Doing My Due Diligence

Time and time again, while working on these posts, I find my research taking little side trips.  Like the time when I was investigating the life of W. C. Cheatham and I had to learn about the Green Back political party.  Or the time when I wanted to date the picture we have of Amelia Virginia Blackshear, and I had to stop and research fashion and hairstyles of the mid-1800's.  And then, there was the time, while working on my last post, when I decided to figure out just what a 6'7" man who weighed 400 lbs would look like.  I take these trips because they not only help us understand the history, but also help a person's story make so much more sense.

Sometimes, however, my side trips are more of the researching-primary-source-documents-in relation-to-genealogy side trips.  Like when I read through ten years' worth of Quaker records to see if it was plausible that the two oldest girls in Jacob's household were actually the nieces of his wife, Judith.   If we just want to trace a line back through each individual ancestor that we are directly descended from, these things rarely matter.  (Unless, I guess, if you are in the direct line of somebody who was raised in someone else's household!)  But when you are trying to tell somebody's story, those other people become much more relevant.  Which is one of the reasons we make those family data sheets.

Ah, those family data sheets.  Just when we think we are all finished up researching an ancestor, we sit down to make that record and realize that we know almost nothing about their children.  Which leads us to a whole slew of side trips.

Today we are going to take a little side trip away from the direct line of Jacob--Elisha Stout--Alexander Blackshear, to talk about a little side trip I had to take yesterday while finishing up Jacob's family data sheet.

Now, the easiest way to get the detailed kind of information needed for a family data sheet (like spouses and death dates) is to just look up a tree online and copy what somebody else has put down for them.  The problem with that, though, as I have shared previously, is that you will find many different versions of trees for the same person, with different parents, and different birth locations, and different children, and so on and so forth.  So, what is a person to do?

Well, there are a few options.  You can hope to get lucky and pick the right one, but I wouldn't really recommend that unless you don't really care if the information is wrong!  A better option is to see if you can find somebody who is directly descended from that person - I've found that those people tend to have more photos and original documents, and sometimes even family stories.  Those trees are also much more likely to have correct information on parents' and grandparents' names, even if they don't have records from the correct person attached.

Speaking of which . . . During the course of my research, I always, always, always ask myself:  Does this make sense?  Sometimes it's really obvious that a particular document doesn't belong, like when you know for a fact a person was born in and always lived in America, but the attached document is for a christening in Wales.  But sometimes you can't really tell from just one document.  And sometimes you have a whole handful of documents, say for instance, documents showing Jacob Blackshear and his children in a different county every ten years, that seem like they don't make sense, until you pair them with the circumstances of the people living in that time and place (i.e. Georgia's land lottery system).  Which is why, when something doesn't make sense, I look for other records, and if those don't give me what I'm looking for, or if I just can't find any, I ask myself, well, is there any scenario in which this could make sense?

Of course, sometimes we have to just admit defeat, like in the case of Lewis Blackshear's birth location, and resign ourselves to the idea that we may never know the truth.

For me, that's really hard to accept, so I will search, and search, and search before giving in to giving up.

So, there I was, working on Jacob Blackshear's family data sheet, and I came to the section for his son, John.  And I came to the line for John's wife.  Now, the Blacksheariana tells us that John had three wives, and it gives a little bit of information for each one.  So, as I'm entering that information, it dawns on me: the book says that John's third wife died in 1871.  But it also says that he lived with just a housekeeper in 1870.  Hmmmm.  So, I asked myself, does that make sense?  And my answer was, no, not really.  So then I thought, well, if there is a problem with that bit of information, maybe the book was also wrong when it said that her last name was probably Nesmith, and that she was probably a widow when he married her.

So, I figured that, before I put that down on a family data sheet and posted it online for the world to see and maybe even copy, I'd better do my due diligence and investigate further.  I'm going to share with you the process I went through, so you can be confident that, if you see something on this blog or my Ancestry tree that doesn't match what everyone else has put down for someone, I have researched the information to the fullest extent possible and have explained with a footnote if I am still unsure whether or not it is correct.

Okay.  The Blacksheariana shows two pages from John Blackshear's family Bible that mention John's third wife:



The first one says, "Nancy A. Blackshear the third wife of said Blackshear was born  -  1826."  The second one says, "Nancy A. Blackshear the third wife of said John Blackshear died Nov. the 22nd 1871."  Both are very important pieces of information as we go back to look at the census records:

John Blackshear 

1880 Census 

Thomas County, GA

Here is a detail of the 1880 census. (You can view the entire page by clicking on the title underneath.)  This shows John Blackshear in the household of John and Amanda Everett.  I've looked at enough other documents to know that Amanda was John's daughter, which makes a lot of sense seeing as how he was 88 years old.  Now, underneath John's name, in the same household, it shows George Nesmith, age 27, S. son, which we can assume means stepson.   The Blacksheariana interprets this to mean that George Nesmith was John's stepson, which is how he came to the conclusion that John's third wife must have been a widow named Nancy Nesmith.  Let's take a look at another record, and then we'll come back to this one.

John Blackshear

1870 Census

Webster County, GA

Here is the detail of the 1870 census.  Near the bottom you can see John (J B) Blackshear as the head of household.  Underneath his name, in his same household, it shows E N, age 44, Keeping House.  The Blacksheariana interpreted this to mean that she was the housekeeper.  But look at the two households above John's - look at what the wives in each household have recorded as their occupation - Keeping House.   That is the designation that wives were given on both the 1870 and 1880 censuses.  It's the equivalent to saying Homemaker as an occupation today.  Now, look at the household just above John's - it shows a woman as a head of household, and it names her occupation as . . . Domestic Servant.  If the woman in John's household was his housekeeper, her occupation would have said the same.  So the census taker was recording E. N. as John Blackshear's wife.  And one more thing - E. N. doesn't have a last name written in.  She has a dash, just like all the other family members on the same page, meaning that she has the same last name as the head of household.  Oh, and look - she was 44 years old, which means she was born in . . . 1826.  The Bible page said John's third wife Nancy was born in 1826.

So I ask you, what makes more sense?  That John Blackshear lived with a housekeeper in 1870, and married his third wife some time after that (even though his second wife had died way back in 1862 - see Bible page above), and that the housekeeper coincidentally was born in the same year as that third wife, and that when the census taker wrote her information, he deviated from the way he recorded every other woman on the same page, or that the census taker misunderstood the name of John's wife?  I think it makes much more sense that the census taker got the name wrong.  The wife's name was supposedly Nancy A., but I have seen numerous instances of a woman who normally went by her middle name, and the census taker put only her initials, but for some reason had them transposed.  Also, Alice Blackshear is recorded in the census as Ellis, and Amelia Virginia's daughter Erences Leona was recorded as A. L., so an A, I think, would be easily mistakable for an E, and vice versa.

(And, in case anyone is wondering, the person listed at the very bottom of the page, as her own head of household but living in the same physical house, was John's daughter Mary Ann.)

So what do we make of the fact that the 1880 census lists George Nesmith as John's stepson?  And why, if he would have been only 17 in 1870, was he not listed in the household of John and Nancy?  Well, it occurred to me that the census taker recorded the relationships of each person to the Head of Household.  In 1880, John Blackshear was not the head of household, his son-in-law John Everett was.  That means that George Nesmith would have been the stepson of John Everett.

Now, I could have just said, yep, that all makes sense. John's third wife, Nancy, was not the widow Nesmith.  But since I'd be putting this information online, I figured I'd better try to verify that.  So I looked at the three previous census records for John Everett, to see if he had been married to a different woman before he married Amanda Blackshear:

John Everett

1870 Census

Worth County, GA

In 1870, John was married to Amanda.   But look at their oldest son - Peyton was seventeen years old, the same age as George Nesmith would have been in that year.  Could it be that they were the same person (George Peyton or Peyton George), and the census taker wasn't told that he actually had a different last name?  Oh!  And if it was possible that John had been married before, could it be possible that Amanda had been married to someone else before John Everett and that was really her son?

John Everett

1860 Census

Worth County, GA

Well, the family looked pretty much the same in 1860, minus the children who hadn't been born yet.

John Blackshear & John Everett

1850 Census

Randolph County, Georgia

So, it looks like John and Amanda had never been married to anybody other than each other.  What options does that leave us to explain the whole George Nesmith thing?  Well, going back to the whole George/Peyton idea, maybe the census taker misunderstood the last name, which was really Everett, and recorded him as stepson for some weird reason?

I know, I'm asking myself if that makes sense, and I'm telling myself it is really quite a stretch.  But to completely rule that out, I did a general search on Ancestry and found this FindAGrave record:

So, that young man had died well before 1880.  I decided to look back at the 1880 census and see if I was just missing something . . . had I drawn a wrong conclusion somewhere and George really was the stepson of John Blackshear?   If you look back up at that record, you can see that the last name recorded for the household was Amanda (age 17), listed as daughter.  Well.  That most certainly couldn't have been John's daughter, because he already had a daughter named Amanda (the wife in the household) and although I've seen people give another child the same name after another child died, it would be really messed up for him to name a daughter with his third wife the same name as his other, still-living daughter.  And if she were John's daughter, why wasn't she in his household on the 1870 census?  And then I realized that she was John Everett's daughter, and she must have been the wife of George Nesmith, but she wan't named as his wife, because they weren't in their own separate household. 

That made perfect sense!  But, you know, due diligence and all that, I decided to look up George Nesmith in the other census records (I had previously tried looking up Nancy Nesmith and came up empty-handed).   This is what I found:

George Nesmith

1870 Census

Thomas County, Georgia

George Nesmith

1860 Census

Thomas County, Georgia

There is George, in the household of his parents in the same county where he would appear in 1880.  (You'll notice that his mother was not named Nancy, and she was still married to George's father in 1880.)

And then, in 1900:

George Nesmith

1900 Census

Thomas County, Georgia

There he is, married to Amanda, with his mother-in-law Amanda (Blackshear) Everett listed as the last person in his household.  And then:

Marriage Record

Thomas County, GA

George T. Nesmith & Amanda B. Everett

See?  So, the census taker created all of this confusion by recording his relationship as stepson, when it should have said son-in-law.   (And for that matter, had John Blackshear been named as father-in-law, instead of father, it might have helped clear things up sooner.)

And to think, without this little research excursion, I never would have caught the mistake.

Unfortunately, when he wrote the Blacksheariana, Perry L. Blackshear did not have access to the Ancestry.com searchable database.  He couldn't just plug in names and get hundreds of results to look through with a click of a mouse.  He would have had to browse through thousands of pages of records manually in order to do what I did in a couple of hours.  Not only that, but, for a lot of the earlier information in his book, he was drawing from the Raines manuscript (genealogical research written around the turn of the century), which was close enough in time to the Blackshears of the 1800's that I'm sure he felt pretty confident in its thoroughness and accuracy.

And where does that leave us now?  With a family data sheet that will not say that John Blackshear's third wife was Nancy A. probably Nesmith, widow - which means a family data sheet with information that conflicts with a book that many consider the definitive authority on Blackshear genealogical research.  Which also means a family data sheet that says something different than almost every other family data sheet out there.

This is the reason I include the sources and comments at the bottom of my family data sheets and timelines - so we can see the evidence used to justify the revised information that contradicts what is found in those millennium files and family data collections that were created back in a time when there were less resources and tools available to researchers.  Am I always going to draw the right conclusions?  Probably not.  But at least anyone looking at my charts will know that diligent research went into those new ideas, and they will have as many resources as possible to review before deciding whether to revise their own family tree or not.

                                                                                                                                          - Therese

P.S.  The Jacob Blackshear Primary Source Documents page is now up!  You can find it through the BLACKSHEAR link on the left-hand menu.

Further Back Blackshears (Week 4)

Tracing Back the Blackshear Line, part 17

Well, we are almost finished with Jacob Blackshear.  The first bits of research I did into his life were way back at the beginning of my Blackshear investigations, while I was actually talking about his son, Silas.  That was months and months ago, and only covered his time in Georgia.  That is exactly where we are going to pick Jacob up again today, so we will have to be doing some review of our earlier findings (I don't know about you, but I can only hold so much in my head at a time, so I only have a vague recollection of what I put in that post way back when!)

In my last post, we saw Jacob and his family leaving North Carolina to make their home in Georgia.  Since most of his relatives were already there, it would make sense that he would head over to the same place as they lived, wouldn't it?  So let's look back and see where exactly that was . . .

Here is a page from Book A of the Index to Georgia's Grants and Head Rights:

Georgia, Index to Grants & Head Rights
Book A

On this page we can see that both Jacob's brother, Moses, and his cousin, David, received grants of land in Washington County, Georgia in 1798 (land in Washington County was originally given out as grants to Revolutionary War veterans).  The next time we see Moses in the records is 1805, at which time he registered for the land lottery as a resident of Washington County.  David and three of his brothers also registered in the same place.  So, I think it is probably safe to assume that Jacob settled in Washington County when he arrived in Georgia.  My guess is that he lived on and worked the land of one of his kin - Moses had 125 acres, and David had 1,059 from the two grants shown above, as well as 1443 acres from four additional grants in that county (and 400 acres from two grants in Wilkes County).  So, yeah, there was plenty of family land for him to buy, lease, or to live on in return for his labor.  Which of these was the case, however, we really have no way to know, because all of the early tax and deed records from Washington County have been lost.

So, what was life like for Jacob and his family in their new home?  I originally had a picture of them in my head, struggling to settle the wilderness, but it turns out that by the time Jacob arrived, there were already approximately 5,000 settlers in the county already, many of whom had also come from North Carolina.  Jacob probably farmed, and his main crop was probably cotton, since that was the primary crop grown in Washington County after the cotton gin was patented in 1794.

Oh, and here is something interesting I came across yesterday:

This is the original log jailhouse built in the town of Warthen in Washington County, Georgia.  In 1804, Aaron Burr (third vice president of the United States and one party in the infamous Alexander Hamilton duel) was housed there overnight on his way to face charges of treason in Virginia.  Maybe it was a bit of a spectacle when he was brought through town, and Jacob and his children were witnesses to the event.  Could be . . .

Or then again, maybe not.

By 1802, Jacob had no less than seven male relatives living in Georgia.  We know this because they all registered for the 1805 Georgia land lottery.  (Registration for the lottery began in May 1803 and required a person to have been a resident of the state for at least one year.)  So, if Jacob left north Carolina and moved to Georgia in March of 1801, why didn't he register for the lottery?  I mean, it was free land, after all.  Who in their right mind would pass that up?  The fact that Jacob isn't recorded on the list of registrants really makes me rethink whether or not he was actually there by May of 1802, more than a year after he supposedly left North Carolina.

And then there is this:  Before I read that court case that said Jacob had moved to Georgia in 1801, I had taken a look at the census records for Jacob's children to see if those could give me any clue as to when they arrived in that state.  The two children who were relevant were Lewis and Alice, because they were supposedly born in the first decade of the 1800's.  I had pretty much put the information out of my mind until I was writing this post and that question about Jacob not registering for the lottery came to me.  So, what did the census records tell us?  Well, the information they recorded was pretty much a mess.  (I don't know why this surprised me!)

Here's what I found for Lewis:
1850 Census - he was born in South Carolina in about 1805.
1860 Census - he was born in South Carolina in about 1804.
(1870 Census - he was born in Georgia in about 1800.)
1880 Census - he was born in Florida in about 1800.

So, the 1870 census is in the right place, but it has the wrong name listed for his wife.  That doesn't really worry me because we saw the same thing happen with W. C. Cheatham in 1900, but what does worry me is that all of a sudden we have a different birth year and that is the only time he reported being born in Georgia.  The 1880 census has him in the household of a grandchild, so who knows who did the reporting, but he had been living in Florida for like thirty years by then so that's not even that weird.  But even if we threw those last two out for being inconsistent with the others, as well as maybe reported by someone whose memory wasn't so great anymore, we still have the problem that the first two census records placed his birth in South Carolina.

Did the family travel overland to Georgia, through South Carolina, and somehow get caught up there for several years?

Here's what I found for Alice:
1850 Census - she was born in Georgia in 1808.
1860 Census - she was born in Georgia in 1807.
1870 Census - she was born in Georgia in 1792.
1880 Census - she was born in Georgia in 1810.
1885 Florida State Census - she was born in Georgia in 1809.

See?  Things get weirder as people get older! On the 1870 census the ages for both Alice and her husband were off by more than ten years, but they had the right son of the right age and their birth places were consistent with earlier records, so I know it was really them.   Also, their daughter-in-law lived in their household, so maybe she did the reporting and had no idea how old they really were, so that doesn't really worry me. By 1880, Alice was a widow, had walked her age back a bit, but named both her parents' birth places as Georgia.  By 1885, however, the correct birth place was listed for her parents.

So. I don't know what to make of this.  I am inclined to go with the overland-trip-with-a-stopover-in-South-Carolina theory.  However, the fact that we found Jacob in the town of Newbern (one of North Carolina's principal seaports and the opposite direction one would take if going overland to South Carolina) on his way out of Jones County makes me want to say that for some strange reason Lewis Blackshear didn't really know where he was actually born!

Uuughh.  Why can't this sort of research be easy?

Well, I don't think we are ever going to get that question resolved, so I guess I am going to have to do another "possible residence location" on my timeline (I hate that!) for those early years of the 1800's.  At least, with Alice, we can be sure of her birth place.  (Assuming that the Alice I have been tracking is the correct person - I think the evidence is sufficient to say that she is.)  The only problem for her is her birth year.

Well, there is a FindaGrave page for her, showing a headstone, which says 1807.  That fits with either of the earlier census records (you know, because of census math), so I'm confident that it is correct.  So we know, for sure, that Jacob and his family were in Georgia by 1807.  But where?  (Oops, did I just say we could be sure of Alice's birth place?!)

Jacob's brother, Moses, was still living in Washington County when the 1807 land lottery was held (during August and September of that year).   He won a 202 1/2 acre lot in Wilkinson County, and finally paid the fee and received the deed in 1811, which was two years after that portion had been turned into the county of Twiggs.  Perhaps Jacob went on ahead to hold the land for his brother.  Or maybe he stayed behind in Washington County while Moses and his sons (who were older) got things set up on the new tract of land.  There is really no way to know, because the land records for Wilkinson and Twiggs have also been lost!  We do know that in 1818, Jacob and his son Enoch were both on the tax list for Twiggs County.  One would think, then, that they had been there since they left Washington County.  The question is, when exactly did that occur?  Unfortunately, the answer is who knows?  At least we can place Alice's birth to before the move there, though, since she was born four months before the land was given out.

Is it safe to assume, though, that Jacob moved to the new land along with Moses?  Well, two of Moses' sons won land in the same county from that lottery, and by 1818 Moses' three sons all owned land there, as did Jacob's son Enoch.  So, yeah, I think that's a pretty safe assumption.

I'm going to put up that map I made way back when because I think it is going to come in handy:

Over on the very left we see Washington County, and moving westward we have Wilkinson (blue).  The yellow is the county of Twiggs, the green is the district where Moses and Enoch owned land, and the red is where Moses' sons were.  To the west of Wilkinson is Houston (purple), which is the next place Jacob is found in the records.  The purple blocks within that county are Enoch's land and, honestly, I can't remember whose land the other box was!!!

Okay.  I've spent a considerable amount of time this past week trying to verify the wheres and whens of Jacob's movement across Georgia for the following fifteen or so years.  And wouldn't you know, I am still having trouble keeping it all straight in my head.  There are so many holes in the records, meaning that we have to look elsewhere for clues, and there are so many things to factor in!

In case you haven't noticed, my motto is "Leave no stone unturned." So I decided I'd better see what I could find for all of Jacobs kids during their time in Georgia, and see if that information could shed any more light on his comings and goings.  It is a complicted mess of information, so I wrote and cut and pasted and wrote and erased and reorganized and finally decided that, if I didn't want it all to just go in one ear and out the other, I should just present it all chronologically.  So here we go:

c. 1808-1811
We have placed Jacob and his family in Wilkinson/Twiggs County beginning some time between 1808 and 1811.  We have no actual documentation to show that he was there that early - we are just making an assumption based on the fact that his brother moved there during that time and that Jacob appeared there on the earliest extant tax digest available for that county (1818).  Jacob may have been living on his brother Moses' land; he had 202 acres, which is enough land to support roughly five families, so it should have been sufficient for supporting two families and growing cash crops.  (Actually I just now discovered that Moses sold 101 acres of pine land from the original grant in 1812, but in 1818 he still held 202 acres in the 28th district, so maybe he bought up better land for farming.)  It is also possible that Jacob purchased his own land, which for some reason he no longer held by 1818, when the tax rolls showed him in Twiggs with no property.

Now, Wilkinson County was created in 1807 from land that had belonged to the Creek Indians, and Twiggs was divided off just two years later.  The Ocmulgee River, which formed the western border of the county, was the border between the state of Georgia and the Creek lands.  Talk about frontier!   (The previous border, before the 1807 land lottery, had been the Oconee River, which formed the western border of Washington County - yikes - I'm sure Judith just loved their new home!)  Here is a little clip from the book, History of Twiggs County, Georgia by J. Lanette O'Neal Faulk:

Gives you a nice mental picture of their lives, doesn't it?

1812 - 1815
We still have no direct evidence to place Jacob during these years, but I wanted to point out that it was a time of turmoil for Georgians, as they had to face first the Creek Wars and then the War of 1812.  During 1812 a civil war broke out between pro-British and pro-American factions in the Creek Nation.  Worried that the fighting would spill over into Georgia proper, Jacob's cousin, now Brigadier General David Blackshear, began to build a series of forts in Twiggs County along the western border.  Fighting did eventually break out between the Georgia militia and Creek Indians, but it occurred on lands further west.  You can imagine the tension, though, for the residents of Twiggs, especially for families with small children or sons of fighting age.  As for the war of 1812, British ships patrolled the Georgia coast and harassed American vessels, but actual fighting didn't even take place on Georgia soil until after the war was officially over, since news of the treaty hadn't reached the United States yet.  Even then, the fighting occurred only in the coastal counties.


1813 
John was Jacob's oldest son, born in April 1792, which means he would have come of age in the spring of 1813.  (Although some men married at a younger age, a man could not own land, vote, be taxed, or serve on a jury until the age of 21.)  I looked through my files just now to see what all I had downloaded for him and saw that I had a War of 1812 pension application file.  It says that he served from August 1813 to February 1814.  Take a look at this page from those records:

John Blackshear

War of 1812 Pension Application pg. 9

The relevant part of this says, "John Blackshear . . . declares that . . . he served the full period of sixty days to wit: six months in Capt Adam Heath's Com'y Ga Mla commanded by Col Walter Harris in Gen'l John Floyd's Brigade against the hostile Indians.  That he was drafted from Warren County Georgia.  Mustered in at Warrenton.  Mustered out at Milledgeville."

What?  Warren County?  NOOOooooooooo!  Just when I thought I was starting to have things figured out!  Were Jacob and his family living in Warren County before they moved on to Twiggs?  (Warren County borders Washington County on the northeast corner.)  Or was John just living there without the rest of his family?  (I find that doubtful unless they had had a falling out, since he would have been needed to help work the farm.  And the falling out theory doesn't make sense unlesss they reconciled, because they end up in the same places over and over again later.)  I looked through the only available records for Warren County: Deed Records, in which I found a sale from David Blackshear way back in 1795, and Superior Court Minutes (1794-1814) in which I found not a single Blackshear on any jury list.  I have no idea what to make of all this, which is actually a real problem, because the years we are talking about are the years in which Jacob's youngest son, Silas, was born.

SIGH!

1815
Jacob's second son, Enoch, came of age this year, and according to the Blacksheariana, he also probably married (not sure I believe this, since his first child wasn't born until 1818) .  But here is something interesting - according to the book, his wife was born in . . . . Warren County!  So, it's posible that they were actually living in Warren County during those years.  Or, it is possible that the Wall family had first lived there, and then moved on to Twiggs County some time prior to the marriage. 


1818
Enoch lived in Twiggs County (tax records).  He held 50 acres in district 28 during that year, which was the same district where Moses had 202 1/2 acres.

Jacob lived in Twiggs County (tax records), but owned no land.  Either he had never owned any in that county, which means he either leased or lived on and worked the land of someone else (possibly relatives), or he had land at first, and maybe gave it to Enoch when he was ready to get married (which only makes sense if they had been in Twiggs instead of Warren for some time at this point).


1819
Enoch lived in Twiggs County (land lottery records).  (According to the Blacksheariana, Enoch lived in Sumter County.  The book says his son was born there, but Sumter wasn't created until 1831, when it was separated from Lee, which was created in 1826; of course the book also says his son was born in Houston County, which also didn't exist yet in 1819, so. . . . once again, you really have to double check the information it gives us!  Enoch did live in Sumter Co. in later years, so maybe the son was mistaken as to where he was actually born.)


1820
John lived in . . . Wilkinson County?  (The Blacksheariana states this on his timeline, but doesn't give a citation.)  Twiggs had been a part of Wilkinson, so maybe he lived on a portion of land that bordered that county, so he was actually close to his relatives?  Or maybe this is another instance of the book not paying attention to the dates of county formations.

Jacob lived in Twiggs (land lottery records).  He won land in the new Irwin County - lot 96 of district 9.  (He paid the fee and obtained title in 1834.)


1821
Enoch lived in Twiggs County (land lottery records).  He drew lot 145 in district 4 of Monroe County and lot 174 in district 12 of Houston County (which the Blacksheariana doesn't even mention!)  We will see that he eventually moved to Houston County, but I haven't found any evidence of him in Monroe, so I don't know what happened with that.

John lived in Twiggs County?  Wilkinson County? (The Blacksheariana says he drew lot 132 in the 18th district of Early Co., but I couldn't find any evidence of this - the only book with a list is not digitized - so I couldn't look to see where he was living at the time.  I only confirmed Enoch's draw because a USGenweb page showed a list of fortunate drawers from Twiggs.  Oh, wait.  If John wasn't on that list, he must not have lived in Twiggs!)

John married his second wife in Twiggs County. (The Blacksheariana shows the page from his Bible.  It says he was married in Twiggs at the house of his wife's family.  Now, I know we just said he didn't live in Twiggs, but, as I mentioned before, if his land was actually over the border in Wilkinson County, his family was in Twiggs so he probably spent enough time in Twiggs to have met a girl there.)  And . . .

His first wife, get this, was the daughter of ... Moses Blackshear.  (Yes, he married his first cousin.)  I hardly think such a thing would have been arranged, so they must have fallen in love, which means they must have known each other before their marriage, especially because she was supposedly born in 1799 and would have barely been considered to be of a marriageable age in 1817.  John would have been 26 years old by then, which tells me that he must have fallen in love with her when she was still too young to get married, or else why didn't he marry somebody else?  So, either John waited for her until she was eighteen, or maybe they got permission for her to marry early; of course, she never had any children, which would be strange if they were married for so many years, (unless they weren't married very long before she died, and he waited several years before marrying his second wife in 1821).  Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is, this supports the idea that Jacob's family was living in the same area as Moses' family prior to 1817, since he would have had to have already met and fallen in love with her around the time he came of age.

So, here's my new theory:  Jacob and his family arrived in Washington County (where the other Blackshears lived) when they first came to Georgia, but moved at some point and were living in Warren County until John came back from the war, at which time they figured that, what with the Indian threat no longer an issue, it was safe to move on to Twiggs County, where Moses and his sons had been since at least 1811.  So they moved to Twiggs in 1814, and Jacob bought land and then signed it over to his son, Enoch, the following year when he came of age and got married.  John could have met his first wife at that point, and waited one to three years to marry her.

And here is my other new theory:   John just moved over to Warren County all by himself when he came of age in the spring of 1813, while his father and the rest of his family moved to Twiggs (maybe so that Lewis could attend school, seeing as how the Twiggs Academy had been opened in 1810), and then John got drafted and served his six months and then decided to join everyone else in Twiggs County.  (I feel like both theories are sorely lacking, but I think that whatever theory I come up with, we'll be okay with the idea that they were in Twiggs by 1814!)


1823
Jacob lived in Houston County by the end of this year. (Under Georgia law, juries were called from the tax list.  Tax lists reflected status as of January 1st.  Therefore, to be called in 1824, one must have been living there on the first of the year, implying that they had probably moved there by the end of the preceding year.)


1824
Jacob lived in Houston County (jury list).


1825
John lived in Twiggs County.  (The Blacksheariana cites a deed in which he sold the lot he won from the land lottery in Early County.  It supposedly named John as a resident of Twiggs.  I couldn't find the actual record to confirm this.)

Jacob and Enoch lived in Houston County (jury lists).

1826
John lived in Lowndes County.  (According to the Blacksheariana, he was a justice of peace during this year.)

Jacob lived in Houston County (jury list).

Lewis came of age.

1827
Lewis lived in Lowndes County (land lottery records).  He drew a lot in Muscogee County (I didn't find him in the index of deeds there, so maybe he just let the lot revert.)  

1829
Enoch lived in Houston County (tax list).  He still owned the lot he had gotten in the land lottery.

Jacob lived in Houston County (tax list).  He had no land and was listed as a defaulter.  He turned 60 years old this year, so maybe he just decided not to pay his taxes.

1830
Jacob and Enoch lived in Houston County (census).

John, Lewis & Alice lived in Lowndes County (tax list, census).  The Lowndes County tax list shows that John owned 400 acres in Houston County in addition to his land in Lowndes, as well as land in Early county, although not the same lot that he had drawn in the land lottery of the previous decade.

If you remember, I mentioned before that Jacob had won land during the 1820 land lottery in Irwin County - lot 96 section 9 - and finally paid the fee for 490 acres in 1834.   Now, I never found any Blackshears in Irwin County, so I just pretty much pushed this information into the back of my mind and never pulled it out again.  But while working on this post, I remembered that, while working on the last post for Silas Blackshear, I found his brothers Lewis and John in Lowndes County during the 1830's.  Maybe Lowndes County was formed out of Irwin County, and the lot was in that part.  It would explain why his sons ended up there, as well as why the fee was paid even though I didn't find evidence of Blackshears in Irwin County!   Let me check . . . .  Lowndes County was formed out of Irwin - back in 1825.

Oh my gosh, this all makes so much more sense to me now!

Take a look at this map:

Map Detail:  Georgia Land Districts
1845

This was the only map I could find online that had the land districts shown but was still close to the way the counties looked in the time we are talking about.  So, in 1820, everything below where the name Irwin is shown on this map was a part of that county.  It contained districts 1 through 16.  Jacob won 490 acres in lot 96 of district 9 (which would later be part of Lowndes County).

The tax rolls for 1830 show that John owned lot 173 in district 12 of Lowndes Co., which was right next door to the lot Lewis owned.  Alice's husband, John Platt, also owned land in the same district.  But guess what?  None of those lots were the lot that Jacob drew in the lottery.  (They weren't even in the same district.  This isn't making so much sense anymore!)  John's land showed the name of the original grantee, implying that he purchased the land from the actual winner.  Lewis' lot, however, does not show the name of the grantee, implying that he was on land that didn't actually belong to anybody yet.  I looked through the entire tax digest and didn't find anyone listed as being in possession of lot 96 in district 9.  If men over 60 didn't have to pay a poll tax, did they still have to pay taxes on their land?  Maybe this is our proof that Jacob had moved to Lowndes and was living on his land lottery tract, but wasn't on the tax list because of his age!


You know, trying to write a person's life story is a whole lot harder than I thought it would be!

1831
Enoch lived in Houston County (tax list).

1832 
Enoch lived in Houston County (jury list).

Jacob lived in Houston County (land lottery records). 

In a previous post, I shared a little clip from the Blacksheariana stating that Jacob received a lot in the 1832 land lottery while living in Houston County.  I couldn't find a copy of the actual record for that anywhere online, so I guess I just dropped it and focused on the fact that he was in Houston County during that year.  I decided to try one more time to find a list of the fortunate drawers for that lottery, and still came up empty handed - I found an online a copy of the original 1838 book showing who drew which lots, but for some weird reason it doesn't list any names for "the first district of the third section," the location of the lot Jacob drew.  After another half hour of searching for the "missing" districts, I stumbled across this:

I don't have any idea what book this came out of, because the blog I got it from didn't say, but it shows that the lot Jacob drew was way down at the bottom in that little triangle wedge, and that it was actually a part of what is known as the "gold lottery."

Gold had been found in the area that is shown as Lumpkin County on the map, so, for whatever reason (geology?), the authorities believed it would also be found in all of those shaded portions of the map.  Each of those lots was only 40 acres, maybe because they weren't great for farming and it was assumed they would just be used for prospecting. (I really have no idea!)  So I suppose it is possible that Jacob, either alone or with his family, actually moved up there into the former Cherokee territory in 1833 instead of staying in Houston County or moving near his sons in Lowndes, but we'll never know for sure because that is the time period in which neither Jacob nor his son Silas were of the right age to be on tax or jury lists, there are no tax or deed records for Paulding County until after this time period, and, although the original record of fortunate drawers can be viewed online, I can't for the life of me find the set of microfilms that have the actual patent documents so I can check for him in the gold lottery set.  Of course, it is just as likely that Judith put her foot down and said enough is enough, and Jacob sold the land, maybe sight unseen, since there was a considerable amount of speculating taking place, and a lot of unrest due to the forced removal of the Cherokee people from the land.

1833
Enoch lived in Houston County (jury list).

1834
John, Lewis, and Alice lived in Lowndes County (tax lists).

Enoch lived in Houston County (jury list).

Jacob received title to the land from the 1820 land lottery in Irwin - now Lowndes.  (The grant lists his residence as Twiggs, but that is the county where he lived when his name was drawn.)  This could indicate that he was living in Lowndes at this time, or it is possible that he just finally saved enough money to pay the fee, at which time he sold the land without ever living there.

1835
Enoch lived in Houston County (tax records, jury list).

John, Lewis & Alice lived in Lowndes County (tax list).  Lewis had different lots in the same district as before.

Silas most likely came of age this year.

1836
John lived in Lowndes County. (The Battle of Brushy Creek, between white settlers and Indians, was partly fought in John Blackshear's orchard.)

Enoch sold four parcels of land in Houston County (deed records).  One tract was the lot he acquired from the land lottery and one was the lot shown as belonging to John in the 1830 tax digest.

Silas (and Jacob) lived in Stewart County by the end of this year (jury list).

1837
Silas (and Jacob) lived in Stewart County (jury list).


1838
(Somebody else is shown as owning Jacob's land lottery lot in Lowndes County, which means he sold it some time after 1834 - maybe in 1836, before moving to Stewart County.)


1839
Silas (and Jacob) lived in Stewart County (jury list).

Enoch purchased land in Sumter County (deed cited by the Blacksheariana).  He lived in an area that was approximately 40 miles (one day's ride on a good horse) east of where Jacob and Silas were living.

1840
Silas (and Jacob) lived in Stewart County (census).  This is the last time we see Jacob in any document.

John lived in Stewart County (census).

Enoch lived in Sumter County (census).

1841
John lived in Stewart County (tax list).  He served as an inferior court judge this year and the next.

Silas lived in Stewart County (tax list).


1844

Alice lived in Lowndes County (tax list).

1848
John lived in Randolph County (tax list).

Silas moved to Arkansas (deed records).

1850
Alice and Lewis lived in Florida (census).

Whew!  That took forever.  But did we figure out where the family lived prior to Twiggs in 1818?  No, we did not.  John's pension application and the supposed location of Enoch's wife's family point to Warren County, but the fact that John married the much younger daughter of his uncle Moses points to Twiggs County (you know, since Moses paid the fee for his land there in 1811, implying he lived there by then).

There is one more mystery I had hoped to solve with all of this:  Was there ever a point in time when Jacob was living in the same location with Enoch and John after they had reached adulthood?  The reason I ask this is because there is an interesting anecdote in the Blacksheariana.  It tells us about a story that was passed down through the family.  In the section about Jacob the book says:

Well.  That's interesting.  We might tend to chalk this up to exaggeration, but the section on John says that "he was of great height and weight," and the section for Enoch says, "Enoch was a very large man, requiring especially built and braced beds and chairs."  Hmmmmm.  That sounds a bit more like maybe they really were quite large.  But how big would they have had to be in order to exceed half a ton together?

Half a ton is 1000 pounds.  They supposedly exceeded this, so either they averaged more that 334 pounds apiece, or somebody needed to recalibrate that scale!

Now, I assume that our Blackshears' weight must have been party attributable to muscle, since they didn't have slaves to work the fields; however, it dawned on me that they might have used hired out slaves to work their land (I don't know if Judith would have been opposed to that or not), in which case maybe they had packed on some extra pounds from sitting around and eating hearty meals . . .

So, what does 334 lbs look like?  Well, your average movie star action hero is between 6' and 6'5", and weighs between 180 - 250 lbs.  So, picture Captain America, Aquaman, The Terminator, Thor . . . not even close!  Here is a picture to help you put their size into perspective:

In the middle you have your Scottish model/reality t.v. star, who stands 5'11" and weighs about 180 lbs.  One either side you have two Scottish brothers who do Ultimate Strongman competitions.  (I chose Scots because Blackshear/Blackshaw is originally a Scottish name. Ha ha!)  The man on the right is 6'3" and 342 lbs., and the man on the left is 6'8" and 384 lbs.  Of course, their weight is all muscle, but stats for men of the same height show that one would weigh about the same if they carried a good amount of fat instead.

Now, I've always heard that people of the past were shorter than today, but after looking through revolutionary war records I discovered that there was actually a huge range in heights, and although around 5'6" seemed to be most common, there were plenty of men falling anywhere between 5'4" and 6'1."  So, my guess is that the Blackshear men were exceptionally tall (between 6'4" and 6'7") with whatever combination of muscle and fat would tip the scales at around 340 pounds.

I can just imagine Enoch saying, "Son, go get the horse
so we can move this rock out of the path . . .
oh, never mind, I'll just do it myself."

The Louisville Daily Courier
19 May 1866

             Ah! Look what I just found:

Here is our proof that it isn't just an exaggerated family story!  This newspaper article was written when Enoch was around 70 years old. (So maybe he was getting short on muscle, but I seriously doubt that the reporter would be bragging if those men had a physique like William Howard Taft, meaning that Enoch must have been really, really tall.)  

I don't think the size thing was limited to Jacob, John, and Enoch, either - Jacob's father left his "wearing apparel" to Jacob and his brother Moses, which means both Elisha Stout and Moses must have been very large men as well.  And here is something else - Amelia Virginia was probably quite tall for a woman, meaning that her father, Silas, was probably quite tall, too.

(Amelia Virginia's sons, A. D. and Elmer were 6' and 5'10" respectively.  Their father, W. C., was 5'11," so if you use the handy formula for figuring out how tall a child will be, based on the heights of the parents, we discover that Amelia Virginia should have been at least 5'10" tall!  Incidentally, W. C.'s son with his second wife, who stood about 5'2", was only 5'7 ½.")

So, standing around with the Blackshear men probably looked something like this:

(Without the modern clothes, of course!)

The incident with the scale (assuming it is true) most likely occurred between 1834 and 1840-ish.  The 1830 census shows that both Jacob and Enoch lived in Houston county that year, and although John did not, he did own a large tract of land there.  It is possible, then, that Jacob was overseeing John's land and he came to visit to see how things were going and all three went down to the scales together.  Or something like that.  So why do I say it must have been a few years later than 1830?  Well, the anecdote tells us that they stood on the wagon scales.  It just so happens that the platform scale, although patented in 1830, wasn't actually sold until 1834.  So, they couldn't have been weighed together before that year.  It is possible that Jacob lived in Lowndes County for a time between 1834 and 1836, which still gives us two of them in the same location, and by 1840 we find both Silas (with his father in his household) and John living in Stewart County.  Enoch lived in Houston County that entire time, but he could have come to visit and gone to the scales with his father and brother.  So, I think the story is plausible.

I personally think it is more likely that the incident occurred in 1834-36, for several reasons: first, it appears that Jacob moved to Stewart County by the end of that time period, but I didn't find evidence of John being there that early.  That means that we have less evidence for two of them living in the same place during 1836-1839, making it less likely that all three men would visit the scales together.  Second, by 1840 Silas was a grown man and he, not Jacob, was the head of the household, which means it is more likely that he would have been the one at the scales.  Third, all three of them would be over 40 years old by then, and we all know what happens to your muscle mass as you get older!  And fourth, it just seems to me that everybody probably knew that they were exceptionally large men, and as soon as they had a means to do so, they figured hey, let's find out how much they actually weigh!


Okay.  So that's what I have for Jacob.  I'll make some mention of him here and there when I talk about his father and grandfather, but I think I've pretty much found everything that is currently available for our sleuthing endeavors.

When we look back at Jacob Blackshear's life, we can see that he lived during times of turmoil and of change.  He lived through events that defined the future of our country - as a young child, he saw his father, grandfather, and uncles go off to fight in the Revolutionary War, as a teenager, he experienced the formation of our new country and the constitutional crisis that followed.  Then, as an adult, he lived through another war, the Indian removal, and western expansion.  During his lifetime, no less than 13 new states were admitted to the union, and the slavery/state's rights question, marked by the Missouri Compromise and Nat Turner's rebellion, began to tear the country apart.

He also lived through dramatic changes in fashion - from 'fall front' knee breeches with stockings and a tail coat, to pantaloons (similar to what we call "leggings" today), and then to basically modern trousers (with a straight leg and center button fly) worn with a frock coat:

Jacob would have worn something like this when he got married.

Around the time Jacob moved to Georgia, this was typical day dress for a man.

By the later years of Jacob's life, modern pants, black ties, unruffled shirts and frock coats were the norm.

Of course, living on the Georgia frontier, there probably wasn't a whole lot of dressing-up going on, and men who were working the fields probably stuck with buckskin pantaloons or pants (the equivalent of blue jeans back then) and tall boots most of the time.  And as for the "wearing apparel" that Jacob inherited from his father, I'm sure the clothes were rather expensive, since Elisha was quite well-to-do, but the fancy knee breeches wouldn't have remained in fashion very long, nor done Jacob much good in Georgia. (For more on the changing fashions of this time period, visit Jane Austen's World.)

There were smaller changes during Jacob's lifetime as well, as the following inventions (in no particular order) came into use: the cotton gin, farmer's almanac, power loom, lightning rod, an improved plow, the coffee percolator, circular saw, and dental floss, the platform scale, the stethoscope, the threshing machine, the smallpox vaccine, the tin can, matches, the sewing machine, the revolver, the steam locomotive, steamships, the telegraph, gas lights, and early photography.  Wow.  He must have felt like he was living in a 'modern' era!

I'll be putting Jacob's timeline and family data sheet on this blog's Blackshear page any day now, but before I do, I want to make a few comments about what I've discovered about Jacob's family.  Here's the chart (the old version) to jog your memory:

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

First, it just dawned on me that I need to fix the death dates or Jacob and Judith.  If I am ending the range based on the fact that Silas packed up and moved to Arkansas in January of 1848 (which I assumed he wouldn't do with an elderly parent in his household), that would mean that Jacob and Judith had probably passed by some time in 1847.

We've talked about the whole Mary and Ann not being their own children idea; I haven't decided yet how to deal with that on the data sheet.

Now for Nancy:  I think we also talked about the fact that she must have been either a twin with or younger than John.  And, that is a tight squeeze to fit her between John and Enoch, so perhaps Enoch was born a bit later. (I'm really not sure why the Blacksheariana only gives an estimated birth year based on the census, when there was supposedly a family chart made up based on an interview with Enoch himself.)  I tried tracing Nancy when I was trying to verify if the elderly man in Silas' household in 1840 was indeed Jacob, and didn't really have any luck.  The names of her husbands came from the Blacksheariana, but I wasn't able to find a single Isaac Griffin (there were actually quite a few in Georgia) who seemed to fit.  The only tree I found online for her had her married to a Jonathon Davis, but when you search the records you find that he and his wife Nancy (originally Turner, not Blackshear) were both born and married in Virginia.  (The Blacksheariana might have actually been tracing this same couple, because the name of their daughter on the online tree - with documents showing the relationship - matches what the book says.)

There was a Nancy Griffin of the right age listed on the 1830 census in Lowndes County (on the same page as Jacob's other three children!) as a head of household, which is a tantalizing find - maybe she was a young(ish) widow twice.  (The census doesn't say "widow" next to her name like it does for other women, but why would she be a head of household if she wasn't?)  And maybe the Blacksheariana was wrong about how many children she had.  (The book says she only had one child, with her first husband, but the census shows two boys 10-14 and one girl 5-9.)   I mean, I actually found on the 1827 land lottery list of fortunate drawers an entry for the illegitimate children of Nancy Blackshear!  She could have been the daughter of one of the other Blackshear relatives, or she could have been our Nancy (She lived in Houston County, the same place as Jacob, at the time.) who later married the Misters Davis and Griffin, and either nobody wanted to acknowledge those children or it just wasn't polite to mention such things back when the original research on her was conducted!  Of course, if that Nancy is not our Nancy, but our Nancy is the one on the 1830 census, it is possible that Isaac Griffin was already a widower, and so the two boys in the household could have been Nancy's step-children.

As for John, I'm convinced that he was actually the oldest child of Jacob and Judith.  His data is pretty easy because there are a lot of primary source documents out there for him.

Enoch also has a lot of primary source records still available; unfortunately, they aren't ones that will tell us much about his birth or death dates.  I did find that he was recorded on the 1870 census, and the Blacksheariana says he died "around 1876," so I'm not sure why my chart says c. 1870!

There should have been another child, a girl, because the 1800 census showed four girls under the age of 16 in the household.  So, I am planning to insert an unnamed daughter after Enoch, born between 1795 and 1800.  (I think my rule of thumb for dealing with possible missing children is:  if they are found in a record, even if we don't know their name, I will include them on the family data sheet.  As for any unusually large gap that cannot be explained with proof of a missing child, well, we will just have to say to ourselves, hmmmm, there was probably another child in there somewhere.)

So, I guess Lewis is supposed to come next, before Alice.  The Blacksheariana says he was married to Civil Platt, and a lot of people out there have found records for a Civility Platt and have attached those to his tree.  However, close inspection of the records and a little bit of extra searching reveals that those are two entirely different people:

Civility Platt was born in 1809 in Georgia.  Her maiden name was actually Civility Lewis, and then she married James Platt (1827), who then died and she married a Jonathan Platt (but not Alice's John Platt) in 1833.   She was still married to Jonathan Platt in 1870.

Civil Platt was born around 1805 in North Carolina, and she was still married to Lewis Blackshear in 1880.  This was most likely the sister of Alice's husband, John.  I never once found her in a census or deed record as Civility.  

And speaking of deed records, the Blacksheariana refers to Lewis as "L.E.B." at once point, implying that Lewis' middle name began with an E, but out of all of the census records, tax digests, multiple land patents and two separate deeds (that I just found today), there is no middle initial on any of them.  There was a Louis E. Blackshear in Georgia, but he was of a younger generation.

I also now have more information on Lewis' death - not enough to give an exact year, but based on the date of his last land patent and his absence from the 1885 Florida state census we can narrow it down to a two to three year range.

When I first started looking for Alice, I was only sort of sure I had the right person, but I'm very confident now that the woman I've been tracing is in fact the daughter of Jacob Blackshear.  There are a ton of census records for her, as well as the headstone I mentioned earlier, so we can pin down a birth and death date and location for her now.

Silas is the last child we know about, but there is a huge stretch of years between him and Alice.  I'm assuming that is the reason so many people choose to go with the 1811 birth year for him.  I feel pretty sure that the evidence points to a later birth date, however, which would mean that either there was another child (or more) born before him who did not survive, or he was one of those late in life babies we like to call "accidents."  (His mother would have been 44 years old in 1814.)

And one more thing that just occurred to me . . . now that we know for 100% certainty who Silas' mother was, maybe his middle initial, M., actually stood for Moore . . . just a thought!

One final note about Jacob:  I've seen some trees showing him as "Jacob B. Blackshear."  I don't know where that comes from, as I haven't seen one single document showing any middle initial for him.  So, until one falls into my hands, I will continue to refer to him as just Jacob Blackshear, without a middle name or initial.

Hopefully I'll have everything up on Jacob's page by the end of the week.  I probably won't put any of the documents for his children up right now, but if anyone would like copies of whatever I have, send me an email (the link is on the bottom left of this page) and I'll either put them on the blog or send them directly to you.

In my next post, we are going to jump over Jacob's father and talk about his grandfather, Alexander Blackshear.  It's too bad I wasn't a little more ahead of things, as it would have been nice to post the Revolutionary War stuff this weekend!

                                                                                                                                         - Therese