Certainty Without Documentation

 

It's the end of another month, and I'm ready to grumble. My goal for this month was to break through the brick wall keeping me from discovering my fourth great-grandfather Job Tyson's parents. Though I've become weary with reading the scribbled handwriting in court records, I've yet to find any documentation to confirm what others have asserted in either today's online resources or the published reports of past generations. 

That tour of the documents has brought me through Pitt County in North Carolina, Beaufort County in South Carolina, and Wayne and Glynn Counties in Georgia—not to mention that detour to follow his wife's genealogy back to her Sheffield grandfather in Duplin County, North Carolina. Though it was not lost upon me that Pitt County was once known as Beaufort County, North Carolina—a possible source of confusion for researchers—I have not unearthed one document on Job Tyson's related family lines which could point me backwards in time, with the possible exception of his father-in-law West Sheffield's 1830 will.

Yet, in reviewing genealogies which include this family, I notice how certain those reports sound about their assertions concerning Job's roots. How do so many people seem to know this? If they have found a source to support that published information, it would help to be able to review such records. 

With the last day of this short month drawing closer, I doubt I'll find any success in continuing the search in such a limited time. As we complete this week, we'll lay aside this research goal and check in on a few other projects which I've been working on, behind the scenes, from earlier this year.

Since We're in the Neighborhood

If this month's research project—finding the origin of my fourth great-grandfather Job Tyson—has led me to the discovery that Job's wife may have come from Duplin County, North Carolina, we might as well take a closer look. Since we're now in the neighborhood, I thought I'd do some exploring. It helps to get oriented to the places our ancestors once called home.

For that task, my first stop is to glean an overview from various "wiki" resources. Among them are the Wikipedia entry for Duplin County, and the FamilySearch wiki for the same location. 

Using Wikipedia is one quick way to learn about a location from a more modern point of view. County entries usually contain an overview of the place, as far as current-day details are concerned. These entries usually also provide a map and, more suited to my purposes, a brief history of the county which, depending on the time frame of each particular ancestor, may still shed some light on my search. One basic detail I look for is the date in which the county was formed, and which counties preceded that formation, in case I need to delve further into records created in a different location prior to that point.

From the Wikipedia entry for Duplin County, I can see that county was carved out of New Hanover County in 1750. Since Job Tyson's father-in-law West Sheffield was likely born in 1747, that tells me I might need to explore New Hanover County records as well—if any church or land records before that time had survived the series of record destructions incurred over the next couple centuries. More to my current pursuit, however, would be the marriage record for West Sheffield's daughter Sidnah to my brick wall ancestor, Job Tyson.

Regarding record survival over the ages, I generally turn to my second resource for scoping out the neighborhood: the FamilySearch wiki. The specific resource there for Duplin County shows me the battle against the ravages of time may have put me on the losing side. There are land records from 1749 and court records from 1784, but the FamilySearch wiki included a disappointing note: "Many court records are missing."

Still, that means some court records may still be accessible. Although I've been forewarned, now that I know, it's worth a try to check it out. 

Bypassing "Go"

 

Remember that old game, Monopoly, where if you drew the "go to jail" ticket, the instructions told you "do not pass Go; do not collect $200." If the game I've been playing this month were called "Geneapoly," that's exactly the card I'd be dealt now. I don't seem to be able to move anywhere. I'm stuck in genealogy jail.

Since I haven't been able to push back time far enough to find my fourth great-grandfather Job Tyson in records before his arrival in Georgia at the beginning of the 1800s, I thought of a way to bypass "Go"—I could try one other variation on the F.A.N. Club concept. I could look deeper into his wife's family history.

Job's first wife, Sidnah—also called Sidney—Sheffield, was said to have been born in North Carolina. That location was the same as the place where Job Tyson may have originated. Granted, I've tried two different times to locate any mention of Job in North Carolina—and failed. But I'm willing to enter this playing field from yet another angle.

I already have seen mention of Sidnah's father, West Sheffield, being from North Carolina. In fact, he was said to have been a Patriot by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Not that the applications for his eligible descendants all perfectly documented that assertion; even there, the D.A.R. has found problems. 

No matter. That organization also pointed out one other detail of interest: that West Sheffield's father was also listed as a Patriot. Sure enough, looking at the D.A.R. website, I found an entry for John Sheffield, West Sheffield's dad, as well.

In that file, his origin was said to be in North Carolina. But none of this Pitt County stuff that had waylaid me for so long in my search for Job Tyson last week. This time, the North Carolina location was said to be Duplin County, instead.

Armed with this information, I headed to FamilySearch.org and their Full Text Search option to look for a Sheffield will that mentioned Job Tyson's father-in-law, West Sheffield. And just as the D.A.R. entry for John Sheffield had implied, there was a will in Duplin County for him, dated the same day, November 22, 1790, as the D.A.R. entry had noted. Added bonus: the will contained mention of a son named West Sheffield.

If West Sheffield's daughter Sidnah was said to have been born in North Carolina, could that specific location have also been in Duplin County? What about her marriage record? And if her future husband found his bride in North Carolina, does that mean I can find Job Tyson in Duplin County, as well? If nothing else, this discovery points me in another direction than those failed attempts at finding him in Pitt County. Maybe I can get out of Geneapoly jail, after all.

Friends, Associates, and Matchmakers

 

What better way to determine an ancestor's origin than to discover where he met his future spouse? If puzzling over just how Job Tyson first met the good friends who witnessed his will didn't provide us any guidance, there are others in the Tyson "F.A.N. Club"—friends, associates, and neighbors—who could still help point the way for us. Perhaps they even played the role of matchmakers.

One of those other F.A.N. Club possibilities was a man named West Sheffield, father of Sidnah Sheffield, who eventually became Job Tyson's wife. Fortunately for us in this exploration, unlike Sidnah who, like most women of the early 1800s, was virtually invisible, her father West Sheffield left a paper trail of useful documents.

Since West Sheffield served in the American Revolution, there are some records concerning key points of his life. He was, for instance, recipient of both land grants for his service in the war, as well as headrights for land in Camden County, Georgia as early as 1812. While Camden County was near Job Tyson's Georgia residence in Glynn County, Job's marriage to West Sheffield's daughter about 1790 may have indicated that the two families met elsewhere, as so far, I have found no records of residence in Georgia before that early 1800s date.

Job Tyson's wife outlived him by over twenty years. Fortunately for us, Sidnah lived until 1855, leaving us a trace of her reported earlier whereabouts through her entry in the 1850 census. To find that, though, means learning that after Job's death, Sidnah quickly remarried. Thus in 1850, by then twice-widowed, Sidnah, now surnamed Peck, was living in her own household next door to her son John Tison. She reported for herself her birthplace in—wait for it—North Carolina.

The question, of course, would be whether Sidnah met her intended, Job Tyson, back in her native state, or somewhere else. Keeping in mind that her father West Sheffield was a Patriot, I checked for his record through the D.A.R. website. There, his record stated that while he served from Georgia, he was born in North Carolina in 1747. Indeed, looking at a published biographical sketch of West Sheffield, obtained from volume 3 of Folks Huxford's Pioneers of Wiregrass Georgia, the writer gave Sidnah's year of birth as 1776. Was the Sheffield family living in North Carolina then, if her father served in Georgia?

By the time of Sidnah's wedding, it's unclear where her family was located. I have so far been unable to locate a marriage record. Still, if we fast-forward to the 1850 census for each of her oldest three daughters, they were reported to have been born in the earliest years of the 1800s in Georgia, not in North Carolina.

With that possibility exhausted of finding any link to tie Job Tyson back to his parents' home in any location other than Georgia, there is one more lead to explore for this examination of the Tyson F.A.N. Club. When I reviewed West Sheffield's own will, I noticed a familiar name pop up among the witnesses: McClellan. That, as I had mentioned yesterday, was a surname appearing twice in Job Tyson's own will—first for witness Charles McClellan, and then another entry for someone listed originally as "J. H." McClellan, and then spelled out as Joseph H. McClellan.

Looking now at West Sheffield's own will from 1830, someone listed as "J. A." McClellan, then signed as Joseph McClellan, once again made an appearance. Could this Joseph be the same as the witness in the Tyson will? If so, we need to see what we can find about the origin of those McClellans. 

Meeting Job's Family

 

If a straightforward search into my fourth great-grandfather Job Tison's roots yields us nothing but disagreeing assertions, perhaps, as has been suggested, we can glean some clues from his children. After all, some of Job's younger children were born in a time frame which yielded them a ripe old age coinciding with the romantic reminiscing about the "good old days" back at the start of the nation. Perhaps we can find some reports that way.

First, though, we need to examine just who Job's children were—and, in case that yields us nothing, also explore Job's wife's siblings. I find it curious that mentions of Job Tison were often coupled with reports of his father-in-law, West Sheffield, making me wonder whether there is more to that connection than meets the eye. Could Job have been orphaned and taken under his father-in-law's wings? Could this have been an example of an old-fashioned betrothal? We may also want to trace what became of Job's Sheffield in-laws, as well.

Job's 1824 will begins a long process of settling his estate—which went on for years, including a second marriage of his wife and executrix, Sidnah. Job was particularly careful to attend to the needs of his youngest children—then minor and unmarried—Susan, William, John, and Theresa. We also learn from his will that he had a son named Aaron, who had barely come of age when his father died, and two older daughters, the soon-to-be-married Sidnah (my direct line) and just-married Melinda. One last detail was the discovery of an unnamed older—and, by the time of Job's will, deceased—daughter who had married a man by the name of Carter, to whom she had borne a son and a daughter.

For each of these, we'll take some time next week to explore what can be found in those hidden nooks across the Internet concerning any of Job Tison's children—and, for that matter, his wife, Sidnah Sheffield Tison Peck, as well. 

 

Speaking of . . .

 

Yesterday, I was fairly lusting over the twelve volume set of Pioneers of Wiregrass Georgia. Today, I think I've gotten over it. As luck would have it, I didn't need to actually fly to Salt Lake City to access the entire collection at the Family History Library there; all I needed do was take a look at their website.

While true, all twelve volumes are indeed at the Family History Library, a little poking around online showed me enough of a snippet to dampen those flames of bookish desire. For the book's entry on Job Tison's father-in-law, West Sheffield, another researcher had posted a snippet from page 295 of the third volume of Folks Huxford's massive work.

In the very first line of the entry for West Sheffield, I spotted details I could easily work to verify—or discount—right from home. According to Pioneers of Wiregrass Georgia,

West Sheffield of Wayne (now Brantley) County, was a son of John Sheffield, R. S., of Duplin County, N. C., and was born there Dec. 13, 1747. He died at his home in Wayne County, Sept. 22, 1830.

True enough, West Sheffield died on September 22, 1830, and his will was presented in court in Wayne County on the first day of November in that same year. The rest of that biographical entry, however, needs some closer scrutiny.

The least of our concerns is the assertion that Wayne County is now Brantley County. True, Brantley was carved from Wayne—but that didn't occur until 1920. Even if the original land upon which West Sheffield built his home now stands in that location, it is to Wayne County that we need to turn for records on his life story in the early 1800s.

But let's get down to more serious doubts—in particular, whether West Sheffield was from Duplin County, North Carolina, and, more importantly, if he was indeed son of a man there named John Sheffield.

I took the "R. S." after John Sheffield's name to stand for Revolutionary Soldier, though of course, I don't have access to the volumes to seek out any reader's guide to abbreviations used in the Wiregrass works. It is easy enough to see what can be found on any confirmed Patriot: just look at the website hosted by the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

There, I find two entries for a John Sheffield. Fortunately, one is specific to a man by that name from Duplin County. Things seem to be going swimmingly so far—until, that is, we realize the entry is bathed in red ink. There seem to be problems with this Patriot's record. Prime among the objections is the obvious fact that a man born "circa 1740" would be hard pressed to father a son born in 1747. The D.A.R. record comments on this aberration.

Of course, West Sheffield has his own listing as a Patriot at the D.A.R. website, as well. An interesting comment added to that entry was his residence listed as the Beaufort District of South Carolina, bringing us back around to that other puzzle for the extended family.

While twelve volumes of biographical and genealogical information may seem, to those of us far from research repositories, to be a gold mine of information, we need to keep in mind that despite being published works, books can contain errors in research, or even copy errors. They are simply guides pointing a possible way for us to continue our own quest for answers.

  

The Déjà vu of Wiregrass Country

 

It was only yesterday, when perusing my Twitter feed, that I came across Judy Russell's pertinent comment in The Legal Genealogist:

Genealogy is as much a matter of geography as it is of history.

Of course, she had no idea I was on the search for the whereabouts of my fourth great-grandfather's parents somewhere in North or South Carolina; she was looking for her, ahem, "German" ancestors.

While the point is well taken—as we've already discussed here—that borders do move from time to time, geography is a pertinent part of genealogy for more reasons than those shifting borders. As I find in so many of my family history puzzles, it helps to know the places where our ancestors settled. Like, really get to know them.

Instead of trying to trace my line backwards through time—following unsubstantiated reports that my fourth great-grandfather Job Tison came from Pitt County, North Carolina—I want to tack in a different direction. Here's why.

As I explored the place in Georgia where Job Tison and his future father-in-law, West Sheffield, came to call home, learning about Glynn County and Wayne County gave me this strange, déjà vu feeling, as if I had been there before. I guarantee you, the only time I've ever been to Georgia was to fly through the Atlanta airport when my original wintertime flight home had been cancelled due to predictable weather eruptions. In other words: I've never set sights on Georgia from any way other than an aerial perspective. So how could reading about those two counties make me feel as if I had been there before?

Simple: I learned about Wiregrass Country.

Glynn County, where Job Tison settled, and neighboring Wayne County where West Sheffield established his home, were considered to be part of what is called Wiregrass Country. Named for the aristida stricta (or "wiregrass") warm season grass native to the coastal plains of the Carolinas, the region in which it best grows stretches from there southward to Georgia and the Florida panhandle, and westward toward Alabama. 

The wiregrass region used to cover far more of Georgia than it does today, and it featured some other characteristics which I also found strangely familiar. The sandy soil of the region featured one additional familiar feature: the longleaf pine. Far more prevalent in that wiregrass region in past centuries, the longleaf pine was useful not only for timber, but for turpentine. And that is precisely why the look of the land seems so familiar to me: I had seen this same geographic appearance over the miles while driving to the ancestral home of my McClellan line in Suwannee County, Florida—where Job Tison's daughter Sidnah moved after her marriage to George Edmund McClellan around 1830.

Perhaps I am belaboring this point, but it is for good reason. Not only have people sought out new places to live which seemed familiar to them, but those who were accustomed to living off the land developed ways to assess whether new territories had the natural resources to enable them to continue making their living with the skills they already possessed. I'll never forget Mark Lowe's instruction on southern research at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy, advising his students seeking their disappearing ancestors to pay attention to soil maps. If those ancestors moved, they likely removed to a place with the same farming conditions required by the crops they had raised back home.

As it turns out, there was a particular migration pattern bringing people into the southeastern Georgia Wiregrass Country. While I'm still working on framing that picture, it appears one typical inbound route brought settlers from the Carolinas, seeking a familiar environment in which to engage in "self-sufficient" farming and livestock herding on cheap land with open range and relatively few other settlers.

While that description doesn't necessarily solve my research dilemma—were Job's parents from North or South Carolina?—it does at least warm me up to the idea that he didn't originate from another location.

There is another bright side to exploring this geographical angle. Once learning about Wiregrass Country, one can't help but realize that the land's unofficial moniker inspired a massive biographical work to catalog the many Euro-American settlers to the region. Called Pioneers of Wiregrass Georgia, the original seven volume set was written by Folks Huxford, with five additional volumes compiled by the Huxford Genealogical Society.

As you can imagine, obtaining all twelve volumes can be a prohibitive process—though a trip to Homerville, Georgia, during their pandemic-limited hours could gain you entrance to the Huxford collection of notes and books which became the impetus of what is now billed as "one of the largest privately owned genealogical libraries in the United States." Not on your itinerary for 2022? No problem: you can check the Pioneers of Wiregrass Georgia index online for your ancestor's name, then tap the book's listing at WorldCat.org in search of the right volume closer to home.

I've already checked for Job Tison: he is mentioned in volumes four and five. West Sheffield? He's there also, in volume three. And why stop there? A glutton for more research resources, I checked for Charles McClellan, father to Job's future son-in-law George as well as witness to Job's will, and even another promising connection by the name of Andrew McClellan.

Now, all I have to do is actually find a library which contains all those volumes. If there's nothing closer, looks like that will be something to add to my to-do list for my next trip to Salt Lake City. I know there's a library there which can help...  

Where in the World was Job Tison?

 

Finding a validating census record may seem a commonplace ritual among those researching their family history. We have many finding aids to help us plug in a name and narrow the possibilities to just the right candidate—if we are researching our more modern ancestors. When it comes to seeking someone named Job Tison in 1790, we're facing an entirely different situation.

First, consider the liberties taken by the forerunners of our modern census enumerator. In 1790, an enumerator may have spelled such a man's name as Job, recalling the famed subject of the biblical tale of woe and endurance. Or he may have added an additional vowel to render the spelling Joab.

That's just for the given name. What about the surname? There is much to wiggle in the wiggle room there. When I first encountered records of my fourth great-grandfather, his surname was reported as Tyson, a surname spelling many readily recognize today. However, in other documents, Job's surname might be spelled as Tison, or even Teson.

Point well taken: be flexible with these early document searches, especially if looking at transcriptions rather than digitized originals.

So...if we open ourselves up to the possibility that our Job Tison could be anywhere in the fledgling nation of the United States in 1790, where might his name show up? Granted, this is a risky question to pose; the results to such a search could, theoretically, be overwhelming, and not very helpful. With that caveat, let's try our hand at such a search.

As it turns out, the only places where I could find any spelling variations for the name Job Tison were not in Georgia where he later resided, but in North and South Carolina. The entry in Pitt County, North Carolina—location of the home historically reported to be his origin—is no surprise to us, given what we've already discovered. However, the other result—in the Beaufort District of South Carolina, was unexpected, as was the lack of any entries for Georgia.

Let's take a look at these. First, the Beaufort entry. I found it interesting that there were two different entries for the Tison surname. Along with Job's—household with one "free white" male "of 16 years and upward" and one female—there was a replicated count for a man by the name of Aaron Tison, as well. I find that interesting, considering that our Job named his oldest son—at least the oldest one listed in his 1824 will—by that same name: Aaron. Perhaps this was a sign.

On the other hand, there was a listing for a "Joab Tyson" in the 1790 census for Pitt County, North Carolina, exactly where later history accounts indicated. That census entry also showed a two-person household: one male and one female. Along with the Joab Tyson entry, there were others listed on the same page, both Tysons and Tisons. In fact, there were several Tysons, as well as Tisons, throughout all of 1790 North Carolina.

Does that satisfy the contention that our Job Tison originated in Pitt County? I'm not quite ready to concede that, for several reasons. First, let's fast forward to the most recent decade in which we can find our Job Tison listed in the U.S. Census: for 1820. As it turns out, Pitt County happened to show that (presumably) same Joab Tyson—this time, spelled as Tison—in 1820. However, we already know our Job Tison was living—and about to be dying—in his home in Glynn County, Georgia, during that same enumeration, this time, listed as Job Tyson.

Yet another reason to doubt the Job Tison version appearing in North Carolina: although the 1790 census gathered names of heads of households sixteen years of age and older—and if our Job was born in 1770, he would certainly have shown as older than sixteen—he could very well have not been considered a head of household, if living with his parents or within another household.

The other consideration which holds me back from wholesale acceptance of the Pitt County theory is the report of Job's marriage to Sidnah Sheffield. Granted, I have no document to secure the date. The only record I have is a copy from a family Bible—and even that record entry was not contemporaneous with the event, itself, being embedded within entries for marriages as late as 1892 (the note immediately above Sidnah's wedding entry) and 1913 (the note immediately following her entry).

However, prior to Sidnah Sheffield's marriage to Job Tison in 1790—or whenever it was—she would theoretically be living in her father's household. So where was that? West Sheffield's name does not appear in the 1790 census—at least, that I can find—either in North Carolina or Georgia. The closest entries I could find were for two households of John "Shuffil"—junior and senior—in Moore County, North Carolina, and the home of a possibly widowed Elizabeth "Shuffield" and her six boys under sixteen in North Carolina's Duplin County. The latter county, according to an entry at Ancestry.com, included a signature ten years earlier on a petition to the General Assembly listed as West Shuffield. Though I'd prefer to see that on an original document than a transcription—much less a note about a record—I'll take that as a clue.

With all that exploration, I can't say anything conclusive yet, but I sure want to explore those North Carolina counties more closely for any sign of our Tison and Sheffield families.

How 'bout a Third Look?

 

The search for information on distant relatives—such as my quest to discover more of the biographical details of my fourth great-grandfather, Job Tison—becomes more complicated, the further back in time we reach. Given that Job Tison was born in 1770—where is the question, and to whom—we are stretching back quite a while, indeed.

Last Friday, we took a second look at what I've already entered in my genealogy database for Job Tison and his family. Thankfully, posting my research dilemmas online through the medium of a genealogy blog makes for some helpful crowdsourcing, and readers have risen to the challenge. Perhaps this is one way to remind us all to take a third look at resources as we grapple with our brick wall research questions.

In an email after Friday's post, fellow genea-blogger Charles Purvis of Carolina Family Roots advised me to widen my search by taking it to resources online like Google Books. And blogger Kathy Duncan of Porch Swings, Fireflies, and Jelly Jars suggested broadening the scope by looking "downstream" at possible published later-life recollections of Job's children or grandchildren, such as this brief bio of Job's son found in the February 19, 1879, Brunswick Advertiser.

There are indeed several other resources we can explore during the remainder of this month, but these helpful suggestions remind me that, in preparation, it would be helpful in that "third look" to review just what we already know about Job Tison's family.

In brief—and I'll share more as the week progresses—I have found that several researchers claimed Job Tison was "from" Pitt County, North Carolina. The problem is that none of the mentions of this detail seem to include documentation to verify that assertion. Worse, now that I've taken Kathy's advice in reading the article she mentioned, I see the Brunswick Advertiser stated back in 1879 that Job Tison—and, incidentally, his wife Sidnah Sheffield—were born "on the line of Virginia and North Carolina," yet that is certainly not an apt descriptor for the location of Pitt County.

True, that one biographical sketch for John Mason Berrien Tison featured details for just one of Job Tison's descendants. I have seven other Tison children's lives to explore—and undoubtedly, I've missed maybe one or two of the earliest of his children. Plus, going on the F.A.N. Club theory that Job Tison may well have shadowed his father-in-law's migration pathway, I can do likewise for Sidnah's father, West Sheffield and (especially) his many sons.

In the meantime, tomorrow we'll strike out to explore the possible census entries from the Virginia-North Carolina border southward to see whether there are any signs of either Job Tison or West Sheffield as early as the first census in 1790. If nothing else, that exercise will confirm or reject the reports that Job Tison had moved to Glynn County, Georgia, by the time he was fifteen.

Not Where They Found it

 

Footnotes are great for helping other researchers replicate the paper trail that led you to the family history answer you've been wrestling with for days (weeks, years). When it comes to noting an online resource, though, the troubles begin when URLs start shifting.

URLs—those online addresses with the unwieldy official title, "Uniform Resource Locators"—apparently can change over time, as webmasters rearrange the organization of their website. Clicking on a hyperlinked address is like magic: it can whisk you immediately to the location of a specific file—if, that is, the file hasn't since changed its address. Sometimes, though, the promised document other researchers might have told you about in the past is not where they found it anymore.

Keeping that URL address steady over time, no matter what, is like a gold standard, in my opinion. Of course, that's provided the specific online record we're seeking has been cited with a URL. In some cases, only the descriptor of the document set might be provided—and if that footnote's resource undergoes reorganization, well, there you go once again. Just because we find a footnote for the document we covet doesn't mean the document will still live at that same spot when we go to find it.

Take my fourth great-grandfather Job Tison's trail from, supposedly, North Carolina to Georgia. Since every mention of the Tison name seems to be coupled with a report on his father-in-law, Revolutionary War Patriot West Sheffield, I figured I'd add that name to my FAN Club research approach.

It might have seemed a stroke of luck to stumble upon an article mentioning West Sheffield's extensive estate papers in a 2017 post at Legacy Family Tree's blog, but alas, I couldn't replicate the footnote's way marker once I took it for a spin at FamilySearch.org. I did, however, locate the Sheffield will itself in the browse-only online collection. Sadly, none of the juicy details were in that part of the file, though—only the factual litany of descendants which, admittedly, does serve to help in the strictest genealogical sense.

None of that, however, serves to point me backwards in time to that mystery spot in North Carolina where West Sheffield was said to have originated. Nor did it help me, by any hint of association, discern where West Sheffield's daughter Sidnah might have pledged her troth to my Job Tison.

Fortunately, however, the Legacy Family Tree author was not the only one to willingly share resources. Once again, another Ancestry.com subscriber came to my rescue, posting a copy of the same marriage document which Michele Lewis had reported in the Legacy Family Tree Legacy News article. And in this case—thankfully—the researcher also noted the exact URL so I could find it at FamilySearch.org, too.

Of course, it's not the documented marriage woes of that other daughter of West Sheffield that I'm interested in, but merely a hope that something else in the apparently extensive file might provide me a clue as to his origin—or at least a tip regarding his family's complicated timeline that brought them from that unknown location in North Carolina to their final home in Wayne County, Georgia.

Now that I've found the spot, I'm in for a long season of reading up on all the details.

Becoming a FAN

 

A most useful concept in family history research techniques can be the "FAN" Club, an acronym representing the Friends, Associates, and Neighbors of our difficult to trace target ancestors. In the case of my fourth great-grandfather, I'm beginning to realize that his FAN Club may be just what I need to find the answer to my question, "Where in North Carolina was Job Tison born?"

Granted, we've already read one article which stated he was from Pitt County, North Carolina. But if Job Tison was born in 1770, it's a far stretch to simply take an author's word for the fact from a report penned in 1933. I'd like a bit more information on how that detail was garnered, thank you.

According to local historian Margaret Davis Cate's column in the July 7, 1933, Brunswick News, Job Tison arrived in Glynn County, Georgia, about 1785. That would mean he was only fifteen when he got there. Did he come alone? Probably unlikely, given his age. That's the first clue that I need to look around for others who might have been traveling partners.

I noticed the same article in the Brunswick News detailed the history of Job's eventual father-in-law, West Sheffield. Interestingly, West Sheffield also came from somewhere in North Carolina, but unlike Job, had settled in nearby Wayne County, Georgia.

Though D.A.R. records readily indicate that West Sheffield was born in North Carolina, they note his service in the Revolutionary War was in Georgia, not North Carolina. Indeed, one of Job Tison's granddaughters applied for D.A.R. membership, stating that her great-grandfather West Sheffield had served as a private from Wayne County, for which he was granted land bounty.

That same membership report includes a statement about West Sheffield's father, John, who also lived in Wayne County, Georgia, but was born in North Carolina, and had died back there in Duplin County, two counties removed from Pitt County. Could John Sheffield have been returning on business to his original home in North Carolina when he was stricken?

The connection both of these men had with North Carolina—both frustrating in its possible coincidental closeness and its stubbornly remaining anonymity—certainly calls for not only further research, but research of the deep kind of inspection perhaps not available online. Despite that, I took my question to Google to see if there was anything to be found on West Sheffield and Wayne County, Georgia.

There was. Of all the unexpected resources, I found an article posted by Michele Lewis in the Legacy Family Tree blog on September 11, 2017. The article itself was about tracing records from burned counties and focused on an example from Jackson County, Mississippi. I assure you, that is the farthest from my research goals I could think of at this point, so let's just say that was unexpected to find.

However, the story the author presented was an illustration of how records from one burned county may be found—at least in duplicated version—in a far removed county. In this case, the document under examination was a marriage verification belonging to another daughter of West Sheffield—who at the time was living in Mississippi, site of the burned courthouse—which ended up in West Sheffield's estate papers in Georgia. A digitized page from that record was included in the Legacy Family Tree article, and a footnote provided a resource online at FamilySearch.org.

Guess I'll be doing some serious reading of those estate papers, if I can actually find them online. Perhaps I'll be fortunate enough to find some slips of unexpected documentation, too. 

If No One Had Told Us

 

It is at times when I research ancestors like my fourth great-grandfather Job Tison that I become most aware of the fragility of family history. At some point, but for some weak link in the nexus between public history and the private nano-history of the common individual, if no one had told us the story, we would never have any way to know it. That thin line connecting generations can be so easily broken and disappear.

This is when I become so aware of how beholden I am to the other family story-tellers who heeded that calling to record what they personally knew. Whether they realized it or not, they became the nodes in this tenuous line who spoke up enough to be heard, who wrote down what they knew so it could be passed on.

Much of what I already know about Job Tison comes from such reports. If I'm lucky, some of the written material will come with scholarly footnotes and bibliographies—but I doubt it. Barring such academic road maps, I'll be left to rummaging through whatever archival material has not been burned in courthouse fires or blown up through the ravages of war, or washed out by the storming furies of nature.

In the meantime, I'm happy to trust what other researchers have passed along—a clipping shared by an Ancestry.com subscriber, or an enterprising blogger or an avid local historian. That, at least, is what I will start with, as we take this journey backward through time, beginning with the 1824 end of Job Tison's life in Glynn County, Georgia.

One such local historian compelled by the inner drive to "pass it on" was Margaret Davis Cate. Whoever she was—the website WorldCat provides her life timeline as 1888-1961—she was the writer to whom we can attribute the snippet an Ancestry member linked to the hints gleaned at that website for Job Tison.

The article shared at Ancestry continues the conversation we began yesterday about the Old Post Road in Georgia and the historic marker placed there in 1932 by the Brunswick Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. As it turns out, I was able to find a transcription of the article, which ran in The Brunswick News on July 7, 1933, shortly after the plaque was placed in a ceremony at the Old Post Road. (Though the transcription is freely available, after accessing the hosting website, glynngen.com, you need to perform your own search by pressing the Control plus F keys, then entering the surname Tison to locate it.)

The article, entitled "Old Post Road Historic Path," was indeed credited to local writer Margaret Davis Cate, and provided a history of the road and its surrounding area. From the column, we also learn that the tavern established by Job Tison and his wife, Sidnah Sheffield, was a wooden structure which, according to the author, was "perhaps the oldest wooden structure in this section" and, at least as of Ms. Cate's 1933 article, still standing.

While it was Job Tison's wife, Sidnah Sheffield, whose Patriot father West Sheffield gained more attention in the Brunswick News article—perhaps also the instigation for the DAR chapter to place the historic marker—the article did mention that Job Tison was from Pitt County, North Carolina, and that he arrived in Georgia about 1785. How the author substantiated that detail, I can't tell, but despite the lack of any scholarly attribution, I'm grateful for yet another one of those tenuous links and the desire of that one lone voice to be an instrument to "pass it on." These are the way-markers pointing us in at least a possible direction.

I realize through that Sheffield-Tison connection that there may be more to that link between Job's new home in Glynn County and his origin in North Carolina. We'll take a look at Job's in-laws tomorrow to see what we can learn. 

Genealogy by IMDb

We may find ourselves going back to the usual websites for our never-ending quest to "finish" our family tree, but every once in a while, an unexpected resource becomes just the tool to glean more about our history. That was what happened this past week when I worked on my mother's Tison line from Georgia and Florida and stumbled upon an unexpected connection.

The root of this line was a colonial American man from Pitt County, North Carolina, by the name of Job Tison. His wife Sidnah, daughter of Revolutionary war patriot West Sheffield, settled with him in Glynn County, Georgia. My mother descends from their oldest daughter, named after her mother, who married a man who moved further south to Florida. The line I was working on this past weekend, though, was that of the younger Sidney's older brother, Aaron Tison.

Aaron married and moved to northern Florida, as well. He and his wife, Louisa Jane Dell, had a daughter whom he named after his mother. Her line eventually led to a granddaughter named Henrietta. What I didn't know about this Henrietta was that she apparently had a beautiful singing voice. What I did learn about Henrietta was that she married a cotton broker named Joe Canova who, after having at least six children, unfortunately contracted tuberculosis and died at the age of fifty two.

That was in 1926. Then came the Depression. Perhaps, realizing that some of her children inherited her vocal abilities, the widow Henrietta encouraged her children to try their luck and see whether their talents would make room for them. Or at least give them a chance to sing for their dinner.

Whatever the incentive, Henrietta's son Leon and daughter Anne joined with the baby of the family, Juliette, and took their family vaudeville act up to the Big Apple. They got their big break when band leader Rudy Vallée gave them a guest spot on his radio show in 1931. An offer from Warner Brothers redirected them from New York to California, where the family remained for decades.

It was actually a newspaper article about Henrietta's passing that alerted me to this hidden story about these Tison descendants. Though a Florida native, Henrietta died in California, not her home state. Her Find A Grave memorial includes a copy of that 1950 news article, headlined, "Judy Canova's Mother Dies."

Of course, that got me wondering, "Who is Judy Canova?" I had never heard of her. A quick perusal of an entry about Judy Canova at Wikipedia led me to her listing at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), which included credits for her decades of work in film and radio. Though a singer—a yodeler, even—Judy Canova was listed as a comedienne. One biographical entry billed Judy Canova's radio program as "the forerunner to television series such as "The Beverly Hillbillies." One blogger, rediscovering her work just a decade ago, gave her "hillbilly humor" some serious accolades:

there's a quality to Judy Canova...that can be seen in the performances of comediennes who followed after her in the 1940s, '50s and beyond, from Minnie Pearl and Dorothy Shay, to Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett. 

That is entertainment, but I'm about genealogy. If this was a relative—a fourth cousin to my mother, though that aspiring actress never knew it—I wanted to get all the details correctly listed in my family tree. IMDb turned out to be quite helpful in the process, by listing not only the names of all four of the former Juliette Canova's husbands, but identifying her two daughters, as well. Now, my family tree includes the likes of actresses "Tweeny" Canova and her younger half-sister, Diana Canova. Who would have thought a resource like the Internet Movie Database would become my go-to source for genealogical information for my family tree?!       

A Look at the Tisons

Job Tison died in Glynn County, Georgia, in 1824—thankfully, after leaving a will dated in that same year. In that will, he named his wife, Sidnah Sheffield Tison, daughter of Revolutionary War patriot West Sheffield, as executrix. By the date of his will, Job Tison's eldest son Aaron was months shy of attaining twenty one years of age, and my third great-grandmother, Sidney, was three years behind him. That left the rest of the family—sixteen year old Melinda, thirteen year old Susan, twelve year old William, seven year old John, and four year old Theresa—fatherless at rather young ages.

That, perhaps, might have been the impetus for their mother's remarriage after only twenty months of widowhood. According to the transcription of a badly obliterated copy of the original marriage record, on 29 October 1825, forty nine year old Sidnah Sheffield Tison became the wife of Michael Peck. Whether he also became the Tison children's guardian I have yet to verify. In fact, there is very little I can find on the man, and by the time of the 1850 census, he is out of the picture, leaving Sidnah listed in a household of one. By 1855, Sidnah was gone, too.

The Tison family—with their surname alternately given in some records as Tyson—did not originate in Georgia. A number of histories assert that Job Tison came from Pitt County, North Carolina. One record tantalizingly indicated that a land grant was issued to "Joab" Tison in Pitt County on November 26, 1793, including the notation, "On S. side of Tar River"—the river running just north of the county seat of Greenville. However, since a reprint of a local Glynn County history mentioned that Job Tison and his family likely arrived in the state of Georgia around 1785, the land grant mentioned may have involved another Tison relative.

Whenever the Tisons arrived in Georgia, they eventually established a popular hostelry along the post road in Glynn County. Job Tison named this property Coleridge, and apparently the building, though no longer standing, was for a long time considered the oldest structure in the area. The site of the popular old stage coach stop is now indicated by a historical marker. Apparently, also near that spot, Job Tison and various members of his family were interred in a family burial ground on the property, though I have yet to discover any record of it.

Leaving behind a thriving business, the fifty three year old Job Tison might have been expected to provide lengthy directions on what to do with a long list of financial holdings and obligations. That, in turn, would provide us with a snapshot of that juncture in his life. Tomorrow, we'll take a look at what his will contained, and what we can read into those few lines of instruction.

From One Clue to Another Question

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking the South: the Strategy

When devising a research plan, I'm accustomed to limited perspectives. "Research the Kelly line" or "get ready for that research trip to Fort Wayne" are typical, short-range plans I come up with.

In tackling my southern roots, especially in preparation for the SLIG class on southern research I'll be attending next January, I've got to expand my horizons. Why? In my case, it's not just a matter of researching one surname, or one line out of many. Thanks to my mother's family history, every line leads to a root in the south. Her paternal line involved a migration trek through colonial Virginia to settle in Tennessee, with a possible link to North Carolina, as well. Her maternal lines were in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, and elsewhere, also stretching back to colonial times.

It's one thing to learn how to expertly research a state. But in this case, we're talking about learning how to research an entire region—from the northern border of Maryland to the islands at the southern end of Florida, and from the tip of Cape Hatteras all the way to the endless domain of Texas.

That's a lot of learning.

The funny thing is, I've got kin in almost all of those places. And some of those folks have been making it pretty hard for me to find them.

It takes a plan to outfox those recalcitrant ancestors. And a strategy to step up my game from its status quo level of progress. For the past few years, my plan (other than for specific research trips) has been to move through all the branches of my family tree and add about one hundred documented ancestors or their collateral lines per week. Granted, now that process will be revised to focus specifically on only my maternal southern lines until I complete next January's class. But I need to do more than just "focus." I need some specific details to guide me.

A typical approach I've taken has been to regularly review my DNA matches to ascertain which family line can claim these hundreds of matches. While I've been contacting about one to two matches per week—some with gracious answers returned, some with nothing but silence—this is certainly no way to scale a mountain the size of my match lists. I've used some tools at GEDmatch.com and DNAGedcom—hey, I've even dabbled with DNA Painter—but I need to bite the bullet and learn how to master Genome Mate Pro.

Also, for the next six months, I need to organize a spreadsheet with all DNA match information, including notes from contacts, and which matches can be corresponded to which family lines. I think it would be great to just pull up a report of all the DNA matches across testing companies, for, say, my McClellan line. There is so much time frittered away, simply going back to look up one detail from one company, then jumping to details from another company. Streamlining the process, across all testing repositories, will help conserve time.

Most of all, though, my strategy needs to include the basic tactic of pushing each southern family line back as far in time as I can go through online resources. For families whose roots reach back to the 1600s here, it does me no good to stop at an ancestor living in the 1800s. There are still many lines I've not attended to, since stopping for lack of progress on their research when I last reviewed them ten years ago. So much has changed in online access to records in just the past year or so that it pays to review all these abandoned research lines to probe for fresh access to documentation. That will need to have its own plan for systematic review.

So, who am I looking for? I've got the Davis and Laws lines in Tennessee, both of which have me stuck in the early 1800s. I've got the Tilson line in Tennessee, which I know came from Mayflower origins in Massachusetts via Virginia—but how? I've got the Boothe line, also in Tennessee, from Nansemond County in Virginia, where I'm also stuck in the early 1800s. Likewise the Rileys, another early Tennessee family, supposedly from North Carolina in the late 1700s.

My maternal grandmother's Florida roots don't make life any easier. I've got McClellan, Charles, Tison and Sheffield who supposedly arrived there from North Carolina and Georgia, but how? I have yet to find out.

Many of these families are rich in history yet difficult to find, thanks to their status as early interlopers on the American frontier. My hope is that, with the many additions to online resources in the past few years, a fresh look at each of these lines will yield promising results. And for those mysteries still remaining, well, isn't that why I'm taking that research class at SLIG? One way or another, at the end of this campaign, these research strategies should yield me some helpful material—and help me figure out just how all those mystery DNA matches connect.