The One Less Traveled By

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting From Hither to Yon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Every Action...

...there is an equal and opposite reaction...

Well, that's not entirely true. But perhaps what I was uncovering in my race to find the nexus between my mystery cousin and myself in this post-mtDNA revelation that we are "exact matches" was proving a more exacting force upon me than I counted on.

So I stumbled upon a record indicating that yes, there were members of my matrilineal line migrating westward—not in the typical path southward and then across the Gulf states, eventually to Texas, but headed roughly due west from Virginia through Kentucky and ultimately to Missouri. It was a shiver-inducing discovery (even in this heat wave!) whose promise left me awestruck.

Representing such a slim chance of a genealogical match, why would I get excited, as if this were the key to connecting my mystery cousin's ancestor Sarah Kinslow Stinebaugh with my Gilmer relations? After all, that would make for some procedurally sloppy research to jump to such conclusions.

Admittedly, all that discovery served to do was confirm to me that, yes, it was possible for people to migrate in that pattern, even though the rest of the family headed elsewhere. But it was handy for another reason: people heading out into the wild open spaces westward—and away from all the supports of civilization—needed as much help as they could get. That's why they often traveled in companies.

And the path that Dr. Frederick George Gilmer took, from his 1806 birthplace in Wilkes County, Georgia, through Christian County, Kentucky, and ultimately to Lincoln County, Missouri, might just have been the same path followed by my mystery cousin's kin.

Sensing the possibility of being on to something might have played havoc with me, somewhere deep within. Who knows? Or maybe it was the concurrent, incessant banging on my roof, courtesy of the diligent construction crew performing a pricy make-over on the top half exterior of our humble abode for most of the past month. Or blame it on the heat.

All it took was one early morning moment to stoop down and greet the cat—my favorite cat, I might add—and out went my back. I don't know if it was an equal and opposite reaction to all the stress piling up over the last few days—both the bad and the good—but that momentary "reaction" landed me flat on my back and too dazed to think clearly through any further research.

Oh, I've poked around and found some interesting links on that Gilmer family, all right. They are amply documented, with records flung even to the far reaches of the Internet. As for putting the narrative together in a cohesive manner though, well, let's just say I'll need some R&R equal to that opposite reaction before I can again think straight—or even stand straight.

Let's just call this Newton's posture prompter.

Sometimes, You Just Know

Why is it that, in the midst of the most frustrating defeats, something seems to work itself loose and open up a possibility that—though it hasn't yet been fully proven—you just know will lead to the right answer?

I cannot begin to tell the countless hours I've spent, sifting through data, trying to unearth patterns that will lead me backwards on my path through time to the woman who correspondingly, taken forward in time again, would yield a female descendant who would become the mother of the adoptee whose DNA test tells him he and I are exactly linked.

Sensing my lack of progress, I've redoubled my effort this summer. But the more I add to my database of ancestors and their related lines, the less I feel I am succeeding.

I had hoped that switching tracks would jump start a stalled project: rather than pursue my line back in time, look for the nexus in my mystery cousin's line. But as you have probably already noticed, I am mired in the disappointing research snares of burned courthouses and missing records on that account, as well.

Last weekend, I told myself I needed to strategize this search better. In fleshing out my skeletal family tree—typically, in genealogical research, we seek out the direct line, not the collateral lines as much—I had now been adding siblings in each line, then bringing those lines forward to the present generation. That would work well in finding ways to match with those other eight-hundred-plus matches on my autosomal DNA test, but it wasn't doing much for this matrilineal pursuit. I needed to focus on one goal at a time, and if I wanted to find the answer to how I was related to this mystery cousin, that meant looking solely at the women's lines descending from my direct matrilineal line.

In other words, keep the route straight on the narrow path of mother's-mother's-mother. And then, only the women born to those mothers—and, in turn, their daughters—until I reach the terminal descendant, in my mystery cousin's case, a son.

So those were my marching orders: evaluate every female descendant descending from that specific matrilineal line.

I don't do well with taking orders.

Well, when I started out, I meant well. I looked at my maternal grandmother—she being the mother of only one daughter who had children of her own. That wouldn't work. I took one baby step backward through the generations to her mother, Sarah Broyles McClellan, who again had only one daughter who bore children.

Repeat one more generation: the next contestant was her mother, Mary Rainey, the woman who reportedly was adopted—in my opinion, taken in by family as an orphan—and then, on the other end of her life, had died young, before the age of customary documentation for deaths. Though I know little about her before her marriage to Thomas Taliaferro Broyles, I do know she had not one, but two daughters who then had children of their own.

However—and you know there would be a caveat, even here—Mary's other daughter was the proud mother of sons. End of that matrilineal line.

Moving up yet another generation proved to be a problem. How was I to know for certain who Mary's mother was? I did find someone whom I believe is my Mary in the household of her relatives in Georgia, just before her marriage to Thomas Broyles, pointing to the possibility of extended family relationships. And I did locate a possible Mary in a Rainey household in Georgia—though after the death of the father, leaving me with a mother also named Mary, an unfortunately too-common name on which to hang one's confidence.

Let's just say that the elder Mary Rainey was the right mother. She certainly had many daughters from which to choose possible routes for another iteration of her matrilineal line.

But that was the 1860s, and not only was war the mode of the tension-filled decade, but the invisibility of daughters given in marriage, duly noted in records filed at soon-to-be-burned courthouses, made the search wearying.

That's where I got bogged down. And that's where, last weekend on a lark, I decided to swim upstream and try my hand at another generation. Not only was my plan stalled at Mary Taliaferro Rainey's generation, but I needed a branch of the extended family with a migratory pattern much different than the one typical for this part of the family—instead of heading from Virginia to Georgia to the deep South, a trail that went westerly, from Virginia to Kentucky and then onward to Missouri.

No one was showing me the way to the Show Me State. But that's where I needed to go.

The next stop, in my tour of generations, was also puzzling me. I really had no indication of Mary Taliaferro Rainey's parents. I had a good guess, based on who took in her orphaned children after her passing. So making that assumption would mean also hoping the mtDNA test would bear out the hypothesis—yet maybe lead me farther away from my original goal of locating the nexus with my mystery cousin.

You can see how mired in the details I became, pondering these women and their changeable names and identities. Coupled with that was one unfortunate anomaly: a family of intermarriages. Moving backward into those decades before the Civil War, I entered the arena of old colonial families for whom arranged marriages among families familiar with each other seemed customary. Thus, I saw surnames echoed through the generations, when taking the sweeping view forward in time from their colonial Virginian origin. I saw Taliaferros intertwined with Gilmers and Meriwethers, Harvies and Lewises, their names waltzing in and out of the generations in grand procession.

I became quite at home with seeing these repeating surnames. Perhaps that was what caught my eye while stymied with considerations about just what to do with this "adopted" Mary Rainey Broyles and her maybe-mother, Mary Taliaferro Rainey. If I followed my best hunch about her mother—incidentally, in direct opposition to respected genealogies of bygone centuries—I would then be looking at the daughters and sisters of one Mary Meriwether Gilmer, wife of Warren Taliaferro. Her mother, in turn, would be Elizabeth Lewis, wife of Thomas Meriwether Gilmer.

You see how those surnames echo through the generations.

Though I'm not sure how this next step happened, it was in that late Sunday night ennui when sleep might have been a better choice. I was still poking through records, trying to find marriage connections and female descendants for these women. I ran across one name, recognized that redundant surname echo, and wondered what else could be found on that person. I jumped from Ancestry.com to FamilySearch.org to Find A Grave, looking.

Perhaps it was from sheer exhaustion with the whole process that I forgot to note my path as I wandered online. Somehow I came to my senses while looking up a Sarah on Find A Grave. Among the possibilities offered for my search was someone named Sarah Harvie Gilmer, daughter of Frederick George Gilmer. Though the Find A Grave memorial stated she had no children of her own, I couldn't help but be arrested by her entry.

I took a look at the list of parents and siblings linked to her name. Not only were those same old surnames creating a siren call in my head, but here was a man (Sarah's father) who was born in Georgia, stopped long enough in Kentucky to have children there, and then moved on to Lincoln County, Missouri.

Now, Lincoln County may not be a locale that rings a bell for you—even if you've been here over the long haul to put up with my internal agony over lack of research progress—but it was one of those along-the-way details that I spared in the narrative. However, before our Sarah Kinslow and her husband, William Stinebaugh, settled in Dallas County, Missouri, William had evidently grown up in none other than Lincoln County.

Of course, it is a long way from the Stinebaugh and Kinslow genealogy to any connection with the Gilmer and Harvie clans—with, incidentally, some Taliaferros thrown in for good measure—but somehow, it was enough to elicit that awestruck gut response in me.

You know this is one lead I'll need to follow.

Above: "The Cottage in the Lane," 1827 drawing in pen and ink with gray wash by English artist, John Constable; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Crowdsourcing the Kinslows...And the Huckabys

Still stymied by lack of documentation after the revelation that William Stinebaugh's Kentucky-born wife was once a Kinslow, I've been guessing my way along the path of census records, marriage records, and now burial records. All this, of course, is an exercise based on conjecture: that the only other Kinslow for miles around the Stinebaugh home in Dallas County, Missouri, would actually be a relation of Sarah Kinslow Stinebaugh.

That man in question was named Page Kinslow. He was the right age to be a brother of Sarah. And he just happened to be from Kentucky. Barren County, Kentucky, to be precise.

We've already rejoiced over the fact that Barren County did not happen to be a "burned" county, and that transcriptions of marriage records posted online helped us follow the trail of Agnes Payne, through her first marriage to Page's father, Joseph Kinslow, and then, as a widowed mother of two young children, to her second husband, Joseph Huckaby.

Setting aside the possibility that this might all be a false lead, I thought I'd see what could be found about the family of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Huckaby, once they all moved to Missouri. I have to keep reminding myself that I might be barking up the wrong family tree—but at the same time, I'm very aware that researching this new discovery might lead me to the very resources that can answer my question.

What could possibly go wrong? At the very least, I'd confidently be able to negate my hypothesis. Even that is progress.

So I clicked over to Find A Grave to see if there were any entries for Joseph Huckaby, Page's step-dad.

There was.

Even though there wasn't any cross-reference hyperlinked to Page Kinslow's own memorial on Find A Grave, it was easy enough to find Joseph Huckaby's memorial. As it turns out, Joseph was indeed married more than once, as the 1850 census, back in Kentucky, had suggested. Born in Virginia in 1789, Joseph had served in the War of 1812. This could be a research situation ripe with helpful material.

Better than that—and more pertinent to my own research goal—Joseph's wife Aggy had a Find A Grave memorial of her own, complete with a photograph.

The memorial indicated Aggy was actually born in Barren County, Kentucky. She was buried, predictably, in Polk County, Missouri, where the entire Huckaby family had settled after removing from Kentucky. Some kind soul had, thankfully, hyperlinked her memorial with that of several of her children—as well as with her parents. The memorial was turning out to be quite a treasure trove.

The best part, for me, was the discovery of two newspaper clippings which had been added as photographs to the memorial. The only drawback: each of those newspaper reports was clipped, all right: right inside the column marker, cutting off the first few words at the beginning of each line for one of the articles, and the end of each line for the other article.

All told, wonder woman Agnes Payne Kinslow Huckaby was mother to at least fifteen children—plus step-mother to the several that Joseph had already fathered by his previous wife. Still, I wanted to read the whole of the obituaries that were posted at Find A Grave, not just guess what the missing words might have been.

Fortunately, search engine power was in my favor. Google turned up another resource containing transcriptions of those very same articles: a Rootsweb file which included a huge page of entries for Agnes. Among the details I found interesting was that, having lived to the age of ninety one—coupled with the fact that, being so much younger than her husband, she lived until 1911—Aggy was "one of the three last pensioners" of the War of 1812.

Still, the best I could find out about that question that bugged me—the name of that second Kinslow child—was a dismissive mention that Agnes had had two children by her previous marriage.

Is that all they could say?!

Of course, the possibility—though slim—that Joseph Huckaby's wife's pension application would include any mention of her two Kinslow children drew me beyond the transcribed notes on this Rootsweb file to the actual digitized images of those pension papers at Fold3.com. Though I managed to obtain the dates I was missing—Joseph Kinslow's death in "July 1840" and that of Joseph Huckaby's first wife Mary in August of 1836—any mention of Agnes' first two children eluded me.

Even so, if I supposed that the mysterious "Joseh Ann" entry from the 1850 census was indeed my Sarah A. Stinebaugh of much later years, tracing back her matrilineal line through the details given on the Find A Grave memorial—and then, piggy-backing those names onto other family trees posted at Ancestry and Rootsweb—I couldn't see any familiar surnames to claim as that nexus I was seeking with my mystery cousin, the adoptee with whom I had an exact match resultant from our mitochondrial DNA test.

Mired in so much data—much of it taking on the cast of a genealogical wild goose chase—I was beginning to lose steam. Maybe this quest wasn't such a good idea, after all. Maybe trying to match the genealogical paper trail with the tale told by DNA testing wasn't going to work, after all. That ingenious creation of scientific pursuit—the mtDNA test—was turning out to be too powerful an opponent to take on. I already knew, from autosomal testing, that my mystery cousin and I did not connect within the range of sixth cousin. Who knows how much farther back the nexus might be.

Frankly, sifting through all the possibilities was just wearing me out.

Following the Family Line

Is it just coincidence that, after emigration from Kentucky, the only other family sharing Sarah Stinebaugh's maiden name lived just across the county line, in Bolivar, Missouri? I thought I'd try an experiment and see what could be found about the kin of Page C. Kinslow, formerly of Barren County, Kentucky.

Fortunately, someone had kindly transcribed that Kentucky county's marriage records for the decades I'd like to see, and posted them online. All told, there were seventeen entries for marriages with a Kinslow groom listed, beginning with Adam Kinslow and Charlotte Drake in 1809, and stretching up to the 1849 nuptials of Massa Kinslow and Francis A. Mansfield. Undoubtedly, several of them were for second marriages.

Just as was predicted by the Find A Grave entry for the man we're pursuing—Page C. Kinslow, buried in Missouri in 1926—his stated parents, Joseph Kinslow and "Aggy" Payne, were showing on the list, married in Kentucky on August 3, 1837. That would be in plenty of time to welcome their baby boy on July 31, 1838—if, indeed, this Page Kinslow, now in Polk County, Missouri, was their son.

Since Page didn't seem to show up in Missouri census records until 1870, it seemed likely that he could be found back in his hometown in Kentucky during his childhood years on the 1850 census. Though the 1850 census doesn't specifically finger family relationships, it would be a handy place to uncover the name of any possible sibling inferences—especially the hoped-for connection with Sarah A. Kinslow, who supposedly became the Sarah A. Stinebaugh we've been pursuing.

Pulling up the search bar—both at Ancestry.com and on FamilySearch.org—that attempt ran into problems. While I was able to flush out an approximately-eleven-year-old Page Kinslow in Barren County for that 1850 census, he wasn't living in the Kinslow household. He was listed as part of a Barren County household headed by one Joseph Huckaby.

Complicating matters was the fact that, though he was listed in the Huckaby household alongside another child with his own surname—Kinslow—that ten year old girl had a given name entered that looked very much as if it should have read "Joseph." Only there was a letter missing. Plus the enumerator's habit of forming concluding Ss in the colonial style: what we would now misread as an "f-s." Was that last letter an S? Or an F? Or possibly a P or an H? The enumerator must have been suffering from writer's cramp by this point in his circuit.

What became of Sarah Kinslow? If this ten year old Kinslow girl was a poorly-transcribed Sarah, we could say she was likely Page's sister. But it would take a lot of imagination to reconstruct that given name as Sarah.

There was another Sarah Kinslow in Barren County. However, her age didn't align as neatly with the consistently-stated age of our Sarah, as she appeared in the Stinebaugh household of both 1860 in Missouri and 1880 in Texas.

Besides, who was this Joseph Huckaby? While I had noticed that there were neighboring Huckaby families settled near the property Page Kinslow had secured for himself as a married man in Missouri, it took another trip back to the online records of the Kentucky county to help reconstruct the family's story.

This One's Still Standing

Alright, then: the death certificate that assured me that Sarah A. Stinebaugh's maiden name was Kinslow led me to the brick wall roadblock of a "burned" county: Dallas County, Missouri.

Now what?

All I had was information gleaned from the census records of her married years: as a young mother in 1860 in Missouri, and much later in 1880, when the family moved to Texas. (For whatever reason, try as I might, I could not locate the family in the 1870 census—either in Missouri or Texas—though Sarah's husband's parents and some siblings were easily located in their new Texas home by 1870.)

What I could determine about this Sarah Stinebaugh was that she was born about 1839, and that she was born in Kentucky. Both the 1860 census and the 1880 census consistently substantiated those two bits of information. A later look at Sarah's headstone confirmed that year of birth.

The next task, of course, would be to tackle where in Kentucky she might have been born. That introduces the question of how she arrived, from Kentucky, in Missouri. Since her husband, William Stinebaugh, was, according to census records, born in Missouri, the most likely scenario would be that he met his future bride in Missouri, rather than back in Kentucky. Could there be any neighboring Kinslow families in Dallas County, Missouri, around the time of their marriage? Perhaps there would be a way around that burned courthouse, after all.

As luck would have it—and though a surname like Kinslow would itself be ripe for spelling creativity—just scrolling through the contiguous pages in the census records, I could find no sign of any Kinslows residing in the neighboring properties near the Stinebaugh residence, either in 1860 or 1850.

Well, it was worth a try. I always like to take a peek and see who else is living nearby my target ancestors. If I don't look, I don't know.

Next step was to search more generically for Kinslows in Missouri, as jumping straight back to Kentucky to seek Kinslows would, at this point, be too premature.

As it turns out, there was a Kinslow household in Missouri—not, unfortunately, for either 1860 or even 1850, but in the 1870 census. Then, too, another complication was that the entry was not for anyone living in the county where the Stinebaughs had resided—Dallas County—but in nearby Polk County. It was an entry for a man named Page Kinslow. Aged thirty one at the time, that would put his year of birth at either 1838 or 1839. If—and, of course, that would be a very tenuous if—he were a relation of Sarah Stinebaugh's, that might even put him at the level of a brother or cousin.

What if I followed the trail backwards in time, from this Page Kinslow, to see if he had any relatives named Sarah? Almost too good to be true, it turned out that this Page Kinslow had an entry on Find A Grave, with volunteer-added contributions about his personal history. While I realize that such volunteer entries could very well be merely mistakes propagated by the passing along of unsubstantiated material, I was game to trace Page back to his roots in the county revealed by this Find A Grave entry.

The entry asserted that Page Kinslow was born in 1838 to parents Joseph Kinslow and Agnes Payne. His childhood home was listed as Barren County, Kentucky.

Off to the Internet resources for Barren County I went! Unlike what I had discovered for the disabused Dallas County in Missouri, Barren County had apparently fared much better during the turmoil of the Civil War years, as witnessed by the online opportunities now opening up to me in my newfound Kinslow details.

If Page was going to turn out to be Sarah's brother, I was in for some easy going through online resources in this county.

Above: The Barren County, Kentucky, courthouse, located in Glasgow; photograph courtesy of the Wikipedia contributor, Bedford; in the public domain.

Burned Up

Finding the maiden name for the woman later known as Sarah Stinebaugh was a coup. At least, that's what I thought when I stumbled upon that suggestion, gleaned from her daughter Margaret Melvina's death certificate.

However, we all know how unreliable an "official" document like that can be. Think of it: everyone stressed over the ordeal of the past few days—or, in the case of some terminal illnesses, the past few months—then suddenly expected to deliver the details of vital records to a stranger, when every mention of the topic might just bring on another volley of heaving sobs.

The way I see it, Sarah's maiden name might have been Kinslow, just as her daughter's family reported it.

Or, it could have been something entirely different. I had to go take a look.

So back to the records for the county in Missouri where I once found the Stinebaugh family living: Dallas County.

I began my due diligence with a cursory glance at the wiki posted for the county among the many pages at FamilySearch.org. It was interesting, in looking for possible marriage records of a Sarah Kinslow and our William Stinebaugh, to stumble upon this map of Missouri counties, along with a listing of what marriage records might be found in each county. Scrolling down the chart to the county I was seeking—Dallas—I was disappointed to see their marriage records only dated back to 1886.

That would be a far cry from our target date range of 1857 through 1859.

I headed over to the FamilySearch wiki for general information on the county. There, I briefed myself on the historic overview of the county: seeing that it was created in 1841, that it was carved out of territory previously belonging to Polk County, and that it was originally named Niangua County.

Googling for further information, I stumbled upon the resurrected Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness site. There, the landing page for the state provided some basic facts for the counties in Missouri—the kind of stuff genealogy researchers find helpful. I took a cursory glance at the list of counties, scrolling down to Dallas County and reading, basically, the same information I had just read back on the FamilySearch wiki.

And then I saw it: the clickable links in a navigation bar just above the list of counties. Sandwiched in between the choices, "List of Missouri Counties" and the intriguing entry, "List of Missouri Extinct Counties," was the middle choice: "List of Missouri Burned Courthouses."

Oh, yeah. Burned counties. I had heard stuff about that. No, correct that: I had been witness to grown adults melting down in vented frustration over their personal burned courthouse. Their own research Waterloo. The end of the line. The reason why so many people have impassible Brick Walls.

It looked like I was now going to join that statistic. I clicked on the link. (Cue murder mystery sound track here.)

The link led to a narrative, explaining the significance of burned courthouses. True enough, the opening paragraph expressed what I've learned from others who've faced this research problem:

Not only are these historic buildings ripped from each of our lifetimes, so are the archives they kept....

I scrolled down the long list of Missouri counties hit by this scourge. Sure enough, among the wounded and dispatched was Dallas County. Hit by Confederate troops on October 18, 1863, the remaining Dallas County courthouse records were subsequently also consumed by two fires occurring in their temporary replacement quarters in both 1864 and 1867.

Fat chance I'd find my marriage record for William Stinebaugh and his bride, Sarah, in that mess.

Perhaps, my ever-hopeful inner voice chirped up, there will be another way to find this...