A Little Bit of This, and a Little Bit of That:

William Calvin Cheatham, part 4

Everything we know so far about W. C. Cheatham has come from the family history book, the census records, and a couple of old photographs.  This is what I had when I started putting all of his information into my family tree on Ancestry.com.  But I still had some nagging questions.  Where in the world was he in 1870 and what was he doing? What year did he leave Texas and go to New Mexico?  When did he leave there and head over to Duncan?  When did they call it quits there and move into the Phoenix area?

I was also wondering about his wives - what was the deal with that annoying wrong initial in the Texas marriage index? - when exactly did his first wife die? - when exactly did he marry his second wife?

I started looking for new primary source documents to see if they could answer any of these questions.  The first one I came up with was his death certificate.

(I found this on the Arizona Genealogy Birth and Death Certificates website.  They have quite a few online, but it's really hit or miss whether you will find who you are looking for.)

Death certificates are fantastic for telling us when and where a person died (and of course, why they died).  They can be a great way to pin down who a person's parents were, but where those parents were born or how their name was spelled, not so much.  They can be a great way to find out where someone was born, but not always, and they can be a great way to find out when someone was born, but also, not always.  Take this one for example.  It tells us:

William Calvin Cheatham died on May 5, 1926 in Phoenix, Maricopa County, Arizona.    He was born on January 19, 1852. (So now we know the day of the month! The year matches the family history, but it does not match the 1900 census, which says 1853.)

He was born in Alto, Texas. (The family history says he was born in Angelina County, but Alto is in Cherokee County.  To try to figure out the truth of things, I looked at the records I have for his father.  The U. S. Census show that the family lived in Angelina County in 1850 - 2 or three years before W. C. was born - and the Texas County Tax Rolls index shows that W. C.'s father owned land in Angelina County from 1849 through 1852.  He owned land in Cherokee County in 1855 and 1859, then Angelina County again in 1860, and in both counties in 1862.  So they could very well have been living in Alto during 1852 and 1853 -since we now don't know for sure in which year he was born.)

His father was E. C. Cheatham (good thing, because that's whose tax records I was looking at!), and his mother's maiden name was Springfield.  (These both match the family history.)  

W. C. was a farmer.  (Which makes sense since the 1920 census showed him farming six years prior to this.)

He died of entiritis as a result of chronic appendicitis.

He was buried at Greenwood Memory Lawn Cemetery.

So after looking at this, I was really scratching my head about the birth date thing.  The first thing I did was look to see who the informant was for the death certificate, because I've found through my research and my own personal experience, that sometimes the informant takes their best guess.  Well, it was A. D. (his oldest son Armon D.) and E. L. (Is this supposed to be Elmer with the wrong middle initial or someone else?  Does anybody know?)  You would think that W. C.'s sons would know this information, right?  I mean, it's not like they are the daughter-in-law or something (I was the informant for both of my in-laws, and I didn't know the answers to every question I was asked.)  So I would think that the date and place of birth should be correct on this.

But wait!  Have a look at this:

Why does the death certificate say 1852 and the grave marker say 1853?  Wouldn't you think the same person would have been filling out all the paperwork at the time?  (You know, if anyone has answers to any of my questions, please leave a comment below!)

So which date should we believe?  This is where I really wish I had a copy of the birth, marriage, and death pages from that old family Bible mentioned in the family history.  Because I would think that people would mostly write those things in there right after they happened, so they should be accurate.

Well, I am inclined to accept what the death certificate says, but I'm going to try doing the math based on the date the censuses were taken and the age reported for him.  I'll be back in like ten minutes to tell you if that helped or not. . . . Okay.  I'm back, and this is what we have:

All of the censuses were taken after he had had his birthday for the year.
    1860 - 8 yrs old - puts him born in 1852
    1880 - 27 years old - puts him born in 1853
    1900 - 47 years old - census specifically asks year of birth - 1853
    1910 - 58 years old - puts him born in 1852
    1920 - 67 years old - puts him born in 1853

death certificate
    1926 - 74 years old - puts him born in 1852, as reported

I'm starting to think that W. C. might not have known how old he really was.  Do we trust what his mother (presumably) reported when he was only eight years old?  We don't know whether he himself or his wives were reporting the information on the other ones, but I don't think it really matters because the same wife would have had to have given different answers.  My husband says who cares, it doesn't really matter, but apparently he doesn't understand that you have to put something on the data sheet, which everyone else then takes as gospel.  I might just have to put an OR in there (unless someone wants to throw that page from Delilah Springfield's old family Bible at me to help clear things up!)

Let's move on, shall we?  I tried to go online to see if there was an obituary for him.  I didn't find one, but I did end up at the Arizona State Archives website.  I found some of the probate documents from when W. C. died.  Here is a sampling of the 49 pages:

(I combined all of the images into a pdf document for you (you're welcome!) and you can download that by clicking here:  William Calvin Cheatham Probate Records.)

These are part of the final settlement papers filed at the closing of probate.  For those of you who might not know, when a person dies "intestate," meaning that they have no will, and if they own a certain amount of property, their "estate" has to go through the process of probate, in which property value is evaluated and debts paid off before the estate is distributed to any heirs.  Probate documents, like wills, are a fantastic way to sort out family relationships and get clues to the socio-economic standing of an ancestor.  It can also help you pin down when other family members did or did not die, as I will show you when I finally get to the Blackshear branch of the family.

Lucky for us, we already had access to enough sources that we didn't need to rely on the probate records to answer those questions for this ancestor, but the records do confirm a lot of what we already "know":

W. C. died on May 5, 1926 in Maricopa County, Arizona.

His wife was Mary, living in Laveen, which means that W. C. also lived in Laveen, even though he died in a hospital in Phoenix.

He had five children: A. D., a son; Elmer V., a son; Shelton, a son; Lila, a daughter; and Leonard M., a son.  (Incidentally, it also implies that this is the birth order, since Leonard is listed after Lila instead of with the other boys, and it tells us that Armon D. liked to go by his initials.)

W. C. still owned property in Duncan, Arizona in 1926, even though he hadn't lived there in approximately ten years.

The property he owned in Maricopa County had a much higher value than the property in Duncan.  (Just a fun fact - $12,500 in 1926 is roughly equivalent to $172,000 today.)

I don't think we learned anything about W. C. that we already didn't know, except how much his land was worth.  But that's okay, because it's always fun to look through these old documents anyway.

After I downloaded all those pages, I found a database on Ancestry with school census records.

It doesn't show it on this particular page, but according to the Ancestry database, this was filled out on March 13, 1920.  Now, when I first found this I hadn't looked through the census records in a long time, so when I saw that W. C. Cheatham and M. M. Cheatham had a seven year old son in school, I was like, wait a mintute!  Did they adopt someone?  (Because, you know, W. C. was 67 and Mary was 59, so it was highly unlikely he was really their kid.)  So I looked back at the 1920 census and saw that Calvin Cheatham was their grandson, and that he and (his father?) Shelton lived with W. C. at this time.

Then I found the database with voter registration records.

1910 Voter Registration, Greenlee County, Arizona

Here we see W. C. ten names down.  This document tells us:

In September of 1910, W. C. was living in Duncan, Greenlee County, Arizona.  (We already knew this because that is where we found him on the 1910 census.)

He was born in Texas.  (Nothing new there either.  It is the kind of information, though, that helps you know you are looking at the right person.  The fact that S. C. Cheatham, presumably his son Shelton Conroy, is on the same list also helps confirm his identity. Crazy bit of info here - While looking for the missing W. C. in newspapers from the 1870's, I found one living in Red River County, which is over there by Angelina.  I thought I had the right guy until I happened across an article saying he was killed in a hunting accident before 1880, which is when our W. C. turns up again!  Just saying - you can never be too careful!)

He reported that he was 57 years old at the time.  (See what I did there?  In the 1910 census, taken one month prior, he reported that he was 58.)

Lets's see what the next one shows:

1908 Voter Registration - Graham County, Arizona

Yeah, I know, these are out of order.  Sometimes you find them that way.  This one doesn't really tell us anything new, except that W. C. was still going with the 1853 birth date.

1914 Voter Registration - Maricopa County, Arizona

This one is especially cool because it has the actual signature of W. C.  It tells us:

On May 18, 1914, W. C. was living in Maricopa County.  (I am so excited, because this helps narrow down the answer to one of my previous questions - when did W. C. leave Duncan?  If you remember, our oral histories placed it around 1917, but now we know it was earlier than May of 1914. Woohoo!)

He was a farmer.  (Not a carpenter this time around!)

He was born in Texas.

He was 5' 11" tall, and weighed 135 pounds.  (So I guess we could call him lanky!)

I just love those documents that tell you what a person looked like!

1916 Voter Registration - Maricopa County, Arizona

The only new information we get from this one is that:

In 1916 W. C. was ranching (as opposed to farming).

He was a registered Democrat. (No surprise there - it just so happens that every place he had ever lived in before this had been primarily populated by Democrats.)

1918 Voter Registration - Maricopa County, Arizona

This one also helps answer a previous question.

On May 15, 1918, W. C. was living in Scottsdale.  (This means he did not move to Laveen until at least the second half of 1918.)

He was a farmer (as was his son Shelton, seen five names down on the list).

Now W. C. only weighed 130 pounds.  (Wasn't his wife feeding him?!)

He had brown eyes, and light colored hair.  (Funny, because looking at the two photos we have, I never would have said "light colored hair.")

1920 Voter Registration - Maricopa County, Arizona

It looks like these voter registrations were good for two years, huh?

On June 12, 1920, W. C. was living in Laveen, but we already knew this from the 1920 census and probate records. 

He listed his occupation as "General Store," not farmer or rancher this time.  (This matches the family history which says that he began buying farm land in about 1922.)

He did not get any shorter, but he did manage to put on about five pounds.

1922 Voter Registration - Maricopa County, Arizona

Here we see again that W. C. was living in Laveen.   He was a rancher once again, but now he only weighed 120 pounds.  (It doesn't seem that he was in very good health at this point.)

1924 Voter Registration - Maricopa County, Arizona

This document doesn't really show any changes from 1922, except that W. C. gained a bit of weight again.  He is still in Laveen, still a democrat, and still a rancher.

I don't have any more voter registrations for the Cheathams in Laveen until 1932, so this is the last one that W. C. appears in. 

I originally found these because the Arizona State Archives website directed me back to Ancestry.  So once I had gone through every database specific to Arizona without coming up with anything else, I went back to the archives to see if there was anything else to find.  I discovered that they had digital copies of historic newspapers, so I thought maybe I could find him there and see if I could clear up exactly when he arrived in Scottsdale.  In my next post, we'll see what those newspapers have to say about W. C. and what he was up to.

                                                                                                                                            - Therese