Perfectly Clear — and Inscrutable

 

How can handwriting be so perfectly clear, and yet not communicate the information we need? That's what had me stuck last week as I puzzled over Rachel Riley Boothe's application for a widow's pension.

Granted, there were some rough spots in the several pages of her application, like the place recording her answer about her husband Alexander Boothe's place of birth. Nancyman? Perhaps that meant Nansemond, a county in Virginia at the time of her 1906 application.

But when it came to a series of questions about her own background, I was both excited to glean more information and equally stymied by the content of her response. The official completing the form used the clearest handwriting for question number three: "When and where were you born and what was your maiden name?" And yet, for the answer about her place of birth, I am at a loss to find the designated location.

While it is obvious that the answer was entered piecemeal, as each section of the information was added. The handwriting for the date of birth and Rachel's maiden name, for instance, seems different—more compressed and smaller than the handwriting that provided the beginning of the answer.

For one thing, while the state name seemed to be misspelled, it is obvious that the answer was South Carolina. However, in retrospect now that we have the resources to view each decennial census, I can't say I am confident of even that answer. For one thing, the earlier census records—1850 and 1860—reported Rachel's place of birth as North Carolina. While anyone's guess is good for the enigmatic entry in the 1870 census, the answer "South Carolina" didn't appear until the 1880 census.

Perhaps it was Alexander himself who provided the answer about his wife's place of birth for those earliest records. An answer like North Carolina would make sense for those living in the northeastern edge of Tennessee, where North Carolina was just over the mountain range. But with the answer Rachel provided on her pension application leading me to a dead end, I wondered whether perhaps even she had gotten the two states mixed up.

The handwriting was so clear on her answer. I enlarged the copy to make sure I was seeing it correctly, though I already knew what I was seeing.

The trouble was, there was no such county by that name in either South Carolina or North Carolina. Remembering that Virginia had some "extinct" counties—after all, that's the case with Alexander's own place of birth, Nansemond County in Virginia—I tried looking for historic names. Remembering "Nancyman," I tried imagining how a county's name might have been spelled phonetically. Still, no clue as to what she meant by her answer. Tobarrass County? Lobarrass? Fobarrass?

Over the weekend, I chatted back and forth with fellow blogger, Charles Purvis of Carolina Family Roots, who offered to help figure out the South Carolina location. Charlie has been experimenting with Artificial Intelligence, and offered to run a few questions through two different systems: Perplexity.AI and ChatGPT.

Based on input regarding the possibility of phonetic spelling coupled with variances in regional accents plus challenges with literacy levels, Perplexity read the entry as "Starrass" and offered a possible answer of Starr, South Carolina. ChatGPT, taking a different approach, noted that the optical character recognition result was distorted but managed to read the entry as "Spartansburg," which obviously would refer to present-day county of Spartanburg.

While further input and refinements would make AI assistance more helpful—not to mention, it's likely a tool which we all could develop skill in using—I can't help but go back to the original document and stare at that crystal clear handwriting, just wondering what the clerk meant when his impeccable handwriting penned that entry. 

Considering "Nancyman" County

 

Brick wall ancestors demand a relentless push to find additional records in the hope that perhaps finding just one more, we'll receive our answer. So it's been with searching for the roots of my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe.

Late last week, I found a document which possibly confirmed Alexander's birth in Nansemond County, Virginia—well, almost. The document actually reported that Alexander Boothe was born in "Nancyman" County, Virginia, on February 14, 1816.

That document was my wakeup call to be creative and patient with handwritten records drawn up during oral interviews. In this case, the interview was with Alexander's second wife, Rachel Riley, in her 1906 plea to receive a pension as an indigent widow on account of her husband's service during the Civil War.

According to the government record of that interview, Alexander Booth served in Captain Hugh McClung's Tennessee Light Artillery company. (Apparently, not only Alexander served, but his son David may have, also.) His service, however, was cut short—"something over one year"—due to development of a disability, according to his wife Rachel's statement in the pension application.

From the time of his discharge, Alexander apparently remained home, and died in Johnson City, possibly going there for medical assistance, as that was not his place of residence. As to when he died, the pension application, although providing space to record that information, lacked any response marking in the date. That Alexander Boothe had died before Rachel's 1906 application is assumed—and at any rate, is more than certain by this date, though his humble grave marker simply indicated his name—"Alex Boothe"—and the initials C.S.A. to designated on which side he chose to serve.

Besides such missing answers in the pension application, there were other details which I hadn't before known about the Boothe family. From each little clue harvested from a newfound document, we take tiny steps forward toward discovering more about our brick wall ancestors. This application gives me a few more points we need to consider for this month's research goal.

Building it Yourself

 

Sometimes, ya just gotta build it yourself. Since I've been stuck on the origin of my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe, I wondered whether following the lines of his two eldest sons might shed some light on where Alexander came from in Virginia, and who his first wife might have been. Quinton and David Boothe, supposedly born to that first wife, certainly were with their father when he arrived in Tennessee, so I have at least a toe-hold to climb their family tree—or build a descendancy tree to use in exploring DNA matches.

Turning to Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool to see what matches might already have been lined up for me, I saw that I'd be amply rewarded if I followed the eldest son Quinton's line, but for David, his younger brother, not one match was showing.

Quinton's line has been easy to follow, and I've actually been in touch with distant Booth cousins from that half-sibling to my own line's ancestor. It turns out that this was the family of whom my grandfather used to tell unverifiable wild tales about John Wilkes Booth—yes, the John Wilkes Booth—that he survived the manhunt following his assassination of President Lincoln and escaping to "a horse farm in west Texas." 

That farm in west Texas, incidentally, belonged to Quinton Booth's family. And apparently, that story was so widespread among Booth cousins that I actually got a phone call from someone wanting to exhume the body from the supposed burial site and use DNA testing to verify the identity of the person supposedly buried in John Wilkes Booth's grave.

For as much as we've known about the descendants of Quinton Booth, I don't know about his full brother David. Checking Ancestry.com ThruLines to see if there were any matches aligned to David's descendants, I was disappointed—but not surprised—to see there was not one DNA match attributed to that ancestor.

That is where the "build it yourself" comes in. If I build that branch into my tree, will ThruLines pick up the possibilities and point me to David Booth's descendants who have tested their DNA? That's what I'm hoping, but doing so will mean lots of work.

Sometimes, building out a DNA match's tree is the only way to verify connections. There are so many who test their DNA, yet never build—or post—their family tree so others can compare notes. For those of us convinced of the utility of genetic genealogy, we have to take that do-it-yourself approach.

In the case of this missing line of Alexander Boothe's progeny, it is certainly worth it for me to check out what can be discovered. Perhaps there is a cousin out there who does know the rest of the Boothe story, going all the way back to Virginia—not speculation, not information copied from someone else's tree, but actual records that will piece the story together and allow us all to take yet another step back through the generations.

Searching for False Positives

 

Family trees can do mysterious things to the identity of our ancestors. Perhaps an ancestor has acquired a false identity, as I'm beginning to wonder about my second great-grandfather, whom I had always known to be Alexander Boothe. According to some vocal—and experienced—researchers from my own earlier days as a neophyte genealogist, that ancestor's name was supposedly William Alexander Boothe.

I, on the other hand, was not able to locate any documents asserting that detail—but what did I know, having just started out on this family history adventure? Now, in retrospect, I feel it is time to go back and do some testing for false positives. In other words, can I replicate any sign that the man's name actually was William? Or, moving even further, can I find any signs that the Alexander I thought I found in Virginia actually remained in Virginia, while I assumed the man I found in Tennessee was one and the same as the Alexander found ten years prior in Virginia?

If I find any indication that there were others with that name in the same location, it would help to know—and to steer me clear of selecting the wrong person by the same name. Let's see what we can find, based on the assertions made by other researchers over the past few decades.

First of all, let's examine the claim that the man's name was William Alexander Boothe, and that in 1832, he married a woman named Mary Smith in Franklin County, Virginia. Can we find the couple in that same county eight years later in the 1840 census? If I've found the right couple, their household of nine individuals in 1840 included one man over forty years of age, along with an adult woman in the same age bracket, plus three boys and four girls (two of whom were fifteen or older). Granted, there is no way to determine from that information whether each of them was a child of that William, but I'm beginning to feel some doubt creep in that this was my second great-grandfather's first marriage. Unless some devastating disease wiped out all my Alexander's children except for his son Quinton—born in October of 1838—that census scenario doesn't seem likely.

Were there any other possible candidates for William Boothe in the 1840 census in Virginia? I took a look. There were multiple Booth and Boothe entries in that state in 1840, but none that looked promising.

What about fast-forwarding to 1850? I first looked for the William and Mary Booth whom we had found in the 1840 census in Franklin County. If that were my Booth ancestor, I'd expect the bereaved widower to not show up in Virginia, since by then I had traced him to Tennessee with his two sons. But here was William, still in Franklin County, with his wife Mary and three children of ages reasonable for a couple married in 1832. This obviously wasn't the "William" who left with his two sons for Tennessee.

Just in case there was another Alexander who also was left behind in Virginia, I tried looking for some indications that I had followed the wrong "ancestor." While I was fairly confident that the Alexander I found at the bottom of the census page in Nansemond County in 1840 was the right one, I looked for someone else by that same name in Virginia.

First, I checked the listing for all Booth heads of household in Nansemond County in 1840—there was none besides our Alexander. Then, I checked to see if, by some odd chance, there already was another Alexander Boothe in Washington County, Tennessee, back in 1840—no one. Back to Virginia I went, to assure myself that my Alexander hadn't remained there while I thought I had traced him to Tennessee. For the 1850 census in Virginia, there was one Alexander Booth of about the right age, but he was living with a younger woman named Louisa, and neither of his two sons were listed in that household.

At this point, I'm gaining confidence that my Alexander Boothe was just that—Alexander, not William Alexander. And while I only have documentation affirming that he was born in Virginia—not, specifically designating a location within that state—thanks to other records, we do have some reports about the possibility of his birth in Nansemond County. To find that, however, requires us to look not in the direction of his earliest years, but beyond the other side of his life, after Alexander Boothe's own death.

Surveying the Document Landscape

 

Today is the start of RootsTech, so you can hardly expect me to focus on my own research when there are so many presentations to watch online. However, I did take some time to explore what documents could be found on this month's research predicament: finding the roots of my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe.

Yesterday, we had explored the direct route of looking for all documents concerning Alexander, himself. Then, stretching our search one more step, we examined the father named in the death certificates of each of Alexander's children. Seeing the consistency gives me more confidence to discard the insertion of a first name of William, as some researchers had asserted.

There is, however, another inconsistency I've noticed in this saga of the migrating Boothe family. Supposedly, Alexander left his home in Nansemond County, Virginia, with his two sons after the death of their mother, arriving in Tennessee in time for the 1850 census. If that was the case, one would suppose the boys' father would report their place of birth as Virginia for that 1850 census—but that was not the case. Take a look for yourself at that record and notice that, while Alexander reported himself as having been born in Virginia, twelve year old Quinton and five year old David were marked as having been born in Tennessee, not Virginia.

Surely that must be a one-off error, you might be thinking. I did, too. So my next step was to look at all the other census records in which I could find either of those earlier two sons from the first marriage.

Searching for Quinton did not produce any helpful information. I have yet to find him in the 1860 census, though I did notice that someone by that same name enlisted in the Confederate Army in Texas in the early 1860s. Checking Quinton's children's death certificates for father's place of birth was not helpful, either. I found his son John's death certificate reported Quinton as having been born in Tennessee—but then daughter Sallie's death certificate showed Texas for her father's birthplace, and son William's informant gave his father's place of birth as Georgia.

It would have helped if Quinton had died just a little bit later than he did. Having breathed his last on January 6, 1908, that date fell at the beginning of the very year in which Texas instituted statewide registration of deaths. Unfortunately, Quinton's does not appear to be among those earliest of such a statewide format, else I'd be snatching it up to view not only the detail on his father's place of birth, but the name of his own mother.

Quinton's younger brother David Booth did not boost my confidence in that story about a Virginia birth for the boys. I was able to find David in each enumeration from the first census after his birth to the last census still existing before his 1899 death. Just as his brother had done, David eventually moved his family to Texas, so a death in 1899 meant his passing predated the modernized form of reporting which includes name and place of birth of each parent. Bottom line for David: every one of those enumerations listed his place of birth as Tennessee, not Virginia.

If those reports of place of birth in Tennessee were correct, that sticking point gives me reason to pause when considering the family story about Alexander Booth losing his wife in Virginia. Perhaps yet again that is a reason why this man has played the part of a brick wall ancestor. Maybe his story is far different than what some of us Boothe cousins had assumed.

Make a List, Check it Twice

 

Having made a list of all the records where I found mention of my second great-grandfather, it's time to check it again. Whether the man was named Alexander Booth or William Alexander Boothe (as one researcher had electronically published far and wide), I still can't say. But it's time to go back through all the records in which he appeared, and check them twice for the precise detail on his name.

This can be tedious work—the kind that, towards the end, may have us kicking ourselves for not being as thorough the first time around. (I'm not to that stage yet, though this ancestor has been a brick wall stopping research progress for far longer than I'd like.)

We've already reviewed Mr. Booth's cameo appearance in each of the census records from 1840 until his supposed death in 1895 and, excepting the missing 1890 census, the name always showed as Alexander Booth—no William in sight.

The next task was to go back and check the death record for each of his children to see what their bereaved relatives reported about the decedent's father's name. This was no small task, considering our man had at least two children with his first—and unknown—wife, plus eleven (at least) children with his second wife Rachel T. Riley.

Had I been able to track down an actual death certificate for either of those first two sons, I would have been rewarded not only with information on Alexander's true identity, but also with the name of their long-gone mother. No such luck, though, for eldest son Quinton died in Texas at the beginning of the year of 1908, perhaps before the more modern format for death certificates was instituted in that state. Quinton's younger brother David likely died before that point, possibly in 1899, though I have yet to complete my search for his death record.

However, moving on to Rachel Riley's Booth children, there were many opportunities to receive the same answer. Beginning with the eldest child, their daughter Laura Caroline, all the way to the youngest of the Booth children I could find—daughter Charlotte Rachel—the entry for the deceased's father was basically the same. It was either Alexander Booth or Alex Booth. Sometimes the surname was spelled with the flourish of a final "e"—Boothe—but other than that, no surprises.

In that trek through the Booth children's own death records, the farthest the standard answer varied was for son Leroy Burton Booth's death certificate, for whom his brother James was the informant, in which the father was listed as "Alec Booth."

There were, however, a couple hiccups in that thorough search. In one case, for daughter Mary, who died in Virginia in 1948, the informant was her son-in-law, Charles Smith, who reported that Mary's father was named John Booth and that he was born in Scotland. In another instance, for son Charles, the section on parents' names and places of birth was left entirely blank—as was the entry space designated for the name and address of the informant. Looking more closely, though, I spotted the cause of death—"railroad accidents causing scalds of almost entire body"—which might be considered a justifiable omission.

Overwhelmingly, the evidence pointed to the man's name not being William. For now, I'll proceed by forsaking that other name and stick with Alexander Booth.

This process of checking every detail, every document, once again has fingered one detail: if there was anything else we could find about those first two sons, the children of Alexander's first wife, perhaps that would lead to some solid guidance back to Virginia—and to some collateral Booth lines.

The Story, as Once was Told to Me

 

Sometimes, those family stories are just that: stories. We can't, however, simply dismiss them out of hand. As with so many such instances, a family story may contain a kernel of truth. It's up to us as family historians to determine which part is the right one to pursue.

So it is with the instance of this month's focus for my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors for 2025. I am beginning to wonder if the story told to me was not entirely verifiable truth. The information was told to me years ago by my mother's second cousin—a fairly close relative, granted, though one I had never known in person—so we could presume it was accurate. Before we make any judgments about its reliability, though, let's take a few minutes to consider the story, as it once was told to me by this distant cousin.

According to the story, William Alexander Boothe—for that was the name this researcher insisted was the man's correct and full name—was born in Nansemond County, Virginia, about 1812. Unknown were his parents, as far as this researcher could tell, as well as the identity of any siblings.

This William was supposedly married to a woman whose name, also, was unknown. The implication was that the marriage took place in Virginia—but again, no documentation.

At some point—perhaps after the birth of a child—the unfortunate, and unnamed, wife died, leaving William Alexander Boothe with the task of raising two young children. A most reasonable solution for such a predicament would be to stay close to family, where grandmothers or aunts could fill in as surrogate mothers until the children's bereaved father could win another bride.

In this William's case, though, his answer was to uproot his two young sons, leave everything behind in Virginia and move to the sparsely-settled region of northeastern Tennessee, where he remained until his dying days.

The backstory to all this drama, according to my cousin, was that William was not too wise with financial matters, perhaps—here's the conjecture—having been tempted by the purchases of fancy race horses. No matter what lured William into this supposed debt, his resolution was basically to do the nineteenth century version of skipping town. And thus...Tennessee.

Was that really what happened? I've tried to find documentation to shed light on any portion of that saga. With the exception of finding someone named Alexander Boothe—note the lack of any "William"—in the 1840 census in Nansemond County, I have so far been unsuccessful in replicating that story.

While I'll always keep that saga in mind—remember, family lore can sometimes contain an element of truth—I may as well start from the beginning and see if the paper trail leads me to a different tale.