Is Your Surname on the Map?

An interesting point pops up in the conversation regarding the search for Thomas Taliaferro Broyles’ grave: that there might be two men in Tennessee at the same time with the name Thomas Broyles.

Surnames can be the source of some interesting searches—and some interesting detours. I'm not talking about a surname as common as, say, Smith. I mean taking on the challenge of a name you just don't see every day. Broyles is one of those surnames that has just the right amount of differentness to it to make things interesting.

I always knew that. When I first heard my mother tell stories about my maternal grandmother’s family, I guess I was young enough to misunderstand the pronunciation of the surname. With just the slip of one “inconsequential” letter, the name morphs to Boyles—a much more common surname. When I finally got the gist of slipping that “r” back into its rightful place, I realized how often I’d run across people named Boyles…and how rarely I’d bumped into anyone named Broyles.

Take those years I was far away from home at college on the west coast. At first, like any college freshman, I didn’t know a soul. As I found my voice and found a way to meet people, out of the haze of newness I eventually discovered that there were two guys on campus—twins, I think, or close enough to fool me—who were named Broyles.

I just knew we had to be related. Somehow.

Believe it or not, as much as I can “talk” on paper to people I don’t know, I can’t find it in me to talk to strangers. So I never did say anything to those guys. Or maybe I did. I can’t remember, but nothing monumental came of it. I still can’t shake that thought that we might have been, oh, say, tenth cousins or something. It’s just that the Broyles name is not that common.

Taliaferro, the other surname I’m concentrating on right now, is another case in point. I remember being at one work meeting—and this was years after I got over my can’t-talk-to-strangers phobia—I ran into this financial rep, took one look at his name tag, and blurted out, “We must be related!”

Of course, he took a look at my name tag, saw a vastly different spelling printed there for my last name, and gave me a look like perhaps I was crazy—or at least illiterate. I think I redeemed my image by some quick talking, and we agreed that, with a name as rare as that, there was indeed a good chance that, somewhere back in Virginia give or take a couple centuries, we were family.

It turns out there are actually websites online that can provide readouts for the geographic distribution of any given surname. Worldwide distribution. Of course, that would provide a fascinating visual for a surname like Lee—not only a common name, but one which has attained Smith-like status in several different cultures.

But I’m not looking for Lee. I’m looking for oddball and unusual. Like Broyles. And if that weren’t enough, give me something like Taliaferro. That’ll put a website like that through its paces!

Though Wikipedia gives a clickable list of several such surname map generators, I’m afraid not all of those references are currently available. Dynastree, for instance, though one resource I’ve heard about in years past, didn’t seem to work for me when I attempted a search there yesterday.

However, I struck the mother lode with the resource at PublicProfiler.

When I entered the search term, “Broyles,” into the PublicProfiler dialog box, at the top of the results readout was a world map showing countries with any distribution of the surname, sorted into color-coded categories by “frequency per million.” While I expected Germany to have a good showing in the results, that country—as well as France—had a “low” distribution. The country with the highest distribution was the United States.

When I clicked on a specific country, the website provided additional information. I clicked on the United States to see what further details I could find. As I could have predicted from my little bit of Broyles research, the states with the greatest showing were Tennessee (which topped the list) and what is now West Virginia. (At the time the Broyles family settled there, it was undoubtedly considered part of Virginia.)

The charts below the map list further data: top countries for the surname with frequency of distribution, top regions within the country, and top cities. In the case of Broyles, it was no surprise to see Greeneville, Tennessee—final resting place of another Thomas Broyles, whom I’ll discuss in a later post—and among those top five cities is Jonesborough, home of my Thomas Broyles.

Since it was so fun putting this handy online vehicle through its paces, I thought I’d take another lap around my family tree and check out the surname Taliaferro. This one was interesting. England, the supposed source of Taliaferro emigration to the United States, was the lowest of the top five countries listed. Germany and Belgium also were included in the top five. Of course, the United States was ranked number one—followed at a distance by the surprise number two spot, Canada. Quebec and British Columbia claimed their share of Taliaferros to the north of the United States. And in America, the predictable locations of concentration include the area around Virginia and Maryland.

This worldnames.publicprofiler.org site is the result of research projects done at University College London regarding the geography of family names. It is free to use. The only downside—and this is where the element of trust comes in—is that, to use the site, you must provide your email address. Other than that, the only restriction is that the use must be for non-commercial purposes.

For those, like me, who need to know more about a topic than is even remotely necessary, the website provides a FAQ section, and another website provides an explanation and sample applications that show how to put the program through its paces.

So go ahead: take this bright shiny thing out for a spin. You should have some fun with it.

In the meantime, it helps me rest my case: while there aren’t too many people with the name Thomas Broyles out there in the world, chances get much higher that in Tennessee, you’ll not only find your man, but two or three others who claim that same exact name.

Above: Watercolor portrait of Chang and Eng Bunker, called by some the original Siamese Twins, by an unidentified French or Dutch artist in Paris, circa 1836; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain. 

Each Discovery Leads to More

Those who are hooked by genealogical research often compare it to detective work. I’ve actually stumbled across comments explaining that genealogy is like CSI, only “without the icky bodies.”

While I have yet to find the dead bodies—my current pursuit of ancestor Thomas Taliaferro Broyles has failed to yield any details on the location of his burial—I have been able to unearth further details on his family constellation, thanks in part to my Genealogy Angel’s discovery of the issue of Confederate Veteran containing his obituary.

Keep in mind that those names have been there for the taking in many online resources. I know that. Right now, I’m preferring to revel in the pursuit, finding the source documents and corollary details in a treasure hunt of my own making. While I have many distant cousins and other Broyles and Taliaferro aficionados who have generously posted their findings—some amateur, some expertly researched and duly documented (no doubt)—there just comes a time when I want to have the thrill of the chase, to do it myself.

Looking back to the article in the February 1923 issue of the Confederate Veteran which I posted yesterday, I want to extract as much data from the narrative as I can. I want to take this step by step. And yes, I know that while my overarching goal of completing the D.A.R. paperwork may not entail such excruciating detail, for a moment, humor me. I want to do some exploring. After all, I can’t sniff out a bunny trail without getting nosy. And you know how I love finding stories.

The opening paragraph of the Confederate Veteran article gives me plenty of ammo for my first volley of exploratory salvos:

            Dr. Thomas Taliaferro Broyles died at his home near Jonesboro, Tenn., on December 8, 1922. He was a son of Dr. O. R. Broyles, of Anderson, S. C, and a brother of A. T. and John P. Broyles and Mrs. W. D. Williams, of Greeneville, Tenn., and Mrs. M. C. VanWyck, of Anderson, S. C, whose husband was Dr. Samuel Maverick VanWyck, C. S. A.

The first step, for me, is to aggregate the records for Thomas’ father. Like Thomas himself, his father was a doctor. In customary southern fashion, the man’s name was given as initials, but I know that his name actually was Ozey Robert Broyles. As we discussed yesterday, Thomas’ mother—though not mentioned in this article—was Sarah Ann Taliaferro Broyles. We’ll trace her Taliaferro roots in future posts as we pursue the American Revolution patriot for D.A.R. purposes.

From this article, we can glean some names of Thomas’ siblings—though I assure you, there were several more than are listed. I presume these were recounted in this article for some significance to the core mission of the publication: veterans representing the Confederates in the War Between the States.

From what I can see so far, here is a deciphering of the alphabet soup of family names. “A. T.” refers to Augustus Taliaferro Broyles, in my records showing as the oldest of the Broyles siblings—though I have far to go before I can confirm that there were none older. “John P.” names Thomas’ younger brother John Pendleton Broyles. I am clueless—no, awaiting a fresh discovery!—as to the identity of “Mrs. W. D. Williams,” though the location of Greeneville, Tennessee, catches my eye as it is far afield of the elder Broyles’ home location in South Carolina. I offer the guess that “Mrs. M. C. Van Wyck” represents the former Margaret Cornelia Broyles—causing me to wonder if the Van Wyck household listed next door to the Broyles home in the 1850 census might be the immediate family of her deceased husband, Samuel Maverick Van Wyck.

Of course, this 1923 article also introduces questions. Mainly, I’m wondering what became of all the other Broyles siblings. Had they all passed away before this point? It looks like I have my work cut out for me, if I choose the path of this detour, for Thomas had many siblings. On the other hand, isn’t it the chase that puts the joy back in genealogy work? At least, for me it is. I thrive on discovering what happened to all the rest of the family. Apparently, there is a lot of thriving left for me if I choose the detective work of this path to pursue.

Introducing the Doctor

Leaving Florida behind in my chase for the D.A.R. prize, I regress into Sarah Ann Broyles McClellan’s childhood years in Tennessee. It is her father, actually, who I am pursuing.

Thomas Taliaferro Broyles was a doctor in the Jonesborough area of Washington County in Tennessee. It is the “Taliaferro,” as we shall see later, that I am most focused on, for that is the surname that holds my patriot prize. Thomas’ mother, the former Sarah Ann Taliaferro, had chosen to pass her maiden name on to Thomas, bestowing it, in the fashion of the time, as his middle name. He, in turn, returned the favor when naming his second-born after his mother.

While I have been bemoaning the dearth of family treasures to pass on the ancestral stories, tidbits have begun popping up. I’m thankful for that. I really have a need to know who these people were.

In my quest to get the stories, though, I may get more than I bargain for. While searching for Irish-Americans in Chicago yielded a rich contextual backdrop to urban life in the late 1800s, finding the details in a southern, post-Civil War milieu presents me with a zeitgeist with which I’m not as comfortable. While I was raised by a mother whose parents were southerners through and through, the end result has been that I’m as much a northerner as my grandparents were southerners.

No matter which side of the Mason Dixon line you may claim as home, you can get a sense of what I mean when you read Thomas Broyles’ obituary, as found by my Genealogy Angel in The Confederate Veteran, on page 66 of the February 1923 edition.

 

            Dr. Thomas Taliaferro Broyles died at his home near Jonesboro, Tenn., on December 8, 1922. He was a son of Dr. O. R. Broyles, of Anderson, S. C, and a brother of A. T. and John P. Broyles and Mrs. W. D. Williams, of Greeneville, Tenn., and Mrs. M. C. VanWyck, of Anderson, S. C, whose husband was Dr. Samuel Maverick VanWyck, C. S. A. Thomas Broyles graduated from the University of North Carolina at eighteen years of age, and three days later was in the saddle as a member of Heiskell's Cavalry. He was one of six brothers, two brothers-in-law, and several cousins in the Confederate army, ranking as privates, captains, colonels, and surgeons. Sustained by trust in the righteous cause, the mother at home unceasingly wrestled in prayer and fasting. Comrade Broyles was a conscientious man and soldier. A comrade of the same command wrote to home friends: "Tom won't hear to our being whipped. He is a brave boy, and comes up to time exactly in the hour of danger." His brother Robert wrote to their mother: "I offered him everything I had, even tobacco, when I saw him last, but he would not even breakfast with me." Characteristic of the Confederate soldier! Both Thomas and Robert were present at Lee's surrender.

            After the war, Thomas Broyles graduated in medicine and practiced for many years. He was a man of piety and unusual attainments, and could thrill his listeners with vivid descriptions of great battle scenes in Virginia, the privations and sufferings of war. He was twice married, first to Miss Reney, of Alabama, and his second wife was a daughter of General Harrison, of South Carolina, a distinguished jurist of his time. She survives him with two daughters. At the age of eighty years he answered the reveille from the distant shore, and his body rests under the cedars of Lebanon churchyard, while below the near-by cliffs the waters of the Nolachucky sing an endless requiem.

Analog, Snails, and the Rainy Season

I have a blogging friend who writes from Minnesota. Every fall, she has a contest among her readers to see whose guess comes the closest to the season’s first snowfall. Incredibly, she already has a winner.

Around here where I live—I assure you, a much more habitable clime than Minnesota—thoughts are more likely to turn to rain than snow. We can begin our rainy season any time from September through mid November.

As for this year, it started last night.

The drip-drip-drip of the season change happens to take on the very aura of what I’ve been feeling about my genealogy project since taking the leap from researching a big city (Chicago) to exploring a rural area (like northern Florida or east Tennessee). Believe me, after a day of sheer research drudgery, I’ll take digital and email any day, over analog and snail mail.

But snail mail it is to be. I’m all set to hurry up and wait six weeks for the sunshiny state of Florida to respond to my request for death certificates for my great grandparents, Rupert Charles and Sarah Ann Broyles McClellan. (By the way, you know this is the south, now, don’t y’all? And everyone in the south uses two names, y’hear?) All the while, I’m fervently wishing there was a place where I could get a fast response without the financial drain.

Why is it that going from zero to sixty to enter the digital research race is such a thrill, while returning from sixty to zero is such a drag? It’s just the same process, only in reverse.

And it’s not like I haven’t paid my dues in dusty reading rooms, or cranking microfilm readers so fast it induces motion sickness. I used to thrive on the hunt in archives, or the chase through multiple cities’ libraries, just to come up with one coveted fact. What’s different now?

It may just be that I’ve become spoiled. With an online world saturated with the likes of Ancestry.com, GenealogyBank, Fold3—not to mention the free resources all the way from the top with FamilySearch.org to the thousands of free genealogy links just there for the taking on Cyndi’s List—there are so many ways to find what we’re looking for.

Until I get to rural—read isolated—places like Embreeville, Tennessee. A spot like Embreeville doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia entry (okay, insert tongue in cheek here). Granted, having a Wikipedia entry does not confer authority upon a person, place or thing. But it does take people to write Wikipedia entries, and it looks like there is quite a dearth of people willing to record anything about the place called Embreeville. Oh, there is a longstanding AngelFire page that gives a brief history of the place. And a weather service website that includes a picture of the area. After all, one of Embreeville’s claims to fame is that the Nolichucky River makes a horseshoe bend around the town. Now, that’s living.

As you can imagine, it sometimes seems as if it would be more productive for research progress to actually travel there and try to find things for myself.

That, however, is my bad attitude coming out. (Yes, I’ll blame it on the rain.)

When the Broyles family needed to go to town, however, they did have a town to go to—thankfully. Sarah Ann Broyles McClellan’s childhood days were balanced between the solitude of Embreeville and the historic quaintness of Tennessee’s oldest town, Jonesborough. Or, putting it more the way the family wrote it in Bible and other records, “Jonesboro.”

Just as there were signs of civilization for the Broyles family living near the town of Jonesborough, I do have online options open to me, too. Just in my one fitful—make that pouty—day of stumbling about in this strange online land, I managed to find some old Rootsweb sites, plus the thoroughly modern Facebook pages for the Washington County Tennessee Obituary Project (seventeen hundred and counting), the Jonesborough Genealogical Society, and Friends of the Washington County Tennessee Archives. The more I look, the more I’m sure to find. It’s just a learning curve, and I’ll have to get used to climbing it without slipping. Someday, I’ll be taking it at sixty.

Somewhere in all those signs of civilization, though, I’ve yet to uncover any obituaries or cemetery records that match up to my Broyles family names. And yet it is Sarah Ann Broyles’ father who is my next link to my quest for D.A.R. membership: the good doctor, Thomas Taliaferro Broyles. I need to remind myself, though, that for this application, all I need is documentation . Stay the course, don’t be tempted to detour onto bunny trails. I need to remind myself of that mantra when I’m yearning to stop and sniff out all those delicious family stories that have peopled the data I’ve done in past research quests. While D.A.R. may want names and dates, I really thrive on the stories—but that will come later. The dreary rainy season does take an occasional break for some sunshine.

Above: oil painting by Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street in Rainy Weather, courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Pursuing the D.A.R. Paper Trail

Having a Genealogy Angel to walk me through the application process for what, in my mind, is a daunting project—acceptance into the lineage society, Daughters of the American Revolution—is a blessing. Getting to meet with said Genealogy Angel over a cup of coffee is heaven-sent.

That’s the way I spent my morning yesterday. Thankfully, my Genealogy Angel is officially appointed to do just that: assist people through the process of dotting all the Is and crossing all the Ts of the paper chain that reaches back from my life to that of a patriot in our country’s war for independence.

I’m learning a lot in the process.

For one thing, I’ve learned that there are some details of my grandmother’s life that I never knew. Facts that perhaps her own daughters never knew. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable to stumble across those details. Sometimes it leads to the realization, “That explains everything,” as another researcher recently observed.

I’m also experiencing a process where these relatives-on-paper are taking on a three dimensional aura like I’ve never noticed before. I’m learning their stories. Learning how to see each one as an individual. Above all, learning to see each name as more than a collection of vital statistics. My ancestors are becoming real people to me.

That is not necessarily an easy task. It takes work finding some of these details. True, the D.A.R. application requires verification of those vital statistics. But in the journey back through time—my time—I’m choosing to adorn those vital dates with as much detail as I can add to the picture. You know me: I need a story to go with those names!

While my maternal grandmother—the Rubie of the last few days’ posts—is still an enigma to me, her mother is starting to come to life through what I’m uncovering. She—the Sarah Ann Broyles of “Jonesboro” in Tennessee who somehow met and eventually married Florida dentist Rupert Charles McClellan—was a relative I never met. Yet, her photograph has been in my life because she was my mother’s beloved grandmother. Through my mother’s stories, her grandmother came to life for me, and ever since my own childhood, those stories allowed me to see much more than just the face in the photograph.

Reconstructing her through the paper trail is only part of the journey, but it is a necessary step. I can find Sarah Ann Broyles in the 1898 record of her marriage in her hometown in Washington County, Tennessee. I can see her tentative first years of marriage—not in her hometown, not in her husband’s, either—in the first census after she married Rupert McClellan. With his name mangled for the 1900 record as “Robert,” he and his young family had settled in Virginia—but not for long. 

Within ten years, he had returned to his home state with his family in tow—not to the homestead of his parents, but a new life for his family and his profession in Fort Meade, Polk County. (Not, however, without having his given name, once again, misrepresented for the record.) And finally, with the 1930 census, choosing to move once again—this time to Tampa, where Rupert and Sarah Ann remained for the rest of their lives.

I find—thanks to a Find a Grave volunteer—photographs of the McClellan grave at the Myrtle Hill Memorial Park in Tampa, the final resting place for Rupert in 1943, and Sarah Ann in 1950. While I have yet to locate any obituaries for them, there is enough of a framework of their life’s stories to help sketch in the details.

And, oh, so much more I want to know than those details that will connect me with a membership in a society that confirms my American heritage. The process of the D.A.R. application, really, serves as the backbone supporting my own quest to delve into the essence of these lives.

I want to know the little details. Really, I want to ask Sarah Ann Broyles so many questions. “How did you meet your future husband? What made you decide to move so far from home? How was life different for you in your new home? Why did you pick the names you chose for your children?”

The list goes on and on. And I may never know the answers. But I know one thing: without asking any questions, I could never begin to make any discoveries.

And, once I’ve begun making those discoveries, I could certainly use a Genealogy Angel to help light the paperwork trail for me.

And a cup of coffee can come in handy in the process.

A Trifling Matter of a Name Change

Ruby or Ruth? That is only the beginning of research woes as I begin to piece together the trail back through my ancestry. The woman whom I called my grandmother evidently had an alias—not for any  sinister reason; she just preferred a more thoroughly modern, perhaps more thoroughly northern, sounding name.

Born to a Floridian father yet arriving in a backwoods Tennessee setting may have complicated the birth records chase. My grandmother’s father, Rupert Charles McClellan, came from a family long resident in Florida. It was her mother, the former Sarah Ann Broyles, who had arrived there from out of state. And when it came time for the arrival of her firstborn, Sarah Ann returned home for the occasion.

In such a situation, young mothers-to-be often wish to be near their own mother during this new life experience. In Sarah Ann’s case, however, her mother had died many years previously. A trip home to be with mother meant reliance on a step-mother, instead.

Or perhaps she chose this circumstance because her own father was a doctor. That might have been enough to inspire confidence in this young mother to exchange the rural setting of the McClellan homestead for the rural setting in which she was raised.

For whatever reason, Sarah Ann Broyles McClellan found herself in a place which, only a year later, was designated in census records not even with any town name, but only as “Civil District 6” of Washington County, Tennessee.

Meanwhile, just down the road a piece—and into the next county—another woman had recently given birth to twins. Martha Cassandra Boothe Davis named them Rovy M. and Roby Jake. Though one died in infancy, the other grew to become my maternal grandfather.

Roby Jake also experienced several iterations of his given name—the one originally inscribed in the Davis family Bible. His middle name, Jake, seemed to become the working name for a while, although Jack later became the preferred substitute. A distant cousin researching the Boothe line once told me he had heard the name to actually be Jackson, though I’ve never seen any evidence of that. He mentioned that he had also seen the name sometimes spelled Robie.

Now there’s a mind bender: Robie ultimately ends up marrying Rubie. That alone would be enough of an incentive to initiate a self-imposed name change!

I’m sure there was more to it, though, than a scenario like that. Perhaps it was wearying, as others in my family have discovered, to exist as a middle-name-is-working-name person in a first-name-functionary’s world. Think of the umpteenth time the census taker insists on “and what is your middle initial” after giving your name as “Jack.” I could see the reversal as an easy capitulation. After all, it’s just for a government functionary. It’s not for life.

And then what happens? Generations and generations of family history researchers dutifully report the gospel truth of his name in perpetuity as “Jack R.”

With help like that, who needs to pay good money to legally arrange a name change?

Who Did I Think She Was?

With apologies to the originators (and sponsors) of the internationally well-known television series, that is the question that comes to mind when I think about researching my grandmother’s genealogy.

If, when considering the word, “grandmother,” the image of a warm, loving, possibly plump matron comes to mind, disabuse yourself of that notion.

While my grandmother did indeed love her family, hers was a world of prim social relationships and proper etiquette gained from her upbringing, life experiences and education. At least, that’s the way I remember her.

And whatever the case, she was definitely not plump.

She is, however, the key standing between me and acceptance into the lineage society known as Daughters of the American Revolution. And yet, how to document this lady’s life?

Even perusing the little wisps of records she left behind, as I page through her Little Brown Book and catch the falling snippets of remembrance, I am already discovering that what I was told may not match up with the way it really was.

For instance, I was told—a revelation shared by my mother, not my grandmother—that the name my grandmother was given at birth was “Ruby.” Of course, hearing that report (rather than reading it), I presumed to spell it in the common way. On finding a delayed certificate of birth for her in an online facsimile of the Tennessee record, thanks to Ancestry.com, I now discover she herself signed the name as “Rubie.” She signed this sworn statement, complete with her middle name and the initial "M" for her maiden name, after her sixtieth birthday.

And yet, the only name I knew her to use was the name, Ruth.

My mother painted it as a case of a person not liking her own name. Woman’s prerogative? How would that stand in a court of law?

I can certainly affirm that the death record found online at FamilySearch.org matches the circumstances, as I remember them, surrounding her death. Including the record of her name as Ruth.

Aha! I thought: I can confirm this through her marriage certificate. Surely that will provide some connection? But no, it doesn’t appear so, for the only record I can find for a marriage between a Ruth McClellan of Florida and a Mr. Davis of Tennessee—his name seemed to vary with the times, just as hers did—was for a date that, if correct, would lead to another set of uncomfortable questions.

My mother—that source of all unwritten secrets—had confided to me on a few occasions that her parents had actually eloped. Part of the circumstances I’ve already alluded to in a post last year. Now I’m beginning to see there may be much more to this story.

I’ve sometimes heard family historians derogatorily referred to as The Family Snoop. I’ve presumed, in those cases, that there were skeletons in someone’s closet—a closet that others might have preferred left undisturbed by intruders. I hardly thought I’d become an intruder in my own family. But in the midst of this genteel ambience, I seem to be sniffing out some skeletons in my own family’s past.

 
Photograph: Rubie—or Ruth—Broyles McClellan, undated portrait from a sitting at Arcade Studio, Tampa, Florida; from the author's private collection.