Lennon on Temple in the Revolution

Genealogists talk a lot about historical context, but Rachal Mills Lennon does something about it. Her 19-page article on John Temple, a Virginian, in the March 2015 NGS Quarterly uses it as a major pillar of her research and analysis and correlation of the scanty evidence available on Temple's Revolutionary War career and pension. (Also, don't miss footnote 67.)

Having read this article, I hope that something similar will help with my Pennsylvania patriot problem.


Rachal Mills Lennon, "Context and Comrades Illuminate a Silent Southerner: John Temple (1758-1838), Revolutionary War Pensioner," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 103 (March 2015): 49-67.

Methodology Monday with the genealogy of mislabeled records

Somehow, somewhere in the depths of the 19th Century U.S. Department of War, a unit of Revolutionary War soldiers got moved from Virginia to Connecticut. Probably it happened when the Compiled Military Service Record cards for George Markham's Revolutionary War company were created from a single 1781 original muster roll. It took a massive systematic effort by Craig Roberts Scott, in the current (September) National Genealogical Society Quarterly, to prove that they should be moved back.

The muster roll itself had "Virginia" written on its side, and no original source places them in New England. Scott first found that Markham himself was closely tied to Chesterfield County, Virginia, both before and after 1781. Then he correlated dozens of the individual officers and soldiers in the unit to same-name men on record in that county. One at a time.

A groundbreaking (or rather, ground-restoring) project of this kind doesn't have to be fancy, but it does have to be thorough and systematic. This one also reminds us to pay close attention when a derivative record makes a claim that cannot be confirmed in the original. That's like a sign saying, "DIG HERE."


Craig Roberts Scott, "Captain George Markham's Military Company: Virginia not Connecticut," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 102 (September 2014): 201-30.


Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday with the genealogy of mislabeled records," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 December 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodology Friday with Isaac Young

Isaac Young (1799-1872) died in California. Where did Shirley Langdon Wilcox, CG, FNGS, find the clue that led to identifying his father back in Virginia? By reading the 1898 California obituary of a woman who died more than 25 years after him; she had been married to his son Leander's partner in a sawmill. It also helped that Wilcox knew about private laws.

Wilcox's article appears in the current (September) issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. I won't spoil your pleasure in following her logic step by step, but doing so should be enough all by itself to quash the notion that genealogy means finding out "all about" your ancestor.

To find our ancestor's ancestor, we often have to study his or her friends, neighbors, and associates -- and sometimes associates of his associates! -- as if they were relatives . . . because some of them probably were. This goes double or triple for ancestors, like Isaac, whose origins lie in the "Dark Age" of US genealogy.



Harold Henderson, "Methodology Friday with Isaac Young," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 14 November 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodology Monday with William Gray and an earthquake (NGSQ)

What's worse than a burned county? Would you believe an earthquake county? In the September 2013 National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Melinda Daffin Henningfield expertly traces a common-name ancestor, William Gray, who was briefly a judge in New Madrid County, Missouri Territory, just after the gigantic earthquakes of 1811-1812, during which the Mississippi River briefly ran backwards.

Those who have common-name brick walls, missing records, and tantalizing potential records scattered across several states can pick up ideas from Henningfield's account, even if their problem family has another name. They will also appreciate the variety of records she brings to the table.

Readers of Thomas W. Jones's Mastering Genealogical Proof will find here an example of one of the less common ways to structure a proof argument: the "building blocks" approach (p. 89). The author moves from one cluster of evidence to the next, but the clusters are organized more by relevance to the case than by chronology or other logic. Gray was in middle age at New Madrid; gradually his later Kentucky and earlier Virginia residences come to light, as do the family Bible. Census evidence, church records, handwriting samples, and onomastics (naming patterns) come late in the story. No piece of evidence names William's father, but the combined weight of the evidence from seven counties and four states is as hard to resist as -- an earthquake.





Melinda Daffin Henningfield, "A Family for William Gray of New Madrid County, Territory of Missouri," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 101 (September 2013): 207-28.

Photo credit: Richard Miller Devens, Our First Century (Springfield MA: C. A. Nichols, 1881), 220; digital image, Google Books (http://books.google.com/books?id=XJU_AAAAYAAJ : viewed 21 April 2014). Also,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1811%E2%80%9312_New_Madrid_earthquakes

Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday with William Gray and an earthquake (NGSQ)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 21 April 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodology Monday and the man with two last names (NGSQ)

People who change names without warning shake the ground that genealogists walk on. In US research, especially prior to 1850, it can take serious digging to figure out whether the two names represent two people or one.

In the March 2014 National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Mary Foote W. Lund deals concisely and precisely with such a problem. Using mostly indirect evidence, she shows that Micajah Bennett  fathered four distinctively named Bennett children born between 1800 and 1810. The same four children were directly identified by a seemingly reliable neighbor and relative as children of Micajah Wheeler. The author can't explain why Micajah used both surnames, but she does marshal additional evidence to confirm that there was only one of him.

Two lessons stand out:

(1) Research the whole family; you're probably going to have to anyway. Records from a grandson and from Micajah's father-in-law -- including one created after Micajah's death -- provided key information.

(2) NGSQ-worthy problems do not all require 15 or 20 pages to solve. Small is beautiful.




Mary Foote W. Lund, "Parents of Stephen Preston Bennett of Franklin County, Virginia," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 102 (March 2014): 5-10.


Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday and the man with two last names," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 14 April 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Finding Fathers: NGSQ-style Genealogy Olympics

If you've been dithering about whether to join the National Genealogical Society, this might be a good time to jump in and do so. The current (June) issue of its Quarterly (NGSQ for short) just astonished me to death! Each of its four main articles could have been the lead article in any other issue.

And the 19-page lead article, "Finding the Father of Henry Pratt of Southeastern Kentucky," by Warren C. Pratt, deserves its position. Henry was born to Elizabeth Pratt in 1809; family traditions name his father as a Huff or as a Virginian named DeWitt. Elizabeth had seven children, and one of them stated in court that she had never been married to anyone.

Few genealogical problems challenge a researcher more than identifying an unmarried father more than 200 years ago in a frontier area not known for meticulously kept records. The solution involved both DNA testing and hard-core traditional documentary research on Elizabeth and her relatives and neighbors. And it did not involve at last finding a written acknowledgment of paternity at the end of the rainbow. The evidence is indirect (circumstantial, if you will) but it is conclusive.

IMO it's well worth joining and reading the article several times to tease out its beautiful logical structure. I'll leave that pleasure to you, and just mention three points that made me gasp:

(1) The author used a road record to help establish neighbors. (Yes, we've all heard of them, but when was the last time you used one?)

(2) "A study of Bedford County Witts identified twenty possibilities for Henry Pratt's father."

(3) One piece of clinching evidence (that's a non-technical term, folks) was a mistaken date.

As time permits I hope to post on the other three articles, each at least as amazing in its own way. But you don't have to wait. Check 'em out.




Warren C. Pratt, "Finding the Father of Henry Pratt of Southeastern Kentucky," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 100 (June 2012):85-103.


Harold Henderson, "Finding Fathers: NGSQ-style Genealogy Olympics," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 8 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Common Law in Colonial America

I picked up a copy of William E. Nelson's slim volume, The Common Law in Colonial America, volume 1, The Cheseapeake and New England, 1607-1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), at an online Oxford University Press sale.

It's of interest to those trying to track the role of common law in American laws. I also found it an interesting quick overview of the New England and Chesapeake colonial societies, how different they were, and how they both used the English common law in shaping their different legal traditions. Virginia and New England remain interestingly different places even after centuries of change and homogenization.

Here's a taste from the introduction:

As it functioned after 1625 in Virginia, the rule of law mattered not because the law had a particular content, but because its content was known, fixed, and not subject to arbitrary change [allowing lenders to count on being able to collect debts]. In contrast, the content of the law mattered enormously in colonial New England, where . . . a key issue was the discretion of magistrates. The magistrates wanted to rule by the law of God, but most of the people in the towns found God's law too ambiguous. {9}

Bookends Friday: The Genealogist and "Empire of Liberty"

I really should just pony up for a subscription to The Genealogist, possibly the most obscure of the top-echelon genealogy magazines. The other day I came across a free library duplicate of the Spring 2003 issue containing an excellent and lengthy article by Cameron Allen, "Lucinda Depp and Her Descendants: A Freed Black Family of Virginia and Ohio," a companion to an earlier article tracing the white Depp family from Powhatan County, Virginia, to central Ohio.

The black Depps were freed under an 1801 deed of emancipation (effective on the death of the grantor and wife), and John Depp's 1829 will, probated in 1831. Allen writes:

The most startling fact in the settlement of Depp's estate was the extreme expedition with which it was accomplished on the heels of the death of his widow, Elizabeth. Her will, made on 7 January 1835, was proved on 2 February 1835 in Powhatan County. In just two weeks from the probate of her will, all the land left to the freed slave family was sold and all the slaves not freed by the will of John Depp were sold on 16 and 17 February 1835. That has to be a record! ... Quite obviously the four projected grantees under the will had decided [ahead of time] ... that they would not take title, but, rather, sell their interest through the executor of the will and take the cash to start a new life elsewhere.

About the time I read this I had just finished Gordon S. Wood's magisterial (and to me very informative) Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. One of his major themes is how the high-minded cosmopolitan visions of the Founders generation morphed into the bumptious, militantly provincial, and rather raw democratic enthusiasm of the next generation. (Just compare the characters of George Washington and Andrew Jackson.)

A tragic part of that story is that in the 1790s there were some good reasons to think that slavery was on the way out, in part because it grossly contradicted the ideals of liberty that had animated the American Revolution. Virginia slaveholders were less willing to break up families; Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and other southerners deplored the institution's injustice; new evangelical Baptist and Methodist denominations stood against slavery; the College of William and Mary conferred an honorary degree on the British abolitionist Granville Sharp.

It was a false dawn. A combination of technological changes, fear that the black revolution in Haiti might spread, and a few actual slave conspiracies turned things ugly. The evangelicals backed off; in 1806 a new Virginia law required freed slaves to leave the state; and the ideology of racism was reborn to justify the repression.

In this context it comes as no surprise that the white Depps' estate was probated in record time and that the black Depps had already planned to leave their home for free soil. Virginia's loss was Ohio's gain. History can illuminate genealogy.

Methodology Monday with a Tom Jones puzzle

What can you make of these five pieces of evidence from Tom Jones's "Uncovering Ancestors by Deduction," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 94 (December 2006):287-304 (free PDF download for NGS members)?

1781: Ignatius Tureman's will names daughter Lucy and wife Eleanor.

1788: Obadiah Overton marries Eleanor Crow.

1796: Obadiah Overton puts up $150 bond for Lucy Tureman's marriage to John Kinzer.

February 1804: Elizabeth Crow, a minor and orphan of James Crow, requests that Obadiah Overton be her guardian. John Kinzer provides the bond for this guardianship.

August 1804: Guardian Obadiah Overton consents to Elizabeth Crow's marriage.

How are all these people related? Combining this evidence with knowledge of Virginia law at the time, Jones proposes a series of hypotheses and tests them using a deed that by itself makes little sense.

This puzzle is only the overture to the bulk of the article (and Jones's lecture "Inferential Genealogy"), in which the names of Eleanor Crow's parents are deduced.

If you can see how these puzzle pieces might fit together, without having read the article or heard the lecture, you may have the makings of a top-notch genealogist.

Michigan Genealogist covers everything from Virginia to Ontario

Michigan Genealogist (PDF) isn't a publication of the Michigan Genealogical Society, because there isn't one (the only statewide genealogy organization is a council of local groups). It's the quarterly newsletter of the state's Department of History, Arts, and Libraries, and it's an on-line publication.

The fourth issue of 2007 -- mostly written by librarians and archivists with reference to their employer's holdings -- covers an amazing amount of ground. The following is a selection:

"Map Guide to German Parish Registers," by Kendel Darragh

"Researching Your Ontario Ancestors"

"Using Online Indexes to Michigan Land Records," by Gloriane Peck

"Research with Probate Records," by Kris Rzepczynski

"The First Three Years of the Michigan First Vital Records Act" (i.e., 1867-1870), by Charles Hagler

"Virginia Genealogy Sources for Michiganders" (this is not a joke!), by Edwina Morgan

"The Birth and Death of Lansing's Black Neighborhoods," by Robert Garrett

And where else are you going to learn that the Library of Michigan holds a microfilm index to the 1855 state census of -- Illinois?