Resolving to resolve

#52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks
 #52: Resolution

Resolving to resolve 

By Myra Vanderpool Gormley © 2018 

I knew I was in trouble when I first saw that Week 52’s “prompt” was “Resolution.” My choices were limited to make a firm decision to do or not to do something — and that is not likely to happen at my age. The other option is the action of solving a problem, dispute, or contentious matter.

 In genealogy there are many “problems,” not to mention a few disputes, and even some contentious matters. However, most of these deal with records and data that argue with each other — not with our family and friends. Although I have some cousins who insist I don’t know how to spell one of my family surnames. But, I’m stubborn and believe that finding creative spelling of names is what makes one a good genealogist. I also refuse to blindly accept 12-year-old mothers and 105-year-old ancestors. 

While it would be nice to make a resolution to try to solve my various genealogical problems, the solutions may be beyond my capabilities or access to records that I need. There’s also the possibility that some records simply do not exist — a price one pays when descended from so many Colonial ancestors who deliberately chose to live in places where courthouses burned, wars were fought, and stubborn folks refused to leave paper trails. 

I’ve even played around with the idea of compiling a list of all of my female ancestors for whom I have no, or an unproven, maiden name and resolve to find answers. That resolution would last until some bright and shiny potential new ancestor came along and I’d be off on another hunting expedition. Alas, I know myself well. 

I could resolve to continue the almost daily updating and housecleaning of my several one-name databases, but this is an endless thankless job I do because, well, just because — I blame it on my Dutch and German genes. 

Speaking of genes, DNA research is fast becoming a tool and a curse. As more people participate and post their trees, I’m finding connections to many new cousins. I’m ever hopeful that some will have family Bibles, photos and other material to share. But I certainly don’t need a resolution to do this. DNA matches are almost as addictive as searching genealogy trees and GEDCOMs. 

2019 is going to bring another #52 Ancestors in 52 weeks challenge, and I don’t need a resolution to do that either. Writing stories about ancestors instead of placing them on colorless trees is much more fun and offers a creative outlet too.

 So, I guess if I’m going to resolve to do anything — genealogically — this coming year, it will be to keep on keeping on. Watch out ancestors in hiding — I’m coming after you.

Making My Nice List

52Ancestors Week 51—Nice

Making My Nice List 

By Myra Vanderpool Gormley © 2018 

It’s nice to be related to someone famous or rich (or both) and it’s nice to find cousins who share their years of research with you. But at the top of my “nice” list are two cousins I have never met personally. 

My maternal grandma use to remind me (jokingly) to be proud because I was a Peacock — a descendant of the Peacocks of Atlanta, in fact. Well, that didn’t mean much to me as a kid on a farm in Oklahoma. Even years later when I began to explore my ancestry seriously, my tendency was to brush aside the family legends about any purportedly rich or illustrious lines, and try to focus on just the facts. 

However, my granny knew what she was talking about — her mother-in-law — Elizabeth (Connally) Fricks, a widow, lived with her son and his wife (my granny) for many years. And Elizabeth (Connally) Fricks was a descendant of Louis Peacock, an early Atlanta-area pioneer. The details about the Peacock-Connally-Fricks connections I did not learn overnight, or by clicking on an online tree, or figure it all out in a weekend, but eventually I discovered that my great-granny was the only child of Elizabeth Jane (called Jane) Peacock who married “Big Charles” Connally at the tender age of 15 — much younger than my other female ancestors. In 1849, my great-granny was born in Atlanta — and her mother — Elizabeth Jane (Peacock) Connally died in 1852 at the tender age of 22 — the mother of only the one known child. 

I has no pictures of Elizabeth Jane Peacock (1830-1852) or any of her husband, Charles William “Big Charles” Connally (1817-1886), but fate smiled on me. One of my nice cousins (and a double cousin at that) shared with me some pictures of her ancestors — Thomas Whipple Connally (1809-1884) and Temperance Arnold Peacock (1818-1896). Thomas Whipple Connally is an older brother of my “Big Charles” and Temperance is an older sister of my Elizabeth Jane Peacock. 

Thomas Whipple Connally and Temperance Arnold Peacock

How nice is that? 

Another cousin, while cleaning out the attic, found a treasure that had been kept in his family for many generations. It was the 1800 Bible of a couple who married that year — my ancestors — Isaac Awtrey and Araminta Bankston. 

This super nice cousin of mine scanned the images and shared with us. Most of us had been researching for years, tracing the descendants of this couple but dead-ended at proving their parents. The Bible provided the date of marriage and the names of fathers of the couple, plus additional genealogical material on their children and more.

 It doesn’t getting any nicer than this.

Scrutinizing My Naughty List

#52ancestors Week 50- Dec 10-16
 Prompt: Naughty

 Scrutinizing My Naughty List 

By Myra Vanderpool Gormley © 2018

 Picking a “naughty” ancestor to write about this week was a monumental challenge. Which one? 

While it is fun for us genealogists to joke about our horse thieves, outlaws, and less-than-sterling ancestors, when you have a tree full of them, it is a bit embarrassing to have so many from which to choose. How on earth did I come to have so many “colorful” progenitors? Is that a special gene? If so, where is it located in the DNA? 

I started to write about my 3great-grandmother, Margaret (George) Awtrey, who in April of 1871 in Haralson County, Georgia filed a Civil War Damage Claim before the Southern Claims Commission[1] claiming that she had been loyal to the Union during the Civil War and had had $279 worth of property taken by or furnished to the Union Army during the rebellion. Her claim included a horse, seven hogs and some potatoes. 

But, I don’t know whether Margaret was actually a pro-Unionist or not. Perhaps she was naughty and lied. Perhaps she was telling the truth or filed because she was in dire circumstances after losing her husband and their home. One can understand a lie in such a situation, but a lie is still a lie. The U.S. government denied her claim. While she said she had been loyal to the U.S., her husband had been a Confederate Army spy, and the witnesses for her claim were her sons and sons-in-law — all former Confederate soldiers and probably not the best witnesses to call upon. 

However, I changed my mind about which ancestor to write about when I recalled that once upon a time I stumbled upon some others with shady pasts while I was reading dull dry deeds of Etowah County, Alabama. Therein, I had found a record that Randall Hensley was indebted to a fellow for $500 for signing an Internal Revenue Bond . . . for the personal appearance of his son, Francis Marion Hensley. 

Oh, no! The latter is my great-grandpa. His father, Randall Hensley, mortgaged his 120-acre farm to pay for the bond and Francis Marion Hensley was charged with violation of the Internal Revenue Law of the U.S. He had been arrested on the Coosa River and charged with “engaging in and carrying on a business of a distiller of Spirituous liquors without having paid the special tax or given bond as by law required.” [2]

Gulp! Dodging taxes is usually unwise, and moonshining, even with its interesting historical past in America, had been discouraged during the Civil War when several Southern states passed laws prohibiting the use of grains for anything but food. After the war a federal tax on home distilleries became law and during the 1870s, this law began to be enforced and in early 1875 they nabbed my great-grandpa. 

By Original: Pfly, using a base map template made with US Federal public domain GIS data;Version 3: John Lambert - This is a modification of File:MobileAlabamaCoosa2.png, which is in Wikimedia under GFDL license., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2065758

Now, a moonshiner in the hills of northeastern Alabama is not how I had pictured my ancestor, so I was somewhat relieved when I read the court case wherein Francis Marion Hensley claimed that he just happened to be tending the still when the Revenuers came by — he was “watching it for another fellow.” 

Well, of course, I wanted to believe him. And did, briefly until I read the name of the fellow for whom he was tending the still — who was, good grief — his father-in-law!

------

 1 "Barred and Disallowed Case Files of the Southern Claims Commission, 1871-1880" (NARA M1407) records. Southern Loyalists (those who were Union sympathizers) made 22,298 claims for property losses totaling $60,258,150.44. However, only 7,092 claims (32%) were approved for settlements totaling $4,636,920.69. Each claimant sought to prove their loyalty and loss through the testimony of others. The paper trail created by the claimants and the people who came forward to testify, for or against a claimant, provide a wealth of information about individuals living in the South during the Civil War.

2 Jason Sumich, "It's All Legal Until You Get Caught: Moonshining in the Southern Appalachians," article, Appalachian State University, Anthro.appstate.edu (https://anthro.appstate.edu/research/field-schools/ethnographic-and-linguistic-field-schools/summer-2007-Alleghany-county : online 9 December 2018); Department of Anthropology-ASU-Boone, NC.

Winter Wonderland

#52ancestors Week 49- Dec 3-9

Winter Wonderland

By Myra Vanderpool Gormley © 2018 

Sometimes I wonder about some of my ancestors. I mean, really. 

Whatever possessed a man, who apparently had a comfortable life with hundreds of acres, horses, mules, and cattle, and a large family nearby, to pull up stakes in Rowan County, North Carolina and at age 73 go to Union County, Illinois — more than 600 miles away? 

Not only did he, his wife and most of their family make the move — but they did it in the winter. What were they thinking? 

Jacob Fricks, of Germanic-Swiss ancestry, was born about 1750 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. A first-generation American, he served during the Revolutionary War in North Carolina; married in 1788 to Eva Elizabeth Earnhardt, also a first-generation American of Germanic heritage. They prospered in Rowan County, North Carolina where they raised a large family. Paul, their youngest of 12 children, was born in 1816. 

So how do I know they made the move from North Carolina to Illinois in the winter? 

From the obituary of their youngest child who died in 1897. It reads: 

Jacob Frick was born in Pennsylvania and married in Rowan County, North Carolina to Elizabeth Earnhart [sic]. They had 12 children, of whom Paul Frick was the youngest. Jacob was a soldier in the Revolutionary War and came to Union County [Illinois] Christmas Day, 1823. 

I think the least they could have done is to have left a written report explaining why the move and a record of how high the snow drifts were. 

DNA vs. Paper Trail

52 Ancestors Week 48

When DNA and the Paper Trail Disagree
 by Myra Vanderpool Gormley (C) 2018

 This week’s prompt “Next to Last” stumped me, so I chose to write about “When DNA and the Paper Trail Disagree.” 

Finding a new clue to the ancestry of the Rev. Wilson Henderson (1762-1847) sent me off in several directions trying to prove or disprove the claim that he was the son of an Edward Henderson who left a will in 1790 in Chester County, South Carolina. 

A number of online trees provided bits and pieces of information and cited their source as “Will” or "Abstract of SC Will” or “Ancestry.com—Chester County, SC Will.” Eventually, I found the latter, which actually is from a book of abstracts of South Carolina Wills, that also had been microfilmed at some point. 

I found the “Will of Edward Henderson” which was, according to the source, “Probated Dec. 3, 1790; Recorded in Book A, page 60. It is typewritten. Since the typewriter was not commercially available until about 1878 — nearly 100 years after the Will was written, obviously this was a derivative source. But one thing was clear, my ancestor, the Rev. Wilson Henderson, was not mentioned in that abstracted Will. 

A bit more digging and I learned that these abstracts were “Verbatim Copies of Old Wills Recorded in Will Book A” (South Carolina) and were a C. W.A. Project #3342. C.W.A. stands for Civil Works Administration and that was a Depression-era temporary jobs endeavor. I almost forgot about this information, thinking that the father of my Wilson Henderson had not yet been identified, and so I put the project on the back burner — temporarily. Then a DNA discussion in re the Henderson Clan caught my eye and someone remarked that it was strange that the Henderson DNA line from Wilson to Edward matches, but the paper trail doesn’t. 

I decided to see if I could find the original Will and read it for myself. Using the catalog at FamilySearch.org, I was able to find the Family History Film 23308 listing this will and there was a digitized version (DGS4753542) available online. 

Off I went, and Images 47 and 48 were my reward. Following the request that “my lawful debts to be paid and my estate as follows: Item. I give and bequeath to my son Wilson Henderson one shilling sterling . . . “ 

So my ancestor is mentioned in Edward’s Will. He apparently is the eldest son, but it impossible to ascertain the order of birth of the 12 children mentioned in the Will. I was gratified to find the evidence that makes the DNA and paper trails agree in this instance. 

Of course, what happens now that I know Edward Henderson (ca 1739-1790) is the father, and I have the name of the purported mother — Johanna Ferguson— is that I’ll put some other genealogy quest on the back burner and dig some more in pursuit of my Henderson Clan.