Daughtered Out

 

The line of Zachariah Taliaferro included four descendants, all of whom were daughters. Obviously, familiarity with that surname in subsequent generations was not owing to Zachariah's line, for he had no son to carry his name forward. In other words, as some in the world of genetic genealogy might put it, Zachariah Taliaferro "daughtered out."

Despite that misfortune in an age when sons were important for many reasons, we still need to get to know each of Zachariah's daughters, for in an era in which families often intermarried, we may see those names appear in future generations. We'll take a tour today of each of those four daughters of Zachariah Taliaferro and his wife Margaret Chew Carter, and include a brief note concerning the surnames each of the daughters adopted upon their own marriage.

The oldest of the four daughters was my direct line, my third great-grandmother Sarah Ann Taliaferro, whom we introduced yesterday. Following her 1803 birth in South Carolina was the 1805 arrival of her sister Lucy Hannah Taliaferro. After a brief break from the customary stairstep fashion, the next Taliaferro daughter, Mary Margaret, made her appearance in 1808. The youngest, Caroline Virginia Taliaferro, arrived another three and a half years later. If there were more children of this couple, I have yet to find them.

While we already are familiar with the name of Sarah's husband—we just spent the past month researching Ozey Robert Broyles' ancestry—it might be helpful to list the spouses of Sarah's sisters. While it is true that some of these southern lines from that earlier era did end up intermarrying over the generations, I have another reason for wanting to list these spouses' names: some of them turn up in local history anecdotes. Of course, during that time period, it is sometimes difficult to research a woman without keeping her in the context of family names.

Sarah's next-younger sister Lucy married a man in 1826 by the name of David Sloan Taylor, son of Joseph and Nancy Sloan Taylor of Pendleton. Theirs was a large family which grew to twelve children, though some which I cannot trace may have died in childhood. While David was said to have accumulated a large fortune before the Civil War, not only his fortunes but his health turned, shortly after the close of the war. He apparently died intestate.

Sarah's second sister, Mary Margaret, married a local attorney destined to be not only a local office holder, but also a three-term American congressman prior to the Civil War. Richard Franklin Simpson's interest in local history likely was passed down to his son, Richard Wright Simpson, whose History of Old Pendleton District provides some guidance on the families he was closely related to in that region.

The youngest daughter of Zachariah Taliaferro and Margaret Chew Carter was Caroline Virginia Taliaferro. Like her older sisters, Caroline married and spent the rest of her life in the Pendleton area of South Carolina's upcountry, where she raised at least four children. Her husband, Henry Campbell Miller, was said in all the census records from 1850 through 1880—the last enumeration before his 1899 death—to have been a farmer, but according to his wife's obituary, he was listed as Dr. H. C. Miller. Caroline predeceased him by several years, dying in 1877 by what her obituary referred to as a "painful accident."

It is interesting to note, in examining the record of American Revolutionary War patriot Zachariah Taliaferro, these four sisters' paternal grandfather, that three of the sisters were named in the genealogical listings in applications for membership to the Daughters of the American Revolution. For some reason, descendants of Lucy Hannah Taliaferro, wife of David Sloan Taylor, do not show among the DAR applications for membership, at least that I can find.

No matter. Even if they couldn't pass down the specific surname of their father, every one of these daughters passed down a Taliaferro legacy to their descendants.

That, however, is not what we are pursuing this month. We want to continue our research journey by pressing further into the past. With that, our next step in the process will be to examine the daughters' father, Zachariah, and what we know about his own siblings.  

 

 

Dispensing Justice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Many Trees Does it Take?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Goals Get Messy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Untangling the Twisted Lines

Now that I've finished the collection of Civil War letters of my first cousin, four times removed—Taliaferro Simpson, or "Tally" for short—my next task is to go back through all the notes I've gleaned from the editors' footnotes on family relationships. Just to be sure—one never knows, you see, whether I've missed an ancestor.

For instance, one footnote at the end of the volume, affixed to a letter of condolences from a Captain Henry P. Farrow of the Confederacy's War Department, mentioned that he was "husband of Tally's cousin Cornelia." Off I went to search for all the Cornelias in my family tree database. After all, how many Cornelias could there be?!

As it turned out, more than I cared to slog through, including one false lead on the Broyles side of our family. Tally's mother, you may remember, was sister to my third great-grandmother, Sarah Ann Taliaferro, who married Ozey Robert Broyles. Their daughter, Margaret Cornelia, married Samuel Van Wyck. Not Farrow.

I knew that. Maybe it's pushing capacity to remember all those names in a nineteen thousand person tree.

As for the other Cornelias? None of them seemed to relate to Tally's mother's side of the family. Besides, I have no Farrows in my tree. Must be a connection on the Simpson side.

But there are others. Remember the "Taylor Shop" entries in Tally's letters? I'll be reviewing those notes to see what can be added about another of Tally's aunts on the Taliaferro side. And of course, since the Miller family—another Taliaferro link—was featured so prominently in the book, I'll be reviewing all those notes to glean details for my database there, as well.

And then, there is the discussion of the future of the "Fair Unknown," Miss Fannie Smith. Whether the Charleston refugee shows up in any other documents frequented by genealogists, I'm not sure, but I'll be scouring those resources closely to see what became of her, after those tumultuous war years.

If there is anything remarkable to report of all this review of footnotes, you can be sure I'll mention it this week. After all, footnotes can provide the most valuable leads for research.

"The Taylor Shop"

How can a non-fiction book be classified as a page turner? Moreover, how can a non-fiction composition include a plot twist? I'm not sure, but what keeps me reading through the letters home from Tally Simpson during his Civil War service is the race to discover whether his fascination with Fannie Smith, "The Fair Unknown," gains any traction before his inevitable fate closes in on him.

Tally, my first cousin four times removed, had become infatuated, sight unseen, with one particular young woman from Charleston seeking refuge with her family in the safety of Pendleton, South Carolina, during the Civil War. Tally's hometown relatives plotted with him to court her from the distance of his ever-changing position as a soldier in the Confederacy.

There was, of course, an obstacle to this plan, which reared its threatening appearance in the unlikely form of what Tally and his cousin called "The Taylor Shop." There was little explanation of what that code-speak meant, but I think I know. The explanation on this diversion from our Fannie Smith Sightings may both provide some insight as well as lead us to an interesting additional connection in a future post here.

While the book I am still reading—Far, Far From Home—has been developed into an annotated guide to Tally Simpson's wartime letters, it is more helpful in identifying historic battles and identities of the military personnel referred to continually, but there is not as much editorial guidance to piece together the family structure. I, of course, already know the family tree for that generation, being that Tally's mother, Mary Margaret Taliaferro Simpson, was sister to my third great-grandmother, Sarah Ann Taliaferro Broyles, but not every reader of this collection of letters would have that advantage.

When Tally conspired with his sister Anna, his cousin Carrie and her mother, Caroline Taliaferro Miller, his goal was to secretly win the heart of one Fannie Smith. There was a potential adversary, however, in the form of what the relatives referred to as "The Taylor Shop." It happened that the Taliaferro sisters—Tally's mother Margaret, my third great-grandmother, and Tally's aunt Caroline—also had another sister. This sister was named Lucy, and she had married a man by the name of David Sloan Taylor.

The Taylors, also living in Pendleton during the time of the war, had many children, including two daughters born at about the same time as Tally—Lucy, two years older than Tally, and her sister Susan, born two years after him in 1841. Tally's own sister Anna was born only a few years beyond that, in 1844. Perhaps as Anna served as Tally's eyes and ears, back home in Pendleton, she sniffed out some competition regarding Miss Fannie Smith—or at least disapproval—coming from her cousins' direction, and may have warned Tally.

While reading books such as this may afford me a wonderful opportunity to spy out the everyday complexities of life among my ancestral families, there is still much reading between the lines, even in this context. And yet, being a mere twenty six pages from the conclusion of the story, I am not sure anything further will be revealed on just what it was that kept Tally speaking so obliquely about his cousins.

There is, however, the historic context beyond the text of this book of letters. And I certainly know how to mine that vein of gold nuggets. Fannie Smith, herself, scattered a paper trail of her own micro-history behind her, which anyone can access, despite the challenge of a name as common as hers. What a wonderful rabbit trail of research to add to my list of diversions. I believe I shall set up a tree to see what has become of "The Fair Unknown" and her legacy.

A Family Name

The other day I was reading Seth Godin—well, because, Seth Godin—and I ran across a word I couldn't set aside. It was one of those words you just wouldn't use every day, but it had the aura of a tool that might become useful.

I don't know about you, but I look at words like I would tools. You want to make your tools work hard for you, but you also want to use the right tool for the right job. No sense sweating over a task with the wrong tool, when the right tool would make the job a breeze.

It was just over a week ago when Seth was blogging about trust. Of course, the whole post is worthy of consideration, but there was one passage that caught my eye:

In most commercial and organizational engagements, trust is something we want and something we seek out, but we use the most basic semiotics and personal interactions to choose where to place our trust. And once the trust is broken, there's almost no amount of transparency that will help us change our mind.

There it was, right in the middle of that statement: the word that caught my eye. Semiotics. I had to look that one up. It might turn out to be handy.

And it did. Not in the straightforward, line-upon-line, knowledge-added way you might have assumed. You know me: rabbit trails all the way.

While the description of semiotics may be the kind of material that induces the eyes-glazed-over response—if you doubt my word, take a look for yourself—but in a strange way, I found it fascinating. Why? Because it included a rabbit-trail-trigger that launched me back into my own family history.

Right in the Wikipedia explanation defining semiotics as the study of meaning-making, the article was careful to warn, "not to be confused with the Saussurean tradition called semiology."

Wait! Saussurean? I've seen a name like that before. Which Saussure would be the one inspiring a "tradition" like that?

As it turned out, the real Saussure was Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist who died in 1913. While that makes for interesting reading (at least to those interested in pursuing semiotics), it also reminded me that I have some de Saussures in my family tree. In fact, that same name cropped up as a middle name for several people related to my maternal line. The regular repetition of that name through the generations almost seemed to shout the importance attached to someone with that name.

Since the link to my tree came in with the marriage of Daniel de Saussure Bacot to Rosa Taylor from the Taliaferro branch of my maternal line, I didn't know much about this in-law to that Taylor line. All I knew is that from this wedding was generated a couple more generations carrying this de Saussure as a middle name. It took some hunting to determine that the source of that name, at least in my extended tree, was thanks to Daniel's paternal grandmother, carrier of that de Saussure as a maiden name. Undoubtedly, the name was replicated in other branches of that tree as much as (or perhaps even more than) it had been in my family tree.

Often, when an unusual given name is mentioned in a group setting, someone will invariably bring up the question, "Is that a family name?" The methodical re-iteration of a family name throughout the generations is a sure signal that someone thought that original name to be of importance.

Now, whenever anyone delves into the intricate study of semiotics and brings up Ferdinand de Saussure, though his lifespan post-dates my family line, I won't be able to consider it without remembering those ancestors and thinking, "I wonder if we're related?"