The Family Tree Problem Solver: Tried-And-True Tactics for Tracing Elusive Ancestors (4 page)

Figure 1-3
1850 census, Fannin County, Texas.

Figure 1-4
1860 census, Fannin County, Texas.

We need to more carefully analyze what we know so far:

1.
Lemuel Blanton's wife was Mary Ann Rogers in 1831 in Missouri.

2.
One of the children living in the home in 1850 in Texas was born in Missouri, and she was the eldest, born about 1833, so the Texas and Missouri family was linked.

3.
There is an age gap between the second and third child on the 1850 census. Perhaps there was a second marriage. Perhaps the new wife was a Britton or Stephenson, the other surnames in the 1850 household.

4.
There is little doubt that the Edwin and Joseph Rogers and the Blanton families were connected, probably through Lemuel's marriage to Mary Ann Rogers, but neither were on the 1830 census in Missouri, nor could either be located before the marriage. We need to go to the next steps.

Step 5:
Look for a trail.

When you have analyzed each record concerning or involving the ancestor you are researching, you are likely to see a pattern of behavior, clues to other places or records to search, and a recurrence of names to be tracked. We have a trail from Missouri to Texas, and we have a number of families that are connected, both in Missouri and Texas. We have two new surnames — Stephenson and Britton — to check. I did, but nothing helpful surfaced. I studied the Rogers family. I learned a lot, including the fact that in his later years, Edwin C. Rogers became a Christian mystic. But he never passed on any revelations to me about where he came from.

I had followed the steps, looking at all the records I could find, pursuing a trail of clues and recurrences of names and associates, eliminating some people while keeping others on the back burner. Nothing. It was time to return to Step 1. I had to construct a new hypothesis, and that required examining what I already knew to see if I could locate new people and new records to pursue.

Remember, Step 1 is to determine what you already know.
This means a careful analysis of every known and documented fact about the individual or family. What had I missed the first time? I looked again. There was one association I had not followed. In 1831 Lemuel and Mary Ann were married in Campbell Township by John P. Campbell. Lemuel was on the 1833 Greene County tax list. That means Lemuel and Mary Ann were living in Greene County, while Ledwell Blanton, although in what was Crawford County, was relatively far away (see
Figure 1-5
).

In 1831 there was only a small settlement of pioneers in the part of the state where John Polk Campbell and Lemuel Blanton were living. Most of these settlers were from Tennessee. They were ignored by the 1830 census taker and few records were available. Among the small number of families living there was a man named Joseph Rountree. Like John P. Campbell he was from Maury County, and he kept a diary about his journey from Tennessee to southwest Missouri. It was preserved in the manuscript division at the University of Missouri at Rolla. I sent for a copy.

Figure 1-5
Maps of southwest Missouri, 1831 county boundaries. Greene County was organized in 1833 and was about one hundred miles southwest of Crawford.

Entry from 15 February 1831: “It continued to snow this day and yesterday a little. This day most intolerable cold. We proceeded on traveling six or eight miles. We met Joseph H. Miller and Lemuel Blanton coming to meet us. Great joy.”

Joseph Rountree knew the two men who had welcomed him. Therefore, they must have come from Maury County, Tennessee. Once I had that connection and a specific place to look, I could turn to the more traditional genealogical records for more pieces to the puzzle.

Lemuel Blanton was the son of John D. Blanton, who died in Maury County, Tennessee, leaving a number of children (note that Lemuel's eldest son was John D.). Lemuel had always retained his Tennessee ties, and after his first wife's death, he had returned to Tennessee to marry on 20 July 1839 in adjoining Williamson County, Martha Nicholson. Martha was the sister of the wife of William Blanton, Lemuel's brother. Williamson County was also the home of Lemuel's first wife's family, the Rogerses, and they were among the other families of the area that moved to southwest Missouri. Everything fell into place once the right clue surfaced. The connections were all as they should have been.

When you take the steps outlined in this problem-solving strategy, one of two circumstances arises. You either hit a dead end as I did with Lemuel in Texas, or the trail becomes wider, the clues more prevalent, the light brighter, and the direction clearer. You know you are on the right track.

If a dead end occurs, you return to step one and reexamine what you know. If no clear direction emerges, then basic knowledge and assumptions must be questioned, and perhaps a new hypothesis devised. Either the researcher must reanalyze the records already found for clues that were overlooked — as I did with the marriage location and justice of the peace — and/or obtain more pertinent information, as I was able to do with the Rountree diary.

One more case will illustrate this strategy for solving genealogical problems before we move to specific types of problems in the later chapters. The Phillips family well illustrates a common downfall for so many genealogical researchers, even very experienced ones. Experienced genealogists research the entire family, including the collateral families they are able to identify, as well as the neighbors. They examine all the records they can find, but they still hit a dead end. Their failure results either from neglecting to investigate a faint glimmer of a light that, with just a little more energy, could have become a beacon, or from neglecting to put the records in the context of a community, rather than just in the context of a family.

Descendants of the Phillips family of Boone County, Missouri, had searched for the family's origins for many years with no success. Hiram, John Y., and Warner Phillips were early settlers in the area of Missouri Territory that became Boone County in 1821. Using family records, land records, associations, newspaper clippings, probate files, and published nineteenth- or early twentieth-century local history books (sometimes known as “mug books”), the family had deduced that the three men were brothers and that Jane Huddleston was their sister.

The family had accumulated a great many records and I found no reason to believe that their research was faulty. From their work, the family configuration appeared as follows.

John Y. Phillips was born about 1789, probably in Virginia, as he was apparently the eldest and both his brothers were born there; died of typhoid fever on 24 September 1847 in Boone County, Missouri; married Margaret [— ? —] who preceded him in death. In his will, John Y. Phillips named three sons, John Y., Theodore, and Warner.
¹²
The loose papers in the probate packet named his children as Harriet, Newton, Theodore, Warner, John Y., Ann P., Ellen, and Austin Phillips.
¹³

Hiram Phillips was born about 1792 in Virginia and married 1818 in Bourbon County, Kentucky, to Elizabeth Cave. He served in the War of 1812 and received a bounty land for his service.
¹⁴
He spent most of his long life farming in Boone County. His twelve children were Ellen, James, William, Augustine, Addison, Richard, Sarah, Hiram, Elizabeth, Joseph, Martha, and Isabella.
¹⁵

Warner Phillips was born about 1794 in Virginia; died 24 March 1881 in Boone County; married Catharine Hutchings. The 1880 census gave his parents' birthplaces as Virginia. Needless to say, there were a number of families with the Phillips surname that lived in Virginia in the early 1800s. Warner and Catharine were the parents of eight children: Joseph B., four sons born between 1827 and 1844 who all died in infancy, Franklin W., Ann, and Catharine M.
¹⁶

Jane Phillips Huddleston died in Boone County, Missouri, in 1849. She left a will appointing her brothers Hiram and Warner Phillips as her executors. Legacies went to her children John H. and Cordelia A.
¹⁷

Many genealogists know that naming patterns can be particularly important if there is an unusual name involved or a pattern of repetition in the family. This can often lead to other siblings and parents. Although the brothers used each other's names when naming their children, the only unidentified names that were repeated were Ann and Ellen. No given name was repeated that might have led to a possible father.

Other than the marriage for Hiram and Elizabeth Cave, no other recorded marriages were found for any of the family members in either Virginia, Kentucky, or Missouri. All of the children for each of these couples were born in Missouri, and the three brothers appeared as the first settlers in Columbia Township of Boone County by 1821, the year of statehood.

Other family members had found more information. The annotated cemetery inscriptions of Boone County, Missouri, reported that the “Phillips Family came to Boone County from Bourbon County, Kentucky.”
¹⁸
In addition to Hiram's marriage there, his wife's father, Richard, had given permission for the marriage. Richard Cave was found in the tax and land records of Bourbon County, and followed his daughter to Missouri. Yet nothing was found in Bourbon County for either of the other Phillips brothers, their sister, or any clues to their parentage. An article in the
Missouri Historical Review
stated that, “Warren and J.B. [
sic
] Phillips came from Scott County, Kentucky.”
¹⁹
“Hiram Phillips is also said to have come from Kentucky but exact county unknown.” More study was done in Scott County. No results. These two “genealogical” statements stymied researchers for years.

The Phillips descendants had studied the War of 1812 bounty land application for Hiram Phillips. He served in Johnson's Regiment of Mounted Kentucky Volunteers. Later he was a sergeant in James Coleman's Regiment of Mounted Volunteers. Although the application gave his marriage date and place, there was no further information regarding his place of enlistment or origin.

I checked the probate records for each of the brothers. Everything confirmed they were related and every associate in Boone County led back to Bourbon County. And yet, the brothers were of age before they left Kentucky, and although all of their later associates appeared on the tax rolls of Bourbon County, they did not. No one named Phillips appeared on the 1810 census for Kentucky that had males in his household of the right age to be John, Hiram, and Warner.

The break in this problem came in reanalyzing records the family already had. The crucial question was one mentioned earlier: “Who else was involved in creating, or is mentioned, in the records? Are they likely to be ‘official’ participants or associates of the individual under study?” I had tracked the associates. What about the official — the commanding officer in Hiram's regiment? Where did he come from? I made a search — a bibliographic search.