Making the News

#52 ancestors Week 46—Random Fact

Making the News 

By Myra Vanderpool Gormley ©2018 

Joseph Warren Baird, a son of Alexander Baird and Nancy Vanderpool, picked as his first wife, Rebecca D. Hartley. They lived in Ashe County, North Carolina, but soon after their marriage in 1860 removed to Tennessee where their first three children were born. 

By 1870, they were living in Benton County, Kansas, and by 1880 their family had grown to five children. Rebecca died in the autumn of 1881 in Kansas, and a cousin shared the information that Joseph Warren Baird removed to Oklahoma Territory, where he died in 1905. 

Research often takes interesting turns and twists and when I found Joseph Warren Baird and his second wife, Jane, and three more children, they were enumerated in Alabama in 1900, but all the children had been born in Kansas between 1884 and 1888— at least according to the census. It appears, based on the birthdates of his second family, that Joseph Warren Baird had not remained a widower long after his first wife died. 

What puzzled me was that my cousin claimed he died in Oklahoma Territory in 1905. That was a bit of geographical hopscotching from Kansas to Alabama to Oklahoma Territory. I had assumed (the sin of all genealogists) that his second wife was probably a neighbor in Kansas, but I was wrong. 

While researching in North Carolina newspaper for another ancestor, one of those random facts fell into my lap which answered the question about Jane, the No. 2 wife of Joseph Warren Baird. Published 15 March 1882 in the Lenoir Topic (Lenoir, Caldwell County, North Carolina), with a dateline of Cove Creek (where Joseph Warren Baird was born) was the following: “The people are still marrying and being given in marriage. Mr. J. Warren Baird, of Kansas (late a widower) has taken unto himself a wife and returned to Kansas. He married Miss Jane Lewis of Cove Creek.” 

This one was almost too easy. I opened up my Vanderpool database and found Jane Lewis. She was the daughter of Abraham Lewis and Nancy Emely Lewis (who were first cousins), and a granddaughter of Daniel Lewis and Betsy Vanderpool. Jane Lewis and her husband, Joseph Warren Baird, are 1C1R (first cousins once removed) as he was the son of Alexander Baird and Nancy Vanderpool — and Betsy and Nancy Vanderpool were sisters. 

Now that I know when and where Joseph Warren Baird and Jane Lewis were married, I should be able to find their marriage record and quit hunting for it on the Kansas prairie.