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
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
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!)
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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
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