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