Who do you think you are?

I wrote about the Melungeons of East Tennessee and Appalachia several years ago after doing some research for my Dad's cousin Hubert.  He asked me to find out if his great grandmother Eleanor Marzenah Bunch was Native American. 

I came across the story of the Melungeons because her family name, Bunch is associated with the group. The stories said they were descendants of either Native Americans or early Portuguese explorers. My research showed no connection between Marzenah's family and the Bunch family in East Tennessee.

Well now they have released DNA test results on dozens of people who had family ties to the Melungeons and all the tests show their ancestors came from Africa not Europe.

In fact, offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women. There have been court cases going back 150 years where family members successfully argued they were not black but Portuguese. A necessary claim to live in peace during the slavery and post Civil War era.

DNA doesn't lie, you don't always get results that are this definitive from the tests for genealogical research but you always find out something you didn't know before.

Hell would be to rent out

William Alexander Lafayette Rawls was married to Eliza Matilda Graham, the sister of my great great grandmother Vashti Graham Wilson.

He was born February 4, 1840 in Tallahassee, Florida and died in Myakka, which was then in Manatee County Florida on January 10, 1907.

In between those 67 years he fought in the Florida Indian Wars, spent four years in the 7th Florida Regiment during the Civil War and then settled down in Manatee County, married Eliza and had nine children with her.

A few years before his death the Manatee River Journal ran a small article about him which ended with the statement in the title of this post. I don't remember how I found the article but thought is was a nice tribute.

I found this photo of him and Eliza in my great grandmother's papers.

October 18, 1903 Manatee River Journal

W.A.L. Rawls of Miakka is in some respects the most remarkable man in Manatee County, if not in the entire state.

He has been a citizen of this county as long, perhaps longer than any other man now living, coming from Leon County in the early '50's and settling first on the Manatee River, where he remained but a few years before removing to Miakka, then inhabited solely by wild bears and game.

Mr. Rawls has surrounded himself with the necessaries of life, raised a large family to man and womanhood, has never been spoken evil of by any one, and has never in all his life employed the professional services of a doctor or lawyer.

Although he possesses a fair education when we consider the opportunities of his day, he has not written a letter, business or otherwise, since he wrote home to his friends from the battlefields during the Civil War, in which he spent four years a brave and valiant soldier.

Some wag has said, "If all men were like Bill Rawls, Hell would be to rent out."

Truck Farmer

You start to see the term on census records from the 1920s and 30s, Truck Farmer. I guess you could say my grandfather Millard Fillmore Green had a truck farm, except he didn't have a truck or a car either. He just found family or friends to help taxi his crops to market.
He grew vegetables on a couple empty lots next to his house in Perry, Florida and sold the produce to the local grocery stores. He did it up until he turned 90.

I've seen several other relatives who had Truck Farmer listed as as their occupation. Several are listed that way on the 1940 census that was just released.

When we moved to our house in Memphis the neighborhood was being developed on land that used to be a farm. There was an old abandoned truck on the other side of the lake, half buried in the mud. It stayed there for several years until they started building houses around it.

After 15 years of development, landscaping, etc the only thing left visible from the old truck or the farm, is this one piece of sheet metal.

Don't blame me, but...

I wrote a story about Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren recently and the problems tracing her Native American family tree. Well, there has been a firestorm over her Teepee since then.

News folks from both paper and the web have been lambasting her claim and have now confirmed the 1894 marriage license application never existed. They didn't even have application forms until around 1950 in Oklahoma.

In fact her proof came down to a family tree some guy put on Rootsweb.com!

Give me a break, who pays attention to online family trees anymore? This is the source of her claim and why Harvard University listed her as their Native American Law Professor?

Rewrite the History Books

It's fun finding a piece of history about your family that was lost to current memory. Several years ago I located a reference in an 1893 New Bern, NC newspaper to a distant grandfather being recognized as the first white male born in the Carolinas. I later found the same fact in a book written by the North Carolina Division of Archives. Certainly no one living in my family had ever heard of this.

Another North Carolina family connection to a piece of US history is the location of the Lost Colony settlement. We grew up being taught they started the first colony on the shores of Roanoke Island in the late 1500s. I recently came across folks who are certain the 115 colonist from Sir Walter Raleigh's expedition were actually setting up housekeeping on Cedar Island, located in the northeast corner of Carteret County, NC.   My wife and I drove to Cedar Island when we were visiting the area several years ago, just to see the coastal highway.

I had no idea there was a 400 year old controversy brewing there at the time. One of my distant cousins, who follows this blog, sent me an email about the story a while back and I decided to look into it. Jean Day wrote a book called "Cedar Island Fisher Folk" in 1994 that tells the Lost Colony story that had been passed down in her family for generations.

In fact there have been scholarly reports that proposed the Lost Colony settlement location was really on Cedar Island going back to at least the 1940s. They based this on the journals that survived, measurements and descriptions of the island, the physical layout of the North Carolina Coast and the currents and tidal action around Roanoke Island that would have not allowed the English ships to get close to it but match Cedar Island perfectly. There are also a Spanish explorer's report from 1606 about finding white men in the Cedar Island area.

So how do white settlers stay in an area so close to the later expeditions and remain hidden from view? The local account is they decided to live with the Indians, taking Indian wives and enjoying the land they had found. That is after all what their original purpose was in crossing the Ocean. They raised their families, planted crops, fished and lived out their life, happy to be in a good place. If you want to read all the technical arguments, pick up Day's book or find a copy of "Riddle of the Lost Colony" by Melvin Robinson, or read the many newspaper articles about the Cedar Island connection using Google news. There is also a recent  news flash about an old map supposedly with invisible ink showing the secret location of the Lost Colony, not at Roanoke Island.

For me the interesting part is the strong belief that has carried down over the centuries from those who live on Cedar Island. They have documentation of place names and deeds going back to the 1700s in the names of Berry, Smith and others who were part of the colony and the same names are found there today. Many of these are related to my family via multiple marriage connections. That is what happens when they stay in the same place for centuries.

But for the folks who live on Cedar Island today, there is no question where their ancestors came from. They've always known they were from the Lost Colony settlement! They tell you, their folks were never lost, they always knew where they were, it was the English explorers and financiers back home who were lost.

Luther's revenge

I wrote a story several months ago about my grandmother's cousin Luther Wilson who most of the family would probably just as soon forget. One of my Wilson cousins did some checking after seeing it and found the Orlando Sentinel had written a couple stories about the Deputy he killed in 1919 after one of his jail breaks. Their articles were published in May of 2011.

The reporter tried in vain to determine what had happened to Luther Wilson but the Florida Prison officials couldn't find the records. That should come as no surprise since they had such a difficult time keeping track of Luther or keep him on the right side of the prison bars.

I helped the reporter with the rest of the story and they published it as an update.

The paper's interest in the story was to get Deputy B.C. Wilcox's name added to a Fallen Officer Memorial in Tavares, Florida.

Lake County Florida added another name to the memorial for a Deputy who was killed in 1929 and then the paper came across the story of Deputy Wilcox who's name had been omitted also. Well this week, 93 years later, the name of  Deputy Bob C. Wilcox was added to the memorial.The ceremony included a bagpipe tribute, Three volley rifle salute and helicopter flyover.

Cherokee Nation

In case you missed it, there was a funny story coming out of Massachusetts this week and it had nothing to do with Mitt Romney, his wife or his dog.

The leading candidate for their US Senate seat, Elizabeth Warren was caught red handed, or not. She has been claiming Native American ancestry for over 25 years in several jobs at major universities. Harvard, the Vanderbilt of the northeast has her listed as their diversity program poster child as a Native American Female Law Professor.

Unfortunately in a big money political campaign people check out your resume. If you give her the benefit of the doubt, she is really only 1/32 Cherokee. That is the same as my wife and her five siblings but they have never been able to turn it into a job preference. We couldn't even get a tuition break at Florida State University for my daughters, where they do everything they can to enroll Native Americans. I wrote about my wife's Cherokee ancestor in another story.

I suspect there will be several cases of white-out sold in Boston this weekend since there is no proof of Elizabeth Warren's Native American ancestry. She claims there was a marriage application for one of her great grandmothers from 1894 that said she was Cherokee. So far, no one, not even researchers at the New England Historical Genealogical Society can find it. Some of the press accounts (no doubt from Warren's PR team) said the Society had verified the record but they came out with their own press statement later and said that was not true. My wife at least has a paper trail to her Native American ancestor!

Quick trip to Tally

I've made a lot of quick trips to Tallahassee, some faster than others. When we moved to Jacksonville I kept my FSU football season tickets and I don't think I missed any games over those seven years. When we moved to Memphis I kept the tickets for about five years but didn't go nearly as often, since it was over 500 miles.

The fastest trip I made over those years was one from Jacksonville when my buddy Paul and I decided to rent a private plane.

Taking a plane 170 miles was not the most economical transport but it sounded like a good idea at the time. The pilot was a friend who needed to get some extra flight hours. It was a fast trip over but we got stuck in Tallahassee overnight on the return. There was heavy fog and the pilot wasn't legal to fly if she couldn't see the ground. So the return we could have done in about 3 hours by car took 15.

There is a family story about my great great grandfather making a quick trip to Tallahassee in 1890.

William Augustus Lundy was trying to claim a homestead on 80 acres of land in Manatee County Florida. He had already cleared part of the land when he got word someone else was making a homestead claim on half the property. The other man had mailed a land claim to the State office in Tallahassee. William Lundy had served in the US Cavalry during the Civil War so he took off by horseback to beat the mail. He was successful and filed his patent on August 5, 1890.

The trip is about 290 miles using the most direct route today. If he used only one horse he would have had to limit it to about 25 miles a day according to someone who is supposed to be an expert, so it probably took him a week to get there.

You don't have to call me Darlin'

One of the first people I met when I started doing genealogy research was from the family of Darling Rowell.

At the time, we didn't know if this family was connected to mine or not. That was over 20 years ago and I'm still not sure how we would be connected. I am pretty sure we are but just can't prove it. He could be a brother or son of my great great grandfather William Rowell.

Darling Rowell was born in South Carolina, maybe the Barnwell District on October 11, 1827 and died of disease on April 2, 1864 that he contracted while serving in Company D of the Florida 2nd Battalion Infantry Regiment. The story is that he became sick in February of 1863 and was sent home where he died a year later.

He was married to Mary Ann Morgan in 1849 in the Barnwell District of South Carolina, at "her father's home" according the the Florida Civil War pension application she filed after his death. They are buried next to each other in the Fellowship Primitive Baptist Church cemetery at Shady Grove in Madison County Florida. I came across the grave markers when I was there about 10 years ago looking for my Rowell family graves.

Whitehurst Landing

One of my distant grandfathers was William Richard Whitehurst who after arriving in America in the middle of the 17th Century, settled in Princess Anne County Virginia. He built what was described as a plantation home called "Three Runs" on the eastern branch of the Elizabeth River.

One of the books I found about him, written over 100 years ago, said he encouraged his family to remain on the family soil and there was still a "Whitehurst Landing" on part of the original land.

The book said it was in Norfolk County, Virginia. I decided to try and find it and see if any of the local residents still have the Whitehurst name. Apparently Virginia county lines have changed quite a bit and some were taken over by Cities. Much of the original Norfolk County has become the cities of Norfolk or Chesapeake.

The Elizabeth River is only about six miles long but has become a center of commerce. The Norfolk Naval Shipyard, where many of the US Navy's ships were either built or repaired over the last 210 years is located there. At the head of the river, according to Google maps is "Whitehurst Landing." So there you have it, 400 years and the family name is still there.

I also found the City of Norfolk, Virginia has a reservoir that supplies drinking water to the city called "Lake Whitehurst."

I Googled Whitehurst and Norfolk and found many people with the name. Charles B. Whitehurst is currently the Vice Mayor of Portsmouth, Virginia. Is he a relative? I don't know, he doesn't have my red hair, but anything is possible...

The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here!

The 1940 Census was released to the public last week. Privacy laws require Census records be kept under wraps for 70 years. This is the second census release I've experienced since I started doing family history research on a regular basis.

For now the only thing available is the images, no index or search feature. If you know where someone lived at the time you can find them, but it may take looking at a lot of images. A fast Internet connection is a necessity.

I found my wife's father and his parents in Smith County Tennessee which was amazing since I had no idea where they lived in the County. They were on the first couple pages I looked at. I'm not sure where my father was during the census since he was in the U.S. Army Air Corps. I've looked in several areas of the Panama Canal Zone, where I think he was stationed but haven't found him yet.

My mother and her parents, Walton "Tink" and Edith Fulford were easy to find since they lived in Cortez, Florida which then and now was a small town. It shows they owned their home as did most of their neighbors. My grandmother gave the information and said she had finished the 7th grade and her husband the 4th. My mother was in her first year of high school. I recognize almost all of the names on the census page since most are relatives. I'm sure there are surprises to be found on the census pages. If you want to find your family, the 1940 Census is available for free on Ancestry.com

New and Improved

I'm impressed with the new version of Family Tree Maker software. I've used it for many years but never upgraded from the 2006 version until last year. This year when they released the 2012 version I didn't plan to buy it until I saw it allowed you to sync your database with an online copy automatically.


I've been careful to backup my personal data for years, after seeing too many problems at work because the IT guy didn't do it. With my old version of FTM I had to copy the data file to another computer in the house or a portable hard drive. Several times that backup copy saved me when the original file was corrupted. The idea of having to re-enter 50,000 names and personal information that I've accumulated in my data file over 25 years would end my genealogy hobby!

I bought a new laptop this year, with bigger faster insides, and decided to try out online backups with it for the FTM file.

The new FTM allows you to upload the data file to ancestry.com and then if you login to your ancestry account you have the complete file to work with via the web browser. This means I don't have to use my laptop to update something. Then when I do open FTM on my laptop it automatically syncs with the online file.

The only problem I found is that it doesn't sync all the photos I had in my data file. They are still there and attached to people, but they don't show up online. I guess they are using a new format to attach photos and I would have to re-attach them to my data file to sync online. Small sacrifice for the convenience of being able to work on research from either my laptop or any other computer, using a web browser. The sync process only takes about 15 seconds so this is much faster than trying to backup a 150mb data file. Since it is the complete file, it serves as a cloud backup. I don't trust ancestry completely, still using the backup drive here on the home network.

Man of the Century

Today would have been my father's 100th birthday.

It is pretty amazing to think one of your parents could be that old. Like most of you, I still think of myself as a twenty or thirty something. Who looks in the mirror and sees an old guy?

Daddy got a head start on being the old man in the family since he didn't get married until he was almost 40. But still, many of the things he did, which an old person normally does, were at or close to my age.

He retired the first time at age 48. I've already passed that birthday. He was proud of the fact that he collected retirement pay from the Air Force for 40 years! He retired from his 2nd career at age 62 and my sister reached that mile marker last month.

He died eleven years ago after being sick for a year and a half. He lived longer than all four of his brothers but not his father who made it to age 93.

A lot of people don't like others recognizing their birthday, but not him. He always had a good time when we had a party for him. His first grandchild was born on the same date so he sometimes had to share the day, but not the cake or candles. This one had 80 on it and he didn't need any help blowing them out.

We had to take it outside so it wouldn't set off the smoke detector.

On this day in history

I haven't followed the Civil War stories that have been published over the last year. Being the 150th anniversary has meant there are plenty of opportunities but for this son of the South, I felt we'd already had enough of those memorials.

There is a nice blog that has covered the Florida Civil War history, which considering the lack of military action in the Sunshine State has actually been pretty interesting.

This week I saw a newspaper story about the 150th anniversary of the battle of Fort Macon, in the harbor of Beaufort, North Carolina. It caught my eye because we have been to the fort. I also found records that one of my great grandfathers dug out the clay on his land, made bricks and they were used to build the fort. I wrote about that find two years ago.

The Yankee siege of Fort Macon started on March 23, 1861 and lasted a month. The Confederates surrendered on April 26, 1862.

Fort Macon was never considered an important military target. When the war broke out the Confederates took it over but there were only a handful of Union troops and four canons. Beaufort, North Carolina has the distinction of falling to the invaders during all three of the wars fought on US soil. There aren't many cities who can make that claim.

Since I had a number of relatives from the area, I decided to see how many of them participated in the battle of Fort Macon.

William Howard Longest, who was married to my great aunt, Laura Sena Foreman, enlisted in Company H of the 1st North Carolina Light Artillery on May 25, 1861 and was inside Fort Macon when the Yankees sailed into the harbor. He surrendered and was taken as a POW by the Union troops. They only held him for four months before exchanging him for some Union POWs. William Longest was born in 1833 but I'm not sure when he died. There is a marker for him at the Newport River Primitive Baptist Church cemetery in Carteret County, North Carolina but it doesn't have dates on it. It was installed in 1998. Laura was buried there also but there is no marker for her.


William J. Foreman who was the brother of Laura Sena Foreman and my great grandmother, Hope Jane Foreman also enlisted in the North Carolina Light Artillery in 1861 and was at Fort Macon. He didn't stay for the entire battle. The Confederate records show he deserted on April 9, 1862. He was married in May 1862 to Hattie Bell in Beaufort, one month after the fort fell.


William Foreman moved to Manatee County Florida after the end of the war and claimed a homestead on Perico Island. In fact, he and his wife Hattie Bell were probably the first from Carteret County to move to Manatee County. William was born in 1838 and died in 1906 and is buried in Palma Sola cemetery in Bradenton, Florida.

Owen Foreman, another brother of my great grandmother Hope was at Fort Macon as part of the North Carolina Light Artillery and also deserted on April 9, 1862. I'm not sure what happened to him after the war. I've never found any record of him after the battle. Hope Foreman named her son Owen Dewitt Garner, apparently after her brother.

Stephen Bryant Holland who was married to my 2nd cousin Margaret Francis Pigott, was also at Fort Macon. He enlisted in Company G, 10th Regiment of North Carolina Artillery and was a Sergent when the battle started. He was also taken as a POW and exchanged after a couple months. Stephen Holland was born in 1838 and died in 1924. He is buried in the Ferrand cemetery in Carteret County, next to his wife.

James W. P. Fulford who was my 3rd cousin had also enlisted in Company F of the North Carolina Light Artillery. He was taken prisoner when the fort fell and exchanged in August 1862. He married Mary Frances Smith in 1872 and moved to Craven County. He was born in 1838, died in 1907 and was buried in Cedar Grove cemetery in New Bern, NC.

The family editor

My daughter is a successful editor for a publishing company in Philadelphia but she didn't have anything to do with this edit.

One of my Florida cousins wanted to obtain a Family Certificate as a Florida Pioneer from the Florida State Genealogical Society. It's for descendants of early settlers, who were in the area before 1845 when Florida became a State.

Our common ancestor William Rowell would qualify since he was in North Florida about the same time the Spanish sailed off. He had to fend off the local Indians before he could do much farming but once that was taken care of his family stayed around. I visited with one of my Rowell cousins last summer who has helped keep the family name prominent in the area for 180 years.

The text that needed an edit was the memorial marker for William Rowell in Fellowship Primitive Baptist Church Cemetery in Madison County Florida.

They wanted to document that William was the father of Joseph Rowell so they could send in the membership application. I had found many sources that listed William Rowell in the area before 1845, his military record, land records and a newspaper account from the 1850s.

Unfortunately the 1840 census record, when Joseph was living in his father's house, didn't list anyone except head of households. I've never located a will or estate records for William that would have listed Joseph. So to take care of this, the cousin paid to add a few facts to the grave marker.

Now this marker isn't original and it is only a memorial not one marking his grave. He lived further west and would have probably been buried on his own land. But it didn't hurt anything to put on the marker what we all know is the truth, that he was the father of Joseph Rowell. That was enough to get the application approved.

Patriot or not

One thing that most people doing genealogy research like to find is Revolutionary War service. That way they can join the DAR - Daughters of the American revolution or the men's group, Son's of the American Revolution. My daughters can join the DAR on about 7-8 different family lines if they ever decide they want it.

One ancestor that I had never been able to document military service for was John Whitehurst of Carteret County, North Carolina. He was my 5th great grandfather and since he was born about 1740 would be the prime age to have participated in the war.

He lived in the Straits area of Carteret County and many of the Whitehurts in the area as well as those who moved to Cortez, Florida early last century are descended from him.

He married Susannah Fulford, daughter of Joseph Fulford and he died in 1795. His only son was Col. Richard Whitehurst, who married Margaret Burgess. I found Richard's grave marker the last time we were in the area and wrote an interesting story about it.

I've never found John Whitehurst on any Revolutionary War veteran list and over the last 200 years no one has tried to claim DAR membership via him. The DAR has really good records and an online index of all membership applications even those that were denied.

Recently Ancestry.com put SAR applications online and I found one that listed him. One of his descendants, John Norman Whitehurst filed an application in 1950. The application was approved but was somewhat vague on what service John Whitehurst had given during the war. I wrote to the national SAR office in Louisville, KY and they confirmed it was approved but they had no information, other than the application.


The application listed as sources; North Carolina Revolutionary Army Accounts, Vol IX, page 31 and the series US and NC War of the Rebellion, Book Z page 56. There is a handwritten note on the bottom of the first page stating they could not find these references. That made it even more of a question, as why did they approve the membership without checking it out?


I started looking for these books and after many tries at different libraries was able to locate both of them in the North Carolina Archives. I wrote to them and asked for copies. As I have found in the past, the NC Archives gives excellent service and I received photocopies of both the pages within a couple weeks.


Looking at the originals I see John Whitehurst received payments from the State of North Carolina in 1785 and 1789 but they don't make mention of why he was receiving the payment. I guess it was good enough for the SAR since they approved the application but what about the DAR?



The DAR web page has a list of who would qualify for membership. It's a long list and includes some you may be surprised at. I am thinking that since the 2nd document shows John was owed money that he may have been one who furnished goods, food or supplies to the Army. Not exactly something you would think would be on the same level as a Signer of the Declaration of Independence, but that is the way it is.


DAR - Acceptable Service:

Signers of the Declaration of Independence

Military Service, such as participation in:

Army and Navy of the Continental Establishment

State Navy

State and Local Militia

Privateers

Military or Naval Service performed by French nationals in the American theater of war

Civil Service, under authority of Provisional or new State Governments:

State Officials

County and Town Officials (Town Clerk, Selectman, Juror, Town Treasurer, Judge, Sheriff, Constable, Jailer, Surveyor of Highways, Justice of the Peace, etc.)

Patriotic Service, which includes:

Members of the Continental Congress, State Conventions, and Assemblies

Membership in committees made necessary by the War, including service on committees which furthered the cause of the Colonies from April 1774, such as Committees of Correspondence, Inspection, and Safety, committees to care for soldier's families, etc.

Signer of Oath of Fidelity and Support, Oath of Allegiance, etc.

Members of the Boston Tea Party

Defenders of Forts and Frontiers, and Signers of petitions addressed to and recognizing the authority of the Provisional and new State Governments

Doctors, nurses, and others rendering aid to the wounded (other than their immediate families)

Ministers who gave patriotic sermons and encouraged patriotic activity

Furnishing a substitute for military service

Prisoners of war or refugees from occupying forces

Prisoners on the British ship Old Jersey or other prison ships

Service in the Spanish Troops under Galvez or the Louisiana Militia after 24 December 1776

Service performed by French nationals within the colonies or in Europe in support of the American cause

Those who rendered material aid, in Spanish America, by supplying cattle for Galvez's forces after 24 December 1776

Those who applied in Virginia for Certificates of Rights to land for settlement and those who were entitled to and were granted preemption rights

Those who took the Oath of Fidelity to the Commonwealth of Virginia from October 1779 to 26 November 1783

Those who rendered material aid such as furnishing supplies with or without remuneration, lending money to the Colonies, munitions makers, gunsmiths, etc.

Laying down your mark

I was surprised to find I've never written about Elijah Duncan before. He is my wife's ggg grandfather from her Lawrence family. When he died on December 14, 1840 in DeKalb County Tennessee at age 83 he was one of the oldest living Revolutionary War veterans in the State.

Being a Revolutionary War veteran he received several land grants in North Carolina in payment for his service. As many in his generation, he sold them and moved west. In reading transcript of one of these transactions it talked of his making his mark, by writing the letter A on it's side. This seemed strange since neither of his names started with the letter A.

The note said this was the sign he may have been Quaker because it was a common practice of their faith. "The custom of laying down your mark when selling property was a practice utilized by many Quakers."


I had never heard of this and I'm not sure if my Philadelphia Editor daughter has either. If you Google the term, the only hits you receive are to a song called "To Remember" by Josh Kelley.

I decided to check with some Quaker experts and see what they had to say about it. I've asked if this was in fact the way Quakers signed deeds and why the letter A?

So far I've contacted editors & Ouaker experts at Quakerpedia, The Religious Society of Friends, The Quaker Information Center, Haverford College (the oldest Quaker college in the US) and my son in law who is finishing up a PhD in Early American History. Let's see which one comes up with the answer.

One of the Ten Thousand

I saw a blog post that estimated we have 10,000 4th cousins. I have no idea if their math was correct but I am sure there are a lot of them.

I came across some photos of the house of one of my 4th cousins. Elma T. Howland was born on August 21, 1879 in Williston, Carteret County, North Carolina. We share a common set of ancestors, Joseph Fulford and Ann Martin who were my 6th great grandparents.

Elma's parents were Benjamin Tucker Howland and Josesh Ann Willis. The Howland family had several children who migrated to Florida along with a lot of other North Carolina folks in the early 1900s but their oldest daughter, Elma stayed at home.

She married Kanelium A. Bloodgood of Onslow County North Carolina and they built a nice looking home at 220 Elm Street in Swansboro around 1907. The house has survived more than 100 years and is now listed on the National Register of Historical Places.

Elma's husband died in 1938 but she lived on in the house for another 25 years. She died on October 8, 1962 but her address was still listed as the house on Elm Street.

They spelled his name wrong

Luther Marion Wilson was my grandmother Edith's first cousin, however I doubt she ever met or knew about him. He died when she was young and I suspect the family didn't talk much about him.

He died in 1921 and I had a note about him that someone had given me that said he was killed at Green Swamp which was in Pasco County Florida. I didn't know what that meant but decided to find out. Now that I know the story, I think his parents must have been confused and should have named him after Martin Lucifer, rather than Martin Luther.

Several years ago I found small newspaper article about a Luther Wilson being charged with a crime in Pasco County Florida but didn't know it was the same person. Then this year, using the Smather's Library in Gainesville, Florida newspaper collection, I came across another article that confirmed not only the first one was him but also explained how he was killed in Green Swamp!

The Bradford County telegraph from November 11, 1921 has an article on page two titled "Luther Wilson is killed by Officers." It details the account of how he had escaped from state prison where he was serving a life sentence for various crimes that started with the rape of his sister in law! He had escaped from jail and had been hiding in the swamp, probably with assistance from his family for over a year. He shot and killed a deputy sheriff at one point who had come out in the swamp to find him.

So this is one black sheep that everyone would probably just as soon forget about. If however you want to read the entire article it is online.

There is a delay

One interesting fact that you find looking at old death certificates is that folks got 'em in the ground quick. Today the norm is to have a funeral three or four days after the death. Go back 50 -75 years ago it was always the next day. They didn't expect family to come from out of town for funerals and if they waited any longer it would not be pleasant to be in the room with the dearly departed.

Of course there were exceptions. Abraham Lincoln wasn't buried for over three weeks. Even with state of the art embalming (for the time) his remains literally were falling apart by the time they got him into you know who's tomb.

I found a story of delayed burial of almost 80 years that involved one of my great uncles. John J. Kelley of Taylor County Florida was married in 1852 to Tammy Blanchard, sister of my great great grandmother. He enlisted in the Florida Fifth Infantry unit from Taylor and Madison County on August 29, 1862 and went off to fight the Yankees. Unfortunately he was taken prisoner toward the end of the Civil War at Chester Station, Virginia.

He was shipped north to the Hart Island POW camp in New York City's Harbor. There after being held for only two months he died of disease on June 6, 1865. His remains were buried in the prison cemetery along with 234 other confederate POWs. Unfortunately he wasn't to remain in his place of final rest.

In 1941, a few months before the US entered another war they decided to move the Civil War graves from the cemetery on Hart's Island to Cypress Hills National Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY. So John Kelley was dug up and moved south, I assume on a boat and not the N Line subway.

The Rich Uncle

We all wish we had one, but for most of us it didn't happen. In my wife's family it happened but they didn't know about it until it was too late.

Her great uncle was Guy Glenn from Bonham, Texas. Unfortunately he died in 1986, about five years before we knew anything about him. He was the older brother of her grandfather. The grandfather was AWOL for 50 years so no one had contact with that side of the family.

I met Guy's daughter and niece while doing family research about 10 years ago and heard from them that he had struck oil on his Texas ranch back in the 1940s. Until recently I hadn't found any other sources to confirm the stories.



As it turns out he had six producing oil wells on his 160 acre ranch near Snyder, Texas. Guy had bought the farm in 1939 when his father died and he received $600 from the estate. Guy made a pretty good investment, turning that $600 into millions.



Of note is that Guy made sure my wife's grandmother also received $600 from the estate, the share from his AWOL brother. Today you wouldn't be able to give away an inheritance that belonged to a deadbeat but I guess back in the 1930s in Texas the Judge didn't ask a lot of questions so they gave the money to the wife and children.



Standard Oil struck oil near Snyder, Texas in 1948 and shortly afterwards oil wells popped up everywhere in the area.






Guy's modest farm was in the middle of the Kelly-Snyder Oil field, one of the most prolific in the USA.


I found several newspaper articles mentioning his wells coming in, with details on how many barrels they were producing. That was front page news for the Snyder newspaper.



It wouldn't be a real Texas story without a bogus land claim that Guy had to defend to keep his title to the land. Someone tried to file a title to the land in 1952 claiming they had bought it twenty years earlier, but Guy came out as the legitimate owner.



In 1956 Guy sold the Snyder farm, bought a large cattle ranch outside of Bonham, Texas and became one of the leading citizens of this small town. He died in 1986 and his obituary lists a full lifetime of community service.

Faces in the Crowd

I used to read Sports Illustrated every week. Probably did so for twenty years, until so much sports information became available online. One of the features they had was called "Faces in the Crowd." It listed several people each week who reached an obscure sports achievement that most of us would have never heard of. I discovered a distant cousin on the pages of an old magazine.

Johnny Ray Evans was born in 1954 in Jacksonville, Florida and died in 2006 in Winter Haven, Florida. I never knew him or anyone in his family. My genealogy software says he was my 3rd cousin, one time removed. His family was originally from Taylor County Florida.

I started researching the family after I received an email from one of the members who came across my blog. I found his obituary online using Google newspapers. It mentioned he was a seven time National Judo Champion. That isn't something you see everyday.

I decided to look up other articles about him and one was in Sports Illustrated, dated November 23, 1964.

I can't copy the photo from it but the link and article are below.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1076648/index.htm

"Johnny Ray Evans, 10, of Hollywood, Fla. a 4-foot-7, 87-pound fifth-grader who took up judo two years ago, won nine bouts—eight of them by clean throws—to finish first over 53 boys in his division at the National Junior Judo Tournament in Miami Beach."

You can see his picture on page 125 using the link that says "view this issue."

This Guy will have a marker soon

Guy Fulford was my grandfather's first cousin. He was a fisherman in Cortez, Florida and was born in 1894, the son of Nathan Hooker Fulford and Betty Manson Whitehurst Fulford. Guy served in the Navy during WWI and I noticed when I surveyed Palma Sola Cemetery in Bradenton, Florida ten years ago that he didn't have a marker on his grave.

Guy died in 1942 and his grave has a large cement vault over it but no marker other than a small funeral home temporary marker that has been there for almost 70 years. Unfortunately none of the family members could remember when in 1942 he died so I couldn't order a marker for his grave.

I don't like having to pay for research so I tried to locate a newspaper obituary without any success. I found him listed on a index of the Tampa Tribune for December 4, 1942 but couldn't find the actual paper. I finally broke down and ordered the death certificate from the State. It shows he died on December 3, 1942 as a result of Coronary Thrombosis. The death certificate said he and his wife Mamie Giddins Fulford were divorced, a fact I didn't know. His sister Susie Fulford Guthrie gave the personal information on the record.

So now we will get a marker for him.

Broken markers

I was reminded of an old broken tombstone marker recently when I was looking for a family photo. My wife and I found the grave of her ancestor, Thomas Longacre several years ago in Alabama.

He is buried in the Longacre Cemetery in Jackson County. There are only two Longacres there so I assume he owned the land.

Thomas Longacre was born in Virginia in 1788 but like many in his generation migrated to Indian lands when the government moved them west. He settled in the northeastern corner of Alabama and obtained a homestead grant in Jackson County. On the 1850 census he owned 1200 acres and it also showed he had 9 slaves.

He died in 1863 and was buried next to his wife Judith Ireson Longacre who had died five years before.

Over the last hundred and fifty years, the grave marker has been broken into many pieces. The section with most of the inscription has been placed upright against his stone tomb and you can barely make out a few of the words.

"Tears of her….(not legible)
... was devoted
to the service of the
Lord during which time
he was a member of
the Regular Baptist"

What do you remember

The local newspaper asked me to share one memory of Cortez, Florida in the "old days" for an article they were doing. I'm not really old enough to talk about the old days. I would probably need my sister in Virginia to do that.

Anyway, here it is, just in case it never makes it to print:

I used to spend summers and school holidays in Cortez and loved going fishing with my grandfather, Tink Fulford. We didn't fish on Sundays because almost everyone went to church but Sunday night it was ok to go fishing. My grandmother insisted we go to the Church of Christ both Sunday morning and Sunday night. Grandpa Tink didn't go to church on Sunday night and he wanted to leave as soon as possible but he wasn't going to tell my grandmother we couldn't go to church. I would have to run from the church building to the dock as soon as the service was over. Grandpa knew exactly what time we should be there and he would untie, start up the boat and wait. I could hear the boat engine from a block away. He would push off from the dock as soon as he saw me getting close. I had to run and jump on as the boat was pulling off. I don't think he would have left us if we missed the boat but he sure acted like it.

The Crabpot

This is only partly about genealogy research. Three or four years ago I came across some Harvey family members from Carteret County North Carolina. They saw something I wrote about my Foreman family and wanted to know if their Foreman ancestor was related.

It turned out that their great great grandmother, Cornelia Foreman Harvey was the sister of my great great grandmother Hope Jane Foreman. We exchanged several emails and they had some old photos they sent me which I appreciated.

Then this past December I saw a newspaper article about Neal Harvey of Davis, North Carolina and the Core Sound Christmas Trees he was making out of Crabpots. In Florida we call them Crab Traps, but folks in Eastern North Carolina have their own dialect, so they call them Crabpots. A cousin in Cortez, Florida stores a bunch of them next to my mother's house and she has never had very merry thoughts about them, but Neal Harvey got the idea he could brighten up Christmas with them.

Neal has made and sold Crabpots for years and since the fishing business hasn't been too good in recent years decided to use the material and shape a tree out of it. The result is a perfect Christmas tree that can stand up to just about anything mother nature can throw at it. Crab traps have to be strong, since they stay in the water for months at a time and if they develop a hole the fisherman's catch doesn't make it to market.

We bought a 6 foot Core Sound Christmas tree this year and proudly put it in our front yard. Our kids and neighbors will tell you our annual decorations are pretty lame but this year we started a new trend.

Finding Grandma

I found one of my long lost grandmothers. Actually she is step great great grandmother.

Sarah Winiford Strickland Green was the 2nd wife of my ancestor John Green. He died young, sometime about 1865 but she remained in the Taylor County Florida area up until at least 1900. She was on the census that year but until recently I never knew what happened to her after 1900.

I have her photo as it was in my great grandparents bible. I knew her grandson John Evans had moved to Suwanee County Florida and I found him on the 1910 census. One of his great grandsons contacted me recently and gave me some more information about the family in Suwanee County. I started looking at public records and found a death listing for a Mrs. Green in 1918. No first name is shown.

I decided to request the death certificate from the State of Florida so see if it had any other information that could tell me if it was Sarah. It took the State a couple tries to send me the correct record but finally I received a death certificate showing this Mrs. Green died on October 10, 1918. It also listed her date of birth as being January 2, 1838 in Alabama. That didn't match Sarah Green as she had listed her birth month as November 1838 on the 1900 census. I noticed the death certificate listed her age as 80 years, 1 month, 1 day. If they were off by one year, and she was 79 instead of 80, subtracting it from her death date her day of birth would be November 15, 1838. So I am satisfied this is Sarah. Either way the birth date on the certificate does not match the age.

She was buried in Siloam Methodist Church Cemetery in Columbia County near the Suwanee County border. The cousin went out to the cemetery but couldn't find a marker. At least we know what happened to her. Her husband, John Green is still a mystery but maybe one day he will turn up also.

All's well that ends well

I have to change my MO about using real names for this story. Not sure they would appreciate it, even though for now it looks like it has ended well.

I "met" via email a 2nd cousin a while ago who lives in Florida. She is the granddaughter of my grandmother Fulford's first cousin. After exchanging emails about the family history and other things for two years, she asked if I could help her find her mother.

It turns out she was adopted as a baby by our cousin and didn't know it until she was grown. Her birth mother was an 18 year old , unmarried girl who was working at a hotel in St. Petersburg when she got pregnant. She did the right thing at the time and put the baby up for adoption.

Fast forward 50 years and the daughter wants to find out about her birth family. She had actually paid $2,000 to the adoption agency to get very limited records that had a name and nothing else. She was able to locate a subsequent husband of her mother in St. Petersburg but they had divorced after a couple years and he had no idea what happened to her. She was a free spirit who was only known to be somewhere else.

So with just a name and approximate date of birth I started looking for her, using the same tools I use to do genealogy research. Online marriage & divorce records, death notices, city directories, newspaper articles, family trees posted at ancestry.com etc. I soon found out who the grandparents were but they had both died within the last few years.

I couldn't locate an obituary for either of them but after a while found a online family tree that had them listed. It didn't show any children but I knew the missing mom was a twin with at least one sister because it said this in the family notes. I contacted the person who posted the family tree on ancestry and had no response for almost two months. Then after several short, one line emails with no information that spread out over several more months I received two emails in one day.

The writer, who never gave me more than a first name said she had been in touch with the missing mom and they wanted to contact my cousin. I sent the email on to her, and she followed up and quickly talked by phone to her first cousin, aunt and was told how to contact her birth mother.

So wow, this search for dead relatives can take you to some interesting places.

William Gannon Fulford

When you do family history research sometimes you find more questions than answers.

I was looking at family records in Craven County North Carolina recently and found the death certificate for William Gannon Fulford. If you just record the day of birth and death you would have put these in your records and gone on. I like to look at the original documents because I have often found facts that connected with some other person I was researching.

In this case, I noticed an unusual cause of death. It is listed as being the result of a stab wound in the abdomen and a homicide.

William Gannon Fulford was the son of Denard Roberts Fulford and Sarah Elizabeth Edwards. Denard was born in the North Carolina and probably a relative. William was just shy of his 30th birthday when he died in 1914.

He had never married and I don't really know much about him except for his unusual demise. He was buried in Cedar Grove cemetery in New Bern, North Carolina. I have just started to look for his story but haven't found anything yet. It may take a while but I am sure the record is out there somewhere.

The Power of Mistletoe

I wrote a while back about the Steamboat Mistletoe and family connections to the ship's captain.

This past summer while visiting family in Cortez, Florida we spent some time at the Florida Maritime Museum and since I had my dog on one of the days I was relegated to walking the grounds. As I did I came across a new exhibit they have installed.

The propeller from the Mistletoe!


In 1917 the ship's job of carrying passengers and freight was past. It was sold for scrap to Ed Pillsbury of the Snead's Island Boatworks.



He planned to convert in into a seagoing barge. Pillsbury wasn't able to make the conversion work so apparently out of frustration, he hauled the ship out of the water and burned it.



The only thing salvaged from the ship was the propeller. It has now found it's way to Cortez along with the remains of the Snead's Island Boatworks.

Three Sisters

This is not about three mountain peaks, food groups, islands or a trendy restaurant. Three Sisters seems to be a popular name or destination. I only had two so don't know what it was like. I guess if there are three in a family they might be closer together than if only two.

This is just a short story about three sisters who I found buried together in a very rural cemetery. This past summer my wife and I took a long detour to find a cemetery where my great grandmother was buried. On the way to Sandhill Cemetery in Taylor County Florida we drove past Sealey Cemetery.

I had received directions from a cousin to Sandhill Cemetery but they mistakenly told me how to get to Sealey Cemetery. Thankfully I had my GPS and the coordinates so was able to make my way to the correct place. It was another 4-5 miles down dirt roads surrounded by land that had all the trees removed by local lumber companies.

Sealey Cemetery is 7 1/2 miles from the nearest paved road, on Jody Morgan Road south of Hwy 19 in Taylor County. It would be a long walk if you had car trouble on the way. Since my directions took me to this place I decided to look into who was buried in this small plot. I found four Civil War veteran's graves and several people I'm related to via the Ezell and Strickland family.

I also found the three sisters. In fact their graves are some of the newest ones in the place. Three sisters who were born within a mile or two of this location who ended up buried there sixty years later. I found the three sisters listed on this 1945 Florida State census.

I don't know if their parents are there. There was no marker for them in the list I found online. The parents were divorced in 1950 so maybe they moved away.

The three daughters of Tom J. Lee and Sallie Russell Lee all married, at least once but their husbands were not on the list of burials either. Just the three sisters.

Martha Lee Denmark was born May 21, 1932 and died July 15, 1969. She married Henry Denmark.

Annie Mae Lee Cruce was born April 17, 1930 and died May 10, 1990. She married Penny Parker and later Willie Joe Cruce.

Sallie Lee Ayers was born May 30, 1938 and died November 9, 1988. She married a Grantham and later James Ray Ayers.

Priscilla and Aquila

I don't know about other folks but we had a difficult time naming our children. We had all the name your baby books and got advise from friends and family but they didn't help much. I think we came up with good names, reflecting both our southern heritage and wanting our girls to be independent of encumbrances.

You have to admit, it would take a preacher to name his kids Priscilla and Aquila. But that is what James Hamilton Wentworth did on January 11, 1889. Wentworth was married to Elizabeth Green the sister of my great grandfather when they had twins in Bilowry, now part of the Eglin Air Force base in present day Santa Rosa County Florida.

Wentworth was working as a Baptist preacher and missionary in this remote area after a diverse career as an Lieutenant in the CSA, school teacher, Superintendent of Taylor County Florida Schools, Judge, Census Taker and Lawyer. There isn't much there in Bilowry now other than mosquitoes and sand gnats so you can only imagine what it was like in 1889.

Priscilla and Aquila were first century missionaries who went with the Apostle Paul on his travels and risked their lives for him. James and Elizabeth Wentworth were probably thinking of their remote home and difficult life in 1889 when they decided on the names.

Elizabeth apparently had a hard pregnancy and subsequent delivery. The twins, Aquilla Edgar Wentworth and Priscilla Elizabeth Wentworth lived only two and three days. Elizabeth never fully recovered and died herself in September of that year.

I wouldn't know anything about the twins except for two letters that were found in my great grandfather's bible. He kept the letter James Wentworth wrote on February 7, 1889 telling about the birth and death of the twins and another one on September 28, 1889 telling about Elizabeth's death.

The first letter says the twins were born two months early and he thought they were well but Elizabeth was too sick to nurse or care for them and they did not survive.

I think they were buried with their mother, in the Holley Point Cemetery in Santa Rosa County but there is not a marker for any of them. There are a couple graves there that would fit the time period, with only a concrete cover. One is an adult and the other a child size grave.

My great grandparents named their next son after Aquilla but spelled it with an E. Marian Equilla Green was born on February 22, 1891.