above: Heading from the one-page ledger entry for William F. Riley in the U.S. National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, Mountain Branch, in Johnson City, Tennessee; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

Remembering That Goal

It didn't seem quite right, while speed-researching that Riley family tree, to just move on ahead without any notice when encountering the sobering story of William F. Riley's unfortunate grandson, "Junkman Froggett," fallen at the hands of a hit and run driver in Illinois. And yet, despite stumbling down research rabbit holes, we are still left with a research goal that is patiently awaiting an answer. The main task at hand is to discover what happened to William F. Riley, himself, so that we can find the report on his death record noting what became of his parents.

It was William F. Riley's parents—the original William Riley and his wife, Cassandra Fincher—whose origins have had me stumped. True, I have a partial report on the junior William's sister's death certificate that they came from North Carolina, but that isn't enough to help me. After all, North Carolina is a sizeable state—and Riley is a common surname. A little more guidance would be appreciated.

Yet, the elder William Riley's namesake turned out to not provide much guidance with my brick wall research problem (though he did lead us to some curious newspaper articles). And so we sit, at the end of the research trail, with the younger William and his wife fading off into the distance at the last place where we saw them, in Putnam County, Indiana.

Considering the younger William was born about 1830, it's a sure thing that he left a death record somewhere—but where? While I could find nothing in Indiana—nor even in Decatur, that Illinois city where his unfortunate young grandson wandered—there was one tempting document left for me to consider. The drawback was that the William F. Riley this document belonged to died back home in Washington County, Tennessee—a place our William had not seen in decades. What were the chances?

Junkman Froggett

A timeline, based on newspaper snippets, of how one great-grandson of William and Cassie Riley—my own third great-grandparents—came to be known as "Junkman Froggett" of Decatur, Illinois:

March 3, 1930, down on his luck and taking a nighttime walk along the railroad tracks, Henry Froggett is not only held up at knife point for his money—which amounted to only $2 in change in his pocket—but the pants in which pockets the money was found.

January 3, 1935, charged with the theft of a garbage can, Henry is held at the city jail, where he explains he thought it had a hole and "was just a piece of junk." While police felt this was a lead that might link Froggett to other recent garbage can thefts, Henry hoped he could be released from jail before that Friday, when he was supposed to report for work at a new work-relief program.

January 4, 1935, "Junkman Froggett" is released from jail, as no formal complaint was filed against him when the owner of the missing garbage can came to retrieve his property.

May 4, 1937, two Decatur men—yes, including our Henry—are held in the county jail, charged with petit larceny for stealing fifteen chickens from a local woman's home.

November 26, 1940, two men—and Henry remains the only constant in this duo—plead guilty in county court for petit larceny of an inlet grating from the city, and are sentenced to six months at the state farm. Apparently, the strategy of switching from chickens back to scrap metal didn't work for Henry.

July 14, 1943, struck by a freight train at a railroad crossing at 10:00 p.m. the previous night, Henry Froggett was found the following noon by a passerby, and is now recuperating at the local hospital from injuries to his back and arm.

October 14, 1943, while walking uptown from his step-daughter's home at 8:30 p.m., Henry Froggett is struck by a passing automobile, an apparent hit-and-run incident. His body slumps in the darkness, and he sustains injuries to his shoulder and head. A local hospital confirms that he also received internal injuries.

October 16, 1943, Decatur police learn that the driver of a Model A Ford had swerved at the scene of the hit and run incident, realizing in the darkness that there was a body in the road. The driver had gotten out of his car and directed traffic around the slumped body so as to avoid any further injury before an ambulance could arrive.

October 16, 1943, funeral services are held at the Moran & Sons Chapel at 10:30 a.m. for Henry Froggett, with burial at Greenwood Cemetery.

November 12, 1943, the coroner's jury returns the verdict that Henry Froggett, aged 61, died as a result of injuries when struck by a hit-and-run driver. The driver has not yet been found.

Whether Henry Froggett—whom Decatur residents once knew as "Junkman Froggett"—was perpetually down on his luck, or just had a maddening knack for getting things wrong, is hard to tell from this brief litany of his appearances in the local news. Perhaps his was a life doomed from the beginning. Or perhaps we need to consider his shortened and struggling lifespan in parallel with history's own timeline of bad luck episodes in the 1930s and 1940s.

Regardless of the truth of the matter, finding these vignettes of his life's struggles evokes a pathos I couldn't escape. While citizens of one 1940s city in Illinois may have rolled their eyes in impatience at yet another of Henry Froggett's antics, I imagine it might have been hard to be the one living the life of Decatur's Junkman.  

 

 

Accused of Mooching

I'm not certain you can call "mooching" a legal term, but it was a term which could land a person in jail—at least in 1940s Decatur, Illinois. Discovering that the local newspaper applied that charge to a man who turned out to be my second cousin twice removed elicits two responses from me. One, of course, has to do with genealogy—you knew that; otherwise, why share it here?—and the other happens to have the potential to be a risky fascination on my part.

Delving into our roots can be risky in its own right. We start out, thinking well of our parents and assuming they came from worthy stock. We move from the generations we knew personally and step into the unknown of those who have gone before—and left us not a trace of information on their origins. Eventually, we step back from the family tree we have constructed and realize it has taken a shape vaguely reminiscent of that Norman Rockwell painting, "A Family Tree," which at its root included both a princess and a pirate.

After having discovered uplifting stories in my own family tree of people who managed to rise about their life's hardships to achieve notable accomplishments, I slammed right into a brick wall which, once chipped away, revealed a few tales I hadn't expected. That's when I realized I was staring at news reports which answered the risky questions I've always wanted to ask.

You see, in our decade of plenty—along with its paradox, the proliferation of the "homeless"—I have always had that inexplicable desire to approach one of these unfortunate people and have an "open" conversation with them. Something along the lines of asking, "How did you get to this point in your life?"

Whether the answer would be coming from a victim of post-traumatic stress following a tour of military duty, or coming from a young person plagued with mental illness (or simply under the influence of debilitating substances), it might end up being an answer delivered in a less safe manner than my unreasonable self might expect. So I have always kept a respectful distance and kept my mouth shut. But one always wonders....

Yet here, in the quiet of my own home, I've poked away at news records of a bygone era and run into a report of someone being jailed for "mooching." On December 28, 1942—right in the midst of the season proclaiming "peace on earth, good will toward men," an unidentified Decatur newspaper provided a small announcement under the headline, "Accused of Mooching."

Henry Froggett, 60, who police accused of "mooching" on the streets, was held in county jail today under a warrant charging vagrancy.

I never would have discovered this unfortunate turn of events for any man named Henry Froggett, if it weren't for the genealogical chase which led me, in search of my third great-grandparents' place of birth, to trace their grandchildren's life trajectories. From William and Cassandra Fincher Riley in North Carolina, I had wandered across the mountains to northeastern Tennessee, where they settled and saw at least two of their children marry in Washington County. From there, their son's family moved onward in Tennessee and eventually to Indiana, where their granddaughter Rachel Elizabeth Riley had married a man by the name of William Froggett.

The unfortunate Henry Froggett of the newspaper report was Rachel and William Froggett's youngest son, who had somehow stumbled his way from the family home in Putnam County, Indiana, to the city of Decatur in Illinois. And it wasn't simply that he was down on his luck that Christmas season of 1942; his, it turns out, was a story filled with instances of a hard luck life. This was just the kind of story which could obliterate my determination to stay the course and stick to my research goal. I had to take the detour.

Finding "Clews" in Indiana

The one imperative, after staying the course to follow a research goal, is to avoid, at all costs, being lured down a rabbit hole. If you have known me for any length of time at all, you already know those bunny trails are my weakness. Therefore, I strengthen my resolve by reiterating my current research objective: to find a death certificate for a sibling of my second great-grandmother Rachel Riley Boothe. This, I needed to do for the sole purpose of confirming not only the names of her parents, but the location of their birth, as well. That detail had unfortunately been omitted from Rachel's own document.

Thus, after having come up with a blank for Rachel's sister Mary, our only recourse was to trace the line of Rachel's brother William F. Riley. The down side to that effort was my doubt regarding whether I had located the right William Riley in Washington County, Tennessee. Nevertheless, having found a marriage record for one man by that name in said county, I took the chance of following this William and his wife, Eliza Jane.

We've already followed them long enough to track them from Washington County to nearby Greene County in Tennessee. And then, suddenly and with no explanation that I can find, a family with the same exact details disappeared from any spot in Tennessee and were magically whisked to Putnam County, Indiana.

Well, almost exact. The three children's names were the same, and their ages exactly ten years older. Their places of birth matched previous records. The only difference was that Eliza Jane Riley had magically been transformed to Elizabeth Riley. Close enough, but still allowing for plenty of doubt.

Regardless, I decided to pursue this bird-in-hand. After all, what could go wrong? All I needed was to follow the chase, no matter where it led me, until I could locate a death certificate for William Riley.

Silly me. I lost my resolve when I clicked on child number one. William's oldest—a daughter he and his wife had named Mary, just like William's own oldest sister—had been born about 1854 in Tennessee, just as we had seen in previous census records. But when I went onto my account at Ancestry to build her profile, I was greeted by a multitude of those shaky-leaf announcements of hints about Mary's life. Somebody else had already been hard at work augmenting the hint collection.

Unlike the usual hints from the Ancestry service, Mary's hints were not the pedestrian census records or vital records we come to expect. Another subscriber to the service had decided to share the wealth from a linked newspaper archive and had posted several articles. One such article happened to include the name Mary Riley, with the title, "Riley vs. Bugg Paternity Suit."

I reminded myself that this was not part of my research plan.

If, realizing that I really am going to move away from that bait, you feel disappointed, you know exactly how I felt at leaving such a bombshell of a headline. But persevere, we must.

I moved on from Mary's life and list of confirming documents to the next of William's children. This brought me to the daughter he had likely named after his other sister, my second great-grandmother Rachel. William's daughter—her full name was Rachel Elizabeth—led a rather conventional life, it seemed. She married a man in Putnam County having the same given name as her own dad—William Froggett—and with this man, she raised five children, four of whom survived at least until the 1900 census was enumerated.

Perhaps the appearance of normalcy lulled me into taking a further look at this family constellation. After all, my habit is to chart all my ancestors' collateral lines, and the possibility of a DNA match from this line prompted me to start building out Rachel Elizabeth's own line. But there it was again: evidence of a zealous fellow Ancestry subscriber, wanting to share all the newspaper articles gleaned on the children of Rachel Elizabeth and William Froggett.

By the time I had gotten to Rachel's oldest son—also named William—I had already learned that he had been charged with larceny, horse thievery, and attempted murder. And not all at once.

Further, by 1900, this son had managed not one but two successful jail breaks. By the time of an undated newspaper clipping posted in the "hints" section, he had escaped with three other prisoners skillfully enough that officials were confessing to the media that after two weeks of searching, all they could manage to do was find "clews to the whereabouts" of only one or two of the four. Our William and one other turn out to have been "the most difficult of the four men to follow."

Unfortunately, the undated news clipping was from a service I don't subscribe to, so I tried to locate the article through the two services I do use—but with no results. I did, however, find other reports from across the state of Indiana on our recalcitrant William Froggett. He apparently had quite a reputation.

Pulling myself away from this pursuit—remember, it wasn't exactly my research goal—I moved down the list of children and away from research kamikazi. I moved on to another of the Froggett offspring. That didn't help. As it turned out, William Froggett's younger brother had a colorful past of his own. And yet, his was a story which was totally different than his big brother's tale. I may have had good intentions, but you know I can't just bypass this one without saying something... 

Getting the Right Riley

Face it: researching a surname as common as Riley can be a rough go. Add in an equally common given name, and you're gifted with a challenge doubly as difficult. Fortunately—at least, according to surname statistics at Ancestry.com—there were far less Rileys living in Tennessee in the late 1800s than elsewhere.

That, however, can hardly be counted as consolation. In seeking William Riley, son of William Riley and brother to my second great-grandmother, Rachel Riley Boothe, I entered the search with the queasy feeling that, at any time in the process, I might make a mistaken research turn and end up with the wrong William Riley. It would be so easy to do.

Keeping my goal in mind—I wanted to find the death certificate for one of Rachel's siblings to confirm the origin of her parents—my only remaining choice was to pursue Rachel's brother William. Their older sister, Mary, disappeared without a trace after the 1850 census. At least, that was the last place I had found her in her parents' household, back in Sullivan County, Tennessee.

By the time of the 1860 census, the elder William and his wife Cassie had moved to nearby Washington County, Tennessee, where they lived alone as an elderly couple. Their daughter Rachel had by then married my second great-grandfather, William Alexander Boothe. And Rachel's brother William? Well, that's what we'll muddle over, beginning today.

By the time of the 1850 census, young William F. Riley was twenty years of age. He could possibly, within the time before the next census, have been married, considering his age—and hopefully in either of the two counties in which I had found his parents in Tennessee. Of course, there was the wild expanse westward which could have beckoned him, or military service to relocate him (or, worse, cause his demise). But the best research course is to assume all possibilities are plausible and look for the most reasonable one first.

I opted to check first for marriage records in Washington County, since that was where William's parents had moved before 1860. Sure enough, there was a marriage record for a William Riley in 1852 in that same county. On June 10, William Ellis, then the Justice of the Peace, signed to verify that he had performed the duties uniting one William  Riley with a woman named Eliza J. Thompson.

If I could be sure that was the only William F. Riley of marriageable age in Washington County at the time, I'd rest more assured of my little research victory—but given the prevalence of a surname like that, no matter how hard I worked, I could not escape that nagging doubt.

Still, onward! I decided to follow the trail out to the end to see where this William F. Riley would lead me, right or wrong. At least, when I reached my goal at the end—remember, I'm after his death certificate with the prize of the full identity of his parents—I'd quickly learn whether I had barked up the wrong family tree.

The only trouble was these Rileys didn't make things simple for me. For one thing, they didn't stay in the same place for long. The only consolation in finding William F. and Eliza J. Riley in the 1860 census—having moved, once again, to nearby Greene County, Tennessee—was to see that the younger William had picked up his father's trade as shoemaker. Another nice touch was recognizing in the names of his three children two which had been repeated from the Riley household's previous generation: Mary and Rachel.

Onward once again to confirm what became of this William F. Riley—right one or wrong—meant an even greater leap of faith in locating him in the 1870 census. Granted, I found William, his wife Eliza and their three children exactly ten years older for that next census—a feat which, strangely, does not seem to occur with the clockwork precision we'd hope such things should—but I didn't find them in Greene County. Nor did I find them in "the next county over" in Tennessee. The only match I could find for a family with almost all those details exactly intact—Eliza Jane had turned into the more staid Elizabeth—was in a place far removed from Tennessee.

I found them in the western portion of central Indiana, in a town called Bainbridge. What had brought them there?


Above: Image of the 1852 marriage record for William F. Riley and Eliza J. Thompson of Washington County, Tennessee, courtesy of FamilySearch.org.

Brick Wall Strategy: Step Aside

When I couldn't—no matter what I tried—find any further information on the parents of my second great-grandmother, Rachel Riley Boothe, the next best tactic is to attempt gleaning the same details from another member of the family. Thus stuck, it was time to step aside and look at Rachel's siblings.

I had the details on the household from the 1850 census—in fact, that was the earliest record I could find on the family. Perhaps, given Rachel's parents' ages, there may have been older children who had, by then, left the household, but at least in that 1850 snapshot, I had the names of two others in Rachel's generation.

Of course, the details seemed squishy, at least if you think about what the census record showed for 1850. There in Sullivan County, Tennessee, William and Cassandra Riley were listed as fifty years of age and sixty, respectively—at least, if that was the correct reading of the handwriting.

And yet, shoemaker William and his sixty year old wife had a daughter—my second great-grandmother Rachel—who was only sixteen years of age, plus another child of the tender age of three. Something in me wants to do the math, but the death certificate for Rachel providing these parents' names restrains my doubt for the time being.

Of course, the 1850 census didn't provide any explanation for just how each person in a household was related, so that three year old child could have had any family connection. As for the other two children in the Riley home—Mary and William F.—I could at least hypothesize that they were my Rachel's siblings. And those would be the ones I'd be most interesting in tracing.

Problem number one: starting with the oldest child, twenty five year old Mary, I ended up with absolutely no further details. True, by the time of the 1860 census, she was out of her parents' home. But by 1860, her parents had moved to the next county, Washington. In those ten years, Mary could have seen her life story take any of several possible next steps. She could have married someone in Sullivan County and raised a family there—or died in childbirth, leaving not a trace nor a descendant. Or she could have moved with her parents to their new home and married someone there. Finally, she could have remained single, continuing in either county alone (which is doubtful) or died as an unmarried woman in either location.

Only problem: I found no record for any of those possible scenarios.

Since my goal in pursuing Mary was solely to locate any further information on her parents, I decided to move on to other research possibilities for now. After all, Rachel and Mary did have a brother, William F. Riley. He, too, was of marriageable age shortly after the 1850 census, which prompted me to look for his marriage record in either Sullivan or Washington Counties. Besides, he, too, had not been included in his parents' household for the 1860 census.

Following the younger William's story, as it turned out, provided not only a good supply of family details, but also evidence why the tactic of researching collateral lines comes with a caution: it can easily supply a slippery slope leading the unsuspecting researcher to the brink of rabbit trails. That, indeed, was what ended up sucking me into a messy story.


Above: Image from the 1850 U.S. Census for William and Cassandra Riley household courtesy FamilySearch.org.

Gathering Our Census

What do you do when you can't find anything about your brick wall ancestor? You gather what you can find, lay it all out, and look for clues. Then, you branch out and look—yep—for more clues.

I really didn't know anything more about my second great-grandmother Rachel Riley, wife of William Alexander Boothe, except that she was his second wife, and that he met and married her in Tennessee, rather than his former home in Virginia. That's not much of a start for research. Back in the pre-Internet, snail-mail days, it was a real victory just to finally locate Rachel's death certificate—and then to find those words any genealogist hates to see on a government document: "unknown."

Still, it wasn't too bad a discovery; the "don't know" response was in reply to the question of where her parents were born. At least the informant, Rachel's oldest son William Horace Booth, knew his grandparents' names. As far as he was concerned, his mom's father was named William Riley. And William Riley's wife was Cassandra Fincher.

As far as where Rachel was born, though, the mistaken report of South Carolina instead of North Carolina added some extra time to the research process. That's where I learned to look at each decennial census report to see if the "facts" agree with each other over the decades.

Sure enough, tracing Rachel back over her life's trajectory, I could finally see some consistency in reports of her native state. But if I had just looked at the 1880 census, for instance, it, too, would have pointed me to South Carolina. And if I hadn't clicked through to see the actual document for 1860, the transcription (at least at Ancestry) would have told me her place of birth was in Nebraska—a detail pointing me in a totally incorrect direction. Other than that, the census consensus seemed to be that Rachel had come from North Carolina, as had her parents and siblings.

It was, in fact, a good thing Rachel had siblings. Searching for a name like William Riley—even if I could get the right state location—would be challenging. I was thankful to realize, as I discovered the given name of Rachel's mother was Cassandra, that that was the same name given to my great-grandmother, Rachel's daughter. As I was to find out, the family did favor use of namesakes.

I was able to locate Rachel's parents in the 1850, 1860, and 1870 census—although, in those later decades, William and Cassie lived by themselves as an older couple, their children all gone from their household. After leaving North Carolina, the Rileys had taken a predictable migration pathway, first to Sullivan County, right up against the Virginia border and not far from the mountain border of western North Carolina. From there, they moved across another county line to settle in Washington County.

That was where the trail went cold for my Riley ancestors. I have yet to find any death records for William or Cassie Riley. Of course, I could trace my direct line ancestor, their daughter, all the way from that point until her own death in 1915. But those "don't know" responses on family documents didn't help me figure out anything further on Rachel's parents.

The next option, of course, is to follow collateral lines, of which I had a few choices. I could take them in order, from oldest sibling on down, follow their own family histories, and upon discovering the date of their own death, look up what someone reported for their parents' names. Hopefully, this tactic would produce another certificate that not only confirmed Rachel's parents' names, but their location of birth, too.

That would be the reasonable approach to take. But that didn't guarantee it would be the successful route to my needed answers. You know there will always be other roadblocks on our way to smash through these brick walls standing in the middle of our research route. It was time to branch out to a side line to look for those needed clues.

Living the Life of the Rileys

Leave it to an unexplained DNA match to send me scurrying back to the ol' pedigree drawing board to check on connections. Now that there are so many tools available to help us link mystery cousins to the right branch in our family tree, I had to see if I could at least place this fellow test-taker on the right side of the tree. Using "Shared Matches" on Ancestry.com, I managed to discover one thing about this person's unknown-to-me surname: it belonged to a branch on my maternal side which was sadly lacking in genealogical elbow grease.

True fact: some branches of our family trees are more equal than others—at least, more equally attended to. Apparently, I had neglected my due diligence on this particular branch, which likely explained why I didn't recognize this DNA cousin's surname. I had a long way to go before I could connect it to the more familiar names in my family's history. It was time to amend that research oversight.

Admittedly, I had a good excuse for what I neglected. While the research would have meant paying attention to the collateral lines of my second great-grandmother—admittedly, not that far a stretch—it was this same second great-grandmother's husband who had already given me ample research fits. She was the second wife of William Alexander Boothe, the widower who snuck out of town, somewhere in Virginia, to set up housekeeping with his two young sons in Tennessee, back before 1850. It wasn't until after he arrived in Washington County, Tennessee, that he gave any thought to finding an appropriate step-mother for his children.

That second wife came with a package of research problems of her own. Some other researchers who chased this same question long ago assured me her maiden name was one of either two possibilities, adding to my lack of confidence about proceeding with this ancestor chase. One researcher assured me this woman's father was likely involved in horse thievery and had escaped justice by crossing the state line—a story I wasn't entirely sure I could buy at that point, but, hey, there weren't enough online resources available twenty-plus years ago and this researcher lived closer to Tennessee than I did. But it did make a plausible excuse for why the family's name might have changed.

Fast forward to this year, and my decision to make amends for my research neglect. I had to revisit that branch of the family—a mere stub on the pedigree chart, having left off with my second great-grandmother's possible maiden name and that of her parents, according to her 1915 death certificate.

Keeping in mind that even duly-authorized government documents can indeed contain mistakes (such as her possible birth location listed as South Carolina)—as well as other gems, such as Rachel Boothe's occupation ("Old Lady")—I decided to take the maiden name provided on that government document and use it as a tentative hypothesis, so I could get to work on piecing together a plausible tree for her family.

That decision launched me into a multi-generational tour of a branch of the family I had never before encountered. Unlike those warm fuzzy family stories of local-boy-done-good, such as the Flowerland story we stumbled upon a while ago, some family histories include episodes that tempt us to sweep them under the carpet. But our families, if we look long and hard enough, will provide us with a wide variety of instances of the entire gamut of the human condition. We need to decide how to face up to that fact.

In this case, my second great-grandmother owed her existence to a couple known—at least in Tennessee—as William Riley and Cassandra Fincher. Where they really came from—and by what name folks there knew them—I can't say at this point. But I followed the trail of their descendants and discovered it certainly was capable of providing me with at least a few stories for my effort.  

Following the Dotted Line

Some pedigree paths lead clearly from the current generation to those sought-after ancestors. Mine, sadly, do not. Even my Virginia ancestors—the ones I'm currently chasing—have turned out to be more stubborn than the stereotypical genteel aristocratic leanings of Virginia roots might have suggested. However, let us not presume that their Virginia origin, despite bestowing upon them citizenship at the Center of the Universe, confirms that aristocratic status. Among this untraceable lot may lurk forefathers wanted for skipping out on debt or, at the very least, pushing the edges of legality.

Let's look, today, at one of my second great-grandfathers, whom we suspect may have done just that: skipped town when bankruptcy stared him down. Tomorrow, we'll follow up with another Virginian who camped out just on the other side of permissible Virginian territory. Either way, it's easy to see why the paper trail didn't quite keep pace with these escaping ancestors.

The story, as I originally heard it nearly twenty years ago, came to me from another family researcher. He was a second cousin to my mother, though I doubt she ever met him or was even aware of his existence. He was, however, a determined and diligent family historian who left a trail of research information on the Boothe line all over the then-nascent Internet. After seeing his posts on such relics of pre-web existence as GeoCities, I finally got in touch with him by email, followed by telephone.

What I learned from this researcher was that this man—my second great-grandfather—was known as William Alexander Boothe, and that, though living in northeastern Tennessee, had been born in a place called Nansemond County, Virginia. He had come to Tennessee not as a single man, but as a widower with two young sons, having left Virginia, according to my researching Boothe cousin, on account of some bad debts after the death of his wife. My informant believed William Alexander Boothe may have fancied horses a bit more than his pocket could afford, and perhaps had squandered his money on that era's equivalent of bright, shiny sports cars in hopes of improving his social status.

For whatever reason, his midlife-crisis ruse didn't work, and the widower Boothe made his escape from Nansemond—relatively close to the border with North Carolina—to Washington County, Tennessee, nestled in the corner between the borders with North Carolina and Tennessee.

While I've been told he was born in 1812, I've yet to find the names of his parents—or even the name of his first wife. In census records for his newly-adopted home in Tennessee—in 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880—he consistently used the name Alexander Boothe rather than William. That, likewise, was the name registered for his marriage to my second great-grandmother, Rachel Riley. It wasn't until I had located an entry at Find A Grave that I saw the use of the name William.

Revisiting that Find A Grave memorial now reveals that someone has posted the name of his parents—though I have yet to find any paper trail to support that contention. And that is my problem: I don't want to presume, based on someone else's post on a website. I need to find these documents for myself.

Finding them, however, will be a challenge. If, for instance, my William Alexander Boothe was truly born in Nansemond County, Virginia, that county is no longer in existence. And while some records are now held at the Independent City Courthouse in Suffolk, civil records for birth and marriage were only kept beginning with the year 1853, eliminating any chance to find his first marriage record, and certainly any hope of finding a birth record for William Alexander or even his sons, both of whom were born before 1850. I won't mourn that problem much, though, for even if they had been kept, those records would have been lost in a fire there in 1866.

Fleeing financial woes might have been bad news for my second great-grandfather, but that might have turned into good news for a researcher like me: while governments might not have kept the best records in the past for births, they certainly took care to track the flow of money, especially when it came to taxes. If Mr. Boothe skipped out on account of money issues, there is sure to be a paper trail—or perhaps even a newspaper report—to point me in the right direction.

While we may not mention genealogical research and skip tracing in the same breath, such search techniques might come in handy in seeking the path of my second great-grandfather from Virginia to Tennessee. That—and a thorough overview of available record sets from that era of Virginia history—are some of the main reasons I'm looking forward to that class in Virginia research at SLIG 2020. However, you can be sure I won't wait until January to begin the investigation. 

Above: Map showing the now-extinct Nansemond County, just above the border with North Carolina, from an 1895 map of Virginia; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.