Skipping Town

It was October of 1866 when the venerable George Edmund McClellan passed away. Still active in his community—he was only fifty eight at the point of his death—he left an estate including several properties in northern Florida, as well as numerous unfulfilled obligations. Perhaps not thinking things through clearly, he had determined to leave the responsibility for sorting out all these business transactions to his second wife, the former Celestia Relief Holman.

Because Celestia, widowed at that point in 1866, was a thirty three year old mother of two young children, she chose—barely six months later—to marry the sixty year old doctor, John Grant. By the time of the August enumeration of the 1870 census, not only had she given birth to the one child she had in common with Dr. Grant, but she was still serving as executrix of the estate of her deceased former husband, George McClellan.

With the passing of those four years with no settlement of the estate yet in sight, the McClellan heirs were understandably growing impatient. Perhaps it is no surprise to find, tucked in the McClellan probate file, a letter dated December 30 of that same census year. Addressed to the Honorable John W. Rice, judge of the Suwannee County Circuit Court, the letter was composed by Philip E. Lowe, husband of George's daughter Virginia.

The letter begins to reveal what might have become the root of a decades-long bitterness among family members. I'll let the letter unfold the problem for you in Philip's own words.

The undersigned of the heirs of the late George E. McClellan of said County deceased, respectfully represents that Mrs. Celestia R. Grant, Executrix of the Last Will and Testament of the said George E. McClellan, is disposing of the property of said Estate, and preparing to leave the State of Florida without making a settlement of the said Estate according to the tenor and meaning of said Last Will and Testament and this is therefore to pray your Honor to adopt such measures as may be necessary to require such settlement to be made.

The letter was signed by Philip E. Lowe. Below his signature were affixed the names of his wife, "Jennie" T. Lowe and his sister-in-law, Belle S. McClellan, by that point the only one of the McClellan daughters who had not yet married.


Above image from the Suwannee County, Florida, Wills and Probate Records, 1810-1974, image number 74, courtesy Ancestry.com.

The Players in this Drama

Reading page by page through the probate file of my third great grandfather, George E. McClellan, I can see there was tension between the family members he left behind. There was, first of all, the suspicion held by the children of George's first marriage that the will's executrix—who happened to be George's second wife and mother of his youngest children—would not do right by them, despite a clearly delineated set of instructions concerning the McClellan property.

There is also the question of what became of George's oldest son, John. After the 1850 census, where John was a young teenager in his father's household, he seemed to have vanished—all except for the record of his 1857 acquisition of a sizeable parcel of land in Suwannee County, Florida, near his father's home. The codicil in his father's will almost makes it sound as if John had predeceased his father, but since he was by then married with three children, this owner of land couldn't have just vanished without a trace. The search is on for any record of what became of his property—not to mention, his wife and children.

In the meantime, the heirs named in George's 1866 will didn't just stand still, waiting for their step-mother to hand over what was rightfully theirs. Life moved on, as it always does, and those three McClellan daughters still living at home—along with their kid brother William—soon married and set up households of their own.

It would be helpful at this point to draw up a list of the name changes resulting from such events during the years their father's estate was in probate. The McClellan children—those of his first wife, Sidnah Tison—were listed in George's will as Julia, Ellen, Clifford, Bell, Virginia and William (older son John being excluded in the codicil).

When George drew up his will in 1866, his eldest daughter Julia was already widowed in the loss of her first husband, Henry Walker, and had just recently married Joseph Densler in March of that same year.

While second daughter Ellen was an unmarried woman living at home when her father died in October, by November of the next year, she had exchanged vows with Hyder D. Riggsbee (upon which discovery I wrestled with an incessant ear worm which threatened to play a continuous loop in my mind of the Beatles' hit by a similar name).

She, however, was not the first of the McClellan daughters to marry after her father's death. Ellen's next-youngest sister Melinda (called by the family by her middle name, Clifford) was married in September of that same year, 1867, in Thomas County, Georgia. Though her husband, John Augustus McCardle, was a Georgia native, from the point of the marriage in Georgia until Melinda's untimely death in 1877, the McCardles lived in Suwannee County, Florida.

One would think, with their younger brother William becoming the one in charge of the household after his father's passing—at least, per the will's stipulation that he allow his unmarried sisters to live with him as long as necessary—that he had a strong incentive to marry them off as quickly as possible. He, in fact, joined his sisters by taking a wife—Emma, descendant of the Charles family I discussed last month—in October of 1867, barely two weeks before his sister Ellen's wedding.

That might have seemed the case with the marriages, in rapid succession, of Melinda, William, and Ellen, but for the next daughter, Isabel—or Bell for short—it was a few more years before her marriage to Benjamin Jesse Worrell in 1874.

There was one other daughter who had already married before George McClellan's passing. That was Bell's younger sister Virginia. "Jennie" had married Phillip Lowe in enough time to give birth to their first child, Fernando Braxton Lowe, just one month before her father passed away.

That was not the last of the McClellan marriages, though, for Julia—once Walker, then Densler—lost her second husband in 1867, about the time of her daughter Josie's birth. By the fall of 1870, Julia had married again, this time to Adam Souder Goodbread.

By the last of the McClellan marriages in 1874, that list of players mentioned in George's 1866 will—Julia, Ellen, Clifford, Bell, Virginia and William—now became Julia Walker Densler Goodbread and her sisters Ellen Riggsbee (cue up that music once again), Clifford McCardle, Bell Worrell, and Jennie Lowe. And, of course, there was their baby brother William McClellan.

It is good to keep such a list of the players near at hand in this lengthy journey through George McClellan's probate case for, as we'll see, between the time of George McClellan's death in 1866 and the beginning of that next decade, those names would be mentioned frequently in the ever-growing probate file of their father.   

Now Indexing: More Naturalization Records

I wasn't kidding when I told you last month that this "volunteer" indexing gig is really backed by a selfish motivation. I want to see more online of the kind of records that will help me figure out what became of my dad's immigrant family in New York City.

Just as I did last month, I've returned to work on more naturalization records from the Southern District of the U.S. District Court in New York. That's a lot of words to say, basically, the records of people who immigrated to New York City, the place where my paternal ancestors came.

Volunteering to index has gotten much easier, in my opinion. I've been volunteering at FamilySearch's indexing project for years, and have seen a number of changes. With the switch to online indexing, rather than working through a downloadable program, it seems like the process goes more smoothly. And, for those indexers who need coaching each step of the way with new or unfamiliar record sets, there are hints to help keep the process on track. Not to mention all the encouraging little touches like the celebratory confetti falling from the top of the computer screen, each time a batch is submitted.

I've learned a long time ago that volunteering can be beneficial to one's well-being, in addition to being helpful to others. But I also learned that intense people who jump in wholeheartedly can burn themselves out rather quickly, so I've learned to pace myself. Sometimes, I think what I'm doing to help is such a puny contribution that that little drop in the bucket won't count for much. But if a lot of us each did our puny little bit, collectively, we'd make such a difference.

I've done a lot of thinking lately about all the resources we now have for genealogical research. With digitized records at our fingertips from a number of sources, we may find ourselves forgetting what research used to be like.

Although I might miss being surrounded by the smell of dusty old books and records, I don't for a minute miss the tedium of spending upwards of eight hours in a day of fruitless searching, and then having to return home empty-handed. Being able to assemble the majority of supporting documentation with the click of a mouse allows me to exchange the tedium of searching for the first line of verification--say, marriage or death records—and jump directly to tackling the challenging mysteries embedded in my family lines.

For that, not only am I thankful, but quite aware that what used to take months or even years to accomplish may now be done in a matter of a few days or less. I—and everyone else interested in pursuing the history of our families—owe a debt of gratitude to those who had the forethought to harness the power of computers in organizing information systems and apply that to the pursuit of our roots. 

Off the Shelf: Unofficial Guide to Ancestry.com

With as much time as I spend in a day using the genealogy go-to site Ancestry.com, a book choice like Unofficial Guide to Ancestry.com may sound counter-intuitive. Take one to three hours a day times three hundred sixty five and then multiply that once again by just about as many years as the family history website has been in existence, and surely I've found every digital nook and cranny there is to find.

Either that, or I've been repeating the same old routine, day after day, that many times. It may be time to learn some new tricks.

Actually, though that point about repeating the same research habits ad nauseum is a valid one, the real reason Nancy Hendrickson's book caught my eye is that I've been asked to teach a local series on how to set up a family tree on Ancestry. I'm looking for resources to offer my students who'd like a little bit more than just class time. Book recommendations, on my list, don't come without firsthand experience.

So, coming with the shortest shelf-life of any of my books that I've shared here at A Family Tapestry, I decided to mention this second edition, just out from Family Tree Books in May of this year. I'm currently test driving this book, but noted the publisher's promise that whether the reader has "just begun dabbling in family history" or is a longtime Ancestry user, the tips within the covers may just turn me into an Ancestry "power user."

Of the four main sections of the book, the first part does address those beginners who have been "dabbling." Covering the basics, both of the principles of genealogy and how Ancestry helps with those basic research needs, the first three chapters provide an overview of the family history database we've come to be so familiar with at Ancestry.com.

The second part of the guide delves into specific features of the website. Record group by record group, the chapters discuss census, BMD, military, immigration, newspapers, photos and memorabilia, directories, and wills—each in its own chapter.

Following that is the section of the book which first caught my eye: the section on DNA. Since one arm of the Ancestry.com universe contains a genetic genealogy world, it makes sense that a guide of Ancestry would include this specialized offering. The section is comprised of three chapters, explaining how to interpret your test results, connect with your matches, and wrestle with those unsolved mysteries of your own ancestry.

Hendrickson's Unofficial Guide has a companion volume, Unofficial Ancestry.com Workbook, which I didn't purchase, but which my students might find useful. I don't plan on teaching to the book, but wanted to vet possible resources students might find helpful.

After all, whenever I've had to learn any new program, how many times have I reached for my desktop bookshelf to pull down my For Dummies guide to find a better way to approach a problem? Regardless of how user-friendly programmers insured that Ancestry would be, I imagine starting from scratch to learn a system like their tree-building program might seem daunting to novices. Having a guide on hand could certainly boost confidence—let alone help researchers capably find the shortcuts to the right record set.

The author, fellow Californian Nancy Hendrickson from San Diego, made sure to include many illustrations of documents found and other examples of the wide variety of material included on the Ancestry.com website. She also included personal examples of how certain records helped her break through research stalemates, which is not only an encouraging touch but a way to provide a human-interest story focus to help pull the reader through what otherwise could have been tedious how-to directions.

With a site as enormous as Ancestry.com, no matter how much you may have used it, there is always another tip or trick you can learn. But from the feedback I get from my beginning genealogy students, they want a hands-on approach to setting up their own tree on Ancestry—and that, they will get from a few weeks in class with me. But after that point, then what? Having a guide to refer back to when they get stuck will be a useful way to bridge the gap between wide-eyed, information-overloaded new user and more comfortable and confident regular subscriber.

My Son Webb?

It's fairly safe to say that, for those of us who have spent decades researching our family history, it comes as quite a surprise to discover entire branches of our pedigree of which we previously had no inkling. In the case of my third great-grandfather, George Edmund McClellan, I thought I had the rundown pat—until I began unearthing signs of the cause of already-known family animosities.

It has taken quite a bit of concentration to read through George McClellan's will and the hundred-plus pages of his probate case. Reading microfilmed copy of handwritten documents is enough to send one's eyes crossing, true, but it was the content that really opened my eyes to the root of comments I still hear my McClellan relatives echo today.

Other than the selection of his second wife as executrix of his will, on face value, it wouldn't seem like there was much to dispute. A hand-drawn map of how the McClellan property was to be divided seemed straightforward. Though the second McClellan wife and "her children" seemed to get quite a bit of the well-to-do McClellan's properties, George's wife Celestia was, after all, mother of two young children, for whose welfare their father understandably wished to provide adequately. His other children, by then, were all adults, and though the majority of them were unmarried women, that would surely change in the near future.

My first surprise, then, was finding that there was no mention in George's will of his oldest son, John. His other children were mentioned by name—"Julia, Ellen, Clifford, Bell, Virginia and William"—but not John. The children of George's second marriage to Celestia Relief Holman were also not mentioned by name. John, however, was not son of this second wife, but of the first, Sidnah Tison McClellan.

There was, however, a codicil to George's will which supposedly mentioned this missing son. I say supposedly because there is one frustrating detail: it doesn't mention the name as John, but enters a different name. The codicil, witnessed on the third of September, 1866, was drawn up barely six weeks before George's passing.

The codicil served to explain why George did not include this son in his will. Apparently, George had previously advanced money so his son could buy property. As it turns out, there was a record for a John W. McClellan who purchased just under one hundred twenty acres of land in Suwannee County in early 1857. If his age as given in the 1850 census was accurate, that would mean John had made this transaction at twenty years of age—quite a young age to acquire so much property on his own.

The only problem with this codicil is that it didn't name the son as John W. McClellan, but as "my son Webb." Perhaps that could have been explained as the name represented by John's middle initial, but I needed more support than a mere conjecture, so I went looking to find any more records of George's son John.

Lacking any success in my search, I then went searching for any results under the name Webb McClellan.

The dearth of documentation led me to notice one other puzzling indication. In talking about his son, George had made reference to "his children three in number" and to the mother of those children. A statement like that would lead one to consider the possibility that, by 1866, George's son John had already passed away.

But was John one and the same with Webb? And if he—whoever he was—had already died, why couldn't I find any record of his wife and those three children?

Codicile

Having previously advanced money for my son Webb for the purpose of buying Lands I set aside said amt to his children three in number and their mother in lieu of any other Legacy belonging to my Estate. Signed in presence of Geo. E. McClellan, Suwannee County, State of Florida, Sept 3d 1866.

Image above of codicil signed in 1866 by George Edmund McClellan of Suwannee County, Florida; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

The Will

At the start of the story, Captain George Edmund McClellan died on October 19, 1866. That may sound more like the end of a story than a beginning, but in our case, what we need to discover is what happened after George McClellan left his family in Wellborn, Florida.

By that date in October, George was survived by his seven children from his first wife, Sidnah, who had predeceased him by six years. The oldest of those children—his daughter Julia—was by then thirty three years of age and just married to her second husband, the father of her firstborn daughter. The youngest of George's children, at the point of his death, was my second great grandfather, William H. McClellan., who was then just twenty one.

With the exception of George's eldest son John and his youngest daughter Virginia, all the other (by now adult) children from his first marriage were still living at home.

Home, however, had a revised definition with George's decision, six months after the passing of his wife Sidnah, to marry again. Predictably, by the time George drew up his will, two months prior to his passing, he opted to appoint this second wife as executrix.

Finding the will, 152 years after it was drawn up, itself was a challenge. As I live on the opposite side of the country from George's territorial homestead in Florida, I had to rely on online resources to glean the information I needed. And yet, just as we saw when trying to locate the legal documents after Drucilla Charles' passing, the digitized records from Suwannee County seem somewhat haphazardly organized in the online resources I used to find them. Just searching, on the Ancestry.com site subsection for wills, brought up two separate links, neither of which was the one I stumbled upon when finding Sidnah McClellan's "shaky leaf" hint. That hint, as it turned out, was actually the probate file for George, six years after Sidnah's passing.

One of those files was actually a link to a transcription—another document which frustratingly seemed to start mid-sentence.

The probate file was over one hundred pages in length. That turned out to be profitable reading, thanks to the advice of one genealogist I recently heard. The lecturer was popular conference speaker Michael Lacopo, whom readers may have first discovered, as I had, through his outrageous blog documenting his research journey in seeking the truth on his adoptee mother's origins.

The conference session I had attended at this year's Southern California Genealogical Society Jamboree was Michael Lacopo's presentation on wills. His advice, in a nutshell: be brave and read all the fine print; you'll be surprised at what you can discover.

Taking that advice to heart, I read every name on every scrap of paper included in George McClellan's probate file. I can't exactly call that a labor of love but it did turn out to be a productive exercise. If I hadn't done so, I wouldn't have uncovered what I believe was the cause of a century-long family resentment over what happened while that probate case slowly ground to a halt.

The will—once I found the original handwritten record filed in the Suwannee County court records—seemed simple enough. A hand-drawn diagram of the McClellan property outlined which sections were to go to which child, and which were to be left for Celestia and "her" children (presumably referring to George's children by his second wife, as opposed to the children of the first wife).

That, at least, involved the property at Wellborn, where the family lived. There was another plot of land referred to in the will, however, which George called "my Piney Mount Land." That, part and parcel, was reserved for "my wife and her children," the same phrase he had used in dividing out the land in Wellborn.

There was more designated for that "wife and her children," it turns out, including "the new building on my place" and George's "growing crops" and most of his stock of cattle.

George's will was signed in the presence of three witnesses—John J. Taylor, William P. Bethea, and Jesse F. McLeran (there's that McLeran surname again!)—on the twenty fifth of August, 1866.

That, however, wasn't the end of the matter. For starters, the will was quickly amended by a codicil on September third mentioning the one McClellan son who had not been named in the rest of the will, which gives us a hint as to the first of many causes for familial grudges nurtured in the process of executing this will.

The Start of a Step-Mother Story

"You can't take it with you," the 1936 hit comedy quips, but what happens to the stuff that gets left behind?

In the case of George Edmund McClellan, my third great grandfather, that stuff just might have made it out of town on the sly, thanks to a crafty step-mother, right under the noses of the bereaved children awaiting settlement of their father's probate.

Well into the 1900s, the descendants of George Edmund McClellan had nothing good to say of his second wife, Celestia Relief Holman. What did she do to merit such scorn? It was in the multiple pages of George's probate file that I began to piece together the story which precipitated such long-lasting animosity.

To set the stage for this story—at least for those who don't know the McClellan family of nineteenth century Wellborn, Florida—George Edmund McClellan was a respected member of the region which became known as Suwannee County. Born in South Carolina in 1808, he eventually arrived in that northern portion of Florida which once was part of Columbia County, where his household was counted in the 1840 census during Florida's territorial era.

George had married Sidnah Tison sometime before the arrival of their first child, Julia, in 1833. While Sidnah was from Pitt County, North Carolina, her marriage to George likely occurred in or near Glynn County, Georgia, where her parents had settled by 1820. The marriage of George and Sidnah was blessed with many children, at least seven of whom survived to adulthood.

From the time of George's arrival in territorial Florida onward, he was active in public affairs, in everything from serving in the militia to serving on the state constitutional delegation, to serving as county judge. His judgment was evidently respected, seeing his name on the list of appraisers in probate files for neighbors; his name appeared, for instance, in the intestate case for Drucilla Charles Hines Odum, whom we discussed yesterday.

When the baby of the McClellan family, my second great grandfather William Henry McClellan, was just fifteen years of age, his mother died. Sidnah's passing was on July 7, 1860, barely two months before the 1860 census was recorded in Suwannee County on August 29, 1860. There, in that record, was the widowed George and all his children but his older son, John, who by then had attained legal age to acquire land of his own.

What happened after that snapshot of life in the bereaved household of the widowed George McClellan involved the predictable. Though George no longer had to worry over having someone to care for the younger children of the family—William by then being nearly sixteen—nevertheless, barely six months after losing his wife, George married again.

George's new wife was a woman by the name of Celestia Relief Holman. Twenty five years his junior, George's new wife was the same age as his oldest daughter. While later records indicated that Celestia was born in Michigan, it is unclear just how she ended up in Florida—or wherever it was that she met the widowed George.

George and Celestia had at least three children: a daughter born in 1862 who died in infancy, another daughter in 1865 named after her mother, and a son, George's namesake, born on March 28, 1866.

The junior George Edmund McClellan likely knew very little of his father, for he lost his father only seven months later. This event evidently precipitated another quick marriage, for the senior George's passing left Celestia in the position of being a mother of young children in an era in which women had few economic alternatives. Within six months, Celestia was married to yet another man twenty six years her senior.

There was only one problem with this scenario: prior to his passing, George Edmund McClellan had named as his executrix this very woman who was now the wife of another man. As you can imagine, this was not a scenario that sat well with the children from his first marriage. And yet, as much as hard feelings could be predicted from this situation, one would hardly expect anything to actually come of such an awkward arrangement. But, apparently, it did.