Further Back Blackshears (Week 6)

Tracing Back the Blackshear Line, part 19

1747.  In my last post, we saw that Alexander Blackshear was first recorded in the records of North Carolina in August of that year.  The last time we can find him in the records of his previous home, Kent County, Delaware, however, was in 1740.

I don't know what happened during those missing years in the records - 1741 through 1746.  Did he leave Delaware soon after he sold his land, which is what I would assume would make the most sense?  But if that were the case, why would he wait so long to put in a land entry in North Carolina?  Perhaps he and his family leased a house and plot somewhere while he spent some time scoping things out and picking a site to claim, and then his was one of the land entries that took years to even get a warrant for a survey.  Or, they could have been just living on their claim and going about their business while they waited for all of the paperwork to go through.  Although the index card in the North Carolina archives showed a land entry date of March 28, 1748, we discovered through other records that that was actually the date his survey warrant was approved, so there's no telling how long before that he put in the actual request.

The other option is that Alexander sold his land and then leased someplace or lived on the land of a family member in Delaware until they moved.  I think that makes much less sense, especially if the Robert Blackshire that we found last week was Alexander's father.  The whole time I was debating who he might be, I kept wondering, who would pick up and make a major move when they had an elderly parent they would have to drag with them, especially if that parent was in poor health?  And especially if there were still two other sons who were staying in Delaware that he could have lived with?  I told myself, well, maybe they already had their wive's elderly parents in their households, or maybe they had had a falling out with their father, or maybe Alexander was just the favorite son and so his father refused to be left behind.  Robert Blackshire's petition stated that he had been in poor health for eighteen months, so if the family had actually moved in 1740, then we remove the problem of making the move with an ailing father in tow.

Of course, we don't know for certain if the Robert Blackshire in the Craven County petition was indeed Alexander's father, but it is quite possible, if not even likely.

But who else did Alexander bring with him?

Well, he obviously brought his wife, and if you look at the proposed birth dates of his children, he brought at least two who were age five or younger:  

Husband:	Alexander BLACKSHEAR
born married	c. 1708
	btw. 1730 - 1735
Wife:	Agnes [STOUT]
born	c. 17??
Children:
	James               b. c. 1735, DE
	Eleanor            b. NC
	Elisha Stout    b. c. 1736, DE
	Abraham    b. c. 1742, DE or NC
	Sarah                b. NC
	Daughter (name unknown)

This is the information that is given by the Blacksheariana.  I got the birth order of the children from its entry for Alexander, but if you look at each individual child's entry, you get these dates and birth locations.  (Obviously, there is a bit of a discrepancy here, since Eleanor is proposed to be the second child but was supposedly born in North Carolina instead of Delaware.)

I'm not quite sure why the book gives a birth date for Alexander of c.1708, since he first shows up in the records in 1734 when he received a "Grant to Survey." I also don't know how long the land grant process typically took in mid-18th century Delaware - I came across a website from the state archives that said warrants were usually issued only a few weeks after the initial application was submitted.  If that was the case for Alexander, we might want to assume that he wasn't married until 1734.  That would be kind of weird, though, because if we accept the 1708 birth year, he would have been twenty-six years old already by then.  But, I also found a paper by some university professor that said that it was very common for people to squat on and improve a piece of land (with fields, fences, houses, and outbuildings), sometimes for years, before actually applying for the grant.  So, maybe that was the case for Alexander.  If so, and he was married when he was twenty-one or so, he might have had one or two (or even three) children before his son James was born.  If none of them survived to adulthood, they most likely would have never appeared in a written document, which would explain why we have no record of them.

I think it is very possible that there was at least one child born before James, not only because, back then, probably every family had at least one child who died young, but also because the average number of children born to a family in the early 1700's was eight to ten, and we only see six in the records for Alexander's family.  And then, there are the names . . . .

Alexander's brothers, and father, and grandfather for that matter, were really big on giving their children traditional family names - the same names that had been handed down since before any of them arrived in the colonies, names like Robert, Thomas, Joseph, and Randulph.  Alexander's grandfather was so big on this tradition that after his sons Thomas and Joseph died, he named subsequent sons . . .  Thomas and Joseph.  We don't see any of these names in Alexander's family, though.  So, maybe he had an earlier son or two who were given one of these names, and either he and his wife, Agnes, didn't like the idea of using the name again after a death, or the child/children didn't die until after Agnes was past childbearing age.

So, it is possible that Alexander brought up to five children under the age of ten with him when he made the move.

And then, there is a possibility that he brought somebody else . . .

While doing some preliminary research into Alexander's wife, Agnes, back when I was making Jacob Blackshear's family data sheet, I came across the page for her mother (also Agnes) on the FindAGrave website.  This is what it said:

"1740 is not only the year Agnes' son Benjamin died but also the year daughter Agnes and her husband (Alexander Blackshear) sell his inherited land and begin the move to North Carolina. Several accounts say Agnes (and one other person not named) accompany them, and she died there sometime around (or after 1745) The other person is not Jacob or Benjamin's widow (Elizabeth Lewis) as they can be accounted for in Delaware. It is unknown what happened to son Charles."

Now, I don't know who or where those "several accounts" might be from, but this memorial was made by a couple who are serious genealogists, so I'm guessing they found the info in some hundred-year-old book or something.  I find it very interesting that those accounts say that there was another "person not named" who traveled with them from Delaware to North Carolina.  Hmmmm.  Could that perhaps have been Alexander's father, Robert?

(I don't know about you, but I am becoming more and more convinced that it was.)

Anyway, at some point after May of 1740, Alexander decided to pack up his family and head off to North Carolina.  When choosing a place to settle, he probably didn't have access to very good maps.  The only maps that have survived from the early 1700's are pretty vague and inaccurate; the following detail is from a 1733 map by Henry Popple, but it was published again in 1746 in a version that was identical except for the color:

The red circle is the town of New Berne, the only town in Craven County and the capital of the colony.  (Alexander's first grant of land was about 30 miles to the west southwest.)  To the northeast was the town of Bath, which was the last residence of the pirate Blackbeard (who had been killed about 22 years before Alexander's move).  To the east of that, there was the "Sunken Land and Dismal Swamps" where Jacob Blackshear's wife grew up.  The map shows two forts within a relatively close distance, and the only Indian tribe mentioned is shown as having been "destroyed," so I guess the area probably looked pretty good.  This map is actually by far the most detailed of any surviving map that I've found prior to the 1740's, even though it isn't entirely accurate (notice how the Trent River is shown as two separate rivers flowing into the Nuese, and from pretty much the wrong directions no less).  Maybe it is even the actual map that Alexander consulted when deciding where he should move to!

Whether the family traveled by land or sea, they probably left some time between late spring and early summer - not only would they have wanted to get settled before winter rolled around, but if they traveled by sea, sailing during the winter months was usually avoided because of storms, and sailing along the eastern seaboard of North America during hurricane season would have had the potential for trouble as well.

They most likely traveled by ship, as coastal sailing was widely used at the time.  Not only that, but just look at this map that was made by John Mitchell in 1773, but is actually identical to the one he made in 1755:

(This is actually a map with excellent resolution, but for some reason when I made it smaller, it got kind of blurry!  I suggest clicking on the title underneath to view it larger.)

Possible Routes of Travel: Delaware to North Carolina c. 1745

At the top you see Delaware, which is where Alexander and his family were traveling from.  They lived in the county of Kent, but I'm not sure where exactly, because I haven't researched that part of their lives yet, so I just stuck a star next to the label "Kent."  Near the bottom of the map, you will see another red star, also not placed in an exact location, but just in the general area of the Trent River (near the borders of Dobbs and Onslow counties).  The green line shows the optional land routes they could have taken, based on the roads that existed at the time (earlier, less detailed maps show a road running all along the coast, so I'm guessing the roads on this map were probably already there by 1740-ish).  This is what their trip would have looked like by land:
They had to load all of the possessions they were taking (which might have been as much as they could manage, seeing as how products were much harder to come by back then), and head way up out of their way to catch the main road, or they would have had to cross about 50 miles overland on lesser tracks.  Then they would cross a river, go overland some more, then join up with a road, cross a straight (I'm guessing that's what you call that part of the water - I studied that back in 6th grade or something!), and carry on a bit more on the road.  Then they would have had to hop on a boat, sail across Chesapeake Bay, then disembark, and travel 55 miles, either fording or taking a ferry across three different rivers along the way.  Then they would have come to the Potowmack (Potomac) River, so they would have had to get onto another boat, and then travel 28 more miles on a road, cross the Rapahannok River, and then head down the road for another 100 miles or so, crossing over at least two rivers on the way.  At that point, they would have had to cross the James River in Virginia, either to Norfolk or Jamestown, then get off the boat and travel between about 76 to 110 miles, depending on which land route they decided to take.  After that, they would have had to get on another boat and cross Albermarle Sound.  Then they would have traveled by road for another 45 miles, crossed the Pamticoe (Pamlico) River, traveled 30 more miles, crossed the Neusse River, traveled another 20 miles, crossed the Trent River, and then, depending on where exactly they were going, possibly gone another 40 miles or so before the trip was over.

Whew.  That sure sounds like a lot of trouble, doesn't it?  Not only that, but the trip would have been at least 354 miles of road, not to mention the time spent waiting for a boat or ferry and then crossing the water, not to mention the time spent loading and unloading, and then we have to consider the time it took to find lodgings, and the time spent dealing with anything that might have gone wrong, and we find ourselves with a very complicated trip that would have taken a minimum of thirty days.

If, however, they just decided to hop on a small ship and travel down the coast (yellow line), which was actually a very common way to travel back then, they could have made it from Wilmington, Delaware (at the very top of the map) to Wilmington, North Carolina (at the very bottom of the map) in just five days and eight hours.  (Disclaimer:  I got that from a calculator with a limited number of available ports, and I filled in a ship speed of 4 knots, which is what I found in a research paper about 18th century coastal shipping, but a ship could have sailed faster if it wasn't heavily laden with cargo and there was a good wind, so if we say 7 knots, that takes the trip down to 3 days.  However, back in the day when there was no electricity and not so may lighthouses, they would have only been able to sail during daylight hours - I don't know if the calculator is assuming 24 hours straight of sailing or not, but even if we had to double the time to account for that problem, it would have been a much more simple - no looking for food and lodgings, no getting on and off boats and ferries - six to ten day trip, which is still so much better than the land route.)  So.  I guess now we know why coastal sailing was such a popular way to travel, huh?

So, why did Alexander leave Delaware and make the trip to North Carolina, possibly dragging his sixty-plus year old father and mother-in-law, and two (or more) young children all the way there with him?  I don't know, but I'm guessing it might have had something to do with Delaware getting to be just a bit too crowded.

There were so many colonists moving southward and new immigrants arriving in the colonies during the first half of the 1700's that New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Virginia almost doubled their population every twenty years, and New Hampshire, Rhode island, Maryland, and both Carolinas more than doubled theirs.  Delaware more than doubled its population between 1700 and 1720, but between 1720 and 1740, it saw a fourfold increase - from a population of 5400 to just under 20,000!  That's an increase in population density from 1.3 persons/sq mi in 1700, to 2.7 persons in 1720, to 10 persons/sq mi in 1740.

North Carolina, on the other hand, had a population of 52,000 in 1740, which was about two and a half times the population of Delaware, but since the area of the colony in 1740 was about 13 times larger than Delaware, it only had a population density of 2 persons/sq mi.  Not only that, but the western border wasn't set, so it was continually expanding westward into former Indian lands.  In addition, North Carolina wanted new residents so badly, that it offered up something like ten years of exemption from quitrents (like a property tax) for anyone bringing a certain number of new settlers into the colony, as well as for those settlers themselves.  So many people were moving to North Carolina during the middle of the 18th century that in February of 1751 the governor of the state noted that "inhabitants flocked in daily, mostly from Pennsylvania and other parts of America already overstocked with people, and some directly from Europe."  Although most records refer to groups of settlers being brought overseas from places like Scotland, who knows, maybe Alexander was also part of a group recruited by some North Carolina landowner. 

(And here is just a side note on the dangers of trusting the internet:  You wouldn't believe how many different answers I got when I did a search to find out the area of Delaware!  I don't know if some of those websites were including water or what, but I finally went with the number on the Delaware.gov website!)

So.  Alexander and his family settled in what was basically a backwoods area, with the nearest town approximately 30 miles away with no real road to get there.  After they arrived, Alexander would have had to clear his land and get a house built, all without having any sons old enough to help.

What was life like for his family back in the 1740's?  Well, he probably spent his time working his fields and doing whatever it is you do to your pine trees to make turpentine and other naval stores (the biggest export from southern North Carolina at the time).  His wife and daughters would have spent their days making cloth and butter and candles and everything else that they needed but wasn't readily available or cost effective to buy.

During the 1740's the first Great Awakening (a nationwide evangelical religious revival) was in full swing.  Conflict with Native Americans, whose tribes had been ravaged by a smallpox epidemic that swept across North Carolina in 1738-40, rose up periodically in the western portions of the colony.  The War of Jenkins' Ear (yes, it was really called that!) was waged between Britain and Spain in the New World, and the summer of 1747 saw numerous attacks on settlements along the coast of Carteret County, and even the capture of the town of Beaufort on Core Sound (about 40 miles from New Berne) by a group of pirates fighting for Spain.  (The future father-in-law of Alexander's son Elisha Stout led the force that repelled the invaders. You can read about it here.)

The decade also saw the British government enacting additional restrictive trade acts, exacerbating the conditions that would eventually lead to the Revolutionary War.  According to the online Britannica, the exploitation of the colonies caused not only resentment, but also outright refusal to comply, and "widespread law evasion fostered in the colonists a spirit of disobedience and insubordination."  The men of North Carolina were apparently exceptionally strong-willed and independent-minded, as at one point during his tenure (1735-1752), the governor, Gabriel Johnston, referred to the inhabitants of the colony as "wild and barbarous," because he couldn't get them to do what he wanted!

And in 1749, the first printing press in all of North Carolina was installed at New Berne in order to print laws and currency (which was actually forbidden by the British government!).  The first newspaper in the colony was published two years later, not that it did Alexander a whole lot of good since he couldn't read, but I suppose at least some of his neighbors might have had news to share, making them all feel a bit less isolated (which also contributed to the conditions eventually leading to the Revolutionary War).

The next time Alexander Blackshear shows up in the paper trail is 1754, the year that the French and Indian War began.  But we are going save that for next time.

Before I go, though, I want to share some interesting facts about colonial dialects.  We've seen that Alexander Blackshear's name was written as Blackshire and Blackshare in those first North Carolina records.  As we continue to follow his story, we will see that it has also been spelled as Blackshaw and Blackshear, and his sons even show up as Blacksher and Blackshere.  In my last post, I said that, since Alexander was not literate, whomever was writing his documents would spell his name however they heard it.  And I mentioned way back when that the Blacksheariana explained that, prior to the 1900's, most people with any variation of the name actually pronounced it as BLACKshr.  Well, there isn't really too much interpretation to that, is there?  It makes sense that a lot of people would spell the second part as "shire" because, you know, New Hampshire and Worcestershire.  (Okay, bad example - I mean, who actually knows how to pronounce that anyway?!)  But what about "shaw" and "shear"?  Those seem like weird choices of spelling, don't they?  

Well, I thought maybe it had something to do with all of the different dialects those document writers might have had, what with so much immigration from so many different places.  But as it turns out, apparently by the time of the Revolutionary War, the language spoken in all of the colonies was pretty homogeneous.  Strange, right?  The hows and whys are explained in a fascinating article on the JStor website called "When Did Colonial America Gain Linguistic Independence?"  (I know, that sounds pretty boring, but it is actually extremely interesting and entertaining as well, so you should definitely click on that title so the link I inserted will take you there!)  

You might be wondering what exactly that colonial dialect might have sounded like.  Well, I read a book several years ago about the Appalachian dialect that said that, due to the prolonged isolation of the area, its dialect was not backwards, but was instead very similar to the way the original colonial inhabitants spoke!  Now, it just so happens that the same holds true for other isolated areas, like the Outer Banks, which were settled primarily by Irish immigrants (thus, their dialect being called a 'brogue'), and the Core Sound islands off the coast of Carteret County and very near Craven, which were settled by families of English background.  The Appalachian dialect has a heavy Scottish influence to it, due to the huge influx of settlers coming directly from Scotland in the mid 18th century, but all three have significant similarities.  And, as all three are from North Carolina, who knows, maybe they are pretty close to what ol' Alexander and his neighbors sounded like!

Just for the fun of it, here are some samples to listen to:

Sample 1
Sample 2
Sample 3
Sample 4
Sample 5 

(The first four came from the video, "Core Sounders: Living from the Sea."  The families living there today are descended from the original settlers from the 1700's.  They had no bridge to the mainland until the 1940's, making their population very isolated.  The fifth is from an interview with Jim Tom Hendrick, a legendary Appalachian moonshiner.)

After taking the time to find, copy, and trim those soundbites, the whole original spelling of Blackshaw was still bothering me, though, so I did a bit more research and guess what?  The modern British pronunciation of "shaw" actually sounds almost like "shore" (with a long o and a very slight r sound at the end).  So that could explain why the family name was Blackshaw when our ancestors first arrived in the colonies, but later began to be spelled with an "r" at the end.  Funny thing, though, is that the modern British pronunciation of "New Hampshire" actually drops off the ending "r" and sounds something like "New HAMPshuh."  It's no wonder the name went through so many changes in spelling over time and place as the colonial dialect became homogeneous and then reformed into a variety of regional dialects during the 1800's.  And, while looking back last night at the 1740 deed in which Alexander and Agnes sold their land in Delaware, I discovered another, different spelling of the name: Agnes actually signed her name as Blackshier!

And that's all I have for you today.  Next time, we'll look into Alexander's accumulation of land in Craven/Jones counties, and see if we can't figure out what exactly happened with that parcel at the center of the dispute with the Bryan family.

                                                                                                                                            - Therese

Further Back Blackshears (Week 5)

Tracing Back the Blackshear Line, part 18

So far, while researching the Blackshears, I've been going backwards from son (or daughter) to father.  It seemed like a good way to do it when I started, because, you know, we were more familiar with the more recent ancestor.  It also seemed like a good idea because I thought there would be more information about the ones who lived later as opposed to those ethereal colonial family members.  You know, the ones who seem to be nothing more than a listing of hypothetical names on a paper - almost imaginary, for all we know about them.  As it turns out, there are a remarkable number of surviving documents from the 1700's, and it is my hope that we can flesh out our forebears enough to make them seem like real, actual people. 

Today we are going to skip back over Jacob's father, to his grandfather, Alexander Blackshear.  But we are not going to start at the beginning of his life - we are going to pick him up upon his arrival in North Carolina, and then we are going to move forward through time, talking about his son and Jacob's father, Elisha Stout Blackshear, as we come to the years in which he begins to appear in the historical record.  Why would I do such a thing?  Well, since we have spent a considerable amount of time in the Craven/Jones County area of North Carolina already, it seemed like it would be better to just pick things up there and finish them off before having to learn about an entirely different place.  Also, some of the documents that I've managed to find concern both Alexander and Elisha Stout, so moving through things chronologically removes the need to decide exactly when to share them.  Who knows - maybe it will turn into one big confusing mess - I hope not, but we'll have to wait and see!

So.  Alexander Blackshear no.1, as the Blacksheariana refers to him, first appears in the records of North Carolina in 1747.  The Blacksheariana tells us that on August 1st in that year, he witnessed the will of one John Fillyaw in Craven County.  The book says the information came from page 211 of some Genealogical Index, but this is what the entry on page 120 of Abstract of North Carolina Wills... by J. Bryan Grimes says:

So, pretty close, but this one spells the name of the deceased a little differently and says that it was witnessed on August 31st.  Of course, since the two secondary sources didn't match, I felt like I needed to try and track down the original will.  I finally found a copy on Ancestry.com, but since they always over-correct their records, I had to re-correct and colorize the will to make it readable:

Will of John Filliaw

Craven County, NC
Alexander Blackshare, Witness

1747

There is Alexander's name, down there at the bottom left section.  Now, I didn't say, there is his signature, because he didn't sign his name - he made his mark.  Let's stop and talk about that for a minute.

 This is how the Blacksheariana transcribes the signature of Alexander Blackshear from his own will:

This makes it look like Alexander had a middle name that began with the letter "A" (probably because of the period the book inserted).  And this is how it shows Alexander's wife's signature:

Same period inserted after what looks like a middle initial.  I suppose this is why I have seen trees with her name recorded as "Agnes B. Blackshear."  But this is what their marks really looked like:

Just like in the will above, Alexander's mark was just a capital letter A, with no period.  His wife's mark was actually an AB, once again with no periods.

And here are some examples of other people's marks:

You can see the one on the left just has an "X" but the one on the right used the letter of her first name.  And here are two more, one that used the first letter of the first name, and one that used the first letter of the last name:

And as we saw above, Agnes Blackshear used the initials of both her first and last names.  So, when a person was either illiterate, or too old and "infirm" to write anymore, the clerk or person writing the document for them would sign their name for them, then the person would write either an X or an initial or other unique symbol (like John Filliaw used in his will) in between their first and last names.  Then, the clerk or whoever was writing their document, would add the his or her mark.  (And when the clerk of the court entered the documents into their record books, they would copy the mark the person drew.)

So why did I bother to show this?  First of all, Alexander used a mark on every document I've seen for him, even the ones I found from Delaware, when he was a younger man.  That tells us that he was illiterate.  (He was a farmer, so it wouldn't make sense that he was blind or disabled or any other reason that would keep him from signing.)  Agnes, however, did not use a mark on the documents from Delaware - the mark above came from her will, when she was old and dying.  This tells us that she was actually educated.  I found that to be a surprising revelation, and so I looked back through the deed book from Kent County, Delaware and discovered that there were a lot of educated men and women, as well as a lot of men and women who were illiterate.  And the really surprising thing was that there were quite a few couples where the husband signed with a mark, but the wife wrote her name.

The other reason I wanted to show you these marks is so that you could see that the marks were a symbol and not an initial.  So Alexander and Agnes should NOT be written as Alexander A. Blackshear and Agnes B. Blackshear, like it is shown in the Blacksheariana.   (Incidentally, middle names seemed to be very rare back then - Jacob's father was always known as Elisha Stout Blackshear, but I have found very, very few other men of the time with a middle name/initial on any sort of document.)

Now, back to that will!  If you didn't notice, Alexander's last name was spelled as Blackshare, not Blackshear.  But remember, he didn't sign his own name, so the person who wrote the will down spelled it like he heard it.  (And come to think about it, since he couldn't read and write, he wouldn't have known how to spell it himself, anyway!)  Which brings us to the next time we find him in the historical records of North Carolina, this time as Alexander Blackshire:

So, it turns out that this entry from the Blacksheariana isn't entirely accurate.  We can find a transcript of the minutes in The Colonial Records of North Carolina by William L. Saunders (apparently the council minutes have not been microfilmed or digitized, or if they have, there is some weird reason why nobody has put them online):

The Blacksheariana says that it was a petition for a Land Warrant, when the minutes actually say that his was one of the petitions for a Grant.  In case you are shrugging your shoulders and saying, so what's the difference, here is a rundown of the land grant process in North Carolina (according to a Familysearch article, here):

Step 1: Entries or Applications

After a person selected a piece of vacant land, he would enter a claim or apply for it by describing its features to a government official or entry-taker. The entry-taker would record the description on loose sheets or into bound volumes, depending on the time period. These descriptions show the name of the person seeking the land, a description of the land, the number of acres, the name of adjacent land owners, and the date the entry was made.

Step 2: Warrants

If, after three months, the person seeking the land received no opposition to his entry by way of legal caveat, the entry taker would convey a warrant to the assigned surveyor. This warrant was the authorization for the surveyor to complete a plat. Sometimes as many as 10 years could pass between entry and warrant.

(We saw this with Judith Moore's father, John Moore, who had already died by the time his land was granted.)

Step 3: Plats or Surveys

After receiving the warrant, the surveyor would survey the land and draw a plat map. This map may vary from the land description given in the entry or warrant. The surveyor sent copies of the plat to the land office.

Step 4: Grants or Patents

After officials received the necessary papers and fees, the new land owner was given the grant document that was his patent to the land.

Step 5: County Records

After land was transferred to individual ownership, later transactions, including deeds and mortgages, were recorded by the county registers of deeds, clerks of the superior courts, and sheriffs. Recording for most counties was incomplete in the early years. Probate records and wills were also used to transfer property. They were usually recorded by other county officials.

The distinction between a warrant and a grant is important, because the petition for a warrant was actually early on in the process.  The petition for the actual grant did not occur until the survey had been completed, which could be months or even years later.  This is why, at the meeting of the governor's council shown above, there were like thirty petitions for warrants and only four for grants.  And the very last word in the above record says Granted, which means that Alexander's land patent was approved.  So, by October of 1848, Alexander had already gone through the entire process and was the proud owner of 100 acres in Craven County.

Now, here is where the records trail gets a little bit crazy.  At some point in time, the North Carolina archives made a bunch of index cards to catalog all of the land grant records:

This card shows that on March 28, 1748 Alexander submitted a land entry for a piece of land in Onslow County for 100 acres.  The land was on "Rattle Snake branch" which happens to be a tributary of the Trent River (or possibly a tributary of one of the many creeks that were tributaries of the Trent River - I need to go back and look at the twenty-something maps I've downloaded!).  But this card, for file #0151, shows no entry number, nor does it show a date that the land grant was issued.  This would make one think that he never received the land.  I tried looking for more land records from the archives, unsuccessfully, but did find a cool website, NCLandGrants.com that has a searchable database and copies of records that I haven't been able to find anywhere else.  When I did a search for Blackshire, I got these results:

You'll notice that the first entry is for 100 acres in Onslow County on Rattle Snake branch, with no grant date.  The file number is  #0151, so we know that it is the same request for land.  The last column says "text only" because there are no images associated with that grant.  (For anyone interested, you can find this page here.)  When you click on that link, you get this message:

       THIS GRANT DOES NOT APPEAR TO HAVE BEEN RECORDED IN A PATENT BOOK
                   It is very possible that the grant was never issued, more research is required

At first I thought that maybe Alexander had dropped the claim for some reason, maybe because he just decided to go a little ways over into Craven County.  Oh, this probably doesn't make as much sense to you as it does to me, so here is a map:

The black borders show pretty much what the counties looked like in 1748.  Craven county was much larger back then, as it included the later county of Jones and parts of Beafort and Pitt.  (It lost part of the top to Beaufort in 1757, and then remember, in 1778 Jones was formed.)  The section over on the left labeled as Lenoir was called Dobbs County until 1791 (and then in 1798 it stole that little triangle of land north of Jones from Craven).

In the Blacksheariana, we are told that there was a record in the North Carolina archives that said this:

Well, I thought this document was lost, since I couldn't find it anywhere, but guess what I just found on Ancestry?   This document, indexed under the name "Max Blackshire."  (I only found it because I was searching for the earliest record of Blackshires in North Carolina for something later down in this post!)

Alexander Blackshear

North Carolina Land Warrant

March 1748

This has the same file number as the index card above, and it says that the warrant was approved on March 28, 1748, for 100 acres "on Rattle snake branch above Tuckahoe" in Onslow County.  So, definitely the same piece of land.  Oh, but I just noticed that the index card above implied that the original land entry was submitted by Alexander in March, but that is actually the date the warrant was approved, which means he actually submitted his entry at least three months before, so in December of 1747 (or earlier if his was one of the ones that took years).  This copy of the warrant shows the date of October 3, 1748 on the back, which was the date that the petition was presented to the council and the patent was granted (which means that part was added by the land office later).

Notice that this also says "Return was in Craven."  Well, the grant that was approved by the council was for 100 acres in Craven County, not Onslow, so my guess is that, when Alexander entered the claim, he believed that the land was in Onslow, but when the surveyor went out to measure the tract, he realized that it was actually in Craven.  This makes me think that the land in question was very near the border of the two counties, which, in fact, it appears to have been:

Right there, where all four of the counties came together, is Tuckahoe Creek.  This map does not say Rattlesnake branch, but I found a modern map that shows it to be about four miles west of Comfort, which would put it on that squiggle line that runs from the Tuckahoe down to the point where the red, orange, and green counties meet.  Now, from this map you might be saying, well, that's not above the Tuckahoe, which is what I was saying, until I realized that we are talking about water courses and the whole upstream/downstream thing, and I think the document meant that it flowed into the Tuckahoe.  Incidentally, there is also a Rattlesnake branch joining up with Beaver Creek, on the north side of the Trent River, but the record clearly says that this was a branch joining Tuckahoe Creek.  Besides, this whole mess only makes sense if Rattlesnake Branch was down there close to the border of Onslow County!

There is still the question of what exactly happened with that grant, since it was never recorded in a patent book.  I don't know if the problem arose with the warrant being from one county and the grant being from a different county, or if the clerk at the land office just went to lunch one day and accidentally forgot which document was the last one he recorded and so it was just missed or what, but I did find a copy of this original land grant book on FamilySearch:

Alexander Blackshear

North Carolina Land Grants

1748

I have no idea why they just repeated the same information on the second page, or why there is nothing but a check mark recorded in the last column, but this shows that his grant for 100 acres in Craven County was recorded as having been approved on October 3, 1748.

Now, remember how I said that the record trail was a little crazy?  Well, things get even crazier.

In the book, Abstracts of the Records of Onslow County, North Carolina, 1734-1850 [1961, v.2], we find this entry:

Huh.  Samuel Blackshire.  That's somebody I haven't heard of yet.

The title of this section in the book is Land Grants of Onslow County, but now that we understand the land grant process, we can see that it is actually anything related to the land grant process that was found in the minutes of the governor's council.  This says that we should look at page 884 of the book of those minutes, and luckily for us, I downloaded a copy of that book last week, so here is the bottom section of that page:

Oh, look.  This is actually recording the approval of his Petition for a Land Warrant.  That means that he was getting approval for his claim to be surveyed, NOT that he was receiving a grant.

The Blacksheariana cites this same meeting of the governor's council for his entry on Samuel Blackshire:

When I first saw that there were land grant records in Onslow County for an Alexander and Samuel Blackshire in the same year, I thought, well, they surely must have been brothers who came from Delaware together and settled in Onslow County.  Of course, it doesn't appear that there is any record of a Samuel in the family in Delaware, but maybe he was a younger brother who was barely old enough to own land by the time they moved to North Carolina.  And, of course, we never hear a single thing about this Samuel again in North Carolina either, but he could have died shortly after their arrival.  But then I thought . . . doesn't that date sound familiar?

We saw up above that the land warrant for Alexander was signed by the governor and dated March 28, 1748.  (This makes sense, because the warrant would have been granted months or years before the actual grant, which was dated October 3, 1748 - seven months later.)  That date was then written on the index card created by the North Carolina state archives.  The records for Samuel, however, say that he was granted his warrant on March 29, 1748.  (And just so you know, no records from the archives show up for a Samuel Blackshire on the NC Land Grants website.)

If those dates were indeed true, then they should have been on the same page of the minutes.  But here is a clip of a larger section of the page:

Look, no March 28th.   I suppose it is possible that there was a missing page of records. (I went through the book and noticed that there isn't always that little line between the minutes of different days, and I also checked the 1748 calendar and noticed that the council always met on Tuesday and Thursday, but never on Wednesday, and March 28 was a Thursday, so I think there might be a missing page.)  However, it seems kind of strange that Alexander and Samuel would have had their petitions for warrants read on one day and then the next, and then we never hear another word about the survey or grant for Samuel (there's not even an index card for him in the archives!)

It seems like it would be more likely that there was some kind of mix-up with the date: either the governor signed the warrants on the 28th and then the council officially read them or approved them a day later at the council meeting, or the wrong date was written on the warrant.  And, if either was the case, it would mean that the clerk who was taking down the minutes at the council meeting must have just mis-recorded Alexander's name . . . which would mean . . . there was no Samuel Blackshire.

(I just thought of another way to check this problem with the date - I'll be right back!  Okay.  I tried checking the records of all the other people whose petitions for warrants were read on the same day.  That was a complete bust for a surprising array of reasons.  But, on the following page of the book, the minutes continue with the list of people whose petitions for patents (grants) were being read.  After checking all four of those, I finally got a hit on the last one and guess what?  It was also dated the 28th of March, even though the minutes showed it taking place on the 29th.  The fact that we didn't see the same issue with the petition for the grant makes me think it was a clerical error, but whatever happened, it looks like there was definitely a problem with the dates!)

Oh, brother.  This is why I always try to get as close to the original source as possible.  Who knows how many abstracts and lists of names used for genealogical indexes are actually misunderstandings of what was really going on?  So who knows how many actual imaginary ancestors are floating around in our trees!  (You know, I really can't stress enough the need for a genealogist to think like a historian.)

Okay, so probably no elusive brother named Samuel.  But guess what?  I stumbled across another document from 1748 in the North Carolina Archives digital collection.  It is a document that must have been recently digitized and added to the collection, because I haven't seen it anywhere else.  And it just so happens to be a document for one Robert Blackshire:

This is a petition to the North Carolina General Assembly, dated March 8, 1747/8.  For any of you wondering what the 1747/8 is all about, it is because two calendars were in use in Europe prior to 1752.  Countries on the continent and Scotland used the Gregorian Calendar, which is the calendar we use today.  England, however, used the Julian calendar until 1752.  That calendar added leap years in a way that gradually added too many days, and the first of the year was March 25, not January 1st.  So, in Britain and its colonies it was officially still 1747 when this document was made, while in the rest of Europe it was already 1748.

The petition was a request from a Robert Blackshire in Craven County to be given an exemption from paying taxes because of his advanced age - over eighty years old!

Now, you might be wondering why I am showing this to you.  Well, it just so happens that Alexander's father was named Robert.  I have found no record of any Blackshears (with any spelling of the name) in North Carolina prior to 1747.  And there is no record of any Blackshears in Craven County in the 1700's except for Alexander's family.  So I ask you . . . who could this Robert Blackshire, aged eighty-something, be?

My instincts (and my logic-thinking brain, for that matter) tell me that this must have been Alexander Blackshear's father.  He was last seen in the Delaware land records in 1738 (in a deed the Blacksheariana never even mentions).  Alexander was last seen in Delaware when he sold his land in 1740.  The next time we find either one of their names is in Craven County, with both showing up in documents within six months of each other.

The problem is, this document says that he was over 80 years old, which would mean he would have been born way back in 1667 or earlier.  But the Blacksheariana and all those millenium files and such have Robert's date of birth as the 24th of August 1677.  Yikes.  That's a ten year discrepancy.  In a different case I would say that maybe people had the birth date wrong for some reason, but having the day and month is pretty specific, so it must have come from an actual record, right?  I decided to try and track the thing down.

The Blacksheariana gives a citation for the information that says, "p. 73 Vol. 2 of the 3rd Series N. J. Archives."  After hours of trying to track this thing down, I discovered that he was using a nickname for the series, and it is actually called Documents Relating to the Colonial History of the State of New Jersey, [1631-1776], with volumes 1-8 edited by William Whitehead between 1880 and 1885.  Each volume covers a different set of documents.  I was not able to find the third series anywhere online, and when I checked the first series, volume two was just a bunch of official government correspondence.  After another hour of searching, I discovered that there were additional volumes edited by a William Nelson.  I used the search function and, although I found a couple of different records from our Blackshaw (the original spelling of the name) family, none of them were related to Robert Blackshaw's birth.

I did find a six book series written in 1911 by a genealogist named Orra Eugene Monnette called First Settlers of Ye Plantations of Piscataway and Woodbridge, Olde East New Jersey, 1664-1714, a Period of Fifty Years.  In volume one, I found this:

 

So, this says that these are the names of residents, and it is in the section titled "First Settlers," which the book says we should take to mean: men who have come of age or widowed women who were heads of household.  But the date next to Robert Blackshaw's name is 1677, which is the year the Blacksheriana tells us he was born, so that doesn't make sense at all.  So, I kept looking, and in volume 2 we find this:

Now, this says at the bottom that it came from the Piscataway, New Jersey Register of Births, Marriages, and Deaths, 1676 to 1790.  (So I don't know why that is not the dates in the heading!)  It clearly says that Robert Blackshaw was born on August 24th, 1677.

So, is there any chance that this was transcribed incorrectly?  Maybe it is a misprint.  Maybe the original record was really hard to read, either because it was faded, or the handwriting was sloppy or the clerk made his 7's and his 1's look like the same thing, making the records open to interpretation.  Maybe there was a blob of ink making one of the numbers look like a different number.  (We have already seen this happen twice in this very blog!)  Of course, my next step was to try to see whether FamilySearch has the original documents online.

It doesn't.  And neither does anyone else.

I made a last-ditch attempt to find anything else to help with this problem, and I finally came across a publication called Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society, series 3 v.02-04, yr. 1897-1905.  What it showed was pretty interesting:

This is supposedly the version made by William Whitehead, who was the Blacksheariana's source.  We can see that this version does not exactly match the version by Monnette, probably because she saw obvious errors, and made the corrections that, according to the note at the top, were made by other genealogists in pencil.  Notice how it also says that the original records were already lost by the turn of the century, which means the book by Monnette was not working from original documents.

Alas, then, there is no way to know if the 1677 date was clearly readable or not.

And this is where the heading of the section above becomes important.  If the birth records truly did begin in 1668, it leaves open the possibility that the document actually said 1671 and was hard to decipher for some reason.  That year would not put him above eighty in 1748, but it comes a whole lot closer - and is the only combination of digits I thought might be confused for 1677!  On the other hand, if the birth date were actually that early, it would leave an awfully large gap between Robert and the next child.  On the other hand (I seem to remember not having enough hands one time before!), Ancestry has a database called "New Jersey Compiled Census and Census Substitute Index 1643-1890," which is made from census records and tax lists, and it says there is a record for Robert's father from 1669, so it would be pretty weird if he didn't start having kids until 1677.

So what are we to make of this record for Robert Blackshire in Craven County?

Well, maybe he exaggerated his age a little bit or just couldn't remember how old he was, either due to not knowing his birth date or to age-related memory decline.  So maybe he wasn't really as old as he said, in which case there wouldn't even be a problem with his birth date.

Maybe he was actually the father of a Blackshear woman, who was married to somebody who lived in Craven County.  At first I thought this could be a real possibility, but after another day of searching, I discovered that only four Robert Blackshaws/Blackshires/Blackshears show up in colonial records in America:  our Robert, his grandson (too young), his grandson's son (much too young), and some guy I just found today in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who was a member of a jury in 1729 and isn't even mentioned in the Blacksheariana.  He could potentially be the right age, but what are the chances that he randomly showed up in Craven County when Alexander did?  Not only in Craven County, but in the same immediate area - I looked up the Justice of the Peace who signed Robert's petition, and he also lived on Tuckahoe Creek.  (I researched the early courts of North Carolina a bit and found out that Craven County had twelve justices of the peace in 1749, and people would go to the nearest JP for something like this document.)

If we use my "does that make sense?" protocol, I think this being Alexander's father, who maybe exaggerated his age a little bit or who was already having a problem with his memory, or who might have actually had a mistakenly transcribed birth year makes as much sense as the idea that this eighty-ish-year-old guy who coincidentally had the same name as Alexander's father either just arrived or had been living in Craven County for some time already, who somehow escaped being recorded in any records the entire time, but magically showed up in the records at almost the exact same time and place as Alexander.

I think, because of my background in archaeology, it is easy for me to accept that long-held historical assumptions might be proven incorrect when new settlements are unearthed or hitherto unknown artifacts are discovered.  Seeing as how historical documents are just one of the many types of artifacts that give us insight into the past, I am perhaps not having as much trouble as many genealogists might in accepting that Robert Blackshaw/share/shire actually died in Craven County, North Carolina instead of Kent County, Delaware.  So for any genealogist out there, I offer this little excerpt from Monnette's First Settlers of Ye Plantations . . .  vol. 6:

I'd love to hear what anyone out there thinks about the identity of this mysterious Robert Blackshire in Craven County (preferably by the time I finish with Alexander and start on his posts), as well as thoughts on interpreting the whole Samuel Blackshire thing.  So, if you have an opinion, please post a comment, or send me an email, or if you have my number, just give me a call!

When I started this post, I originally meant to talk about Alexander's move to North Carolina.  I wanted to talk about his journey there, when he arrived, how we knew he had arrived, as well as who he arrived with - hence the Robert Blackshire document.  Unfortunately that turned into quite an ordeal, and I think this post is plenty long already, so I'm going to stop here and save the rest of it for next time.   See you then!

                                                                                                                                            - Therese