Doubting Thomas

 

Having the guidance of hundred-year-old genealogy books may seem a gift to the puzzled researcher—I know I welcome such as trailblazers when I'm otherwise lost—but right now I'm beginning to doubt some of the information offered. Specifically, after inspecting both the will of my fifth great-grandfather, John Carter of colonial Virginia, and that of his son-in-law, Owen Thomas, I'm beginning to doubt Mr. Thomas.

Last week, I spent time searching for any mention of the name Kenner in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Kenner was the supposed middle name of Owen Thomas' only surviving daughter Sarah, and Spotsylvania County was where both the Thomases and the Carters lived—or at least filed their wills. While I did find several references to the surname Kenner—even ones related to the extended Carter family—they just didn't seem to represent pieces that could neatly fit into this family puzzle.

This past weekend, I began the second phase of this investigation: to discover what links, if any, I could find to open up my understanding regarding the alternate surname, Kenyon. That, as you may recall, was the middle name given to John Carter's granddaughter Sarah Thomas—the same Sarah Thomas, incidentally, who was daughter of the by-then dearly departed Owen Thomas.

While I still can't fathom why a father would know less about his daughter's middle name than a grandfather might, we need to pay attention to this discrepancy. It might show us something we hadn't already discovered. For instance, the doubting Thomas in me sees alternate scenarios: that Sarah, Owen's daughter, might not be one and the same as Sarah, John's granddaughter. Or, perhaps Kenner was a more important family name to the Thomas family than Kenyon. Likewise, Kenyon might be the Carters' significant relative whose namesake became little Sarah. There could be many reasons for the confusion between the two names in those two documents.

Thankfully, there is a tendency toward collaboration which seems to be growing once again in the genealogy world, and I owe it to my newly-discovered apparent kazillionth Carter cousin twice removed, fellow genea-blogger Patrick Jones of Frequent Traveler Ancestry for pointing me in the direction of other court documents. Without his observations as he revisits this family history puzzle along with me, my review of the Kenner-Kenyon controversy would have yielded the score Kenner 3, Kenyon zip.

This is where I realize that casting our research nets in a far broader circle than we'd assume reasonable can indeed pay off. In this Kenyon case, that means looking at wills and other court records for not just key ancestors, but for at least three generations of family members. In the case of the Kenyon and Carter link, that also means looking for documents in neighboring counties, such as Caroline County, and even further afield, such as King George County.

With that, tomorrow we'll begin exploring the 1749 will of one of John Carter's elders, a man by the name of—wait for it!—Abraham Kenyon of King George County, Virginia. 

Tying up Another Loose End

 

Sometimes, it is those loose ends we find while we race to pursue our ancestors' records that trip us up. 

This week's discovery started out innocently enough: I was looking for any reason for the discrepancy in the middle name of John Carter's granddaughter Sarah Kenyon Thomas given in his will, and the name provided in another will by her own father, which stated it was Sarah Kenner Thomas.

While finding several entries concerning people with the surname Kenner in colonial Virginia court records, I stumbled upon another puzzle: the introduction of the name of Thomas Roy, who seemed to be mentioned often in the situation of one deceased Rodham Kenner and his widow, the former Judith Beverley. Today, I need to tie up that unexpected loose end in our Kenner foray down the genealogical rabbit trail.

Barely five years after the Reverend Kenner's passing, a March 1740 entry in the court records of Caroline County showed someone named Thomas Roy was appointed as guardian for George, the young son of the widow of Rodham Kenner. A mere month later, a suit brought in the same Caroline County against the same Thomas Roy did us the favor of identifying Thomas' wife as Judith, executrix of Rodham Kenner's will. And later that year in August, the record showed that the jury in that case found the same Judith, now Thomas Roy's wife, entitled to the whole of Rodham Kenner's estate.

Indeed, since Judith was born a Beverley, I could have consulted the posthumously-published genealogy by John McGill, The Beverley Family of Virginia. There, the entry for Harry Beverley's daughter Judith listed two spouses: first husband Rodham Kenner, followed by her second marriage to Thomas Roy.

According to the book, Thomas Roy was born about 1712 and died in 1772. An interesting sidelight of the book provided the note that Thomas Roy, Judith's second husband, was a son of someone in Caroline County named John Roy. An earlier record in Caroline County showed that the will of one John Roy had been proved in 1734 by Dorothy—possibly his wife—and someone named Thomas Roy. The same Thomas as Judith's second husband? 

What I have yet to discover—though I'm still working on it—is whether Thomas Roy might have been related to yet another connection in this extended family: the in-laws of Judith's sister Margaret. Margaret Beverley was Judith's older sister who had married John Chew of my family line. Margaret's mother-in-law happened to also be a daughter of a couple named John and Dorothy Roy. While the timeframes may be off, discovering this still makes me aware of just how often these same colonial surnames seem to cycle through family histories of that era.

Whether it was this Kenner connection which, decades later, yielded us the name of Sarah Kenner Thomas in her father's will, I can't yet say. First, we'll need to discover what might be found for the alternate middle name for young Sarah, the one mentioned in her grandfather's will: Kenyon. We'll explore that possibility next week.

Kenyon or Kenner? Gets Stickier

 

I admit it: I'm already deep into the family history forest's latest rabbit trail. And with every step, the trail gets thicker and stickier.

Last month, I spent time trying to locate all the information I could find on my fifth great-grandfather John Carter of Spotsylvania County in colonial Virginia. This month, the plan was to move to John's supposed second wife, Hannah Chew, and examine what could be found on her family line. And yet, there was a snag. There's always a snag.

The problem is that John Carter may have had yet another wife. No, take that back: the wife we thought he had might not have been the right person. After all, even the D.A.R. entry for the Captain seems to indicate otherwise.

The complications, however, burrow deeper than just that glitch. For one, we spotted yesterday the possibility that the name he gave in his will for his granddaughter might not have been entirely correct. According to her grandfather, that child's name was Sarah Kenyon Thomas. But according to the will of her own father, her name was Sarah Kenner Thomas.

Which one was the correct name?

To try to answer that question, I began by first searching for anything I could find in county court records for the surname Kenner, followed by another search for the surname Kenyon, which we will consider in a later post.

As it turned out, there were several entries containing that Kenner surname in abstracts of Spotsylvania court records, from which we can piece together a story of possible relationships. And that's where things get sticky, when it comes to piecing together a family tree. Apparently—and I've heard this before—families in the early years of colonial Virginia were quite intermarried. We'll see this as we trace the Kenner connections.

Before we run through this obstacle course of court resources, to put this rabbit trail in perspective, the mention of Sarah Kenner Thomas was made in her father's will dated in 1772. Yet, the only other references I could find for a surname Kenner occurred several years before that point. Here's how they unfolded.

First was the discovery in Spotsylvania County of one and only one name attached to that search: a man identified as the Rev. Rodham Kenner. I found mention of him in several Spotsylvania County records, but then, since property owned by the man who got me started on this chase—John Carter, Sarah's grandfather—spanned the border between Spotsylvania County and Caroline County, I discovered more entries in that second county.

To set the stage—though not the order of original discovery—I found mention of the nuncupative will of the Reverend Kenner listed in Caroline County. The abstract mentioned the will was proved by Judith Kenner, and that the estate was divided by an unnamed wife and son. Digging further for Rodham Kenner's wife's name, I found a Spotsylvania County mention of a 1729 (or 1730) marriage license issued for Rodham Kenner and Judith Beverley.

Thus, the Judith Kenner mentioned in Rodham's will could very possibly be this same wife identified as Judith Beverley. The interesting point here is that we've already found a Beverley family connection in the mother of my fifth great-grandmother, Hannah Chew, who married John Carter. Hannah's mother, Margaret, was daughter of Harry Beverley, who also was the father of Judith Beverley. When Hannah's husband John Carter was drawing up his own will and thinking about his orphaned granddaughter, did he somehow recall the wrong name when he meant to identify his in-laws' Beverley connection?

A guardianship proceeding from Spotsylvania County brought up another tie-in to that same Beverley family: at about this same time, Hannah's father John Chew had been designated as guardian of his wife's younger sister, Agatha Beverley. Security for the appointment was provided by none other than this Rodham Kenner, in-law by virtue of his marriage to Judith Beverley.

While indications were solid that Judith Beverley was Rodham Kenner's wife, who was the unnamed son in his will? Back in Caroline County, abstract of a March 1740 court entry revealed the son's name to be George Kenner, specifically naming his father and noting that the man was already deceased. (An interesting side light, which we'll save for later, was that the guardian appointed for the still-underaged George Kenner was a man named Thomas Roy.)

The court record also indicated that young George Kenner, through his new guardian, was to receive (in trust, presumably) "all the estate" from his "late guardian" Howson Kenner. That set the stage for a final record found back in Spotsylvania County. Fast forward another twenty five years, and the now-married George Kenner—along with another party by the name of Roy—is selling his portion of an inherited property passed from his grandfather Harry Beverley through Harry's five daughter, with the portion of George's now-deceased mother falling to him. Judith apparently had left no will—or at least did not mention this particular parcel of inherited land in her will, if she did draw one up.

This last court record provided a neatly-summarized overview of part of the Beverley family tree, listing the daughters whose husbands could now claim they had been in-laws of a significant colonial Virginian. But other than discovering the identity of three additional men with the surname Kenner—Rodham, his relative by the name of Howson Kenner, and Rodham's son George—this excursion taught us nothing more than that those colonial Virginians had multiple family connections. It certainly didn't reveal just who it might have been whose namesake became Owen Thomas' daughter and John Carter's granddaughter. 

Confirming a Granddaughter's Roots

 

Building a family tree for a granddaughter seems a fairly straightforward task. After all, the implication is that we already know who made that child someone's granddaughter. But when I wind my way through all the documents which leave us clues about ancestors living so long ago in colonial Virginia, I begin to ask myself: was John Carter's granddaughter really named Sarah Kenyon Thomas?

According to my fifth great-grandfather's 1778 will, the handwritten document was quite plain in spelling out the child's name: Sarah Kenyon Thomas. In fact, that name was listed in the will more than once, just to be clear.

But who were Sarah's parents? John Carter's will, putting his gift to his granddaughter in trust—under the supervision of "my son John Carter"—seems to indicate that she was underage at the time her grandfather's will was drawn up. Why, though, did the man direct that his son John hold it in trust for her, if the younger John was not the child's father? (Besides, if he were, then the name Sarah Kenyon Thomas would indicate a married name for the granddaughter.)

Looking to that old trailblazing Carter genealogy—The Descendants of Capt. Thomas Carter of "Barford"—author Joseph Lyon Miller listed Sarah as daughter of by-then deceased Elizabeth Carter. Finding that, my next step was to do what we genealogists always do: look for the documentation linking Elizabeth Carter and Sarah Kenyon Thomas to a missing husband and dad.

Assuming the entire family all still remained in Spotsylvania County where John Carter's will was proved in late 1783, I searched through a collection of abstracts of early court records, which is posted at Ancestry.com. Included in that collection were will books, deed books, guardian bonds, even listings of county residents who served as sheriff and who served in the Virginia militia. Looking for any entry mentioning a surname Thomas plus the granddaughter's given name Sarah, I was able to locate a possible dad for the child, and husband for John Carter's daughter.

The deceased—for this was the abstract of his own will drawn up in February of 1772—was a man by the name of Owen Thomas. Though the mention of those who served as executors and witnesses to Owen Thomas' will were not familiar family names to me—with the one notable exception of his own wife—the will did seem to confirm that Owen Thomas had married someone named Elizabeth. This was a partial confirmation of the statement in the Miller book.

There were, as it turns out, only two legatees mentioned in the will of Owen Thomas of Saint George's Parish in Spotsylvania County. One was specifically Owen's wife, Elizabeth. The other was identified as his daughter. Her name? Sarah Kenner Thomas.

Really? What happened to Sarah Kenyon Thomas, granddaughter named in John Carter's later will? Did someone get confused between two different branches of an extended family? Finding this, you know I next had to broaden the scope to see whether I could find anything further about either of these possible family names: Kenner or Kenyon. After all, which was the child's actual name: Sarah Kenyon Thomas? Or Sarah Kenner Thomas?