While We're Still in the Neighborhood

 

Last week, I had speculated that a thorough search through records from the late 1700s or early 1800s in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, might help tell the tale of just who else migrated from Virginia to Georgia after the American Revolution. That, I already knew, was the story behind my Taliaferro fourth great-grandparents' migration south to the area around the Broad River valley. I had wondered whether the same would hold true for this month's focus from my Twelve Most Wanted, my third great-grandfather Thomas F. Rainey. After all, that's where he met up with his future bride, Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro.

While working on records from this neighborhood, I thought I'd delve into this possibility further. Since the couple married in 1818, I tried my hand at the digitized copy of the subsequent 1820 census first. I could barely make out the name Thomas F. "Raney" toward the bottom of one page, but have struggled to read through the rest of the listings. No other possible family members' names have jumped out at me so far.

When I moved ahead to the 1830 census in Oglethorpe County, however, I found a different scenario.

In the same neighborhood as Thomas "Raney," I spotted a few other possibilities. One was the name of Nicholas Powers. He, you may remember, was the minister who had performed the wedding ceremony for Thomas and his bride, Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro—after having just married Mary Elizabeth's widowed mother, himself.

As my squinting eyes searched farther down the list, I spotted another name of interest. This other person, like Thomas, also was surnamed "Raney" and went by the first name Isham. That unusual name I had seen elsewhere: Thomas Rainey had given one of his younger children that same name. 

There was one problem with that discovery. Thomas' son Isham Rainey was born about 1840. And this name I had found in the 1830 census.

Something worth following up on? You bet.

Above image: excerpt from the 1830 U.S. Census for Oglethorpe County, Georgia, containing the names of heads of household for two Raney families; courtesy of Ancestry.com.

There Was Another Clue

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting to Georgia

 

If the goal this month is to research a family which had originally lived in Virginia, how did they get to Georgia?

Though we are barely into the month of March and the third of my Twelve Most Wanted research topics—Thomas Firth Rainey—I can already see that while this third great-grandfather may have spent his adult life raising a family in Georgia, he claimed to have been born in Virginia. What made a young resident of one of the leading locations of the nascent United States decide to move elsewhere?

On the surface, the reason might seem to do with Thomas Rainey's choice of a bride, for he married a Georgia-born woman by the name of Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro. But even her maiden name told me that this, too, was a family name known for its roots in Virginia.

As it turns out, that connection between the Raineys and the Taliaferros may have revealed only a small part of a larger circle of Virginians who all decided to head south to Georgia. That migration may have reached back to the days of the American Revolutionary War, when support for colonial military action was weaker in Georgia than in the other American colonies. Some of the early recruits sent to serve in Georgia were actually from Virginia. The second Georgia regiment formed in 1776, for instance, was comprised of eight companies of men from Virginia.

Whether any men from the Rainey family were among those recruits, I can't yet say, though I do know that a Taliaferro relative of Thomas' future wife did serve in Georgia. After the war, though, a small group of Virginian Continental soldiers returned to Georgia, remembering that they liked what they had seen there. They petitioned the legislature for a grant of 200,000 acres, which was provided upon the condition that two hundred families would be brought into the settlement.

That group of settlers arrived and claimed land in the Broad River valley, a location which, before 1790, was part of Wilkes County. Beginning in 1790, Wilkes County was divided to form a number of smaller counties. Among those newer counties was Oglethorpe County, the same county where, in 1818, Thomas Rainey took Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro as his bride.

Was the Rainey family part of that migration of two hundred Virginia families to Georgia after the Revolution? I can't yet say, but I do know that Mary Elizabeth's extended Taliaferro family was among those Broad River settlers. It may be possible that that was the same reason that drew Thomas Rainey's family to the area as well. If I can find census records, land records, or even tax records for that area during that time period, it may help to locate any families there claiming that same Rainey surname.

When There Isn't Much to Go By

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beginning at the End

 

It is interesting to read family history assertions noted by other researchers who evidently had missed the details of one or more pertinent documents. Such may have been the case, yesterday, when I mentioned a July, 1988, query from a Rainey researcher who had provided a list of "all" Thomas Rainey's children. As it happened, there was at least one family name missing—that of my second great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey. 

Beginning our search at the end of Thomas Rainey's life helps to fill in the picture, for there in his will, he specifically records his youngest daughter's full—and unusually long—name. Drawn up in October of 1857, the document was not entered into the record in the county of his last residence—according to the 1850 census, that would have been Coweta County, Georgia—but in the now-extinct Campbell County.

The 1850 census itself wouldn't have provided the full picture of Thomas Rainey's family, for Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey had not yet been born. Not until her father's death could I find any confirmation of her birth—and that, only from inferences based on those two documents. Orphaned at a young age, then dying shortly after her own marriage, Mary Elizabeth was for a long time the missing link who kept me from connecting her to Thomas' Rainey family line.

Now, Thomas apparently has become the next pivot point in the Rainey generations. We can move from the point of his last testament filed in Campbell County, to his 1850 residence in Coweta County, and then jump to his possible residence, according to the 1820 census, in Oglethorpe County, the same Georgia location where he had married only two years earlier. But then what?

Pushing Thomas back to his origin in Virginia—his reported state of birth, according to the 1850 census—would be a different matter. No steady procession of documents could easily point the way to the late 1700s. There were, however, a few clues we could consider from what we already know. Those hints are certainly worth the try to follow.

Chasing Unanswered Questions

 

Back in July of 1988, someone from Texas posted a query in a genealogical publication called Rainey Times.

That researcher basically asked the same question I'm chasing after, nearly thirty eight years later: Who were the parents of Thomas F. Rainey? Perhaps that curious researcher back in Texas might have found the answer to that question by now, but I certainly haven't. This will be my month to see if I can.

I have some ideas about this third great-grandfather of mine, but so far, I've failed to produce satisfactory documentation linking him to his past. I did manage to discover that his middle initial—F.—likely stands for Firth. And I've also realized that the very child who is missing from that 1988 listing happened to be my own second great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey (yes, that was indeed her full name).

There has been a lot of time invested in learning more about this family over the years. Tracing back to those roots leading to the Rainey line has been information hard won. But I can't let that brick wall remain standing; I selected Thomas Firth Rainey as the third of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026 in hopes of pressing back at least one more generation to his past.

While I know that Thomas Firth Rainey spent most of his adult life in the state of Georgia—marrying in Oglethorpe County in 1818 and dying in Coweta County in 1858—there is a possibility that his origin was in Virginia. At least, that's what he reported for his entry in the 1850 U.S. Census. This month will hopefully tell more of that tale.

Image of query from Rainey Times above is courtesy of the actual insertion, as shown at Ancestry.com; the image of the publication's July 1988 cover is courtesy of FamilySearch.org where the entire Volume 8 is available to view.

Some Lines are Long . . .

 

There are some lines in my family tree which extend through multiple researched generations—my matriline, for instance, where I've managed to trace that mother's mother's line just over the divide from the 1700s to the last quarter century of the 1600s. On the other hand, some family lines are, well, frustratingly stunted.

One branch off my matriline falls in that latter category. While it was a bit of a struggle, I was able to figure out the parents of my orphaned second great-grandmother Mary Elizabeth Rainey, using the mitochondrial DNA test in tandem with the usual autosomal test available at so many genetic genealogy companies. From that step onward, progress on researching my matriline went smoothly.

Her father's line? Well, that's another story.

That story, as it turned out, left me with a name, a few dates and locations, and not much else. Mary Elizabeth's father was likely a Virginia man named Thomas Firth Rainey, who made it to Oglethorpe County, Georgia, by early adulthood. There, in 1818, he married Mary Elizabeth's mother, a Georgia-born Taliaferro descendant for whom Mary Elizabeth was named.

After that date followed several children, last of whom was Mary Elizabeth, herself. Most of those collateral lines I have not been able to trace, but thankfully, there have been a few which have yielded confirmation through autosomal DNA test results that I am on the right track for this orphaned baby sister's line.

As for her father, Thomas Firth Rainey, I still don't know much more about him than his date of death in Coweta County, Georgia. What I would like to know about this third selection of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026 is the identity of his own parents. Since Thomas was born about 1796, this search—if successful—will put me on a trail to wander back through the years of the American Revolution to records regarding his parents, possibly even during the British colonial era. If the door opens in this brick wall Rainey line, it may also lead me to collateral lines whose descendants number among my unexplained DNA matches.

For this March's research focus for my Twelve Most Wanted, Thomas Firth Rainey will either be a brick wall stubbornly refusing to yield to probing, or be one ancestor whose life's opened door will lead to multiple additional discoveries. With the many new tools technology has gifted us, I suspect research on Thomas Rainey's ancestors may see that more successful latter result. 

From Third to Eighth

 

Well, it might not seem as impressive as going from zero to sixty in less than five, but I did make it from third to eighth (great-grandmothers) in less than five—weeks, that is. And that was my research goal for this month. You can tell I'm satisfied, I'm sure.

The idea, at the beginning of this month, was to pursue documentation while piecing together the lineup on my matriline—that line of generations from mother to maternal grandmother to her mother and onward to each subsequent generation's mother. Thus I moved from third great-grandmother Mary Taliaferro to fourth great-grandmother Mary Gilmer, then to her mother Elizabeth Lewis, and her mother Jane Strother, followed by Margaret Watts. And then, onward once again to the woman I so far only know as Mary, wife of Richard Watts.

I had even noted, in my post starting this month, that we "may even land as far back as the beginning of the eighteenth century in colonial Virginia." We did a bit better than that: my newfound eighth great-grandmother, whom I so far only know by her given name Mary, was a woman whose daughter was born in 1700.

The real game changer for me was the FamilySearch Labs development of their Full Text search capability. That made working my way through those colonial wills with their fancy handwriting and extra curlicues less burdensome on my eyes—to say nothing of my patience. I can't help but think of all the other lines in my mother's tree which could benefit from such a review in upcoming months.

In addition, I was able to solidly confirm one of my mtDNA matches, based on what I was able to add to my records with the help of those newly-found wills and deeds. The other three of my "exact matches" are still a mystery, but a task to save for another day.

There are some months, as I work on my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors for each year, when the month closes without much of a sense of satisfaction. There is always work to go back to, the next time I pass that way in the family tree. The same can be said for this month's project. If eighth great-grandmother Mary was born in Virginia, there is certainly a good chance that I'll be able to identify her maiden name—perhaps, even, the name of her mother, as well. But I'll save that for another year's goals.

Somehow, in the cracks between the progress I'll be making on next month's Twelve Most Wanted research goal, I'll be able to squeeze in visits to the FamilySearch Labs site again to confirm more members of this extended family tree through wills and other legal documents stashed away in colonial court records. While research sometimes seems like progress moving ahead in mere inches at a time, it's the conscious, continuous addition of small victories that add up.

With the beginning of the next month—and next week—we'll turn from working on my mother's ancestry to spending three months working on my mother-in-law's tree. And that means, instead of wandering through the handwritten court records of colonial Virginia, in April we'll pick up on a research project from last year to review the family records of neighboring colony Maryland.  

Solving for the Unknown

 

Genealogy, as I've always seen it, can be quite like an algebra equation: you need to separate the known values to one side of the equation to solve for the unknown entity isolated on the other side. 

Right now, I've been grappling with an unknown: the names and identities of the children of my fourth great-grandmother Mary Meriwether Gilmer and her second husband, Nicholas Powers.

Unfortunately, Nicholas Powers did not leave a will—at least, not one I could find anywhere in the state of Georgia, the Powers family's residence, during the mid 1800s when he most likely died. However, I was able to find a court document indicating that someone named Nicholas F. Powers had been appointed administrator over the estate of "Nicholas Powers late of Oglethorpe County." The catch? The document only identified three children: Nicholas, Sarah, and Thomas.

It occurred to me that I did have a way to isolate the unknown entity in this genealogical equation to learn more about the family of Mary and Nicholas: DNA testing. While the relationship would be distant, it was still within reach. I decided to take a look.

Since my ancestor Mary Meriwether Gilmer had been previously married to a man who was my own direct line ancestor, Warren Taliaferro, I first looked up how many matches I shared with people who descended from Warren. According to Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool, I currently have sixty four DNA matches who share a genetic connection to Warren. 

Normally, you'd expect about the same number of matches to also connect with Warren's wife, Mary. But in this case, because the young widow had married Nicholas after Warren's death, descendants of those Powers children—however many there actually were—increased Mary's match count to seventy seven.

Sure enough, when I clicked through to see who made up the difference in the two counts, there were descendants of three Powers children in the mix. However, don't count on that easily solving my genealogical algebra problem. The three Powers ancestors were listed by these DNA matches as George, Mary Caroline, and Thomas. 

Well, Thomas I've already found in documentation, but Mary Caroline? And George is on the borderline, as I haven't found him in any records so far, either, though links to his Find A Grave memorial display family names which sound like Powers and Gilmer namesakes to me. 

I've begun checking each of the seven DNA matches descending from Thomas Powers, as at least I have documentation confirming his descent from my fourth great-grandmother. Surprisingly, the closest match shares twenty six centiMorgans with me, all in one segment, when it could have been quite possible that we would share absolutely no genetic material at all. The paper trail confirmed the connection, encouraging me to review the rest of the list, too. As for George and Mary Caroline, though there is a slight smidgeon of DNA that could tie us to the same ancestor, it is a very weak link. Better to look first for positive signs in the paper trail, before trying to solve for that unknown.

The Other Husband

 

If George Gilmer had disparaging remarks to make about his sister's husband, Warren Taliaferro, with that commentary he was only warming up. When it came to the other husband, George's sister Mary's second marriage, he likely had far more reason to be critical. While Warren Taliaferro at least had a will, second husband Nicholas Powers apparently did not.

I found that detail—or rather, noticed its absence—when repeating yesterday's search routine using the FamilySearch Labs Full Text search feature. This time, I was on a mission to find the will of Nicholas Powers. There were two reasons I wanted to find this. First, of course, was to confirm the approximate date at which he had passed. The second reason was to get a more accurate listing of Nicholas' children, since I was concerned the count for the Powers children was not correct in George Gilmer's book.

Despite my success yesterday with the search for Warren Taliaferro's will, no will came up for second husband Nicholas Powers. Instead, there were multiple entries for deeds which included the Powers name. To narrow the search, I added his wife Mary's name, which helped reveal part of the story.

From that attempt, I have been able to glean a few indications. The first was that someone named Nicholas F. Powers served as administrator for "Nicholas Powers late of Oglethorpe County" in a document dated May 3, 1853. An earlier indenture, drawn up in April of the same year, identified Mary M. Powers as wife of Nicholas Powers, and listed their children as Nicholas, Sarah, and Thomas—three children hardly being the "six from her last" husband that her brother had reported in his book.

The third discovery I found was somewhat curious. Entered toward the end of a deed recorded in Oglethorpe County, a specific parcel of land was sold "excepting forty feet square in the North west corner of my Garden where my Eldest Child and Nicholas Powers deceased is buried." The document was signed by a W. T. Williams on August 31, 1849.

Our Mary's Nicholas? Hard to say, though in a county of twelve thousand residents, it might have been doubtful that there were two couples by the same names. Without a will, the only way to determine the names of all their children would be to search through the many other deeds listing Nicholas' name in hopes there were further provisions for the fatherless children. As for Mary, herself, we may learn more by focusing on her own siblings—especially the brothers who had been named as executors in her first husband's will.   

What Others Were Saying

 

If it seems odd to us to find a centuries-old document dating the marriage of a teenager as young as Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro, I wonder what the people of that fourteen-year-old's community might have thought at the time. Apparently, we don't need to wonder for long what others were saying, for one local man was quite willing to make public his take on Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro's father—and step-father.

That man was George Rockingham Gilmer, maternal uncle to my third great-grandmother Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro. After serving two terms as governor of the state of Georgia, as well as several terms in the United States House of Representatives, George Gilmer settled down to write his recollections of several Georgia pioneers he knew personally. He published that collection in 1855 in a book he called, in typical run-on fashion of the era, Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia, of the Cherokees, and the Author.

Of his sister, Mary Meriwether Gilmer, he styled her as "a woman of good capacity," but of her choices of spouses, he was less approving: "She married successively two very indolent, inefficient men, whom by her industry she saved from poverty."

The first of those two men, as we've already surmised, was Warren Taliaferro (alternately recorded in some editions of the book—as well as in other records—as Warner). Mary's second husband, according to George Gilmer, was the Reverend Nicholas Powers, "a handsome Irishman." 

While that might have seemed a curious observation—and one so public, as well—it was the author's next comment which was more to the point of my pursuit. What about their children? 

Unfortunately, Tell-All Gilmer did not provide names, though he did say that his sister had ten children, "four by her first husband, and six by her last." As to any further details, we will have to resort to the usual means to detect the specifics. With that, I resort to another report that everyone's been talking about—though it is buzz generated by a far more modern crowd.

After RootsTech, I noticed several blog posts detailing a document search development powered by AI. A "game changer," as it has been acclaimed by one blogger, Judy Russell. Longtime genealogy writer Kimberly Powell detailed the step-by-step process to use the experimental full-text search feature being tested at FamilySearch. I paid close attention, and then popped over to Randy Seaver's blog to read about his experience putting the feature through its paces.

I wanted to test this tool for myself, and looking for Warren Taliaferro's will seemed the perfect starting point. For one, despite his given name being so variable—Warren in some cases, Warner in others—I wasn't sure what result I'd find. I knew that Taliaferro was a surname unusual enough to keep me from facing the wearying possibility of multiple false leads.

Fortunately, when I tried using the FamilySearch Labs tool, I didn't limit the search to one location, for Warren Taliaferro's will was not where I expected it to be filed. Though the family lived in Georgia when I found them, Warren also had another residence in South Carolina. Now that I think it over, that makes great sense, as he was brother to another direct-line ancestor of mine, Zachariah Taliaferro, who I knew also lived in South Carolina.

The FamilySearch Labs experimental Full Text search brought me to two different copies of Warren Taliaferro's will—one handwritten, the other a later, typewritten version. Each of the wills was transcribed and that transcription appeared in a sidebar alongside the digitized image of the document itself. I chose to examine each one and compare it with its displayed original, as it seemed from the results that the AI either stuttered or had a slight case of dyslexia at times.

If I had wondered yesterday whether my Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro was really part of Warren's family, the will laid those concerns to rest. If we can believe what George Gilmer said about his sister and brother-in-law, the couple did indeed have four children—or, at least, those were all who were named in the document. Warren identified his two sons, Zacharias and Charles, as well as two daughters. Along with mention of Lucy "Gilmore" Taliaferro, we can all be relieved that the other daughter's name was listed as Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro. So she was part of this family, after all.

That, however, calls into question the Oglethorpe County, Georgia, guardianship bond we reviewed yesterday, naming all the "orphans and minors" of Warren Taliaferro, a list which went on far longer than the four named in Warren's October 1815 will in Pendleton District, South Carolina. It is observations like this which make me want to take far more literally comments in wills such as Warren's directive to divide his property "into as many equal parts as I shall have children alive at that time" of his death.

George Gilmer, incidentally, was one of two brothers of Warren's wife Mary whom Warren had appointed as executors of his will. Perhaps George wryly spoke from personal experience.

A Package Deal?

 

To figure out just how it was that Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro ended up named in a marriage license dated the same day as that of her widowed mother would take some searching for old, old documents. On the face of it, the situation gave the appearance of a package deal: I marry you, if I can also marry off your daughter.

The only problem with that hypothesis was that Mary Elizabeth was not the youngest of her parents' children. That might have been the case for her own future daughter, my second great-grandmother, the orphaned Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey. But we now have found indications that the mother, Mary Elizabeth, was likely a daughter of Mary Meriwether Gilmer and Warren—or Warner, as he was alternately called—Taliaferro. Thus, the reason why the baby of the Rainey family ended up bearing the name of her older—and tragically deceased—brother, who had been named after his maternal grandfather.

Looking through court records to find any explanation for what happened leading up to her mother's second marriage—and her surprisingly early marriage as well—didn't seem to produce any satisfactory explanation, but I did learn more about the entire family in the process.

In the court proceedings in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, one transaction recorded September 24, 1818, served the purpose of posting bond as security for the appointment of one Peachy R. Gilmer as guardian of the children of the deceased Warren Taliaferro. The Taliaferro children named in the document were Lucy G., Zachariah T., Sarah H., Charles, and Sophie, identified specifically as "orphans and minors of Warran [sic] Taliaferro, deceased."

Note the absence of any mention of older daughter Mary Elizabeth. There is a clear reason for that: Mary Elizabeth had already gotten married to Thomas Rainey in June of that same year.

Or was that the reason? After all, in looking at that document designating the guardian of Warren Taliaferro's orphaned children, another possible reason Mary Elizabeth's name wasn't mentioned could have been that this was not even her family. We need more information to confirm that assumption.

To find any further details regarding the deceased Warren Taliaferro, I wanted first to look for his will. And that became my perfect excuse to try out a new search tool which, it seems, everyone is talking about. We'll check out that new way to see what we can find, tomorrow.   

About the Reverend

 

The search was on to discover my roots—specifically, the mother of my orphaned second great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey. Because the name Taliaferro kept showing up in what I could find about this family, I was fairly certain that was M.E.W.T. Rainey's mother's maiden name. However, in looking around the page where the younger Mary Elizabeth's marriage entry had been made in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, I noticed some interesting details.

For one, the name of the minister who performed the marriage ceremony for young—and I do mean young—Mary Elizabeth and her beau Thomas F. Rainey was Nicholas Powers. The Reverend Powers had signed a statement indicating that he had performed their marriage ceremony on June 9, 1818. Remembering that Mary Elizabeth had, in later years, reported her age such that her year of birth would have either been in 1804 or 1806, I did the math. Yep: this girl was either fourteen or—worse—twelve at the time of her marriage to Thomas Rainey. Surely, that couldn't be correct.

That marriage date was gleaned from one Oglethorpe County record, but there was more than one entry for Mary Elizabeth's wedding date. In another ledger, listing only the date and names of bride and groom, the entry date for Mary and Thomas' wedding was given as May 30, not June 9. Could that have been the date when the marriage license application was made? 

While puzzling over that discrepancy, my eyes wandered over the page. What should I spot, just below the Rainey and Taliaferro entry, but another Taliaferro entry. This one also was dated the same: May 30, 1818. The Taliaferro in question for this entry was someone named Mary, but rather than Mary E., as our Mary's record had been entered, this other Mary was "Mary M."

And the groom? The Reverend Nicholas Powers, himself.

Of course, the next question was: who was this Mary M. Taliaferro? She couldn't have been a sister of our Mary, I reasoned. It would be unlikely to see two sisters with the same given name. Perhaps this was an entry for two Taliaferro cousins who coincidentally got married on the same day—or at least applied for their marriage license at the same time.

As it turned out—at least, if we can trust this clue at Find A Grave—the other Mary was someone named Mary Meriwether Gilmer. The reason she was identified in her marriage record as Mary Taliaferro was that she had been the widow of someone named Warren Taliaferro. On the same day that the Reverend Nicholas Powers applied for a license to marry the widow Mary Taliaferro, Thomas Rainey had applied to marry the exceedingly young daughter of that same widow, and her future step-father had performed the ceremony ten days later.

   

Above: Entry from the marriage records of Oglethorpe County, Georgia, showing the entry dated May 30, 1818, for Thomas F. Rainey and Mary E. Taliaferro immediately above that on the same day for Nicholas Powers and Mary E.'s mother, Mary M. Taliaferro; entry courtesy Ancestry.com.

Meet M.E.T.

 

It is always wise to start with what you know, when launching a search for the unknown predecessors lying behind those brick wall ancestors in your family tree. At one time, my third great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro was one of those mystery ancestors. Only because of the help gained by using the mitochondrial DNA test was I able to break past the point before that, when all I knew about my second great-grandmother was that she was an orphan from Georgia who married Thomas Taliaferro Broyles and moved to Tennessee six years before her untimely death in 1877.

It wasn't easy to find the orphan's parents. Before DNA, all I knew, thanks to an entry in a family Bible, was that my second great-grandmother's maiden name was Mary Rainey—and even the spelling of her surname was suspect, due to handwriting issues. Eventually, the discovery that the daughter lived with her older brother Thomas in the 1870  household of one Charles Taliaferro in Columbus, Georgia, led me to the previous census record where, in 1860, the two siblings lived in a household headed by one Mary E. Rainey.

The older Mary was, at that time, apparently widowed, for there were several young people living in the home with her—but no husband. In typical fashion for the 1860 census, the household was itemized, giving the names of the men below the head of household, then the women who, in bookend fashion, followed—first the oldest daughter Martha, then the youngest daughter, "Mary W. E." 

The problem was that looking for the family in the previous census meant that baby Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey would not be included in the household, since the 1860 census had indicated she was born about 1851. Noting the names of the older children, though, I pushed back to the 1850 census to discover baby Mary's father's name: Thomas F., same as the brother with whom she had been living after her parents' deaths. From there, I also obtained a copy of the elder Thomas' will, filed in Campbell County on June 7, 1858 which, although not identifying the other children, did name two daughters, including—thankfully—Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey.

Now that I knew her parents' identities, it was time to learn more about them. Unfortunately, I haven't learned much about Thomas, husband of the elder Mary Elizabeth and father of the longer-named daughter. As for his wife, Mary Elizabeth, I discovered through her husband's will that, in addition to naming his wife as executrix, the same Charles Taliaferro in whose household I originally found the younger Mary Elizabeth and her brother Thomas living had been named executor of the elder Thomas Rainey's 1858 will. That, combined with the repeated reference to Warren Taliaferro, both as name of the couple's deceased son and the appendage to their youngest daughter's name, sure seemed to point the way to a Taliaferro surname for Thomas Rainey's wife.

As it turned out, there was an 1818 marriage record recorded in Oglethorpe County for one Thomas F. Rainey and his bride to be, Mary E. "Talafero." What was concerning, though, was that if the bride was indeed our Mary E. Taliaferro, she would have been quite a young bride. Based on the ages given in the 1850 and 1860 census enumerations, she would have been born in either 1804 or 1806.

The initial thought might have been, given the different location of the county, that this was not our Mary. However, it was the name of the minister which hinted we might have the right bride, after all. This minister of the gospel signed his entry in the court records as Nicholas Powers. Like many other clues we find in family history research, this name had more than one connection to Mary Elizabeth's family, as we'll learn tomorrow. 

Taking a Ride on the Matriline

 

It isn't often that my family history explorations follow a straight path, but for this month's focus, that is the route we will take. Don't think this will be an easy ride, though. The route we'll take runs straight back through history on my matriline, that one descending line on the pedigree chart that leads from mother to maternal grandmother, to her mother, ever changing surnames as we make the flying leap from generation to generation.

Our springboard will be the mother of my orphaned second great-grandmother with the impossibly long name: Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey. Her brief life had to do double duty on the family history namesake post, carrying the name not only of her own mother, but that of an older brother whose untimely death the family never wanted to remain forgotten.

Mary Elizabeth Warren Taliaferro Rainey suffered a similar fate, herself, dying after the birth of her fourth child and only son. Fast forward several generations and I found this woman shrouded in mystery, almost forgotten by her daughter, my great-grandmother, who, at barely three years of age, was raised by a step-mother. Any oral tradition of passing along the family stories was interrupted at these two points: the loss of the younger Mary Elizabeth and that of her mother.

For this month's focus on my Twelve Most Wanted this year, I want to retrace that matriline. Especially now that, thanks to mitochondrial DNA testing and a match who has accurate tree-building skills, I have been able to identify that earlier ancestor—Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro, wife of Thomas Firth Rainey—I  have the springboard to launch into deeper exploration of that elder Mary's roots. And it's about time.

We'll have plenty to keep us busy this month, as her matriline moves us back from pre-Civil War Georgia to again visit roots in Virginia. As we continue down that line, this time we'll take a closer look at what can be found on family names such as Gilmer, Lewis, and Strother, pushing back as far in time as we can with documentation searches. If we are exceedingly fortunate, we may even land as far back as the beginning of the eighteenth century in colonial Virginia.

Before we get lost in such research daydreams, though, we need to start with what we know. Come this Monday, we'll meet at the station to begin this ride along the matriline toward our first stop: an introductory meeting with my third great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro.

A "Singularly Verified" Dream

 

In wrestling with the deeply-buried roots in our family tree, it's best to start with what we know before digging down into the murky unknown. Thus, in seeking the Carter roots of my fourth great-grandmother Margaret Chew Carter, who eventually became the bride of "old bachelor" Zachariah Taliaferro, it's best to start from the vantage point of her married life, complete with the names of her children—known values which keep my genealogical wanderings centered in reality.

Still, in searching through the book we discovered last week—the 1912 publication by Dr. Joseph Lyon Miller, The Descendants of Capt. Thomas Carter of "Barford"—it was encouraging to spot between its covers what, at least to me, was a familiar story from my family's past. I had read this story in other, more recently published, genealogy books, and wonder whether the Miller book was their source for the tale in which Zachariah Taliaferro, persuaded by a Virginia friend to delay his return home to South Carolina, had a dream about the grand ball he was about to attend, and which was the prime reason for his delayed departure. 

In his dream, bachelor Zachariah saw himself entering the ballroom and spotting a beautiful young lady across the room, tying her slipper. As author Joseph Miller put it in his book, on the night of the actual event, Zachariah found his dream "singularly verified." The beautiful young lady, Margaret Chew Carter, eventually became his bride.

Those details I've already documented in my own family tree, so it was affirming to see the listing of Margaret's children in the Miller book, just as I already knew it to be. From that starting point, I could then move cautiously back through time, seeking what leads I could then verify about the Carter family through other documentation.

There were a few details I found in the process—one I felt confident could be confirmed through Margaret's father's will, and one which has already confounded me. A book intended to trace the lineage of the founding Carter immigrant in the American colonies, the Carter book obviously would have provided a listing of the children of Margaret's father—John Carter—but it also mentioned that Margaret became her father's one child who inherited the old Carter residence. Both of these details can easily be verified, once we find John Carter's will.

Where I am stumped is in the book's statement that John Carter served as a captain in the Revolutionary War. While one resource is by no means a complete listing of the universe of possibilities, the D.A.R. listing of Patriot ancestors is a first go-to website when I wish to confirm service in that war. In the case of John Carter, there is a listing at the D.A.R. website, but it comes with so many red flags that I begin to doubt the details asserted in the Miller book. Chief among the problems, at least in my mind, is the website's statement regarding the identity of John's first wife, combined with the tricky detail of his having two different daughters to whom he gave the name Margaret—one child from each of his two wives, at least according to the Miller book.

While finding a genealogy book of the early 1900s detailing all the names in multiple generations of an ancestral family may seem like a dream come true, it only reminds me, once again, of my oft-repeated motto, "Trust but verify." It may be great to find a trailblazer for our research, but we need to enter that relationship with our eyes wide open. Now we start with the real work.

Trusting the Trailblazer

 

While those of us who chase our family's history may pride ourselves on our independent research, the truth of the matter is that none of us could do this detective work without the help of others. One way or another, we need a trailblazer to point the way. The key, however, is to ensure that that trailblazer is worthy of our trust.

There is a phrase which made its appearance toward the end of the Cold War years which I have since co-opted for my own less-political purposes: "Trust, but verify." What inspired me to adapt that motto for genealogy was the frustrating discovery that some information provided on death certificates might not necessarily be correct—details like mother's maiden name, for instance. Not that anyone was deliberately seeking to deceive future generations; it's just that the moments immediately following the death of a loved one can be some of the most high-stress times in a person's life. Thus, we receive incorrect information that once got blurted out by those who should know, then duly recorded by government officials who are only doing their job, but otherwise would have no way of knowing.

My father-in-law's family led me to yet another example of "documentation" which might not be trustworthy: his great-grandfather's grave marker, which clearly spells the patrilineal surname as "Steavens." Since discovering multiple instances such as these, I've learned to be far more willing, in looking at family history resources of any kind, to trust—but verify.

Thus it is when we turn to those published genealogies of the early years of a previous century. Though research trailblazers may have written their findings closer to the time of our ancestors, these books were compiled without the technological aids we've come to take for granted. No matter how well-meaning the researcher, we have to accept it as a given that there will be mistakes. But should we toss out the books as worthless for our purposes? Absolutely not; we take them and double-check the work done a hundred years ago with the tools we have now to bring up digitized documents for verification. Thus, we trust, but verify.

In researching my January project for those Twelve Most Wanted I slated for 2024—the paternal line of my fourth great-grandmother Margaret Chew Carter—I've found mentions that she was descended from a man known as King Carter. We've already discussed one example from a book published in 1911, but I later found that same information repeated in a different book from 1926. The problem is that many of the genealogy books of the previous century were not as stringent about providing their sources; the latter book might only have been repeating what the author read from the previous one, without personally verifying the information. The reader has no way to know—only to verify that detail independently.

Based on what I've learned from the minimal research done this past week, I already have warning bells going off in my head when I read an entry like this:

This section of the 1916 book, The Kinnears and Their Kin, details a Carter line from John Carter, presumably the founding immigrant, through to the children of Margaret Chew Carter and her husband Zachariah Taliaferro. Yet, based on a quick search online, it becomes obvious that the author's designation for the person known as King Carter was incorrect. How many times has this information been repeated?

While that may be discouraging to realize, I have run across some positive signs. I mentioned the other day that I had run Margaret Chew Carter's name through a Google search. Among other hits, I ran across this entry at JSTOR from an October 1910 article in The William and Mary Quarterly. (If you don't have access to that service—though you only need to view that first-page preview—you can also read the article at Internet Archive.)

The article, written by Joseph L. Miller, detailed several discoveries—"positive proof"—found since his last article on the Carter line had been published the previous year in the same quarterly. Among those items was correction of a detail concerning one Margaret Chew Carter, incorrectly noted to be wife of someone named Captain John Marshall. As Dr. Miller explained, it was actually her half-sister, also named Margaret, who had married the captain. Updating such discoveries for the record certainly helped up the author's trustworthiness level, at least in my opinion.

But who, exactly, was that writer in The William and Mary Quarterly? It took a bit more searching to discover that "Dr. Jos. L. Miller" was indeed a medical doctor, whose published works in his chosen field generally pertained to what has been called "his major hobby and passion," first the history of Western medicine, then eventually, local history and the history of various lines in his own family.

These lines included—fortunately for me—the Carter family from which Margaret Chew Carter eventually descended. Not long after publication of the 1909 and 1910 articles Joseph Lyon Miller wrote for The William and Mary Quarterly, he did indeed fold those "positive proof" discoveries into a 1912 volume he called The Descendants of Capt. Thomas Carter of "Barford," Lancaster County, Virginia, 1652-1912. 

From the reputation detailed in the biography included with a donation he made to a Virginia college, to examples of how he updated his own research, I feel Joseph Miller gains enough credibility to tentatively merit trustworthiness as a genealogical trailblazer—but remember, as we look at his discoveries on Margaret Chew Carter's forebears, we still need to keep that mantra close at hand: trust, but still verify.

Finding the Road Map

 

Tracing the line of a family surname can be challenging, as those of us wrestling with "brick wall" ancestors can attest. This month, as I work on the first goal of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2024, I am chasing after a colonial woman with the maiden name of Carter—a surname common enough to possibly lead me astray. However, I am also fortunate enough that this particular Carter line includes some notables from the colonial era in a region rich in history—and historic preservation. Finding the "road map" to lead me through the Carter generations may be easier than I thought.

Of course, the question might be, why find a "road map" for genealogy at all? Just do the work. Yet, pushing back to an era devoid of the common types of documents we might rely on for more recent family research—birth certificates, death certificates, even census records or obituaries for women—it sometimes seems the search would be easier if we already knew the father's name. And that is precisely what we aren't sure of. Yet.

Thankfully, in our digitized age, we stand a better chance of locating records, thanks to trailblazers who've already done the research and shared their work. We have libraries full of published genealogies—think the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, or the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana—with multiple volumes already scanned and put online for anyone to use. The same goes for independent organizations like Internet Archive where, once a book has aged beyond copyright and is in the public domain, a quick search can bring us right to the front page—or deep inside, if we use the website's own search capabilities.

Then, too, subscription services like Ancestry.com or MyHeritage have acquired digitized volumes for their own customers' use. In seeking information on my fourth great-grandmother Margaret Chew Carter, wife of Zachariah Taliaferro, several hints at Ancestry provided citations in books and journal articles.

Besides that, despite the common state of a surname like Carter, I discovered that doing a simple Google search on Margaret's maiden name led me to several resources I would otherwise not have known about. For instance, as part of the Zachariah Taliaferro family records donated to the Clemson University Library Special Collections and Archives, there is a biographical statement which includes Margaret by name. And if I repeat that Google search while specifying one website—limiting my search to, say, "Internet Archive"—it leads me to mentions of her name in several books written in the early 1900s.

Finding the road map, in Margaret's case, is not necessarily the problem. There are resources out there. But once I find them, the question becomes: are they reliable? We've already mentioned the entry in one book, asserting Margaret's relationship to a well-known Carter man who preceded her by one or more generations, "King" Carter. I've seen that claim repeated in other resources. But is it true?

That's a question I'll need to answer for myself. But in the meantime, it points us to another question to consider: once we find a family history road map, how can we know that resource is reliable? Let's take a look tomorrow at a couple examples I've found which give me pause—and some thoughts on how to handle that likelihood. 

What I Know About Margaret

 

Considering Margaret Chew Carter, my fourth great-grandmother, if you asked me what I know about her, I'd have to say: very little. Well, at least that is a step beyond answering, "nothing." But my aim this month is to learn far more about this woman's life.

The problem with researching Margaret starts with learning that she was someone who was born in 1771—not a very good time for finding records about women. Even so, there should have been some records on her life. Women's names did appear in baptismal records and marriage records—if, after over two hundred years, we can still find them. Yet, even those basic documents I have yet to find.

What I do know about Margaret starts at the end of her life. She became the wife of Virginian Zachariah Taliaferro, and moved with him to South Carolina, where they set up housekeeping and he practiced law. Over the years since their wedding, she gave birth to four daughters who survived to adulthood, all of whom married and raised families of their own. These she named Sarah Ann, Lucy Hannah, Mary Margaret, and Caroline Virginia.

In addition, Margaret's headstone is pictured at Find a Grave, a wonderful gift to family researchers, with the small caveat that I can't exactly read the inscription pictured on her grave's memorial. A kind volunteer at Find A Grave transcribed the information onto the website's virtual memorial, indicating that her date of death in South Carolina was May 19, 1822.

While I have no way to vouch for that information—yet—I noticed there was no mention of her name in her husband's will, dated January 14, 1831. Nor was there any indication that he, if a widower, had remarried. Zachariah Taliaferro died—again, according to his Find a Grave memorial—April 14, 1831, nearly nine years after the date indicated on his wife's headstone. 

However, while I can't find actual documentation regarding Margaret, apparently, several others have included her in their published genealogies. Granted, any genealogy can contain errors, but it would do us some good to at least catalog the several sources I've run across while working on this family line. Some of the books were written on the Taliaferro line of Margaret's husband, some on other surnames related to Margaret's own Carter family in one way or another. Let's take a few days to review what has already been written on her in these hundred-year-old resources. If nothing else, we can use any information we find as a road map to guide us in locating those elusive records.

Tracing the Carters

 

There is always the possibility that, delving into our own family's history, we may cross lines with someone who was, indeed, historically significant—not just to our own family, but to the community at large. Tracing the Carter line may just hold that very possibility—but first, we'll have to check this out for ourselves. That's my goal in researching my Carter family history this month.

While this won't be as daunting as tracing the family history of a line of Smiths, the Carter surname—the focus of the first of the Twelve Most Wanted I'll be researching this year—might just be a challenge. Carter is a surname which has been part of this country's history for centuries.

Granted, when thinking of well-known Carters in American history, our former president Jimmy Carter may come to mind, and that would indeed be a good example. Seeing the multitude of people claiming that same surname, though—only a decade ago, records showed Carter being the fifteenth most common surname in President Carter's home state of Georgia—we can hardly say that there must be a relationship there, simply because of a shared surname. Besides that, the Carter I am pursuing was my fourth great-grandmother, Margaret Chew Carter, wife of Zachariah Taliaferro. Back then, those Carters lived in Virginia, which, at least by 1880, claimed Carter as the ninth most common surname in that state.

While we'll need to hone our search to a very specific line of Carters this month, I already have a few clues to guide me. Margaret Chew Carter is mentioned in some published genealogies, which can serve as trailblazer to lead me to documentation, either to verify or discard what's been asserted in those books. While that may seem like "reinventing the wheel," I think it's prudent to confirm for ourselves what others have claimed in any genealogy, whether published as online family trees or coming from the pages of dusty old volumes at the library. Just because a source is old or printed in a book doesn't mean it is more reliable—it's the documentation that counts.

What details I have for now include that Margaret was born about 1771 in colonial America—just a few years shy of the start of the American struggle for independence. Her father—the next step in our search for Carter roots—was said to have been John Carter, a perfect example of how to expand the generic nature of such a name.

While a given name like John may seem to confound the research challenge, we can add that Margaret Chew Carter's mother was a woman named Hannah Chew, passing down her maiden name to her child, as has often been customary, plus providing us a guidepost to separate this one John Carter from the multiple others who were surely out there at the same time around their colonial Virginia home.

However, I can't be sure that those history books including this family's names are entirely correct. This is something we'll need to prove for ourselves. Take, for example, this excerpt about Margaret's husband's Taliaferro line, linking Margaret to another member of the extended Carter family:

According to that book, our Margaret was a descendant of King Carter. So, who was King Carter? And was Margaret's connection to this man one that we can verify?

That resource—the 1911 volume entitled Historical Sketches of the Campbell, Pilcher and Kindred Families—might indeed have been well-researched, but I want to trace that line for myself, not solely because I enjoy the thrill of the hunt, but because we all need to confirm each step in our family's chain of events with solid documentation.

So, lest we get lost in the minutiae of King Carter, we need to focus on Margaret and move in a methodical process, first to the next generation in this Carter line: that generically-named John Carter of colonial Virginia. But for those consumed by curiosity (confession: I am, too), I'll relent to take a brief moment tomorrow to discover who this claim-to-fame possible ancestor might have been, at least according to history. Then, back on track!