Bound For Alabama

What? How did this New Yorker find herself researching family roots in the post-Civil War state of Alabama?

Migratory patterns have always been fascinating. Over the centuries, people groups have wandered from Point A to Point B, thanks to ingenious contraptions of transportation. After all, that’s how my Irish-American husband turned out to have come from a Viking heritage (as we recently discovered, thanks to Y-DNA testing).

That, too, is apparently how my colonial Virginia Taliaferro settlers ended up being great-great grandparents of people who lived in not only South Carolina and Georgia, but even further south and west in Alabama, and eventually Texas.

Once again, I’m following the trail of descendants—descendants, that is, not only of my direct line, but of all their siblings as well. The reason: I’m still looking for collateral lines on behalf of my seven-hundred-plus DNA matches. (Thanks, Amy Johnson Crow, for re-sensitizing the genealogical research community to that term!)

More importantly, I’m still seeking the nexus that links me with my mystery cousin, Joel—who shares an exact match with my maternal line as pinpointed by mitochondrial DNA testing.

It’s a good thing I’ve been focusing on this disparate collection of surnames, garnered by Taliaferro daughters by virtue of their marriages. Yes, that knowledge will help me see where I match those many others whose GEDCOMs don’t reveal our connection, simply because they don’t reach back far enough to the generation in question.

There is another reason this is a productive exercise. Remember my quandary with my mother’s mother’s mother’s line? (Yes, that is exactly what mitochondrial DNA testing pursues.) The reason I’ve been stuck is that my grandmother’s grandmother was said to have been adopted. You’ve seen the contortions I’ve twisted myself into, trying to find documentation to clearly indicate which Taliaferro daughter was Mary Rainey’s mother. The Mary Taliaferro who was documented as marrying Thomas Firth Rainey—in my estimation, at least—was likely daughter of Warren Taliaferro, another brother of Benjamin and Zachariah. But that’s not what some published genealogies of the prior century assert.

The good point of this search for all descendants of all lines is that I’m now discovering other useful publications—admittedly focusing on these other lines, but quite frequently including that handy subtitle, “and related lines.” Sometimes, in those “related lines” come independently-researched conclusions about the same families I’ve called into question. It’s nice to compare notes with some serious researchers.

At the same time, I’m being exposed to titles of which I’d otherwise have been oblivious. After all, what’s a native New Yorker doing, researching the depths of the deep South? This is virgin territory to me.

Thankfully, I’ve been provided a whirlwind tour of available titles on account of the many public domain texts scanned into the collection of places like Ancestry.com. For instance, as I examined the line of descent from Benjamin Taliaferro—older brother and arch-rival-in-romance of my fourth great grandfather, Zachariah Taliaferro—I ended up following his son David Merriwether Taliaferro to Alabama. The family’s genealogy was recounted in the Early Settlers of Alabama volume II, originally published by Mrs. Elizabeth Saunders Blair Stubbs in New Orleans in 1899.

As was often the case in these early American families, David apparently married a cousin, for his wife Mary Barnett was kin to the same Meriwether family as David’s mother—something I discovered only thanks to a lead from Ancestry.com pointing out the details from a 1938 book by Sarah Travers Lewis Scott Anderson, Lewises, Meriwethers and Their Kin.

Once settled in Alabama, the family stayed in the Montgomery area, for one of their descendants was also mentioned in a book in the Ancestry.com collection. In Notable Men of Alabama, the entry for Montgomery attorney William M. Blakey details his descent from his grandparents, David Meriwether and Mary Barnett Taliaferro, through their daughter Mary Elizabeth. The one-page biographical sketch includes enough details on his four grandparents, his parents and his siblings, to construct a family tree on this one branch of the extended family.

As I work my way down each line’s descendants, I’m grateful for the references to these books. Granted, if I had known those surnames at the start, I could have visited a nearby genealogical reference library and located copies of books with these associated surnames—if I had known about them at the start. With the handy online link to reference material, thanks to the Ancestry hints, it calls to my attention digitized publications I can now access from home. Reading through the rest of these books has allowed me to glean much background material on not only a branch of the family I never knew before, but also the context of the places where they settled.

Including Alabama—a place I never dreamed I’d be researching.

Oh, The Places Where Our Ancestors Hide

It’s all well and good to say you can, as a genealogical researcher, go to historic newspaper archives to find references on your illustrious ancestors, but what of the ones who weren’t world class citizens?

Admittedly, turning to the Library of Congress’ NUCMC catalog won’t suit your taste, if your ancestors were pioneer settlers on the prairie. Nor will a paper chase through the archives of any university holdings or governmental repositories. We just have to face the fact that some of our ancestors were near-anonymous commoners who lived out their days, hoping to grow enough or make enough to cover for their daily bread.

Still, I say there is hope in finding something of record. When that means more “hope” than “finding,” these are times when we need to think, “crowdsourcing.”

I’ll tell you why I say that. Remember my Tully family—one of the Irish immigrant families I’ve been researching in preparation for our trip to Ireland last October? One of the Tully daughters, shortly after fleeing the famine, settled in Ontario (Canada West) and thereafter was married to a man by the name of Edward Ryan. For whatever reason, the couple chose to head further west, and, rather than settle in Chicago as had her siblings, they continued beyond that point. For a while, they lived in Winnipeg. Then they tried their hand at farming, claiming a land grant in the Dakota Territory. After what must have been a horrendous bout with influenza or another ravaging disease, what was left of the families in their party chose to return to Canada. But some stayed in the Dakotas.

You know me: I’m not satisfied to only pursue my ancestral line. I want to know what happened to all the siblings. And their descendants. So I pursued the lines of each of their children—the ones who survived the illness that swept through the family’s settlement.

Other than land records, thanks to the Bureau of Land Management, there would not be many documents to grant me a peek into what made up the daily life of these settlers. Or at least, that’s what I assumed.

At that time, however, I was still actively pursuing the genealogy forums, asking questions about resources that the locals might be aware of, but which would not usually be known by those not living in the area. Thankfully, several respondents to my queries helped me find archives tucked away in university holdings that I would otherwise never know about. This happened both in North Dakota and back in Canada, where some of the family migrated to the western provinces of Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. It would otherwise have taken more search prowess than I possess to have flushed out these resource diamonds in the rough. But that’s the power of crowdsourcing our research solutions.

Granted, there are those ancestors out there who never owned land, never died and passed along their property and possessions by official means of wills, never wrote letters, never were part of family photographs, and maybe never even lived near a town or went to a church that published those folksy gossip columns about who was coming to town, or what the neighbors were up to. I can relate to that quandary—after bemoaning the lack of documentation during our research trip to Ireland in search of pre-1849 records of our Irish ancestors, I winced to read Black Raven Genealogy’s blog post on how Dara relied on a collection of dog licenses to find any record of one of her relatives. Now, that’s desperate. But ingenious. We can take a lesson from those like our fellow genealogy researchers in Ireland and learn to be resourceful in our research approaches.

There are other forms of research crowdsourcing. Unlike the organized approach of queries on genealogical forums, these are more scattered, requiring more perseverance to flush them out of hiding. Or reminders that they are there. Take the GenWeb system, for instance. Most of us (especially in the United States) remember that old resource, organized by nations, states, and eventually counties. Unwieldy to navigate, unpredictable in how much—if anything—can be found in any one given domain, the GenWeb sites may hold just what you are looking for. You will never know, though, unless you pay them a visit and take a look around. Volunteer driven, the site resources are as eclectic as the people who contributed to building the site.

Other resources are entirely locally based. You may have to ask many questions before you discover a promising local repository that could hold the details on your specific ancestor. Try contacting the county historical society or genealogical society for any resources on finding your ancestors. Some county collections—either at these societies or at the local library—may not be shared as part of a larger system. I know that is true in the county where I live. For some reason, our newspaper collections have not been included in the holdings of large online archives such as GenealogyBank or NewspaperArchive. Sometimes, the only way to inquire about such collections is to go straight to the source: the county in question.

People often seem to be happy to share what they know about local resources. Sometimes, the leads I’ve found, just by asking questions or getting on mailing lists, have been enormously helpful. Consider the Perry County, Ohio, website put up by a lone volunteer on his own dime, because he felt it was the thing to do. For those researching the same location, those discoveries are indeed gems.

One other form of crowdsourcing resources is one I hope to see more of. That is the volunteer who sees resources that would be useful for research, but which are tucked away in unknown corners where they would be of use to no one. These are the people who stumble upon photographs or journals of the strangers of bygone years, tucked in a corner of an antique store, and devise a way to let the rest of the world know about them. “Far Side of Fifty” launched one such project for “orphan photographs” back in 2009, and shares one photograph a day in hopes of reuniting photo with family. So far, she’s posted nearly two thousand photographs. Out of those, over one hundred have already found their way home.

Far Side is not alone in this task. If you want to know of others bringing old photographs to light, Far Side keeps a hyperlinked list of other blogs doing the same thing.

What I have yet to find is a blogger who is sharing old journals. While some bloggers will transcribe a family member’s journal and post it for others to read, it is a rare thing to run across someone doing so for a non-relative. Think of all the historic references that could be tucked away in such diaries. A few years ago, archivist Melissa Mannon blogged about finding one such diary, which launched her into the project of transcribing it.

Of course, as wonderful as all that sounds, as the photograph or writing of a mere stranger, it is only of academic interest. What would make me perk up and get really enthused would be if someone walked into an antique store and found a photograph, a journal, a letter, or some other keepsake from one of the ancestors in my family tree.

Now, isn’t that what we’d all love to find?!

Perhaps it is each other we should be looking to, when we wish to find those traces our ancestors have left behind.

Stories Then, Stories Now

Since I mentioned, yesterday, the value of gleaning family history stories from old genealogy books, I can’t leave this topic without bringing up an auxiliary point: that of the stories that can be found via newspapers.

Granted, the most important point in writing one’s genealogy is to insure accuracy on the details of names, lines of descent, dates and places. Beyond that genealogy, though, are the details that put flesh and blood to those dry bones of history. While some people are fortunate enough to find such tidbits via books of bygone generations, not everyone can claim that opportunity.

There is, however, another resource—one that I simply couldn’t bypass without spending at least a day’s consideration. That is the resource of newspaper publications—both historic and more recent.

With the exception of the common day laborer ancestor who made the unfortunate choice of living among the teeming millions in urban centers such as New York—the reason why my paternal side likely never gained any column inches in the annals of the New York Times—many of your distant relatives may have shown up in surprising places in the newspapers of their hometowns. Whether in the details of a mournful—but extensive—obituary, or in passing mention of who their guests were for a fried chicken dinner on a lazy Sunday afternoon, your ancestors are there, just waiting to be rediscovered in the pages of historic newspapers.

Sometimes, too, just as history repeats itself, so do the historic stories run in newspaper articles.

Take Benjamin Taliaferro, the older brother—and arch-rival in romance—of my fourth great grandfather, Zachariah Taliaferro. His move from the family’s home in Virginia to the rugged land of up-country Georgia after the Revolutionary War had caught my eye when I was considering what might have been the cause of later Taliaferro generations’ similar move. “Why Georgia?” can be answered by some of the newspaper articles found in search of the bigger picture of Benjamin’s life story.

The earlier newspaper articles provide details as they unfolded during his life. Benjamin, likely born in 1750, was reported to have moved to Georgia by 1784. After a rich and active life of service to his fellow Georgians, Benjamin resigned his position due to a lingering illness, which eventually claimed his life in 1821.

Here’s how the details played out in newspaper discoveries, thanks to collections available at various online repositories.

From the Augusta, Georgia, Chronicle on March 21, 1795, we read:

His Excellency the Governor has appointed the Honorable Benjamin Taliaferro, Esq. Major-General of the third division of the militia of this state.

An entry in the June 10, 1797 Chronicle shows Benjamin Taliaferro in action—in whatever untitled role he was fulfilling—with a collection of legal notices. The heading requests

Mr. Smith,

Please publish the inclosed [sic] reports in your paper. I am Gr, &c.

                        Benjamin Taliaferro

The article continues with several announcements of court cases from various Georgia counties, all commencing, “The State, vs.” and entering the accused’s name and several paragraphs of the charges.

As Benjamin Taliaferro served as both a state legislator and a United States congressman, of course there were several newspaper articles detailing his service. For a thorough search, I’d capture all the details for a family history. I won’t recount them all here—but if this were your family, wouldn’t you want to find such details?

A later article in the Chronicle, for instance, mentioned on November 15, 1800,

On the 27^th ult. his excellency the governor issued his proclamation, notifying to James Jones and Benjamin Taliaferro, Esqrs. their having the highest number of votes for members to represent this state in the house of representatives of the United States, that they may signify their acceptance or refusal of their appointments, and adduce the requisites and qualifications required by law.

As it turned out, due to illness, Benjamin later had to resign that seat. The Georgia Gazette in Savannah published the legal announcement that shows the then-current requirements for such an occurrence. From the March 11, 1802, edition:

By His Excellency JOSIAH TATTNALL junior, Governor and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of this State, and of the Militia thereof,

A    P R O C L A M A T I O N.

Whereas Benjamin Taliaferro, Esq. one of the Representatives of this State in the Congress of the United States, hath resigned his seat as a member thereof: And Whereas, in and by an act to regulate the general elections in this state, and to appoint the time of the meeting of the General Assembly, passed the 11^th day of February, 1799, it is, among other things, declared, “That all writs of elections to fill vacancies that may happen for Members of the General Assembly of this State, or House of Representatives of the United States, shall be directed to the Justices of the Inferior Courts of the respective counties…” I have therefore thought fit to issue this my proclamation, notifying, directing, and ordering, the respective Justices of the Inferior Courts of this state to consider this my proclamation as a general writ of election, for the purpose of filling the vacancy of a Member in the House of Representatives of the United States, in the room of the aforementioned Benjamin Taliaferro…

            Given under my hand, and the great seal of the state, at the statehouse in Louisville, this 23^rd day of February, in the year of our Lord 1802, and of the Independence of the United States of America the 26^th.

            JOSIAH TATTNALL jun.

By the Governor,

            Horatio Marbury, Secretary of the State.

            GOD SAVE THE STATE.

Though Benjamin resigned his seat due to illness, he lived almost twenty years beyond the point of his resignation. Even then, the newspapers told the story—though unfortunately, I didn’t locate the obituary itself—with a Chronicle advertisement on January 14, 1822.

Will be Sold,

At the late residence of Benjamin Taliaferro, deceased, in the county of Wilkinson and state of Georgia, the following property, to wit…

The advertisement detailed the two tracts of land being offered for sale, as well as supplies and household goods being sold to settle Benjamin’s estate. Affixed to the end of the notice were the names, Benjamin Taliaferro and Thornton Taliaferro, his two sons who likely served as executors.

Not only was the tale of his life told through the news reports of his era, but later articles recounted much more.

A July 30, 1937, article in the Macon Telegraph explained how Taliaferro County got its name—in honor of Benjamin—and reported that a local chapter of the D. A. R. had recently honored his memory with a commemorative marker at his grave site.

A lengthy February 16, 1966, article by Congressman Robert G. Stephens, published in the Augusta Chronicle, explained the history of how Taliaferro County received its name. The narrative included the congressman’s take on how the name came to be pronounced as it is.

Taliaferro County is one of the few Georgia counties whose name is consistently mispronounced by non-Georgians. As so frequently happens in our English language, they say the word as it looks and not as it is spoken, because it is spoken as if it were spelled “Tolliver.” In England, where they speak with a broad “a” they pronounced it years ago as we Georgians do today.

This article, it turns out, provides one explanation for why Benjamin, a Virginian native, decided to make Georgia his home state.

When the active phases of the Revolution shifted to the South, Taliaferro volunteered to join Gen. Daniel Morgan as a captain and like many of his fellow soldiers, he tramped the back-country of South Carolina and Georgia and saw it as the land of opportunity, tucking its desirable qualities away in his memory for future reference when hostilities were at an end…He returned to Virginia as a paroled officer and married Martha Meriwether, a neighbor of the family in Amherst County. Remembering the beautiful and fertile land in Georgia, hearing from other veterans of Georgia’s liberal policy in rewarding soldiers and perhaps because he had quarreled with his brother, Zack, when he married Martha, to whom Zack had been engaged, Captain, now Colonel Taliaferro came to settle in Georgia with his young bride in 1784.

Beyond this explanation, the author referred to the Gilmer book I mentioned yesterday, in detailing the economic pressures that made such a move from destitute Virginia after the war. Once Benjamin established himself in Georgia, and once that move was seen by other family members as successful, doubtless others in the family saw fit to follow suit. Feuding brothers or not, those migrating family members later came to include some of Zachariah’s own sons.

Even as recently as 1991, the Columbia County Chronicle continued to print stories on the origin of Taliaferro County, providing me with a nearly two hundred year long trail of newspaper accounts of my ancestor’s brother, whose pioneer move to up-country Georgia inspired his Taliaferro relatives of two generations to follow suit.

Above: "The Homecoming," 1885 painting by Jennie Augusta Brownscombe; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

New Insights From Old Stories

If you think, by all my recent talk about cutting-edge technology for genealogy, that I’ve given up on the tried and true in the dusty archives of yesterday’s records, think again. DNA testing may help us do that end run around our genealogical brick walls—and that’s great—but there is nothing like finding detailed passages about an ancestor in a newspaper article, old letter, or better yet, in a recognized book of the family’s genealogy.

One thing that has always bothered me about genealogical research is that it seems to focus on precise identification of names, dates, locations and parentage—but leaves us knowing next to nothing about these people we call our ancestors. I want to know more than these vital statistics; I want to know who these people were.

That’s why I’ve personally taken to delineating the difference between the two pursuits: calling the former efforts genealogy, and placing the personal descriptions in the category of family history. I know some people consider the two terms synonymous. But now you see why I don’t.

Let’s take an example from the family I’ve been discussing: that of the sons of Zachariah Taliaferro, senior, and his wife, the former Mary Boutwell. I mentioned yesterday that the eldest son, Benjamin, had moved from the family home in Virginia to new territory in Georgia after the end of the Revolutionary War, leaving behind his younger brother, Zachariah, my fourth great grandfather.

The two had not parted on the best of terms. There is a reason for that—a reason I’ve been able to glean, thanks to the points of view expressed in two different books. If it were not for the research libraries which continue to keep such old volumes in their collections—and for the up-and-coming organizations that are converting these old publications into digital files—I would never have known even as much about these ancestors as their physical descriptions.

Take Benjamin Taliaferro, the oldest son of Zachariah Taliaferro, senior. According to a passage on the family in the book, Sketches of Some of the First Settlers of Upper Georgia, after Benjamin was released from imprisonment by the British during the Revolutionary War,

[H]e was in the full vigor of young manhood when he left the British quarters to mix again with his neighbors in Amherst. His person was six feet high, his features handsome, and his understanding good. Army intercourse had refined his manners and made his conversation agreeable.

Likewise, it was thanks to a description in another book that I learned of the appearance of Benjamin’s brother Zachariah. According to The Descendants of Capt. Thomas Carter of “Barford,” Lancaster County, Virginia, my third great grandfather had also been a soldier in the Revolution, and had been described as

A man six feet tall, weighing over two hundred pounds, blue eyes, black hair, and clean shaven face…a man of good understanding, equable temper, liberal to the poor…

Bouncing between the two volumes—the first written by George R. Gilmer, the second by Joseph Lyon Miller—I learned much more than just the physical description of the two Taliaferro men. I learned what caused the rift between them, prompting each to go his own way—Benjamin to Georgia, Zachariah to South Carolina.

Using first the Gilmer book to uncover the Georgia side of the story, we are introduced to another player in the drama.

Martha Meriwether, the only child of David Meriwether, a neighbor of old Zack, was a blooming, charming young woman, when Capt. Taliaferro [Benjamin] returned to Amherst. They soon met, admired, and loved.

Right away, we discover the cause of the rift (as if you hadn’t foreseen the following from the text so far).

Martha Meriwether had previously been engaged to marry Zack Taliaferro, a brother of Capt. Taliaferro. The struggle was hard on the part of the army man of honor to resist the temptation to supersede his brother. But love conquers all. The red-coat got the better of the gown. The brothers quarreled and parted, never again to meet in friendship.

The conclusion of the story, from the Georgian point of view, seems believable enough.

The disappointed lover quit the country for a residence in Pendleton, South Carolina, where he remained a bachelor until the bright hopes inspired by youthful beauty were dissipated by the loose habits of frontier society and the struggles of a lawyer’s life.

That, of course, would not be quite how the South Carolinians would have seen the conclusion. While the Pendleton District may have originally been considered a frontier, Zachariah did quite well for himself, as it turns out. Not only was he successful as an attorney, but he did—eventually—find the happy ending to his own story.

This, though, we have to find by looking up his line in a different book than that favoring the Georgian line. The Miller book provides the details on the rest of Zachariah’s love story.

One summer when about the age of forty years he was visiting his relatives and friends in Virginia. On the eve of his return to South Carolina he was persuaded to remain a day longer and attend a grand ball at Fredericksburg the next night. The night before the ball he dreamed that he attended the dance and on entering the room saw a beautiful young lady at the other end of the room tying her slipper. The night of the ball, as he entered the room his dream was singularly verified. He sought an introduction and later the young lady—Margaret Chew Carter—became his bride.

That fairy tale rendition seems almost apocryphal in its happy ending. Perhaps in its several iterations by family storytellers over the generations, it has been somewhat embellished. However, one thing I know: Zachariah Taliaferro did indeed meet and marry a woman named Margaret Chew Carter.

Stories such as these are the stuff that makes our dreary old genealogies come alive—to ourselves, and to others. And the resources to find them are even more so at our fingertips than ever before. Everything from Google search to FamilySearch.org can provide us with the leads to locate such books. The growing number of repositories of digital records—such as HathiTrust and Internet Archive—allow us to search for mentions of our surnames. If nothing else, once we find promising titles of old genealogy books, with WorldCat, we can pinpoint the nearest library holding the volume we seek. Whether by a day trip to an out of town library, or by inter-library loan, we can locate the books which promise to give us that better idea of who our ancestors really were.

Above: "The Love Letter," 1770 oil on canvas by Jean-Honoré Fragonard; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Circling the Spot

When the Taliaferro family first came to America, they settled in Virginia. The land they arrived at was, at the time, merely a British colony. By the point in the family’s history that brings us to the generation in question for my current brick wall research quandary, some of the family had removed to Georgia.

As I try to determine who my target person—Mary Taliaferro, about to be wife of Thomas Firth Rainey in 1818—might have descended from, one possible clue could come from examining who else was married in the same Georgia county as she. Could the cluster of Taliaferro weddings pinpoint the specific father of this bride?

According to the records accessible online now—and, granted, these are only gleaned from indices on FamilySearch.org, though some digitized records are accessible at Ancestry.com—there were four Taliaferro family members who married in Oglethorpe County between the years 1809 and 1830. Who were they? Who were their parents?

The earliest of the marriage records was for a “Lewis B. Talefaria” who wed Elizabeth Johnson on August 10, 1809. This was likely Louis Bourbon, son of Martha Merriwether and Benjamin Taliaferro.

Louis’ father Benjamin was born in colonial Virginia, and came of age during the years of the American Revolution, for which cause he served as a lieutenant, and during which service he was promoted to captain. After the war—and possibly owing to a falling out with his brother Zachariah (of my direct line) over the hand of a particular young lady—Benjamin left Virginia for Georgia.

Benjamin’s arrival in Georgia, as it turned out, was timely as well. He played an active part in the formative years of Georgia state government. For his service during the thirty five years he lived in Georgia, Benjamin was posthumously honored by the naming of a county in his memory—Taliaferro County. Though he was noted to have died in Wilkes County, his oldest son’s marriage in Oglethorpe County—that of Louis to Betsy Johnson—may well have taken place in the same basic area, since Oglethorpe County was formed from part of Wilkes County.

So we find, from this earliest Taliaferro marriage record in the Oglethorpe vicinity, that it was a record referring to the eldest son of Benjamin. What of the others?

Besides the 1818 marriage of Mary “Talafero”—whoever she was—the next Taliaferro marriage in Oglethorpe County was that of Polly or Sarah “Taliferro.” She, as Sarah, was recorded as becoming the wife of one Hay T. Landrum, according to the 1829 marriage entry. One of the old genealogical publications I’ve referred to, compiled by Willie Catherine Ivey, noted her as “Polly” and indicated that she “married a Mr. Landrum.” She—whether Polly or Sarah—was daughter of Benjamin’s younger brother, Warren Taliaferro (sometimes referred to in genealogies as Warner Taliaferro).

The final remaining Taliaferro wedding in Oglethorpe during this time period was that of Charles, also a child of Warren Taliaferro. While the marriage index shows his bride’s name as Milanda Meriwether, her name was apparently Mildred Merriwether. This wedding followed close on the heels of Charles’ sister’s wedding—on November 16, 1830.

So, there you have it: four weddings. The earliest was for the eldest son of the eldest Taliaferro brother to move from Virginia to Georgia. The last two, in 1829 and 1830, were for two of the children of the younger Taliaferro brother. Could the remaining Taliaferro marriage in 1818 have been for a child of either of those Taliaferro brothers?

According to Ivey’s Taliaferro genealogy, older brother Benjamin’s youngest daughter was named Mary. However, younger brother Warren—though not having any child named Mary that I can find—was married to a woman named Mary Gilmer. Could it be possible that Warren and Mary named one of their children Mary—but owing to the confusion of having two Marys in the same household, resorted to the use of a nickname? Which of Warren and Mary’s daughters would it be? The only one credited with marrying a Rainey in the Ivey genealogy was listed as Nancy, not Mary. Is Nancy a nickname?

One other detail to consider: this Mary and her husband, Thomas Firth Rainey, eventually had a son, whom they named Warren Taliaferro Rainey. While that seems like a flashing neon light pointing me in the right direction, I’d like just a little more paper-based justification before I accept what seems to be the obvious.

Above: "Signing the Register" by English painter Edmund Blair Leighton; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.    

A Genealogical End Run

While my adopted mystery cousin is enjoying success in his pursuit of the truth regarding his roots, DNA testing has been providing me some helpful assistance in another quest.

Remember my brick wall ancestor, my second great grandmother, Mary Rainey of Columbus, Georgia? The best I had figured on her was that, along with a brother named Thomas, she might have been living in the household of her uncle in the census taken just before her 1871 marriage to Thomas Broyles.

Tracing back in time, I may have discovered her in the home of her widowed mother in 1860. And possibly, I identified her father with the assistance of an 1850 census record.

All that, if you remember, was smashed to pieces when I pulled out those time-honored genealogy publications which insisted that those “parents”—Thomas Firth and Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro Rainey—could not possibly have been the people I had assumed they were. Why? Thomas Firth Rainey supposedly married another woman, identified as Nancy Taliaferro, daughter of Warren and Mary Gilmer Taliaferro. This, despite the fact that there is an Oglethorpe County, Georgia, record of the wedding of Thomas F. Rainey and Mary E. Talafero on June 9, 1818.

Oh, how I wished that “Nancy” was merely the nickname for “Mary.”

We all know how wishes do not a sound genealogy make. But you can’t blame me for hoping.

Just a couple days ago, it turns out, I discovered I might not be left to fruitless hopes or wishes. Among the now over seven hundred matches I’ve received on my autosomal DNA test results, I found one that showed a Rainey among his forebears.

With the Family Tree DNA testing service, every time I receive a match, I am given whatever surname data might have been provided in the other customer's profile. Sometimes, that information is extensive—like an up-to-date, thoroughly-researched GEDCOM. Sometimes, the profile includes only a smattering of surnames—or, worse, nothing at all. Thankfully, for those customers in agreement—and really, why test if you aren’t interested in pursuing such matches?—their matches are supplied with an email address for further contact.

Rest assured: I contacted my potential Rainey match.

As it turned out, his mother was the person serving as administrator for these test results. And she is diligently doing her family history research. It’s nice to make contact with a kindred spirit, keen on pursuing family roots; it’s even more encouraging when that kindred spirit comes with a mutual family relationship.

In this case, the relationship turns out to be fourth cousin. Yes, I know: that is a distant relative. I wouldn’t know the man if I passed him on the street—a highly unlikely scenario in any case, as he is apparently in Texas and I in California. However, the virtue of the discovery is this: if I can use this test result as key to lead me to others related through this particular line, I may be able to demonstrate, via DNA alone, that those time-honored genealogical publications have reported my direct line in error. And that, my friend, would let me run right past that frustrating research brick wall.

All this is thanks to the line of the very brother who was found living with my orphaned second great grandmother back in Columbus, Georgia, in the 1870 census. Thomas Firth Rainey, junior, was by then a Civil War veteran who eventually left his war-torn home state of Georgia to begin life anew in Texas. This DNA match is his direct descendant.

Knowing this gives me only the first step in piecing together an argument to support the notion that my second great grandmother was daughter of Thomas and Mary Taliaferro Rainey. Of course, the next task will be to connect the senior Mary with her Taliaferro parents—the point at which I believe those published genealogies are in error. That, I will only be able to do as I find more matches to either confirm or rule out the connection. But I’m now one step closer to verifying that hypothesis than I was before.

Of course, finding key resources to bolster the paper trail would be primo. Lacking that, I still have recourse through this alternate means of research. And that is the value of this new tool of genealogical research. It’s just a different way to do an end run around that old proverbial brick wall.


Above: Excerpt from 1870 United States Census for Muscogee County, Georgia, courtesy Ancestry.com.

Score Another One For Genetic Genealogy

Sometimes, participating in DNA testing leads to the overwhelming sense of being lost in a strange world of numbers, big terms, and incomprehensible concepts. Muddling through the middle of it all can seem mind-numbing.

On the other hand, there’s nothing like success to shake one loose of that DNA malaise.

I mentioned to you, back in November, that I was contacted by a person whose mitochondrial DNA test results came back as an exact match to mine. For me, this is an unusual result. Out of the three tests I administer for my family—both my husband’s and my brother’s Y-DNA test and my own mtDNA test—this was the only instance of finding anyone who came as close as that.

The drawback was: the person claiming this exact match is an adoptee.

Put in a tailspin, trying to figure out just who among my mother’s maternal line ancestors—unbeknownst to anyone else in the family—could have put up a child for adoption, I did what I could to help my new mystery cousin with this quest.

The only help I could offer, it turns out, was a feeble attempt at comparing data. You see, if I trace my mother’s maternal line back through the generations, I don’t get very far. As you’ve already realized, if you follow A Family Tapestry with any regularity, is that I am stuck at the level of my second great grandmother.

That's the puzzle I've been trying to unravel, following that email from my mystery cousin back in November. I did write about the search, tangentially, in a couple more posts on DNA in December and earlier this month. Behind the scenes, the two of us were emailing back and forth, comparing notes, discussing possibilities—in my family (despite its limiting, brief documentation) and in his own research.

To his credit, my mystery cousin has been very focused on the pursuit. For someone with a background in genealogical research, this quest might have seemed easier, but there were multiple steep learning curves to mount in his case: the aspects of finding birth parents, overcoming legal obstacles of various states’ “sealed” adoption policies, learning about the world of DNA testing and the skills of genealogical research.

It was the aspect of DNA testing that helped lead this cousin to possible matches. While the mtDNA test provided a bit of direction, the main test that proved useful was the autosomal DNA test. This test identifies matches of a much closer familial range than the mtDNA or Y-DNA test can provide, making it the practical choice for such a pursuit. Not that it makes things easier. The test, in itself, is not a turnkey operation; the researcher does need to know what he is doing—and be prepared to put in lots of work following through with the search. DNA tests are a tool, not “The Answer.”

What I’m so excited to share, today, is that almost exactly two weeks ago, my mystery cousin emailed me the simple announcement:

            I have found my birth mother.

Overjoyed on his behalf, of course I wanted to know the details. This was, after all, somehow a person related to me. While we are still plotting out the nexus between his birth mother’s line and my mother’s line—hint: this may go back a long way beyond my brick wall second great grandmother—I am enjoying the latest reunion news from my cousin. He and his mom have spent hours chatting online, then by telephone and in a face to face meeting.

The conversation didn’t stop with their reunion. Both of them are intensely keen on sharing their story—the pain of the separation, the years of the search, the methods of the search and how they reconnected. Besides, after mounting that steep learning curve, now this cousin has a lot to share, as a resource in helping others with their search for their birth parents as well.

Their story is not over, of course. There is much to catch up on, after a lifetime of separation. Once they move beyond the exhilaration of this reunion, though, I, for one, hope they put their story in a form that can be passed on to others in the same dilemma. Telling their story at conferences would be nice. A book would be great. No matter how they share the saga, though, just the fact that they can share it is the most important part.

Sometimes, it is easy to see how DNA testing can work for others—but hard to actually put it to work for ourselves. In my cousin’s case, as an adoptee totally new to the field of genealogy, he had the motivation to learn—and then, to do what he had learned.