Why was the first public orphanage built in 1790 in Charleston, South Carolina?

In the Winter 2015 issue of the Utah Genealogical Association's quarterly Crossroads, I review John F. Murray's book, The Charleston Orphan House: Children's Lives in the First Public Orphanage in America. "No nuance, no child, no foster mother is left behind in this revealing and riveting book."

Methodology Monday with the Goggins Family

Morna Lahnice Hollister skillfully weaves documentary and DNA evidence together to produce a 200-year male-line family tree for Luchion Goggins (1900-1984), in the lead article in the September 2014 National Genealogical Society Quarterly. Those struggling with African-American research, South Carolina research, or other difficult problems can learn and take heart from the tools she used to solve this one.

Key to the documentary side of the research was correlating different records to confirm accuracy or detect error. Family oral history named Luchion's father. By taking that hint to the census the author found Luchion in his widowed mother's household. Moving back, Hollister used a table to correlate four censuses and show the perplexing 1870 enumeration of the Goggins household as a dubious outlier.

Further back, documentary evidence showed that Luchion's great-grandfather and grandfather were owned by the Herndon family and that Jesse Goggins was a long-time associate and overseer for the Herndons. Y-DNA evidence established a significant probability that Jesse Goggins or one of his male relatives was Luchion's great-great grandfather.

Without DNA evidence such a connection would have been speculative. Without the documentary evidence we wouldn't even be able to speculate, let alone find the right people today to test.



Morna Lahnice Hollister, "Goggins and Goggans of South Carolina: DNA Helps Document the Basis of an Emancipated Family's Surname," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 102 (September 2014): 165-76.


Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday with the Goggins family," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted  3 November 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

FGS Day Four (Saturday September 1)

The South Carolina backcountry could be the US headquarters of brick walls, so it behooves dedicated researchers to pay attention when Elizabeth Shown Mills devotes an entire lecture to the region, as she did Saturday, the final morning of FGS 2012 in Birmingham. It doesn't matter whether you have, or ever expect to have, research targets there. To paraphrase an old song about a big city, "If you can solve it there, you can solve it anywhere." My only problem with the talk was that not everyone at the conference was there to hear it.

Squeezed in around the lecture I enjoyed a pleasant breakfast with fellow APG board members Joan Peake and Kimberly Powell, picked up a 75%-off book at the Genealogical.com booth, and got to the Birmingham airport before midday, leaving plenty of time to chat with the selection of early-departing genealogists in Concourse C. (Speaking of vendor booths, earlier in the conference I was pleased to meet up with a new and very promising hybrid that could be the answer to the riddle, "What do you get when you cross an antique dealer with a genealogist?" -- to be blogged about in the near future.)

By leaving midday Saturday, I missed another very interesting-looking talk about exceedingly obscure federal pension records by Kenneth W. Heger, on NARA Record Group 48 (Records of the Department of the Interior) including pension commissioners' reports on appeals and correspondence.

Thanks to all the volunteer workers who made this conference possible. I'm looking forward to next year's edition in the Midwestern research mecca of Fort Wayne, Indiana!


Harold Henderson, "FGS Day Four (Saturday September 1)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 2 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

A different take on 19th-century law

On H-Net, Timothy S. Huebner reviews Laura F. Edwards's new book The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South,
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). The book is based on micro-research in six counties in North and South Carolina. This passage from the review caught my attention, and it wouldn't surprise me if something similar were true in other regions, especially near the frontier:

Courts developed around magistrates in order to deal with more serious
offenses, but Edwards convincingly shows that in the final analysis
the people wielded considerable power within this system.  Possessing
a deep sense of their responsibility to the community, as well as a
basic understanding of local legal processes, men and women--whether
black or white, rich or poor--routinely brought complaints against
others for breaching the peace.  Such complaints empowered individuals
at the same time that they preserved existing hierarchy.  "Local
officials considered complaints on a case-by-case basis, righting
specific wrongs done to the metaphorical public body without extending
additional rights to any category of dependents," Edwards explains (p.
110).  Thus, local officials responding to complaints could "undercut
the domestic authority of one husband or one master" without making
any generalized rule that affected husbands or masters (p. 110).

I haven't met up with the book itself yet, but I hope to soon.

Methodology Monday with Jonathan Turner's widow

This month's feature for the Transitional Genealogists article study group is Rachal Mills Lennon's 2004 National Genealogical Society Quarterly article, "The Wives of Jonathan Turner: Identification of Women in Pre-Twentieth-Century South Carolina." Don't turn the page because you don't have SC ancestors. The message is for all researchers everywhere: when the going gets tough, the tough research families, not individuals.

Lennon describes "a task many researchers fail to undertake: investigating the widow to find out if she can supply additional information about her husband. ... if a propertyless widow 'disappears' from the census or if evidence suggests she was not the mother of the child on whom a researcher is working, the genealogist may be tempted to drop that widow from the research plan."

As they say in the horror movies, "Don't do it!" In Lennon's case study, she found: "In 1894, fourteen years after her last census appearance, the seventy-seven-year-old Preshey applied for a widow's pension, identifying her late husband, Jonathan, as a veteran of the 'Florida War,'" and identifying Turner's preceding wife and the mother of three of his children. There's more -- join the National Genealogical Society and read it all in PDF format on line: NGSQ 92:245-255.

Methodology Monday with the Otts

This month the Transitional Genealogists are reading and discussing T. Mark James's article, "Abraham Ott of Orangeburg, South Carolina: Direct vs. Indirect Evidence," published in the June 2005 issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, a free download for NGS members. The article has many interesting aspects, of which two at least will stick with me:

* the author resides in New Zealand, but he didn't let that keep him from researching a 200-year-old South Carolina burned-county puzzle.

* the irritant that produced the pearl, in this case, was a list of intestates (people who died without wills) that included a name that shouldn't have been there -- a name that suggested there might after all have been two Abraham Otts alive in the same time and place. The moral (for me): don't duck or casually minimize those odd bits of data. In fact, seek them out. They may be trying to tell you something, and usually it's: Do More Research.