Retracing Those Steps

Imagine with me, for a moment, a hypothetical instance one hundred years from now, in which a descendant who never had the pleasure of meeting you decides to try his or her hand at the genealogical inquiry of your grandparents' whereabouts. Think of all the twists and turns that this future researcher might encounter.

In the case of my own maternal grandparents, I know that if the only tool I had to track their whereabouts was the decennial census record, I would have had great doubts about what I was finding. That family would surface, once every ten years, in places as far flung as Maryland, Florida, Michigan, and Colorado—even though their address of record was, for over forty years, in Columbus, Ohio.

Of course, I know the reason why: a desperate father during the Depression, fighting to find a job adequate enough to support his family, went to great lengths to attend to his duties.

But I only know that because my mother told me so. What about those future researchers who never would have known my grandparents? Who might never have had the opportunity to hear the family stories? The shreds of documents available to them might only offer disjointed slivers of the big picture. How can these researchers put the story back together again?

If you've followed me as I retraced the possible route of distant branches of my ancestral line through Georgia to Kentucky and then Missouri, you might be realizing that my situation has not been much different than the hypothetical future researcher we've just been considering. Left with nothing more than the "road map" of census records—and even hampered in my research by "burned counties" destitute of even the documentation normally considered in such a pursuit of family history—I've been faced with a puzzle as to how family whose members typically headed in one direction would suddenly show up somewhere else.

As I've belabored the minutiae of old migratory patterns in the early United States this past week, you may have wondered, "Why go through all this trouble?" After all, the exercise didn't really help me break through any brick walls. I'm still as puzzled about the nexus between my "exact match" mtDNA cousin and my own branch of our mutual matrilineal line as ever.

The exercise, however, is one I would categorize as a research investment. It provided me the confirmation I needed to see that such a different route was plausible. And it gave me an idea which branch of the family might be the one yielding the most answers if I look at it more closely. After all, I'm pushing back, generation by generation, testing each female descendant to see which one is the possible link. Though the families did tend to intermarry—and repeat that tendency, generation after generation—I may well have a viable target to research with this Gilmer branch of the extended line.

Besides, the exercise broadens our understanding of what our ancestors went through, in their quest to find yet a better homeland. If family history seeks to broaden our understanding of what those ancestors peopling our genealogy once faced, knowing the routes they took and the reasons why they did so adds so much more to the story of our heritage.

I'm not alone in that assumption. In an informative blog post outlining several of the early American migratory pathways—and who was most likely to use each one—genealogist Amie Bowser Tennant concluded,

Learning about migration routes can help you overcome obstacles in your research, uncover previously untapped resources, and lead you to your ancestors’ homeland.

As for my own foray into the possible routes that led one branch of my extended family away from the deep South—and hopefully toward a connection with the line from which my mystery cousin descended—I'll use that as a springboard to examine who else might have traveled with the family of John Thornton Gilmer from Kentucky to Missouri. After all, if travel conditions to this wilderness called for the safety of numbers, there may have been other family members in the company. I need to examine those families, as well.

While it still means researching a sizeable number of possible relationships, at least it provides the focus to hone in on one family line. Tightening the parameters is certainly a welcomed option.

The One Less Traveled By

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Way They Went

[T]hese settlers formed the most intimate friendly social union ever known among the same number of persons; how exceedingly active they were in business; economical in their expenditures; honest in their business dealings, and how they prospered beyond example.

Almost mournfully in his book, George Rockingham Gilmer reflected on the demise of the Broad River settlement—though peopled with friends and relatives he was quite comfortable in portraying in as realistic a light as possible, situated in a position he unapologetically lavished with praise.

In the introduction to Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia, it was noted the author

hopes that though now scattered widely apart through the southern and southwestern States, his book may unite them together once more in the kind feelings of kinsfolk.

Whatever led to the domino effect of one family after another choosing to leave their Georgian paradise behind—and note here, this decision was not one arrived at, understandably following the turmoil of the war in the 1860s, but well before the 1850 census records—one by one, many of my Taliaferro family had edged westward through Georgia, then across the Chattahoochee River into Alabama.

Some of them may have eyed this move as a shrewd investor's move, as the federal government was offering large tracts of land for sale in the newly-opened territory. Though following not many years after the original emigration from Virginia to the Broad River settlement in Georgia, this next move may have been made in relatively modern comfort, thanks to the progressive development in Georgia of a thorough network of rail lines between the 1830s and the 1850s.

Since I have, as one of my research goals, the outlining of the descendants of each of my maternal ancestral lines—thus my focus on surnames like Taliaferro, Harvie, Gilmer and Meriwether—I began to see a pattern as one family after another seemed to disappear from Georgia census records and re-appear in the rolls of Alabama cities like Montgomery.

Seeing the considerable emphasis placed by author Gilmer upon the industry and prosperity of the social milieu in the Broad River settlement, it was easy to recognize echoes of those characteristics in the next generation in their own selected residences. It would be interesting to examine the social networks formed in the next generation by these families of the Broad River settlement—not only from the genealogical aspect of their intermarriages, but from a sociological viewpoint, as well.

Though not in a particularly flattering way, that very point was picked up by a book in the 1970s, examining the socio-political underpinnings of their apparently elite, cohesive subculture. The book had coined the term, "Broad River Group," to refer to the Alabama settlers emigrating from that Broad River settlement of former Virginians who had, only a generation prior to this, claimed their new homes in Georgia.

One reviewer of that book later rehearsed the very migratory history of the Taliaferros, et al, that I've already mentioned, and described the "Broad River Group" as

an alliance of relatives and friends who dominated Alabama politics in the territorial and early statehood period.

It is not surprising to learn that the families of this group were considered to have been the early movers and shakers who established both Huntsville and Montgomery as two of Alabama's financial and business centers. As I had, independently, followed the family history of these lines, from the 1850s onward, it was quite obvious that these were people who had experienced a great deal of success.

All this was not without the turmoil that so often accompanies political maneuvers. As an entity, the Broad River Group of Alabama saw its demise with the loss of key candidates and rejection of unpopular policies, even in the state's formative territorial days. Whether my Taliaferros and Meriwethers were in the thick of these battles, I haven't yet uncovered—though I can certainly see that, as individuals, they had a fair number of successful attorneys, judges, and physicians in their ranks.

Examining whatever personal and business qualities had been bred into them during their earlier years in the families' residence back at the Broad River settlement in Georgia would be an interesting study. These traits likely stood them in good stead, even after moving to the recently-opened "frontiers" of the lands that were to become the states we now know as Alabama and Mississippi.

Above: "In the Arbour," 1882 oil on canvas by Polish artist Aleksander Gierymski; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Vectors and Migrations

If one had just arrived in paradise, what could possibly induce a soul to want to leave again?

The move to the Broad River area of Georgia seemed just the thing for the party of Virginians joined by my Taliaferro ancestors, just after the Revolutionary War. The land held out promise of productivity. The river provided convenient access to markets via Augusta to Savannah. What more could anyone desire?

Within one short generation, however, the promise of this new land had begun to fade. And with that fading went the prosperity of the people called there by that very hope.

For one thing, living near a river in a temperate climate can have its down side. A first clue to such difficulties was one I found in a biographical sketch of Nicholas Louis Meriwether—doubtless a distant relation—who had become one of the many who sadly bid goodbye to his Broad River home. The entry noted, "He spent most of his time attending the sick of the Broad River settlement."

The possible cause of such illness might be inferred from a history of nearby Augusta, Georgia—similarly situated upon a river. What was once dubbed "Stranger's Fever" periodically made its appearance in Augusta over the years following the nearby establishment of the Broad River settlement. According to Charles C. Jones' Memorial History of Augusta, Georgia, what later became known as Yellow Fever was documented in an outbreak there in 1839 in which one third of the entire Augusta population suffered an attack. Another such episode followed in 1854.

Members of the local Medical Society set themselves to the task of evaluating possible causes of this devastating illness. Opinions vacillated between conjectures that the disease was not contagious and that it was—and if so, how it was spread.

Eventually in the Society's investigations, it was noticed that "an unusual quantity of animal and vegetable putrefaction" had been found in "a number of small ponds and marshes." (Jones, page 258-259.)

In a stellar example of public policy that might have seemed like a good idea at the time, it turned out that the city fathers, some time before this, had decided that

there be constructed a slide or platform on the river bank for the purpose of throwing the dirt and rubbish collected by the street officer clear of the bank into the river.

As it turned out, their plan worked quite well, as many in the city availed themselves of this dumping-off point—so much so that the heap had swelled into a mountain of its own. Once the local officials realized what they had done to themselves, the next task—a similarly huge assignment—was to dismantle the hazard.

While that entire debacle occurred not in the Broad River settlement, but down river in Augusta, it serves to demonstrate the then-current view of rivers and their usefulness. It also revealed lack of understanding, at the time, of vectors of diseases—including the oft-found mosquitos of such low-lying "small ponds and marshes" as had been noticed in the physicians' inquiry into the Yellow Fever causes. Apparently, the good people of places like the Broad River settlement were all but hanging out welcome signs for the very visitors who bred the disease that was killing them.

I doubt very many of those choosing to leave the Broad River settlement realized, at the time, what it was that convinced them to pack up and move. Perhaps they once again convinced themselves that that periodic wearing out of the land was upon them.

Then again, the rise and fall of fortunes seemed pegged to more local causes, such as the fate of the nearby town of Petersburg—the down river inspection stop for shipments of tobacco headed to Augusta, then Savannah, then across the ocean for international trade. A shift in cash crops from tobacco to cotton and a change in transportation modes from "Petersburg boats" to roads and railroads routed elsewhere had a devastating impact on the economic well-being of the region.

Or maybe the Broad River families succumbed to a new kind of fever—western fever, for which the only known relief was to forsake all and move out West.

A New Life in Georgia

Following the American Revolution, a company of Virginians followed their leader, General George Mathews, to the promise of a fresh start in Georgia. This was the beginning of what was later referred to as the Broad River settlement.

If it hadn't been for the fact that the decision to make such a move involved some of my ancestors, I would never have known a thing about the Broad River. Having followed the research trail from the Taliaferro home in Virginia to this place in Georgia—wherever it was—I began uncovering details of a society whose impact reverberated beyond that idyllic Georgia riverbank.

To read reports of that settlement, written only the span of one generation following that move, one would think this was the description of Paradise Found. A former governor of Georgia, George Rockingham Gilmer, filled the pages of an entire book with accounts of the people from that place—concerning their industry, ingenuity, perseverance, effectiveness, and, eventually, wealth.

Governor Gilmer's book came with the traditional lengthy title of one published in that century. It began, Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia. George Gilmer, himself, was born into a family of that Broad River settlement, and having known many of the people in his Sketches, seems to have held back little in his descriptions of his neighbors and relatives.

While his book is a great tool for recreating the characters that peopled that community, my first problem in researching the Broad River settlement was in locating the place. Using Google maps, I was able to see the area around the river, itself, but that didn't help determine where along the river the Mathews party had settled. Wikipedia provided a stub of an article on the Broad River too, but again, no perspective on this slice of history. I found the website of the Broad River Watershed Association, which helpfully provided a map of the river basin, overlaid with the outline of surrounding counties, but again, it provided information of the county borders now, not during the time of the Settlement.

Buried in the middle of the Gilmer book, thankfully, the author had included his own description of the location. From the governor's own account:

I was born the 11th of April, 1790, on the south side of Broad River, about a mile and a half above the Fish Dam Ford, in that part of Wilks which is now Oglethorpe County.

Thankfully, the book also included a map, detailing the homesteads of several of the settlers of the area. It read almost like a phone book to me, as I took in the surnames and realized how many of them were relatives of my ancestors.

In seeking the motives for leaving their established homes in Virginia, I found one handy answer in the pages of the Gilmer book. In broad, sweeping generalizations, the introduction to Sketches explained, "In tracing the causes of the present happy condition of the people of Georgia to the character of the settlers," their good fortune was concluded to be a direct result of the vigorous stock from which these settlers sprang.

"The strong, the brave, the determined to be free" was, according to Gilmer, the heritage of the Broad River people:

...the Harvies, Meriwethers, Taliaferros, Gilmers, Mathewses, Barnetts, Crawfords, Johnsons, Jordans, and McGehees removed, with their families, from Virginia to Broad River at different times from 1783 to 1790...descended from the most vigorous and industrious class...

In reading the descriptions of the various family lines throughout the book, what emerged was a clear picture of the interrelationship of the families. It is not hard, in researching my own family line, to stumble upon any number of these other surnames, intermarrying with the Taliaferros. Likely, the same held true for each of the other families listed in the Gilmer narrative.

Indeed, the introduction to Sketches touches upon this aspect immediately, describing

...how these settlers formed the most intimate friendly social union ever known among the same number of persons; how exceedingly active they were in business; economical in their expenditures; honest in their business dealings, and how they prospered beyond example.

What more could one wish, given such a perfect community? And yet, even this perfect set up had its down side, as we'll witness when members of subsequent generations once again chose to pick up their belongings and move elsewhere.

   

 

Begin at the Beginning

Though genealogy is a craft that starts at the end and works its way back toward the beginning of a family's history, in the case of our hunt for the nexus between two matrilineal lines—mine and that of my mystery cousin, the adoptee whose mtDNA test results are an exact match to mine—I'm going to reverse direction and examine possible migratory routes of this family from their original home in the colony of Virginia.

First, of course, comes the caveat that not only does my adoptee cousin not know his matrilineal line for sure, but I don't know mine, either. Remember, in tracing backwards in time from my mother to her mother to her mother, I'm stalled at my second great grandmother's origin, for she, too, was said to be adopted.

"Adopted" back then, however, was not the closed case it would be in our time. Likely, before her marriage to Thomas Taliaferro Broyles in 1871, Mary Rainey was orphaned in her teen years and taken in by relatives willing to do their duty, as good family members of that age were expected to do. (Think Pollyanna moving in with her spinster aunt after the death of her parents.)

With that in mind, we need to remember that I am still assuming who my second great grandmother's parents were. With every step backwards through the generations, I'm working on the hypothesis that Mary Rainey's mother was Mary (possibly Nancy) Taliaferro, daughter of Warren Taliaferro and Mary Meriwether Gilmer of Rockingham County, Virginia.

So for our task of examining the migratory pattern of this family line, we'll reverse the usual research direction and start at that beginning—that jumping off place in Virginia from which some of the Taliaferro family and some from the Gilmer line left their ancestral Virginia property for the promise of a better life elsewhere.

The earliest influences on the Gilmer and Taliaferro families, in considering the question of moving from Virginia, may have been a result of the Revolutionary War. According to George Gilman Smith's The Story of Georgia and the Georgia People, General George Mathews, having served during the Revolution with Virginia troops in Georgia, decided to return there after the war (see page 112).

He was a shrewd speculator, and he bought at a bargain a claim to a large body of land known as the Goose Pond tract on Broad river and decided to move to it. He brought in the famous Broad river settlers....

Then, too, the agricultural practices back in Virginia had impoverished the land, and in combination with land grants following the war, became attractive incentives for many Virginians to forsake their previous land holdings. Again, according to Smith (page 139),

the prospect of finding good tobacco land in Georgia drew large colonies from all the central and tide-water counties of that State. 

Georgia governor George R. Gilmer, writing his own understanding of the migration of the company of Virginians to Goose Pond, gave the date for General Mathews' move to the Broad River area as 1784. Another survey of the history of the area listed, among the many Virginians following General Mathews' lead and relocating in this Broad River settlement, the Taliaferros, the Harvies, the Meriwethers and the Lewises.

Just the people we'll be looking for.

 

 

Moving On

What makes people move?

More to the point for our current genealogical pursuit, what convinced the ancestors of my matrilineal line to decide to leave one settlement, in favor of the struggle of carving out a new home in a new wilderness of a New World?

Chasing my matrilineal line backwards through time has been relatively easy, as long as specific names and family constellations showed up predictably in census records and other governmental documents. Coming to roadblocks in that documentation, however—say, a gap in time in which no further records appear in one locale—introduces a signal to look elsewhere for those ancestors' residency. A family, once giving every signs of being established in a community, no longer appears in the local records. Now what?

Census records and other online resources can help us determine where our ancestors were. But in order to discover where those ancestors went, you often need to delve into books to find your answers. You need to uncover the reasons for the change, and the likely rationales and routes for the change of residence.

There are reasons for my conjecture that the best answer to this question will be found via books.

First, while providing proof of residency in a specific place at a specific time, documentation such as census records or the certification of vital records provides merely a snapshot in time. Those are papers that confirm that, yes, this person was at this place at this time.

But when "this place" changes, that paper trail can fail us. That paper gift does not come to us, wrapped as a package deal, revealing the rationale for how the person arrived, how long they had been here, or how long they intended to continue at this specific address. Unlike that documentation, a narrative—as often provided in collections of letters, journals or written histories of families or places—would supply the continuity of the story: what made the family decide to move from one place to another. Unless you are fortunate to stumble upon such a cache in an archive or other private repository, the most likely place to access such narratives would be in books.

Second, though we now see a resurgence in keen interest in family history, prior periods of such interest arose during times in which the common medium for storage and exchange of these stories was publications. Admittedly, more and more material has been digitized and uploaded to websites of interest to genealogists, and the search is certainly made more bearable through computerized capabilities. But to access the repositories of the thoughts and recollections of prior generations, we often have to return to the medium in which they communicated: the written word.

Granted, much of that written word is now finding its way onto the Internet, as well. Witness the Google Books project and other online efforts to convert out-of-print public domain books to searchable online properties. But the bottleneck in that process is the question of choice: the choice of the gatekeeper. And that choice will tend toward those projects that hold the most interest for the broadest percentage of users. If your interest is in the history of one obscure county in the far reaches of the hinterland, your only answer may be to locate such a book via WorldCat at a library as close in proximity to your home as possible.

Thankfully, in the case of this specific pursuit—locating the whys and wherefores of the migratory choices of various branches of my matrilineal line in hopes of locating the nexus with my mtDNA-matching mystery cousin—I am finding possible hypotheses addressed via several books that have been digitized and placed online.

Yes, though indeed they are accessible online, these are books from which I am building my case on the likely answer for why one branch of the family chose to go against the grain and, instead of following the migration pattern of the rest of the family, head west instead of south.

In the next few days, I'll be laying out the various reasons for what urged the family on, first from their colonial homes in Virginia to their settlement in upper Georgia. Then, we'll take a look at what causes might have goaded the families onward, and examine which path became the preferred choice among family members. And finally, in hopes of finding that nexus, we'll look at the branch that took the road less traveled, heading west from Georgia through Kentucky to Missouri—and why they might have chosen that very different direction.