Further Back Blackshears (Week 3)

Tracing Back the Blackshear Line, part 16

When I started my last post, I thought we were going to talk about the family of Jacob Blackshear - his wife, Judith, and his children.  But I found so much about Judith and her family, and it took me so long to find it all, that the post morphed into an investigation into the John Moore family instead, and I never got past Jacob and Judith's marriage!  Today we were supposed to go back to Georgia and see if we had missed anything in the early years there, but we are going to have to back up a bit and finish off their time in North Carolina first.

So, last time we made some significant discoveries.  We verified the identity of Judith, identified who her family members were, and learned that they were Quakers who came from Hyde County, North Carolina.  We also found documentation that showed that Jacob and Judith were married in March of 1791.  Jacob would have been about 21 years old, and Judith would have been, well, we don't really know; we should guess between the ages of 18 and 21 as well, but let's talk about that for a minute . . .

In my last post, I had her birth year as c. 1770, because I was trying to sandwich her between the births of her siblings.  1770 puts her at 21 years old, though.  I wanted to change that to 1770 - 1773, which gives a range down to 18 years old, but I had Gideon's birth date as 1772, and Judith had been born before him.  I just discovered, though, (like thirty seconds ago!) that her brother Gideon actually had to have been born in 1771.  This is how I discovered this - I was flipping through the notes in my research notebook and noticed that the Abstracts from the Records of Jones County showed a land grant file for Benjamin Stanton dated December 1792, and it says that he was getting 100 acres of land that adjoined the land of Gideon Moore and Elisha Stout Blackshear.  When John Moore wrote his will in January of 1792, Gideon was still a minor, but he had to have turned 21 some time between then and December because he was the owner of the land by that point.  That means that Judith had to have been born in 1770 at the latest.  I don't really like that date, because I feel like it would be more likely that she was younger rather than older when she got married, unless of course she needed to wait until Jacob was ready, and so turned down any marriage proposals that came her way after 1789 (which was when she moved to Jones County and met her future husband).  That sounds plausible, doesn't it?

(And you know, I really hate it when I don't have access to original records and have to rely on published abstracts, but if I didn't have the Abstracts of the Records of Jones County... I never would have known to look at Benjamin Stanton's land grant to solve the mystery of Gideon Moore's - and thus his sister Judith's - birth year!)

So, this is what our nifty chart looks like now:

Husband:	Jacob BLACKSHEAR
born married died	1769   in Craven Co., NC
	1791
	btw. 1840 - 1848  in Stewart Co., GA
Father:  Elisha Stout BLACKSHEAR		Mother:  Susannah [WARD]
Wife:	Judith MOORE
born died	c. 1770  in Hyde Co., NC
	btw. 1840 - 1848  in Stewart Co., GA
Father:  John MOORE		Mother:  Mary

Jacob and Judith started their life together with (as I mentioned a few weeks ago) 132 acres of his own land, plus the 100 acres he shared with his cousin, and a house.  Not too shabby, huh?  Over the next nine years, Jacob became a planter, and he and Judith expanded their family.  Both of which make me say, let's take a look at the 1800 census:

1800 U. S. Federal Census

Jones County, North Carolina

Jacob Blackshear

This was nine years after Jacob and Judith were married, and it shows that they had two sons under the age of ten, one male between 26 and 45 (that would be Jacob, obviously), two daughters under the age of ten, two daughters between the ages of ten and fifteen, and one female between 26 and 45 (Judith).

Wait.  Four daughters?  Two of whom were already at least ten years old by that time?  How is that possible, when Jacob and Judith had only been married for nine years?

Let's take a look again at the bottom portion of Jacob's family chart and see how this matches up with what the Blacksheariana told us.  

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]

There are four girls listed, but two were supposedly born after the first two boys, and there is some evidence that Alice was born after they moved to Georgia.

And now I see why the Blacksheariana was estimating that Jacob and Judith were married around 1787 - he was trying to squeeze two girls in ahead of their son John.  But, I think we have solid evidence that they were not actually married until 1791, which would make it awfully difficult to have had three children already by April of 1792.  Technically, it could have been possible if they had triplets, and although I saw some Quaker records where people had twins, I don't know if medical care was good enough back then for a woman and all three triplets to survive.  So, that leaves us with two options:  either the two oldest girls were not their own children, or the birth date given for John is incorrect.  The Blacksheariana got his birth date from his family Bible (shown on pg. 245), so we can be pretty confident that it is correct.  I suppose one of the older girls could have been his twin, and the other born between him and Enoch, but that still doesn't solve the problem that they were recorded as being already ten years old in 1800, and Jacob and Judith hadn't been married for ten years yet.  How does that even work?

Well.  I have an idea.

How about this theory:  The two oldest girls were actually the daughters of Judith's sister, Amelia.  Amelia got married in 1786.  Her husband died in 1793.  In his will, he names his children as Elijah, Mary, Ann, and Joseph.  The last time we see any record of Amelia in the Quaker minutes is 1796.  What if she passed away some time between that year and the 1800 census, and Judith took in the two girls?  (And maybe someone on their father's side took in the boys.)  The Blacksheariana does have some confusion over the Alice and Ann bit, but, as I will discuss soon, I think that those were actually two different people.  The fact that the book has some confusion over Jacob and Judith's children tells me that the information may not have come from a written resource (like a family Bible), but instead from oral history (like maybe the interview with Enoch that was recorded by his grandson).  If this were the case, perhaps Enoch wasn't aware that his older sisters were not his real sisters.  And maybe, for some reason, the birth order was recorded down wrong, or not even recorded at all (maybe Enoch just said, I had four sisters named . . .) and Perry Blackshear assigned the order when he wrote his book.  The names are right, the ages are right, and even though the birth order is not, the Blacksheariana gives no birth dates for any of the girls, so in my opinion their birth order isn't set in stone.  So, I think that such a scenario is possible, and in fact, I think it is more probable than the idea that Jacob and Judith somehow had three children in their first year of marriage, or that some of their children were born out of wedlock, since Judith would have been disowned by the Quakers for that - I've seen records of that exact thing!

Since we're looking at the 1800 census right now, let's shift gears and talk about something other than the children for a minute.

When I research our ancestors, finding names and dates is nice, but I'm always wondering what life was actually like for them.  We can somewhat imagine life for Jacob and Judith and their children, because we've all had at least some exposure to life in Revolutionary Era America at school.  For example, it's no surprise that their everyday clothes would have looked like this:

Or that Judith would have worked at a loom like this:

Hezekiah Alexander House

Or that the family might have lived in a house that looked like this:

Hezekiah Alexander House

Or that their children may have slept in a bed like this:

Hezekiah Alexander House

But can we discover any specifics about their life?

We can see from the 1800 census that Jacob didn't own any slaves.  Because all of the 1810 census records for Georgia have been lost, and because Twiggs County, Georgia is one of the three counties in that state where the 1820 census records have also been lost, the only other record we have for Jacob is from 1830.  Jacob didn't own any slaves in that year either.  I always thought that was a bit strange, since most of his relatives were slave holders - his cousins and uncles held large numbers, and his father and grandfather are shown as holding a couple to a few.  Now that I know that Judith had been raised as a Quaker, though, it makes a lot more sense.  She apparently remained staunchly against slavery for her entire life, because I checked all of the census records for her children,  and her son John was the only once who owned a slave before her death (he lived in a different county and owned one slave.)   Enoch doesn't seem to have ever owned any, and both Silas and Lewis held a couple after their parents died and they moved away from Georgia.  Even the one daughter I have managed to trace was married to a man who doesn't seem to have ever held any.  (Meanwhile, many of their cousins seem to have amassed quite a bit of wealth from their slave-worked plantations.)

So, if Jacob was a planter, but didn't have any slaves, what did he plant and who worked his fields?  My first guess was tobacco, but apparently only the North Carolina counties on the Virginia border grew tobacco.  Two other cash crops grown in the state during the 1700's were indigo and rice, which were both grown in swamps (which, if you look at the map, there were quite a few of in both Jones and Hyde counties), but rice was extremely labor intensive (requiring two to three slaves per acre), so only very large plantations grew it.  Most planters raised cotton, but at that time it had not yet become a cash crop - it was just grown for the family loom.  After 1764, both flax and hemp were sometimes grown as cash crops, and there was a lot of fruit grown in orchards, but the primary crops were wheat and Indian corn.  And apparently, raising cattle and hogs occurred extensively, especially on river plantations (they could graze among the uncleared trees and then be shipped by river to markets), which most likely applied to most of the Jones County land.  North Carolina's main cash crop, though, was it's pine forests, which were cut down for lumber, and which were also used for naval stores - tar and turpentine are both made from pine trees (who knew?), and as we will see later on in this post, by the time Jacob sold one of his parcels of land, it was still predominantly forested.

As for who worked the land, it was most likely Jacob, and since his sons were still too young to be of any help even by the year 1800, he would have needed the help of hired hands or indentured servants.  After taking a closer look at the 1800 census records, though, I don't think he used indentured servants - there is a category that is for "all other free persons except Indians not taxed," which is where an indentured servant would be counted, and his household didn't have a number in that column.  Of course, there were about a total of 70 counted in that category for Jones County altogether, but they all just had a blank line for the name of the head of family and all but two were just tacked on at the end of the last page, so I'm not sure what that was all about.  Maybe his did have one, then.  If he did, he would have paid his passage to America in exchange for four to eleven years of labor.

And just to give you another mental picture, I read this strange book about colonial agriculture in North Carolina that was written like, ages ago, and it said that farming progress in North Carolina was slow, due to the "indolence of the planter" and "the lack of farming tools."  It cited reports of various visitors to the colony, who said that the men rolled out of bed barely before lunchtime and then just stood around leaning on their fences, and that there was not a single plow or wagon to be found anywhere, as the men still did all of their planting with a hoe!  The author defended our Blackshear ancestors and their neighbors by pointing out that, because the land was either swampy or forested, the plow would be pretty useless anyway.  (Of course, the whole idea is a bit ridiculous, as I have seen wills from Jones County dated prior to the Revolutionary War in which plowhorses were left to a person's heirs, but perhaps that was only wealthy planters with a lot of land.  I would think that in order for it to be common enough to be noticeable, the average farmer must have primarily relied on the hoe.)

Anyway, since Jacob didn't have all of his land cultivated, maybe he was able to simply rely on a couple of hired hands for help.  And since we are talking a bit about what life was like for Jacob and his family, I would like to point out something that I noticed while reading through the deeds and wills for Jones County:

Most of the men of Jacob's generation were literate, but most of the women were not.  I kept noticing that only a few of the men signed with his "mark" and that only a few of the women did not.  Jacob signed with his name, not a mark, which means that he could read and write.  I actually came across a deed yesterday, in which Judith's sister Amelia was a witness along with her husband, and they both signed with their name.  If Judith's sister was literate, then we can probably assume that Judith was literate as well.  So how did they get their education?  Well, it doesn't appear that the Quakers of North Carolina had schools during the 1700's, so Judith was probably taught at home, either by her father (her mother signed with a mark, meaning she was illiterate) or by another Quaker woman.  The Quakers required families to teach their children to read well enough to understand the Bible by the age of twelve.  But, for children whose mother was not raised in a Quaker household, that might be a problem, so I suppose local meeting houses might have provided lessons.

As for Jacob, it's quite likely that he was educated at home, probably by a tutor since his father was pretty well-to-do.  However, a school was established in the town of Newbern (ten to twenty miles away, depending on where exactly their land was) in 1764, so it is possible that Jacob got his education there.  (It was actually a school for boys and girls, so that might be where the few, literate, non-Quaker women learned to read and write.)

Okay.  Moving the family along . . .

By March of 1801 Jacob had sold all of his land in Jones County (well, all the land that we have evidence that he possessed, anyway).  As I've said before, this suggests he was getting ready to move, since we don't find any deeds after that year in which he is either purchasing or inheriting (or receiving as a gift!) any new tract of land.  Since we know he ended up in Georgia, it's probably safe to assume that he was moving there at that time.  But can we find anything to actually confirm this theory?

Well, we do have a few clues.  First, many of Jacob's Blackshear relatives had already made the move to Georgia by then.  His cousins David, Edward, and Joseph were all in Georgia by 1795:

The Pennsylvania Gazette
(Philadelphia, PA)
2 Dec 1795

Their brother Elijah had also left North Carolina by then, even though he isn't mentioned in this article - a deed from 1794 states that he was from Washington Co., Georgia.  According to the Blacksheariana, Jacob's brother, Alexander, left North Carolina prior to 1790, probably in order to drive the cattle of his uncle James to Georgia.  His brother Jesse is not found in the deed records of North Carolina after 1796, and his brother Moses drew a lot in the 1795 Georgia land lottery.  The only Blackshears on the 1800 census for Jones County, NC were Jacob and his father, Elisha.

The second clue we have is the will of Jacob's father.  It was written in 1808, and says:

So, Jacob and Moses had already received their share of the inheritance before their father died.  His will also says:

Both of the executors for Elisha Blackshear were his sons-in-law, as were two of the three witnesses.  I've read enough wills in the past several months to know that, as long as there was a son or brother who was at least 21 years old, they would most likely have been chosen as one of the executors and would have been at least one of the witnesses present.  This suggests that none of Elisha's sons were still around to serve in either of those roles.

And finally, the last clue (which I had completely forgotten I had until I checked my Ancestry page for Jacob last night but is probably the most interesting thing I'll share in this post today so it's a good thing I noticed it!):

The following is a transcription of a court record from 1801.  I found it on the USGenWeb website for North Carolina, and it says that it came from the North Carolina State Archives.  I'm really crossing my fingers that the original is still there - FamilySearch is currently working on getting all of those records, back to the year 1800, online, but there is currently nothing up for the first several years of that date range.  So hopefully sometime soon the actual record/minute book will be available to view in its entirety, because I'm pretty sure that the following portion is not all that was recorded for the case:

(File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Jo Huettl)

JACOB BLACKSHEAR vs THE HEIRS OF CATHERINE SAULS

STATE OF NC, Newbern Sup. Court of Law

Samuel Westbook maketh oath that Jacob Blackshear and those under whom he
claims have to the best of this Deponents knowledge and as far back as he can
remember, always claimed, held, used, and rented out the tract of land being
on the East side of Cypress Creek and estimated at 81 ½ (eighty one and one
half) acres – that in the winter of 1796 the sd Blackshear leased the sd tract
to Kindred Sauls for five years at the rate of five & twenty pounds per year
with condition, as Deponent has been informed, that if the rent reserved
should not be paid that the sd Blackshear might then enter on the devised
premises – that the sd Kindred Sauls with his father John and his mother
Catherine under and by the authority of sd lease, entered on the said tract,
built a log house thereon cleared a few acres of ground and as Deponent  has
been informed both by the sd Kindred and the said Blackshear, paid the rent
pretty regularly for two or three years.  This Deponent further saith that
John Sauls the father of Kindred having died the Sheriff came to the house
where the said Kindred and Catharine lived with a writ at the suit of some of
the Mr. Bryans who claimed a title in the land in opposition to Blackshear and
that the said Catharine was after long solicitations prevailed on by them the
said Kindred, having declined ??? when he was possessed to take a new lease
from them for two years at the rate of five shillings a year, they executing a
bond to indemnify her for keeping possession of the said land under them. The
said Kindred after this as Deponent has been informed, tho still living on the
land did refuse in pursuance of the directions of the Bryans to pay Blackshear
any rent, and on this account the said Blackshear entered and built a small
house on the land.  Deponent doth not know the manner in which Blackshear
entered.  He hath understood of Catherine and Kindred Sauls that he came to
the house which they had built, and where they resided, and required of them
to give it up to him as they would not pay him the rent due – they refused to
go out – he began to take out some of their furniture, but on being warned by
them not to molest them, desisted and built a house on another part of the
tract.  This Deponent further saith that the said Blackshear was removed from
the tract by the intervention of a jury, but afterwards restored by the
Sheriff  - Deponent further saith that the house to which the Sheriff has
restored him is the same that Kindred Sauls build soon after taking the lease
from Blackshear.

Signed Samuel Westbrook

Sworn to in Court 24 July 1801

Okay, let's pause here for a moment.  This is a from a court case titled Jacob Blackshear vs the Heirs of Catherine Sauls.  Now, if you notice, at the top it says it came from the "Sup. Court of Law" in Newbern.  Newbern is the seat of Craven County, and it is also where the District Court cases were heard.  I don't know if the "Sup" means superior or supreme or what, but what I do think is clear is that this is a case that was appealed, being originally heard in Jones County, where the land was located and the plaintiffs and defendants resided.  That means that the original court case might have actually been The Heirs of Catherine Sauls vs Jacob Blackshear, but we wouldn't know for certain unless we found the very first entry for the case.

What you just read is actually a deposition by Samuel Westbrook, who just so happened to be Jacob's brother-in-law.  He said in his testimony that Jacob always held the land as his own, and if you notice, it was eighty-one and a half acres.  Hmmm.  I think that those are the eighty-sum-odd acres that we saw two posts ago, that were left to Jacob by his grandfather and that he sold to Jeremiah Parsons in March of 1801.  (Here is the link to that post if you want to go back and read the deed.)

So, apparently, Jacob leased the land out, and everything was going alright, but then the father of the family leasing the land died, and the Bryans, who apparently had previously sued over the title of the land, came and told the renters that the land was actually theirs and they would need to sign a new lease with them.  The son wasn't having any of that nonsense, but they finally convinced his mother to sign a new lease and quit paying their rent to Jacob.  And then, since they didn't pay their rent (this would have been around 1799), Jacob supposedly went over there to repossess the property, but they threatened him with the law, (and in fact brought a lawsuit against him, which is just what I suspected, see?) and so he just went and built another house on another part of the land, but then, some time later, the Sheriff came and restored his property, kicking the Saul family out of the house they had built.

That doesn't make Jacob sound like a very nice person, does it?  But I do find it strange that he would build a small house on the land when he obviously must have had a different house somewhere since he had a wife and six children!  Let's see what happened next:

James Shine maketh oath that Jacob Blackshear and those under whom he claims
have as far back as this Deponent can remembers claimed, held and used the
tract of land, supposed to contain 82 ½ (eighty one and one half) acres on the
East side of Cypress Creek adj to the lands of William Bryan & others of the
family of the Bryans, but separated therefrom by a fence and a thick hedge of
trees.  That this Deponent is a subscribing witness to a lease make of this
tract by Jacob Blackshhear to Kindred Sauls in December 1796 for 5 years at
the yearly rent of 25 pounds.  That at the time of making said lease it was
expressly agreed on between said Jacob and Kindred and Deponent believes
inserted in the lease, that if the rent reserved should be in arrears the said
Jacob might enter on the demised premises. Deponent further saith that by
virtue of this lease the said Kindred with his father John and his mother
Catharine Sauls entered on the land, cleared some part of it that before was
in woods and built the house from which the said Catharine & Kindred have been
removed by the Sheriff under the writ of restitution arising from this humble
Court.  Deponent further saithat that he has been informed and doth believe
that the said Catharine while living with the said Kindred in the said house
and on the said tract was  [next word unreadable] – by the Bryans who had before
since said/paid ????  Jacob’s Uncle and Grandmother for this land but failed
in their suit and who still ??? set up a claim thereto to take a lease of the
same from them or one of them for two years at the rate of 5 shillings a year
and that the said Kindred after this second lease was made to his mother did
refuse to pay the said Blackshear his rent, for which refusal and the rent
being arrears said Blackshear entered thereon.  Deponent doth not now believe
that the said Catharine or Kindred Sauls ever had any title or claim to the
said land other than as before states.

Signed by James Shine

This is the testimony of a second deponent, one who supposedly signed as a witness on the lease agreement between Jacob and the Sauls family.  He affirmed that the land had always been held by Jacob.  He also testified that the Sauls were "removed by the Sheriff under a writ of restitution arising from this humble court," so it sounds like Jacob won either the original case or his appeal, which is why he had his land seized back from the Sauls by the sheriff.  This deposition tells us just how the mess with the Bryans supposedly came about as well - they claimed that they had paid Jacob's uncle and grandmother for the land, but that was contested and they lost a lawsuit in the matter but still claimed the land as theirs anyway.  (That's what it sounds like, right?)  

Now the next part:

Jeremiah Parsons maketh oath that on Monday the 13th of July, two days before

the meeting of the Superior Court, Dawkins Wilkinson, the Sheriff of Jones Co

handed to this Deponent a copy of a notice of a rule to show cause why a writ

of re restitution should not be awarded against Jacob Blackshear in favour of

the heirs of Catharine Sauls, telling this Deponent that the same time that he

had not been able to find Jacob Blackshear and that he did not know but that

Deponent might have some interest in the affair.  Deponent further saith that

some time before the said 13th July the said Jacob had left the County of

Jones on a journey to the southward and has not yet returned, to Deponents

knowledge and further that Deponent doth not know or believe that the said

Jacob knew of any thing of said rule against him.

Signed Jeremiah Parsons

Sworn to 26 July 1801

Huh. So Jeremiah Parsons, the very same man who had paid Jacob Blackshear one hundred and twenty-one pounds for the land just four months prior, didn't say that he himself held title to the land, or that he had been scammed by Jacob, or that he had any interest at all in the matter, even though the sheriff believed that he "might have some interest in the affair."  

And then, Jeremiah Parsons said that Jacob had gone on a journey "southward" but hadn't come back yet.  Well.  Georgia would be southward, wouldn't it?  

The case continued:

William Bryan maketh oath that Jacob Blackshear defendant in the motion by the
heirs of Catharine Sauls, has removed himself and family from the County of
Jones with intention to reside in the State of Georgia and has been removed
from the said county ever since the first of March last

Signed Wm. Bryan

Sworn to in open Court 16 July 1801

So, this is interesting.  William Bryan, one of the Bryans who were laying claim to the land, testified that Jacob and his family had moved to Georgia.  Well, that's our proof then, isn't it?  Yay!  Another mystery solved! 

Let's keep talking about this crazy case, though.  This deposition says that Jacob had been gone from Jones county since "the first of March last."  Now to me, that sounds like he means the previous year (1800), but I've seen that wording several times in old records and it always just means the one they just had.  So, like we would say, "this past March."  And this is another thing that makes me call this case crazy - I went back and re-read the deed from Jacob to Jeremiah Parsons.  It was dated the 5th of March 1801.  But supposedly Jacob had been gone since the 1st of March.  Well guess what?  The deed was actually executed at Newbern, in Craven County, which is where the Superior Court was held.  Newbern was on the Nuese River, a very large river that empties into Pamplico Sound, which means that it would have been a great place to board a ship.  Maybe Jacob and his family were going to take a ship down the coast to Georgia, and they left Jones County and met up with Jeremiah Parsons in Newbern on their way out of North Carolina.  Maybe Jacob didn't want to wait any longer to leave, but he had to wait for the next term of court for his appeal to be heard, so Jeremiah Parsons agreed to take the risk and pay him a cheap price for the land, gambling that the Sauls would lose the case and he would get to keep it.  Could be, right?

Jeremiah Parsons then went back home and had the deed recorded in May.  And then, there were two months before the next court date:

Jones County

I give you notice to produce to the jury of  newbern and at the trial of this

suit now pending in the Superior Court of law for the District of Newbern

wherein Doe on the demise of Edward Bryan and others is Plaintiff and John

Parsons, Catharine Sauls and myself are Defendants the original deed which I

believe to be in your possession or in that of some of the bessons ??? of the

Plf made by Martin and Edward Franks to Edward Bryan and which was produced on

the former trial of the suit between you and Elisha L. or S. Blackshear

otherwise I shall prove by witness the contents of the said deed.

Signed Jeremiah Parsons

Sept 3 day 1801

James Green maketh oath that he delivered a copy of the written notice to

Edward Bryan, William Bryan and Joseph Bryan

Signed James Green

16 Jan 1801

Okay, so this looks like it is actually a notice sent to the three Mr. Bryans, saying that they needed to produce for the court a copy of an original deed in which the Franks sold the land to the Bryans.  (The Franks were the in-laws of James Blackshear, and they were the original owners of the land that Alexander Blackshear purchased in 1754.)  It also says that this land had been the subject of a court case before, between the Bryans and Elisha Stout Blackshear!  (Perhaps Jacob's father was the one being sued because he was the executor for both his father's and mother's estates?  He was supposed to be the owner of the land between the time his mother died and Jacob turned twenty-one, but Jacob came of age two years before her death, so maybe, as executor, he was the one in charge of transferring the property from his father to his mother, and then from his mother over to his son. )  The notice also says that Jeremiah Parsons was one of the defendants along with Catherine Sauls in a suit brought by the Bryans, so it looks like there were two different lawsuits regarding the land at the same time.  

Oh, yeah, look at the next part (ha!):

EDWARD BRYAN & OTHERS vs JOHN & JEREMIAH PARSONS

District Court July Term 1801

Benjamin Brocket disposes and says that on the 6th day of March 1800 he went

as Sheriff of Jones County with a Juery of Men to the House of Jacob

Blackshear in said County by the Command of a Warrant by two Justices of the

Peace for said County to take ??/ said Jacob out of possession, that this

Deponant remembers the said Blackshear did not claim the possession whereon

Catherine Saul lived but that a young man named Parson claimed the Premises

and forwarned the Bryans of said County from touching or meddling with the

said Premises, and make publick declaration of the same, all this to the best

of his knowledge and belief.

Signed B. Brocket

24 July 1801

Ah!  So on the 6th day of March in the year 1800, the Sheriff went out to remove Jacob from the land and he said the land wasn't his - Jeremiah Parsons claimed the land.  So now we have the question - was the date on the deed between Jacob and Jeremiah recorded incorrectly (the version we have is from a transcribed copy of the original deed book), or was the date in this deposition recorded wrong?  Well, I think the date in the deposition is right, because in December of 1800 there was a bill put forth in the North Carolina General Assembly authorizing Benjamin Brockett, "late Sheriff of Jones County," to collect back taxes due to him.  Since he obviously wasn't deceased in December of 1800, it must mean that he was no longer the sheriff by December of 1800, which means he couldn't have gone out to remove Jacob in 1801.  So that could mean that the deed was recorded with the wrong date (it wasn't spelled out long hand, but why they would have executed the deed in Craven County instead of Jones is beyond me), or, I guess it could mean that there either was a deed back before March of 1800, but that it was lost, and so Jacob wrote a new one for Jeremiah Parsons, or that there was an agreement between the two that was never set down in writing until Jacob was getting ready to move away.

Either way, it sounds now like Jeremiah Parsons was the guy who wasn't very nice when he tried to evict the Sauls family.  (Whew.  I hate to tarnish the reputation of our ancestors!)

You know, trying to make sense of all this, I went back and looked at all of the deeds we already examined, as well as a bunch of new ones, and I must say, these deeds are really giving me a headache.  This court case says that Jacob left town on the first of March, but the deed to Jeremiah Parsons was dated several days after that, not to mention the fact that it now looks like Mr. Parsons had taken possession of the land a whole year earlier.  Then, it turns out that the deed in which Jacob and his cousin Alexander sold their land on the north side of the Trent River to John Gilbert was actually dated March 17, 1801.  Never mind the fact that Alexander didn't even show up on the 1800 census for Jones County . . . . aaaaannnnnd that deed says that the 100 acres the two men sold were bounded by Jacob's other parcel of land, but we have a deed showing that Jacob had sold his other 50 acres north of the river back in 1797!  So, I really have no idea exactly what was going on, but I think it is still safe to say that by the spring of 1801, Jacob Blackshear and his family left North Carolina for the state of Georgia.   (And just in case any of you are wondering whether the Blackshears or the Bryans were the actual legal owners of the land, well, I'll talk about that when I get to Alexander!)

And since we have Jacob and his family at a transitional point right now, I think I'll wrap things up here.  Next time we will head back over to Georgia, get the rest of Jacob and Judith's children born, and see if we can dig up any new records from their early years in that state.


                                                                                                                                          - Therese