Further Back Blackshears (Week 2)

Tracing Back the Blackshear Line, part 15

In my last post, we began looking at Jacob Blackshear's time in North Carolina.  We determined that there was ample evidence to place his birth year in exactly 1769.  We didn't really talk about where he was born, so let's get that out of the way - his grandfather, Alexander, was in Craven County, North Carolina as early as 1754.  (The deed I mentioned in my last post in which Jacob's cousin Alexander sold 100 acres adjoining Jacob's eighty-two acres to Jeremiah Parsons actually states that the whole 181 acre tract - I know, those eighty sum odd acres! - was purchased by their grandfather in 1754.)  Jacob's father, Elisha Stout, received a land grant in Craven County in 1769.  That means that Jacob Blackshear was born in Craven County, which, if you remember, was later cut in half to form Jones County from the southern portion.

We also discovered that in 1797 Jacob was considered to be a farmer, but that by 1801 his status was described a that of a planter.

As far as his wife and children go, we pretty much put down what was in the Blacksheariana as a starting point.  We did see, however, that Jacob was not listed on the 1790 census as a head of household, which means that he most likely was not married in 1787 like the Blacksheariana suggests.

Today, we are going to do some looking around and see what else we can find out about Jacob Blackshear's wife and children.  Let's start with that handy-dandy chart I put up last time:

Husband:	Jacob BLACKSHEAR
born married died	1769   in North Carolina
	c. 1790
	btw. 1840 - 1848
Father:  Elisha Stout BLACKSHEAR		Mother:  Susannah [WARD]
Wife:	Judith MOORE
born died	btw. 1760 - 1770  in North Carolina
	btw. 1840 - 1848
Father:		Mother:
Children:
	Mary	m. Wall or Watt
	Nancy	m. Davis, Isaac Griffin
	John     b. 22 Apr 1792, N.C.               d. 6 Aug 1885, GA	m. Mary Blackshear, Mary Vinson (1821), Nancy A. Nesmith (widow)
	Enoch    b. c. 1794, N.C.                d. c. 1870, GA	m. Margaret (Peggy) Wall
	Alice /Ann	m. John Platt
	Lewis      b. 1805 in S.C.                 d. Fla	m. Civil Platt
	Silas        b. c. 1814, GA                 d. 1864, TX	m. Sophama [Garrett?]

I kept the blue coding on certain parts so we could see which facts from our research do not match up with what the Blacksheariana says.

So. Judith Moore. The Blacksheariana names Jacob's wife with certainty.  My guess is that he got that information from the family chart made by Jacob's great-grandson, based on information provided by Jacob's son Enoch.  I have found a lot of death records from the past century in which people (mostly sons - sorry, but it's true!) do not seem to be able to recall just what their mother's maiden name actually was.  I think this was probably less of a problem back then, because communities were smaller and people were probably much more aware of everyone else's comings and goings.

The question, then, is can we find out anything else about her?  The Blacksheariana doesn't trace the wive's families, so looking at what other people are putting on their trees will give us some clues as to where to start researching.  First I checked on FamilySearch, and I guess nobody on that site is researching her because there are no parents on her tree.  I checked the trees on Ancestry.com, and most of them have no parents listed for her either.  Of the ones that do, we have pretty much four choices:

The first shows her parents as John Moore and an unknown woman, and places Judith's birth in Jones County, North Carolina and her death in Houston County.  It had three sources:  A Family Data Collection record for Jacob Blackshear, Ancestry Trees, and an application for membership in The Sons of the American Revolution by Perry Lynnfield Blackshear (the author of the Blacksheariana).  (Strangely enough, none of the dates he listed for Judith Moore on the application match what was in his book which was published the following year!)  This doesn't really give us anything to work with, other than the idea that Judith's father was named John.

The second shows her parents as Thomas Moore (born and died in Craven Co.) and Mary Farrar (born and died in Mecklenburg, VA).  So we see that there is already a problem, because if they lived their lives in two separate states, how did that even work?  This variation of Judith's tree also shows that she was born in Virginia, and that her parents had sixteen children, the last of which was born when the mother was seventy-one years old and three of which were born after the mother died.    The only sources these trees have (if any at all) are Ancestry Trees and a Millenium File (which is just stuff that people doing genealogical research wrote down).  So, yeah, I don't think this version works.

The third shows her parents as (Colonel?) Thomas/John Moore (born and died in Craven County, NC) and Mary Farrar (with the same info as above).  It pretty much matches the second version of Judith's tree, except that it adds an additional child at the end.  This tree actually had five sources for Judith's family:  Ancestry Trees, the same Sons of the American Revolution application, two birth/marriage/death records from two different places in England, a will of John Moore, and a Quaker meeting record.  Unfortunately, it still has the problem of the parents living their lives in two separate states, and is using records from a whole different country (so obviously not the same people) to back up relationships.  As for the will, it is for a John Moore who died in Orange County, NC (which contradicts the death place they put for him) who did have a wife named Mary, but if you read the will it says he died in the year 1800 and left his plantation to his wife (who was already dead according to the tree) and all of his children were still minors, which means they couldn't have been born before 1779, so this can not possibly be the right John Moore.

I would like to let you all know right now that there were, like, a billion John Moores in North Carolina during the 1700's.  I did a general search on Ancestry to see what I could come up with and got results showing land grants in thirty-one different counties (in just the first five pages of results). And there were at least ten wills in ten different counties in the few pages of results I looked at.

The Quaker meeting record actually held some promise, since it had a John Moore with a wife named Mary and a daughter named Judith.  In fact, this record was the jumping-off point for my own research into Judith Moore.

Those three versions of Judith's tree is what Ancestry gives me in the hints when I am on my own tree page for Judith.  After doing about six hours of my own convoluted research into the matter, I remembered that I could just do a public tree search and get more results.  I found one that was quite interesting (based on my own research).

So, the fourth version of Judith's tree, which not too many people have copied, shows her parents as John Moore (born in Perquimans County, NC) and Mary Pearson (born in Delaware, Pennsylvania 15 years later than the other Mary, which makes a lot more sense!)  According to this tree, Judith's mother Mary had nine children with her first husband between the years 1762 and 1783.  She supposedly then had seven children with John Moore between the years 1756 and 1796.  Um, that's not possible.  Not only does that make the marriages overlap, but she would have been still having children when she was fifty-nine years old.  The biggest problem for this tree was that it showed Judith's husband as "Husband Springs", not Jacob Blackshear.  There were no sources attached to the tree, so who knows where all those bits and pieces of information were pulled from.

So, that is what I had to work with.  Luckily, that Quaker meeting record turned out to be a gold mine.  I am going to put up the record for you to look at, but I want to warn you that it is very hard to read.  Not only was the handwriting poor and the ink from the back side bled through, but it has that fantastic (not!) editing that Ancestry likes to do to their documents to get black print on a white page when the microfilm copies of the records are all gray.  I looked for a long time online to see if I could get an unedited version, but had no luck.

Quaker Quarterly Meeting Records

Perquimans Co., North Carolina 

John Moore & Family

1781

The bottom section of this page is the part we want to look at.  It says that John Moore, along with his wife Mary and his children Mary, Sarah, Armelia, Judith, and Gideon were requesting that they be "taken under the care of Friends" etc., which basically means that they were wanting to join the Quakers.  It is dated the 8th month, 8th day of 1781.  (There is some disagreement online as to what year is actually written at the top of this page, but if you keep on going until the years before and after, you can see that it is indeed 1781.

I was intrigued when I found this record, because, hey, it actually says Judith Moore, and it is really hard to come by records for women from way back then!  The problem was, how could I know if this was our Judith Moore?   The Ancestry database says that this record is from Perquimans, North Carolina, which is nowhere near Jones County.  (It is way up at the top of the state on the Pennsylvania border.)  Of course, this is dated 1781, so that would be time for the family to make a move before Jacob and Judith got married, but it's not close enough for me to say, yes, we have the right girl.  Also, I wondered how old this Judith must be if she was asking to become a member of the Society of Friends, but it turns out that there was no age restriction, the parents just had to make the request for their children.

While looking for something that might help me confirm if this was the correct family or not, I came across a tree that had a new and different record for John Moore, showing that there was a Captain John Moore who served in 1781 and was a Loyalist, and I was like, wait a minute, a Quaker wouldn't be a captain in the army.  (That was before I realized just how many John Moores were in the state!)  I was pretty much feeling like it was going to take way too much time to figure this line out, so at first I just sat on it (this was several months ago).  Then, when I got going with the research into the further back Blackshears, I was going through the entire Abstracts of the Records of Jones County and noting every single time the Blackshear name turned up in the records.  And guess what?  There was a deed from one John Moore to the Quakers.  Yep.

Jones Co., North Carolina Deeds Book G pg. 108 John Moore to Quakers 1791

Jones Co., North Carolina Deeds Book G pg. 109 John Moore to Quakers 1791

As you can see, this was a deed of affection in which John Moore gave the Quakers a gift of one acre land upon which to build a meeting house and graveyard.  It says that he was a member of the Quaker group.  And it says that the land he was giving them bordered the land of Elisha Stout Blackshear.  I don't know about you, but I think that this is about as good as it gets.  We have a John Moore joining the Quakers, and he had a daughter named Judith, and then ten years later we see him in Jones County, and he owns land right next door to Jacob Blackshear who married a girl named Judith Moore.  That all sounds like an awful big coincidence if it isn't the same people, don't you think?

So then I started doing some Quaker research.  I discovered that local Quaker groups formed "Monthly Meetings," which then sent representatives to the "Quarterly Meetings," which were kind of like the regional meeting for a whole section of the state.  So, the record above came from the Perquimans Quarterly Meeting, which was for the eastern part of North Carolina, and basically records a summary of what had happened during the year at the various Monthly Meetings, which means that John Moore and his family might not have attended the Perquimans Monthly Meeting at all, because they actually lived somewhere else in eastern North Carolina.

So then I took a closer look at the record.  Go back up and look at the bottom section of the Quaker meeting record again.  It begins the entry with the sentence, "At a monthly meeting held at Core Creek, Carteret County . . ."  I think we ought to look at a map again!

Well, look at that.  Carteret County was right there below Jones and Craven Counties.  And one of those long skinny islands off the coast was called Core Bank and next to it was Core Sound. (I found that on a different map!)  So even though the Quaker minutes were from the Perquimans Quarterly Meeting, it was recounting something that had occurred at the Core Creek Monthly Meeting.

And guess what else?  Remember that undated petition for a ferry and new road that I showed you in the last post?  Well, here is the second page of it:

There we see that a John Moore was part of the jury chosen to lay out the new road.  His name is right there above Jeremiah Parsons (remember him?).  This was in a file for Craven County, but remember, Jones County wasn't carved out of Craven until 1778, so it's possible that this was a petition from before the two were split.

Now, I was wondering how all of this data fit together, what with John Moore attending Quaker meetings in Carteret County in 1781 and then having land in Jones in 1791 and then being on a document from Craven County that was all about laying out a road and establishing a ferry on the south side of the Trent River.

Well, as I continued to research the Quakers, guess what I discovered?  There was no Monthly Meeting of Quakers in Jones County until 1792 - after John Moore gave land for a meeting house (which I know was built, because there was a different deed that described a tract of land as being next to the Quaker meeting house and Elisha Blackshear's line.)  That means that any Quaker who lived in Jones County before 1792 would have had to attend meetings somewhere else.

You know, I don't think I actually convinced myself that I had the right family until I typed all of this up just now!

I decided to go back to that book of abstracts and see if I could find out when exactly John Moore first obtained land in Jones County, just for the heck of it (because you never can be too sure you've drawn the right conclusion if you don't check all available resources!)

This is what I found for the name Moore/Moor:

1.  Apr. 1789  There was a piece of land already owned by John & William Moore.
2.  June 1789  John Moore purchased 360 acres (from Benjamin Stanton)
3.  Dec  1789  John & William Moore of Craven County sold land
4.          1790  Land entry to John Moore (joining Elisha Blackshear's line)
5.  Nov 1791  John Moore sold land to Quakers
6.          1793  Land Grant to John Moor (at Blackshear's corner near Quaker meeting house)
7.      c. 1805  There was a deed that mentioned "John More, deceased."

I would say that #2 is definitely our guy (I discovered during my Quaker research that Benjamin Stanton was a Quaker).  Also, I would say that #4 and #6 are both him, because we know that that is where his land was.  I don't know if the John & William from Craven County are our John and a brother or not.  It's possible, although, if John purchased land from Benjamin Stanton five months prior, you wouldn't think the other deed would refer to him as being from Craven County.  Well, unless he hadn't actually moved onto his new land yet.

So where does that leave us?  Well, we know that John Moore was definitely in Jones County by 1789/90, and that by 1792 he was attending Quaker meetings there.

Once I figured all of this out, I was super excited because all I had to do was find the records from the Trent Monthly Meeting (that's what the Jones County group became called) and I would have all kinds of information at my fingertips!!!!

Well.  That excitement was short lived, because it turns out that all of the records from the Trent Monthly Meetings have been lost.  And do you know why?  Well, as it happens, the entire Trent group of Quakers decided to pick up and move to Ohio around the year 1800.  And not just that group, but a whole bunch of other groups from eastern North Carolina as well.  It all had something to do with new land being opened up for settlement in the Northwest Territory and a Quaker preacher who had gone to check it out and who came back and basically said it was the promised land, and also there was something to do with the fact that Quakers were against slavery, but it was against the law in North Carolina to set a slave free so any Quakers with slaves would just transfer ownership to their Society of Friends and the Ohio territory was going to become a free state soon so it was a great way to free their slaves once and for all.  That was the best summary I can give, because I actually read all of this at 11:00 p.m. last night and even though I bookmarked all of the books I got the information from, I should have actually written notes because now it seems like way too much trouble to go back through all those bookmarks and find the information again!

Anyway, long story short, there are no records for the Trent group of Quakers.  But, before they up and left for Ohio, they had to petition the Quarterly Meeting to give them all letters of transfer to a new monthly meeting and then the Trent one had to be officially dissolved.  And, apparently it took some time for everyone to sell all of their land and get ready for the more than 600 mile journey, because they all met up in Pennsylvania (where the Cumberland Trail began) over the course of several months.  I went looking through the Pennsylvania meeting records and this is what I found:

Society of Friends

Redstone Monthly Meeting 

Fayette, Pennsylvania

4 July 1800

The top of this page notes that Christopher Kinsey and his family "produced a certificate" from the Trent Monthly Meeting in North Carolina.  And then Henry Carter, and Mary Moore, and Ruth Bogue all produced a certificate from the same place.  The next one was from a woman and her three children from Core Sound.  See?  And that was all from one meeting.  I went through several months and there were a ton of people from those places trickling in.  (By the way, this is a digital image, not microfilm, and I didn't edit it so that is what the record book actually looks like today.) 

Something bothered me about this, though, and that is the fact that Mary Moore was all by herself.  What had happened to her children?  What had happened to her husband?  Well, we know that Judith was already married about ten years prior, so it is likely that her siblings were married as well.  But what about John Moore?  How could I know if this was really Judith's mother?  This bothered me and bothered me while I was doing my research last night.  And then . . . 

Today I found John Moore's will:

Will of John Moore Jones County, NC 1792 page 1

Will of John Moore Jones County, NC 1792 page 2

John Moore wrote his will on January 26, 1792.  That was just over two months after he gifted land to the Quakers.  Maybe he knew he he was in poor health and wanted to be buried with other Quakers, and what better way to do that than to give them a piece of your land for a meeting house and graveyard?

The provisions of the will were:

His lands in Hyde County should be sold and the money used to pay off his debts with the remainder used to support his wife, Mary.
To his grandson, John Jolly - 5 shillings
To his daughters, Mary, Sarah, Armelia, & Judith - 5 pounds in hard money, each
To his son, Gideon - his lands on the south side of the Trent River, when he turned 21
                               - one feather bed and furniture
                               - all of his mechanics tools
                               - all of his wearing apparel
To his niece, Dorcas Spring - one feather bed and furniture (upon his wife's death)
To his wife - the rest of his estate and personal property (to go to their son Gideon upon her death)
His wife, Mary, and his friend Malachi Jolly were to be his executors.

The will was proved in court during the May Term of 1792, which means that John Moore died sometime between January 26 and May of that year.

So, when I read this will, a few thoughts came into my mind.  First, that we know this is the same family, because all of the children's names match those from the Quaker record.  Second, that the Mary Moore I found in Pennsylvania was more than likely Judith's mother, since Judith's father was definitely dead by then.  Third, John Moore must have been pretty well-off, since he was leaving feather beds left and right.  (I wonder if I can find an inventory of his estate . . .)  Fourth, at least one of his daughters was married, and her married name was Jolly.  And fifth, John Moore had a sister who married someone named Spring, which could come in handy if I decide to try to trace his tree further back.

Oh! And remember that land grant I mentioned above from 1793?  Well, we shouldn't let the fact that he was already dead by then bother us, because, as we saw in Georgia, the land grant wasn't finalized until the survey was completed and the fee was paid, and sometimes that didn't happen until after a person's death.

So this is what we know so far for Judith's family:

Husband:	John MOORE
born married died
	Spring 1792, Jones County, North Carolina
Father:		Mother:
Wife:	Mary
born died
	(Ohio?)
Father:		Mother:
Children:
	Mary
	Sarah
	Armelia
	Judith
	Gideon

Not too much.

So, going way back to the beginning of all this, who exactly was Judith's mother?  We ruled out Mary Farrar for being far too old and in the wrong place.  But we do know that her name was Mary.  So let's see what we can find by doing a search for John Moore with a wife named Mary. . . .

I actually came up with a Quaker record from 1769 for a John Moore who married a Mary Person in a place called Welses/Wellses.  (Or maybe it was actually Well's.  You would not believe how impossible it is to find out where that was - or even what exactly it was actually called.  It was so impossible that I didn't find it online anywhere, not even on any of the old maps.)  I did find another Quaker record in which they were announcing their desire to marry, and it said Wellses was in Perquimans County.  So here is another map:

So, there is Jones County at the bottom.  Then, moving upward past Craven, there is a county on the coast shown in pink, which is Hyde County, which is where John Moore's will said he owned land. (Just in case we need to revisit that place later, there it is!)  Then, up at the top of the map, we see Perquimans County (yellow), right next to Chowan County.  Why did I show Chowan County?  Because, while trying to figure out if this John Moore and Mary Person couple was our John and Mary, I decided to look up the other Quakers mentioned on the same pages.  They mostly came up with records in Perquimans or Chowan counties during the 1780's.

Well, those counties aren't too far away from Carteret, Craven, and Jones, so maybe they moved some time after they were married.

So.  Do we have enough evidence to say that this is the right marriage record?  Well, they were married in 1769.  That would work as far as Judith's birth goes, but I think Judith was the youngest daughter, because every time the children are listed, they are listed in the same order, which makes me think they are listed by age.  Judith had three older sisters, so we are looking at four to nine years after the marriage before Judith was born.  That means her birth year would need to be between 1773 and 1778.  She probably got married around the end of 1790 or the beginning of 1791, and most girls of the time got married between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, which would give us a birth date range of 1770 to 1773.  I think that might be pushing it.  Of course, Mary could have been John's second wife, which would make the births of the older daughters irrelevant.  But do you know what is an even bigger reason to think that this is, in fact, NOT the right couple?

This just occurred to me.  The very first Quaker record we looked at today showed that they were requesting to be received into membership.  The terminology is important, because it means that they were new, prospective members, not transferring their membership by letter from a different Quaker group.  If the John and Mary from the 1769 marriage record were already members (which they were), they would not be coming in as new members in 1781.

So, barring some other smoking gun document, I am going to conclude that Mary Person is not the right Mary.

Well.  That was disappointing.  I could probably start searching through the Carteret County records on FamilySearch, but that will take a very long time, so instead I am going to shift gears and look at the children a bit.  Looking for them gives me four more names to search to see if I can figure out the family's movements.  It will also let me know who they married, which is great for filling into a family data sheet.  (I might as well make one for John Moore since I've put all this time into the research!)  There is one more reason to do this:

You see, while reading through the records to try and figure out where Welses was, I noticed that couples who wanted to marry always announced their marriages to their Quaker group ahead of time and then they were assigned other members to help them - I don't know, prepare or something!   And then, I also noticed there were an awful lot of Quakers being kicked out of the Society because they had married a non-Quaker.

You know, at first I was disappointed that I couldn't look for marriage records in the Trent Monthly Meeting, what with the records being lost and all, but then I realized that the Trent meeting wasn't formed until after Jacob and Judith were married.  That means I should find them in the Core Creek records.  (Yay!)  But theeeen I realized that Jacob probably wasn't a Quaker, so their marriage wouldn't have been announced in the meeting record.  But, if Judith married him, a non-Quaker, she would have been disowned by the group and I might be able to find a record of that!  (Yay again!)  Unfortunately, it appears that the monthly meeting minutes for Carteret County have also been lost (or are just not available online).  Which means I will have to sift through the Perquimans Quarterly Meeting Minutes to try to find a report of it.

Since that is a daunting prospect, I decided to just do an Ancestry search for Judith's sisters first.  For her sister Armelia, I found a record of her being a witness at someone else's wedding, one of her announcing her intention to marry, one with the Society giving her the okay to marry, and finally, one with a record of her marriage.  (We'll throw all of that into the chart when we are finished.)  I found pretty much the same stuff for Sarah and Mary.  But take a look at this:

This is from April of 1784.  It says that Mary was the daughter of John and Mary Moore of Attamuskeet in Hyde County, but that she was marrying a man who lived in Carteret County.  We know that John Moore still had land in Hyde County when he died, and we also know that they joined the Core Creek group of Quakers three years before this, in 1781.  Hmmmm.  Maybe they lived in Carteret County first, and then moved to Hyde County, but kept attending the Core Creek Monthly Meeting for some reason, either because they just wanted to stick with the people they were close with, or because there was no organized meeting house in Hyde County, and if that were the case, maybe they never even lived in Carteret, but they had to travel over there for meetings.

Now, here is a record for Armelia (top of page) and Sarah (bottom of page):

This was from two years later, and was reporting from the Core Creek Monthly Meeting.  It shows that Armelia (I know this says Amelia.  I've found other records where she is referred to as Milley.  Her father's will shows her as Armelia, as do some Quaker records, so that is what I am going to use.) was the daughter of parents from Hyde County, and that she was marrying someone whose parents were from Carteret County.  So, pretty much the same situation as her sister two years earlier.  You'll notice that this is talking about a "certificate of removal," which doesn't mean she was being removed from the Society, just that she was going to be moving to a new monthly meeting location.

The portion for Sarah says "At a Monthly Meeting for Core Sound held at Clubfoot Creek on Nuese." If you look back at the map, the Nuese River is actually in Craven County.  I found a website that said that Core Creek and Clubfoot Creek were both local meeting houses under the Core Sound Monthly Meeting, which was in Carteret County.  Once again, Sarah married a man who came from Carteret County, even though she was from Hyde.

While I was looking through these records, I came across a page with this on it:

This is from the Core Creek meeting and is showing all of the marriage records that were not recorded properly.  Somehow the entry for Malachi & Michal Jolley caught my eye.  I remembered that both John Moore's will as well as his deed to the Quakers named a Malachi Jolley.  And I also remembered that his will said that his grandson was named John Jolly.  Holy Moly.  I think I just found another sister of Judith Moore!  I did a search for her and found a record of her marriage from 1782, and although it doesn't name her parents, it does say that she and Malachi were both from Hyde County, although they were married at the Core Creek meeting.  And both John and Mary signed as witnesses at the wedding.  Since the marriage was two years before her sister Mary, I'm guessing that she was the oldest daughter (and wasn't named in her father's will because she had already died).  Only one thing bothered me - if she didn't get married until 1782, why was she not named in the records when the rest of her family joined the Quakers in 1781?

Well, after doing an Ancestry search for her name, I came up with a page from the Encyclopedia of American Quaker Genealogy by William Wade Hinshaw:

The very first entry under the last name Moore is for Michael (who we would think was a boy, but is shown two entries down as marrying Malachi Jolly, which means she was a girl!).  It shows that she joined the Quakers on July 12, 1780, just about a year before the rest of her family, which explains why she wasn't named in that 1781 record.

Now, look at the very last entry under MOORE:

There is Judith, from the Trent group, daughter of John and Mary, being disowned for marriage out of unity.  (You can find what all of the abbreviations mean on the last page of this booklet, here.)  And do you see when that happened?  She was disowned in April of 1791.  (Didn't I say in my last post that it looked like Jacob wanted to get married back in the fall of 1790?!)

Good ol' Mr. Hinshaw obviously consulted the meeting minutes when he wrote his encyclopedia, so I figured I should be able to find this record too.  Since the Trent meeting minutes are reportedly lost, I went through the Perquimans Quarterly Meeting minutes, page by page, for the year 1791 and found no mention of it.  I actually managed to find the Core Sound Monthly Meeting minutes (and that was a task - Ancestry has so many records mislabeled and organized under vaguely named tabs in places that don't make a whole lot of sense!), and it wasn't mentioned there either.  So then, I did another Ancestry search for Judith Moore, and this time got a hit in the Women's Meeting minutes:

Judith Moore

Quaker Women's Monthly Meeting Minutes

Core Sound, North Carolina

1791 (4th & 5th Month)

Well.  Isn't that lovely?

Both the top and bottom portions are about Judith.  Unfortunately we can't really read the dates, but Ancestry assures us this is from 1791.  Here is the best transcription I could come up with:

"At our Monthly Meeting,

There was a complaint brought to this Meeting against from the preparatory Meeting on Trent against Judith Moore for Joining in Marriage with a man not of this Society. This Meeting appoints Viley Dew and Mary Shapley to prepare a paper of Denial against her and bring to next Monthly Meeting for app[?]tion in this [?] and answered in writing in order to hand to the ensuing Quarterly Meeting.  Mary Harris and Sarah Mace are appointed Representatives."

And at the bottom of the page:

"At a Monthly Meeting of Core Sound,

. . . The Friends that were appointed to prepare a paper of Denial against Judith Moore have produced one to this meeting which was read [app...?] and is as follows:  Judith Moore Daughter of John & Mary . . . of Trent   . . . in Jones County . . .  among us . . . called Quakers and for some years . . . contrary to the advice of her "

Wouldn't you know that out of all the document I've shared in this post, the record I most wanted to see would be unreadable?  It seems to me that the first entry is recording that someone reported that Judith had married a non-Quaker.  Two women were appointed to draw up papers against her, and two other women, who just so happen to be Judith's older sisters, were appointed as "representatives."  Judith was supposed to answer the charges against her in writing, and if she sounded appropriately repentant, they might let her remain a member, or allow her to rejoin later if her husband decided to become a Quaker.  (I've read a few of these for other infractions and they are pretty interesting!)

The second part, which occurred one month later, appears to be saying that the paper of dismissal was brought forth and read out loud in the meeting, and then it looks like it gives a record of the exact charges against her, which is the really unreadable part.

So.  I thought that was going to be it.  It was a bittersweet victory to have found it, and to have it confirm my guess about when Judith and Jacob Blackshear were married, only to have the specific details of the matter blurred out in blobs of ink.  But then I looked at the following page:

Judith Moore

Quaker Women's Monthly Meeting Minutes

Core Sound, North Carolina

1791 (5th Month)

This is a continuation of the previous page.  The first page ends "contrary to the advice of her" and this one continues:

"Parents Relations and Friends [hath?] suffered herself to be joined in Marriage to a Man not of our Society in a manner not agreeing with Christian Disciplian [sic] and practice used amongst us.  We therefore Declare to the World that we Disown all such disorderly Conduct and her the said Judith Moor (now Judith Blackshear) being until Repentant work a Reformation in her which we sincerely Desire.  Signed in and on Behalf of our Monthly Meeting of Coresound the 7th [9th] Day of the 3rd Month 1791

Sarah Mace, Elder"

Now cue the chorus of angels - if anyone wasn't convinced that we were following the right trail before, I think this is definitive proof that we have found the correct family!

(Wow.  Gotta love those Quaker records.)

So apparently, the Moore family moved in next door to Jacob Blackshear in 1789, and he and Judith fell madly in love, and by 1790 they decided they wanted to get married, but maybe Judith could not convince Jacob to become a Quaker, so, even though her friends and family advised her not to go through with it, some time before April of 1791 she married him anyway.  I couldn't tell if the document they created disowning her from the Society of Friends was dated the 7th or 9th of March, due to the splotchy ink.  (I'm kind of leaning toward the 7th, because there is a little jig at the top of the number.)  I'm wondering if that is the actual date of their marriage, because the first mention of her marriage being reported in the meeting records was in April, and yet this is backdated, so it sounds like they dated it from the actual date of her infraction.

So, where does this leave us now?  It leaves us with marriage dates and spouses names for the daughters, and a whole lot of other questions.  Questions like, when did each of the children die?  Did the family ever actually live in Craven or Carteret Counties?  Who was Judith's mother and when did she and John Moore get married?  Was John Moore a farmer, since he owned land, or did he have a different occupation since he left all of his "mechanics tools" to his son in his will?  And, what exactly did a person use mechanics tools for in the eighteenth century, anyway?

Back to the records, then.  Okay.  I have just spent the past three days looking through Quaker records and reading through horribly preserved documents from Hyde County to see if there was anything else I could find out about Judith's family (you know, because I'll need it for the family data sheet).  I came up with a whole lot of dead ends, but I also came up with a ton of new information and a much, much better picture of what was going on back then!  Here's a rundown of what I discovered:

I found out from Hinshaw's Quaker encyclopedia that the Attamuskeet (Mattamuskeet) group in Hyde County was under the jurisdiction of the Core Sound MM in Carteret County.  So, apparently the members of all of the local meeting houses ended up attending meetings together once a month, which explains how they all happen to be in the records together and their children are marrying each other even though they live in different counties.  On that note, I'd like to point out that, if you look back up at the map, it is pretty obvious that the Moore family traveled to the Carteret/Craven county monthly meetings and the weddings they always seemed to be attending at least partly by boat, don't you think?  (Just a random thought to help you create a mental picture of their lives back then!)

I discovered that John Moore first purchased land in Hyde County in 1766, which was probably shortly after he got married.  He purchased more land in 1773.  After his death, his wife Mary, as executrix, and Malachi Jolley, as executor, sold one acre of land in Hyde on which the Quaker meeting house stood to the Mattamuskeet group of Quakers (1798).  Then, they sold 50 acres on the east end of their Hyde plantation to James Hall, who was already living on it (hmmm, he probably took over the farm/plantation when the Moores moved to Jones County).  This was in 1799, right before Mary headed off to Ohio.  Mary must have given the rest of John's land to Gideon, even though I didn't see a deed ( I might have missed it!), because he sold the other 50 acres of the original one hundred acre plantation in 1803.  (Oh, and their land bordered Lake Mattamuskeet on the north side, so you can look back up there at the map and get a general idea of where they lived.)

I discovered that there were some other Moores in Hyde County.  The first, Roger, sold land to a (pirate?!?) from Ocracoke Island in 1754.  Then, there was a William, who bought land in 1747.  William sticks around and can be found on some tax lists, and on a jury list with somebody Jolley, and then in a will dated 1781, which says that he had three daughters and a son named John, to whom he left his plantation and all of his cooper's tools.  (Interestingly, I looked up eighteenth century mechanic tools and it turns out that is what woodworking/carpentry tools were called back then.  I'm pretty sure that cooper's tools - which are tools for making barrels in case anyone didn't know - would fall into that category.)  Well, our John Moore had a plantation in Hyde County, and he had a collection of woodworking tools.  So this might have been John's father, but so far I don't have enough evidence to say for sure.

I also noticed that there was another Moore, Henry, in the Hyde County records who seemed to be of the same generation as John.  I would think this was a brother, but he wasn't named in William's will, although he might have already gotten his inheritance before.  He had a son named John, so it is quite tricky when looking at the records - you have to check the dates of deeds, and anything after 1792 would have to be this possible nephew.

Annnnnd, if you look at the North Carolina Census for 1786, you find that there was a John Moore Sr. and a John Moore Jr.  I noticed that Judith's brother-in-law, Benjamin Stanton, is shown in the Quaker records as being a Jr. but his marriage record names his father as Henry.  There was an older Benjamin Stanton in their Quaker group, so I think they just used Senior and Junior to mean the older and younger back then.  Where am I going with this?  Well, I say this because the John Sr. and Jr. in Hyde County might not be father and son.  At first I thought the John Moore Sr. was our guy, but he had one too many females in his house, unless his mother lived with him, and one too many untaxable males if William was his father.  (Oooh, unless they had another son after Gideon who died before John wrote his will, and the census reflects the family's status at the beginning of the year.  Hmmmm.  The extra son scenario fits with what is on the 1790 census, too.)  The John Moore Jr. had exactly the right number of people, but he had two black people in his household, which would be weird for a Quaker, although he had only been a Quaker for about five years at that point and it was against the law to free slaves in North Carolina, remember?  So, if our John Moore was the Junior (we know he lived there so he had to be one of them), that would mean that there was a John of the same generation as William.  Buuut, there was a Malachi Jolly listed right underneath John Moore Sr., and a Malachi Jolley was already married to John's daughter Michal by 1786, and it showed the right number of people in his household, so maybe John Moore Sr. is actually our guy after all.

This is a perfect example of how genealogical (and historical!) research can be so tricky - After looking at deeds and wills from Craven County, and doing online searches and reading histories of Craven County and North Carolina in general, I determined that the John Moore in the ferry petition above is the same John Moore who had lands in Jones County along with William Moore, but this is not our John Moore.  It looks like it is probably a distant cousin of our John Moore, though, because the Craven County Moores are descended from The Honorable Roger Moore Esq, a colonial politician who owned a massive plantation and who died in 1751.  So there we have a John, a William, and a Roger, each appearing to be in the same generation as our John and the William and Roger in Hyde County. (So, don't download that record and attach it to Judith's father!)  The Craven Moores also had a James and Thomas, as did the Hyde County Moores.  And come to think of it, every time I find a John Moore in North Carolina, there is a William there as well.  I love the idea of honoring relatives by giving family names, but it sure does make research hard!

And this leads me to a little side trip I'll call The Many Pitfalls of Research.  While trying to find out in exactly what year Judith's brother Gideon was married, I came across this little post from back in 2005:

This little bio is so full of confusion it had my head spinning:

• First, just because all of the Quaker records for the John Moore family are part of the Perquiman's Quarterly  Meeting records, as we discussed before, this doesn't mean they lived there, so that also doesn't mean Gideon was born there.  
• Likewise, we already ruled out the John Moore & Mary Pearson marriage for Judith's parents, because our 1781 record shows that they were new converts to the Quakers, and did not in fact transfer their membership to the Core Sound MM.  
• There were several John Moores scattered across North Carolina during that same time frame, and for some reason at least half of them married a Mary, so just because we can find one Quaker record with the same names doesn't mean it is the right John and Mary. (There was a John Moore who attended the Perquimans Monthly Meeting, but ours attended the Core Sound Monthly Meeting, whose representatives were sent to the Perquimans Quarterly Meeting, thus the name of Perquimans on those records.)  
• Somehow, the person who originally compiled this information knew that Gideon was named as a minor in his father's will, yet they have dated the will as 1785/6, even though the will very clearly says in the very first sentence that it is dated January of 1792.  
• Next, I have read through a lot of Quaker records, and I have never come across the Trent MM as being called Trent River MM.  
• As for Gideon appearing as a soldier in Jones County and Rutherford County in 1812 (one of which is way on the western end of the state), I couldn't find a copy of either record anywhere.  I found four other Gideon Moores in the War of 1812, two in Virginia, one in New Hampshire, and one in Haywood County, North Carolina.  
• Oh, and this bio says that the War of 1812 records were the first record after his father's will, but that's not true because he is on the 1800 census for Jones County, shown as a single male head of household with no other family (you know, because his mother went off to Ohio via Pennsylvania). 
• Now for the 1810 and 1820 censuses - there was a Gideon Moore in Moore County, and that Gideon Moore was the right age, but this says that he was living in Moore County during the War of 1812 even though that county is nowhere near the two places mentioned where he supposedly enlisted.  
• Not only that, but I have copies of three deeds signed by Gideon Moore in 1804, 1806, and 1809, all in Hyde County, and I know those are the right Gideon because they are all related to the deeds signed by his mother and Malachi Jolly a few years before.  
• And guess what?  There is a Gideon Moore on the 1810 census in Hyde County, so yeah, probably the same guy (our guy), which means it would be weird for him to have gone back to Jones County during the war (forget the fact that I never found any proof of that - in fact, I have two different deeds showing he sold his Jones County land in 1802 and 1803), and also it means we can throw that 1820 census from Moore County out the window since it is obviously the same Gideon as in the 1810 census there.  
• I found two Gideon Moores on the 1830 census, one in Northampton County and one in Randolph County (even though this bio doesn't mention the 1830 census), but one of those was too old, and the other was too young.  
• The last evidence this cites is the 1840 census for Randolph County, which is the right age, but that is probably the same person from the 1830 census in Randolph, so one of those has the age misreported.  As for him dying in Randolph County before 1850, there is no explanation of what proof they have, so I'm guessing it's because he wasn't on the 1850 census for that county.
• Funny how this bio makes no mention of Gideon's wife, whose identity can be easily figured out by looking at the deeds and wills of Hyde County (It only took me, like, half an hour to find and read everything I needed.)

This is why I put so much time and effort into exhaustive searches and then close reading of all the documents I find - because I am loathe to put down anything on my family data sheets (that somebody else might copy) unless I have looked and looked and looked into the records and have either proof or very strong circumstantial evidence that logically says the information is correct.  (Like the time this morning when I found a Revolutionary War record for Malachi Jolly saying that John Moore served in his stead, and I was like, woo hoo!  that's something new!  But then I cross referenced it with John Moore, looking for a matching document, and found one saying that John Moore served for Malachi Jolly, but that he died in 1778!  So not our John, but also not the other one from Hyde County who was listed on the census in 1784, or whichever one was in William Moore's will from 1781 either!  Maybe the Malachi Jolly in the war record was the father of John's son-in-law and friend Malachi Jolly and the John in the record was an uncle of our John . . .)

Well.  This post has really gotten out of hand, hasn't it?  Now you can see why I have been researching the Blackshears for six months and haven't even finished two ancestors yet!

I thought I was going to talk about Jacob's wife and children in this post - I actually wasn't really expecting to find anything about Judith's family -  so let's wrap this up with what I've found for the John Moore family:

Husband:	John MOORE
born married died	c. 1740
	Spring 1792, Jones County, North Carolina
Father:  (possibly William MOORE)		Mother: (possibly Mary)
Wife:	Mary
born died
	(Ohio?)
Father:		Mother:
Children:	(probably all born in Hyde County, NC)
	Michal       b. c. 1764 (Michael) d. btw 1786-92, NC	m. Malachi JOLLEY, 13 Mar 1782
	Mary     b. c.  1766               d. after 1815, OH	m. Benjamin STANTON, 11 Mar 1784 (m. David BERRY, 1812)
	Sarah    b. c. 1767               d. after 1832, IN	m. James MACE, 5 Mar 1786 m. Jonas SMALL, 1811
	A(r)melia   b.  c. 1768 (Milley)   d. (bef. 1814)	m. Zemeriah HARRIS, 5 Apr 1786
	Judith   b.  c. 1770               d. between 1840-                         1848, GA	m. Jacob BLACKSHEAR, (7 Mar) 1791
	Gideon  b. c. 1772               d. after 1810	m. Sarah (Sally) ENSLEY, c. 1804/05
	(possible additional son) b. btw 1782-85 d. bef 1792 NC

I really had to just guess on the birth years based on the marriage dates for the children - I went with the average 18 to 21 age range for marriage at the time.  I also didn't find exact death date or place information for most of them, so I went with the last time and location that I found them in the records.

I am assuming that Michal passed away before her father died since she was not mentioned in his will.

For Mary, the trees I get with the Ancestry hint have the right first husband and children, but they show her marrying Benjamin Stanton again almost ten years later with her maiden name again. (This was actually a Mary Moore from the Craven Co. Moores, marrying a different Benjamin Stanton, maybe the senior mentioned in the Quaker records.)  Those trees also show nothing about her parents.   I found a Quaker record showing that she and her husband and children went to Pennsylvania in 1800 and then on to Ohio in 1801, where she had two more children before her husband died and she remarried.

The information that I have for Sarah does not match what I find on the Ancestry trees at all - they all seem to have a set of parents from England with different siblings, but I'm pretty confident that what I have put together is correct.

The trees I have found for Armelia either show just herself and Zemeriah Harris as her husband, with no parents listed, or they show her as the daughter of John Moore and Mary Pearson and married to Nehemiah Harris, with all of the children that the Quaker records show for Nehemiah and a wife named Mary, who started having children back in 1777, so that's enough evidence that that was probably a brother of Zemeriah who was married to some other woman (not to mention the records name a Zemeriah Harris and a Nehemiah Harris as two different people).  I couldn't find any record of her after her husband's death in 1793, but she was not listed as a witness at her son's marriage in 1814, so she might have passed away before then.  (Oh, and her husband's will calls her Amelia, so I don't know what her name really was!)

As for Gideon, I never did pin down any hard proof of what happened to him after 1810.

If I were to spend about another twenty hours just reading through the records page by page I might be able to find some of the missing information, but since those are all just siblings of the ancestor I am actually looking at, I'm not going to spend any more time on them.  If anyone would like copies of any of the John Moore & family records, send me an email.  (I'll put some of them up through a link on the Blackshear page, but probably not the ones that don't mention John or Judith).  Likewise, if anyone wants to collaborate on further research into the Moores or Blackshears, let me know!

Oh, and one more thing - while proofreading this post, it dawned on me that I had seen something saying that the Mattamuskeet MM included land north of the Pamplico River, but that part of land is in Beufort County on the map above.  It turns out that the county lines were redrawn in 1792 (this is a later map, remember?!), which is relevant because I came across some deeds with descriptions of Moore land being north of that river, and I threw them out as probably being irrelevant because that was a different county.  Oi!  That's research for you!

                                                                                                                                            - Therese