Tracing Back the Blackshear Line, part 28
We have been looking into the life of Alexander Blackshear for some months now. Although we aren't finished with him yet, today we are going to start looking at his son, Elisha Stout.
Now, I've made some brief mentions of Alexander's oldest son, James, in previous posts, but I'm not going to be examining his life like I will be for Elisha. That is because Elisha is one of my direct ancestors while his brother is not, and I can't even find the time to cover the people I'm actually descended from, much less all of their relatives. So I'll just be throwing things out for those other relatives here and there to give a better picture of what the family was doing and experiencing in general, or when needed to figure out the details of an ancestor's life, and save the closer scrutiny for those in my direct line.
Like Elisha. But where to begin? I had originally planned to go through his presence in the records chronologically, looking at his comings and goings, and talking about his marriage and children later. But as I picked him up in 1764, the first time we see him since that militia list from the French and Indian War, the very first document necessitated a discussion of his wife. So let's take him from the beginning.
Elisha Stout Blackshear was born in the year - well, we don't really know for sure. We can narrow it down to a pretty close range, between the years 1736 and 1740. We have several different types of evidence we can look for to help us make this determination:
Alas, it doesn't appear that the Blackshear family Bible exists anymore. We know there was one, because Alexander left it to his son James in his will, but it has since disappeared.
Not every ancestor lived during a war. And not all military records give us an age or birth date. But military records often offer clues to help us narrow down a range. In this case, we have the militia list from the French and Indian War (1754-1763). (If you somehow never read the post where I showed it, you can find it here.) As I've mentioned before, the list is undated, but it was found in the archives in a box with other lists, and most of those lists were actually dated, and all of the dates were from 1754 to 1761. We know that this list had to be from 1760 or earlier, though, because Elisha's future brother in law, Benjamin Simmons, was on the list, and he was already dead in 1761. Elisha had to have been at least 16 years old to be in the militia, so if the militia list we have is from 1754-1759, that gives a date range of up to 1738 -1743. (It could be earlier, because Elisha could have been older than 16 at the time it was made.)
Jones County, North Carolina conducted a census in the year 1786. The entry for Elisha says that his household had one male between the ages of 21 and 60 years old, and two males in the category of under 21 and/or over 60. Since we know that Alexander was still his own head of household, and Elisha couldn't have possibly fit into the older age category, those must be two sons. If Elisha was under 60, he would have had a birth date after 1726. But we already knew that. The first federal census took place in 1790. It only showed males sixteen and over or under 16, so that wasn't helpful. The 1800 census has the final age category beginning at age 45, so based on the date range we have already come up with, that doesn't do us any good either.
The only tax records we have for Craven/Jones County are from 1769 and 1779. The 1769 list lumps all white males in a household age 16 and over together. Elisha only has one - himself. That was to be expected, really. The 1779 tax list was a property tax record, so it only indicates the name of the property owner and doesn't mention any age categories or other members of the household. So that was a bust, too. The only other records from this category involve Elisha's children, which might be helpful as we'll see in a few minutes.
This type of record can help us narrow down a birth date if we know the birth order and exact or probable birth dates of our ancestor's siblings. In the case of Elisha, we know he had an older brother and sister, born between c. 1731 and 1733. Then we have a probable sister with a birth date of c. 1740 and a brother with a birthdate probably between 1742 and 1744. So there is a big gap that Elisha could fit into, and that gap is basically prior to 1742. Once again, not especially helpful, but it does corroborate what we have already found.
Court records were very helpful in determining the birth year of Elisha's son Jacob. For Elisha himself, not so much. I didn't find any evidence of him serving on a jury in all of the 1760's. The first reference I came across was from 1764, when a deed was proved in court. I suppose if I were to read through all of the records of Craven and Jones County up until his death I might find something helpful, but seeing as how there doesn't seem to be any surviving court records for Jones prior to 1807 and Elisha died in like 1810 or 1811, I think that's a long shot.
As I mentioned before, I was going to wait to talk about Elisha's children, but I think there might be some relevant information here, so let's at least discuss his sons.
The Blacksheariana gives us a proposed birth order, but with the caveat that "no claim of accuracy is made." The information on Elisha's children came from three sources: Elisha's will, a "Family Chart" created around 1865 by the grandson of Elisha's grandson, Enoch (who was somewhere around 70 years old at the time), and a manuscript made by a Dr. Raines around the year 1900 that traces the descendants of Elisha and his brother Abraham (much of which is based on the Family Chart mentioned before).
The book lists Elisha's first four children as Alexander, James, Jesse, and Moses. However, as I've discovered is often the case, if you look up the entries for each of those sons, you discover that the birth dates they are given don't match this order:
James - c. 1758
Jesse - c. 1767
Moses - c. 1761
Okay then. Alexander has a full birth date, which means it probably was taken directly out of a family Bible and is most likely accurate. That means that Alexander was NOT the oldest. (In fact, it would make him younger than Elisha's son Jacob, whom the Blacksheariana lists as the 6th child and youngest son!)
James is listed in the Raines manuscript as child number two, but all we know about him is that he went over the mountains and supposedly ended up in Tennessee, where his descendants are later found. Unfortunately, that's all we have for him, so there is really no way to pin an age on him.
Jesse is given a birth date which is based on a marriage date - according to the Blacksheariana he paid for a marriage license sometime between 1787 and 1789. Not only that, but he served as a chain bearer for his brother Moses's land survey, and chain bearers were usually younger brothers or sons, so it wouldn't make much sense for Jesse to be older. So a date of c. 1767 is probably a safe bet for him.
Moses also has a proposed birth date based on a marriage bond, so we can assume that he was definitely not the fourth son, but instead the first or second. He was married in 1782, and assuming he was 21 years old at the time, he would have been born in 1761. Subtract 23 years from that for his father, and we get 1738, which is what we would expect to see as a birth date for Elisha if Moses were his second child.
So where are we now? Well, if James was the first child (although I'm not 100% sure he really existed, since there doesn't seem to be any record of him in North Carolina!) and Moses was the second, we should probably push Elisha's birth year back to 1738. Unless, of course, Moses was the first son, and either he or his father married at an age earlier than 21. In that case, we would probably not want to go any earlier than 1742. But if we do push the date back, should we push it all the way to 1736 like the Blacksheariana wants to do? Well, I'm sure it is possible that there might have been a daughter or two born before Moses, but I'm not going to try investigating that because it took weeks to look into the daughters of Alexander, and I didn't come up with much in the way of definitive dates anyway.
So. As I mentioned up above, we can find some of Elisha's children in the census records as well. Moses Blackshear was married with three children on the 1786 census. He was married with three sons and two daughters by 1790. This information fits perfectly with a marriage date of 1761, which we already knew, but we can see how the census would have allowed us to extrapolate that if we didn't. Jesse is shown on the census being married but with only one child, which is more evidence that he was younger than Moses. There are no other sons on this census, which means that the mysterious James must have already "gone over the . . . mountains."
(And here is something else I feel like I need to clarify, since I didn't look into this while researching Elisha's son Jacob: In 1790, Elisha had one son still at home, and I assumed that it must have been Jacob, because he was the youngest, and that, even though he was married in March of 1790, the census must have been recording status as of January 1, because how else would we explain the discrepancy, but now I see that Elisha's son Alexander was actually younger than Jacob, so he must have been the one still living at home! See? Connect more dots, add more pieces, and the picture gets clearer . . . or sometimes more muddy, because I just realized that Jacob wasn't listed on the census as a head of household. Uuugh. Maybe that was another case of people not understanding the reporting instructions, which leads to recording people in two separate households or not at all.)
Alas, even though the records of Elisha's children have been (mostly) enlightening, they haven't gotten us any closer to figuring out the problem of Elisha's birth year.
The Blacksheariana tells us that there is no marriage bond for Elisha Blackshear. I looked, and I didn't find one either. That's not really surprising, because there really aren't very many surviving bonds from the 1700's. Why is that? Well, of course there are those ubiquitous courthouse fires. But also, neither marriage licenses nor marriage bonds were actually required. The NCPedia website tells us:
Marriage in North Carolina, until 1868, could be either by license or by banns (public announcement) in the county where the bride lived. It is estimated that in North Carolina two-thirds of all marriages prior to 1868 were by banns, as they were quicker and cheaper than licenses. If a marriage by license was desired, a marriage bond, which was free of charge, was procured to ensure that there was no legal impediment to the union. The bond was not proof of marriage but only of the intent to marry. Those not wishing to bother with licenses and bonds could publish the banns on three successive Sundays and then be married by a clergyman or magistrate. No public record was made of this procedure.
So, no proof of Elisha's marriage. Even more problematic than that, though, is that we don't even know for sure who Elisha was married to. With his son, Jacob, the Family Chart that was made based on information from his son, Enoch, told us exactly who he was married to and we can read the Quaker records that verify that information. We don't have anything like that for Elisha. All we know is that his wife was named Susannah.
The parents of E. S. B. [Elisha Stout Blackshear] lived in Craven Co., Enoch Ward lived in the neighboring county of Carteret; the last child mentioned in his will was “Susannah” (1750). In Ga. an Enoch Ward, (also mentioned in his father's will), is found to be neighbor to Jacob Blackshear, the youngest son of Susannah and Elisha Stout B[lackshear]. Jacob named a son Enoch, which name had not formerly been in the Blackshear Family. The grandson of Jacob married Caroline Ward, indicating that the Wards and the Blackshears continued to be neighbors in Ga. as well as in N. C.Well, okay. That all makes sense, right? Of course, a whole lot of people from North Carolina ended up in Georgia after the Revolutionary War (you know, since the government of our fledgling country had no money to give to the soldiers as pay, it gave them land in Georgia instead), so I'm not so sure that part proves anything. But how about this:
Elisha shows up in the land records for the first time in 1764. As we will see, he both received a land grant and purchased land in that year. Since men under 21 could not receive a grant, and since it was only common for a man under 21 years of age to own land that was acquired as a gift (contracts with men under 21 were not legally binding, so nobody in their right mind would enter into one!), we know that Elisha was already 21, which means he was born in 1743 or earlier. Nothing new there. But what do the land records say about moving his proposed birth date back to 1738, or even 1736?
Well, if Elisha barely shows up in the land records in 1764, that would be a bit strange if he had been born way back in 1736, because it would make him already 28 years old. Scratch that, because as we've seen with his father, getting a grant could take up to two years. However, waiting until he was 26 to begin the process doesn't really seem all that realistic to me either. Not only that, but the year 1764 began a flurry of land acquisitions for Elisha, so it also seems strange that he wouldn't own any land for five or six years after coming of age and then suddenly have the financial means to purchase over 1000 acres of land (!!), plus pay the fees on approximately 600 acres of land grants (!) over the next five years. (I'm pretty sure I read the deeds correctly, but we'll double check when we look at each one.)
I guess now would be a good time to do that:
As you can see, this is a (relatively) modern transcript of the original deed. Apparently the original deed book was in such bad shape that they just typed up a copy and chucked the thing, because this is the only version that I could find.
Elisha Stout's first land purchase on record was for 100 acres of land on the south side of Tuckaho Creek, which is where his father also had 100 acres. He purchased the land from Abraham Bailey, who was his brother-in-law. (Ah, so not only did Abraham Bailey serve in Alexander's militia unit, but they were also neighbors!) But here's the weird thing: the deed says that the indenture was between Abraham Bailey, Planter, and Elisha Blackshear, also Planter. If you remember, Alexander wasn't named as a planter in the deeds until after he had acquired more land in addition to his original 100 acres. This tells us that Elisha already owned a considerable amount of land when he made this purchase in 1764.
Why, then, is there no record of such a purchase? (Believe me, I looked.) I suppose that it is possible that when the modern clerk of the court typed up the comprehensive index of all of the Craven County deed books, there was a deed that was missing or was accidentally missed, or was just not readable. Perhaps if I were to go through the thousands of pages of original deeds I might actually find one showing a prior purchase. (I'm not going to do that, though. I can only make it through about 80 pages of scanning those old deeds before I give up.)
But here is a thought: Maybe Elisha's wife brought land to the marriage.
Hmmmm. That would explain everything, right?
Susannah Ward's father was Enoch Ward, a sea captain, a judge, and a very wealthy man. In his will, he mentions a house and lands that were "in this Neck," as well as "piney lands" and "Banks Land." His youngest son was to receive half of the house and land they were currently living on, and he gave six of his seven daughters (and James Shackleford) 250 acres each of the Banks land (That's 1500 acres right there!). The remaining land was left to his other son.
Now, the original will was filed in Carteret County, and I've read that the family lived in the town of Beaufort. I've also read, though, that Ward's Creek, which juts off the eastern side of the North River, was named after Enoch Ward, indicating that he lived there and not in the town proper. Both Enoch's wife and his previous deceased wife were Shacklefords, so I assumed that the "banks" land was on what is today known as Shackleford Banks. (It turns out that Enoch and John Shackleford jointly purchased 7000 acres of banks land, and then split it, with Enoch taking the section on the far eastern edge of the map below, north of Cape Lookout and known today as Core Banks.) However, in the course of my research into the Onslow County connections, I discovered that the family also had land in another outer banks area. (Map time again!)
You can see that the counties of Craven, Onslow, and Carteret all met down there on the White Oak River. (This map is actually from 100 years later and the boundaries of these counties changed, especially down there where they met, so this is approximate!) By reading the Abstracts of the Records of Onslow County, I discovered that Susannah's brother Richard not only owned lands on Core Sound (from his father's purchase mentioned above), but he also had a large holding down on the bottom left where the map says "Hurst." (Modern maps actually show a "Warde Channel" in that area.) It's possible that Richard and Susanna made a trade of land at some point.
But what's strange is that the will was also recorded in the Craven County deed book (the original copy is online and way easier to read than the actual will). The index to deeds shows the names of the children as being the recipients of the property. Why would that be? Well, Carteret County was just a part of Craven Precinct (there were no counties) up until 1722. Also, the boundary between Craven and Carteret wasn't even established (neither defined nor surveyed! You can read about it here.) until after 1809, so maybe the land was in an area where nobody knew for sure which county it actually belonged to! Really, I couldn't tell you. It's strange, for sure. But why is that even relevant?
Well, because the deed I just showed you says that Elisha Blackshear was a resident of Craven County. That means that if the land his wife brought to the marriage was the land that made him qualify as a planter, and if that land was in Carteret or Onslow County, Elisha was actually living in Craven.
He might have been living on land that was his father's or he might have been already living on this parcel of land that he was purchasing from Abraham Bailey - it appears that Abraham and Eleanor had been living in Onslow for a good many years already at that point.
So, getting back to whole idea of pinning down Elisha's birth year . . . . If Elisha did indeed marry Susannah Ward, he wouldn't have needed to purchase land before the marriage because he would have acquired 250 acres through a dowry. Susannah also received from her father thirteen pounds proclamation money and a one-seventh share of half of his household property and of half his stock of horses, cattle, and sheep and hogs. (Pretty good dowry, huh?) Not only that, but the land she was bringing was banks land, not "piney land," which means it didn't need to be cleared. And not only that, but it was probably already under cultivation and might have even had an overseer, allowing Elisha and his family to remain in Craven County while profiting from the plantation.
So. This whole scenario makes it more likely that Susannah Ward was the wife of Elisha Blackshear, because it would explain how he could have been a wealthy planter without ever having purchased a piece of land, and how he was able to build up enough wealth to then go on a major land shopping spree during the 1760's.
But what does this say about his birth year? Well, on the one hand, it tells me that he could have been younger than 21 when he married, because he wasn't going to be needing to purchase land to support his wife. If that were the case, we could choose a birth year near the later end of the range, say, 1741. That year would also fit with the idea that he applied for his first land grant as soon as he turned 21, and then waited around for a year of two before it was finalized. On the other hand, the fact that he already had land meant that he didn't really have an immediate need for more. He could have gotten married at 21 and just lived on the proceeds of the dowry land. It is also possible that he was leasing the Abraham Bailey land since well before the purchase, giving him even less of a need to acquire more, and thus waiting some time to apply for a grant. On the third hand, if we look ahead to the next five years, Elisha seems pretty ambitious and aggressive with his land acquisitions, so I just can't see him being born in 1736, turning 21 in 1757, and then waiting seven years until he was 28 years old to start focusing on building his wealth.
I think, therefore, given all of the evidence we have just looked at, that a 1736 birth year is too early. I don't really like pushing it up to 1740 either, though, since that would almost certainly require Moses to be his first child. So I am going to settle for c. 1738, which allows a little bit of wiggle room in either direction.
Oh, and do you know what just occurred to me? Way back when, I was researching Elisha's son Jacob, and I wrote a post about his wife and her family. (You can find it here.) Well, her family appeared to have moved to Jones County, right next door to Elisha, shortly before she and Jacob were married. But now we see that it is possible they actually met earlier, since she attended Quaker meetings in Carteret County. Perhaps they actually ran into each other while Jacob was accompanying his father to inspect his land in that county!
And now, let's get back to that 1764 deed, shall we?
Well, there isn't really anything new there, other than to mention the fact that one of the witnesses was Elisha's father, Alexander Blackshear.
But here is the page from the court minutes that shows the deed being proved:
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| Craven County, NC Court of Pleas & Quarter Sessions April 1764 |
The deed was signed on January 6, and then it was brought into the next term of court to be recorded. (No waiting around for years until the property was being sold like some of our other ancestors liked to do!)
So now let's move on to the 1764 grant.
Elisha's first grant was for a parcel of only 48 acres. I'm not sure why he wanted only 48 acres, and I'm not sure why he wanted those 48 acres, but I'm guessing they were either in close proximity to his other land or that of his father, or the land itself was quite desirable.
The land was on the south side of the Trent River, and the only other description of its location that might be even a little bit helpful is that it was bordered by the lands belonging to Samuel Johnston and Henry Johnston. Now, I'm pretty sure that this Henry Johnston was the son of the late governor and brother of Carolina Johnston, whose lunacy inquisition had been held in Alexander Blackshear's house a couple of years earlier. (This Samuel was probably Henry's uncle, who later followed in his brother's footsteps and became governor of the new state of North Carolina.) If you remember, I speculated in my post about that incident that the land was very close to Alexander's land, so that would explain why Elisha might want it even though it wasn't enough for a full "plantation."
The survey was dated August 10, but the grant wasn't approved until three months later, on November 9th, and I have no idea when Elisha actually applied for the grant, because the original warrant is missing and the index card from the archives doesn't have an entry date (probably because the warrant was missing) and when I searched the general assembly and governor's council records for the name Blackshear, all I got was the land grant mess of Alexander that I showed you several months ago. So we won't be able to answer the question of when he actually started the process.
Here is the copy of the shuck and the front and back of the survey:
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I'm guessing that those 48 acres were just leftover land stuck in the middle of everyone else's grants, because, as we can see, it was a pretty strange shape.
Something else I noticed right off when I looked at the back of the survey was the identities of Elisha's chain bearers. Now, just in case any of you missed my earlier post about this, (I would direct you to it, but I can't find which one it was in!) surveys were conducted back then by using a Gunter's chain, which was 66 feet long and contained 100 links. One end of the chain would be placed on a marker. The two chain bearers would carry the chain and then, under the direction of the surveyor, stretch it tight and place another marker at the end. They would then remove the chain, put the starting end on the new marker, and continue the process until the desired length had been marked. I couldn't find a website that would tell me how much the chain weighed, but there is a picture on the Caswell County North Carolina blog of somebody holding one, and it doesn't look all that heavy. I guess the reason that chain bearers were usually young men, then, is because they had to be out tromping around the countryside, dragging chains through who know what type of topography and vegetation, bending over every 66 feet to place the marker, bundle up the chain again, and replace the chain on the marker.
The interesting thing about Elisha's chain bearers is that they were his younger brother, Abraham, and his father, Alexander. Alexander was not a young man. He would have been in his mid 50's at that time. That didn't sound right, so I double checked to make sure that there were no other Alexanders hanging around of the appropriate age. Nope. Not unless Alexander had another son younger than Elisha who died before he came to adulthood and thus never showed up in any records. (Not even as a chain bearer for the survey conducted for Elisha's older brother James just three months prior.) So since we have no evidence that another son existed and no way to test the theory, I think we will have to just assume that this was Elisha's father serving as a chain bearer.
Maybe for some reason Alexander felt he needed to make sure the survey was done right, or maybe somebody else was supposed to do it and they fell ill or didn't show up for some reason and Alexander jumped in to take his place so the survey didn't have to be postponed. Or maybe it was easy, clear land to survey and Elisha couldn't find anyone else and since it was only 48 acres Alexander said what the heck, I'll do it.
Whatever the reason, it tells us that, even in his mid 50's, Alexander was not yet "old and infirm" as they liked to say back then (and as his great-grandson Silas claimed to be by his later 40's). I'm sure Alexander probably left all the bending and such to his son Abraham, but he still had to trek 143 yards (stopping to stretch the chain tight and placing markers seven times), and then 308 yards (stopping, stretching and placing 14 markers), then another 506 yards (23 markers), then 693 more yards (32 markers), and then 220 yards (10 markers), and finally the last section that joined up with the first station, of which we are not told the exact distance, and which I could probably figure out using geometry, but I'm not going to do that any more than you are! Now, I don't know what kind of land it was (swampy? rocky? covered in brush?), but according to the Slick and Twisted Trails hiking blog, the average rate to hike off-trail is one to one-half miles per hour. So covering approximately 2000 yards would be just over a mile, so that would be one to two hours of walking, not to mention however long all the stopping and stretching the chain tight and placing markers took. (They were probably out there for at least half a day!)
(If anyone is interested, they can read up a bit more about the surveying topic on The Legal Genealogist website, which also has a crazy anecdote about how measuring with a chain isn't quite accurate, thus leading to the disputed border between North and South Carolina being resurveyed using modern techniques in recent years.)
And in case any of you are in the habit of collecting any old document that makes reference to an ancestor, here is a copy of the page from the North Carolina Court of Claims and Land Records showing Elisha's entry:
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| North Carolina Court of Claims of Land Records Patents Granted 9 November 1764 |
I got this from the FamilySearch website (film # 7509217, image 102) in case anyone wants to go back to the previous pages to see what the headings are supposed to be. (I'd just tell you myself, but it all seems to become somewhat of a mess as you get closer to Elisha's entry.)
I pretty much spent the entire day today looking though microfilms of land records trying to find an entry date for this patent without any luck. So I guess it's time to move on from 1764.
It just so happens that we don't find Elisha in the records during 1765 - well, I haven't found him, but who knows what I might stumble upon in the future! Since we left off with Alexander at the end of that year, I think we will wrap things up here for now.
But first - here is an interesting tidbit about the father of Elisha's purported wife:
In the summer of 1747 several Spanish vessels from St. Augustine “full of armed men, mostly mulattos and negroes” landed at Ocracoke, Core Sound, Bear Inlet, and Cape Fear where they “killed several of his Majesty’s subjects, burned some ships and small vessels, carried off some negroes, and slaughtered a vast number of black cattle.” In June the same vessels entered Beaufort harbor and absconded with several smaller ships. The Spanish returned on August 26 with the intention of taking the town. Major Enoch Ward and fifty-eight militiamen responded but were driven from the village.
Three days later, Col. Thomas Lovick and Maj. Ward collected more men and counterattacked, driving the Spanish out. Whether the majority of the Spaniards had already left by the time Lovick and Ward attacked is unknown. They may simply have been refitting their vessels, and not intent on capturing the town for strategic purposes. Several “Spanish negroes” were captured, as evidenced by William Moore’s petition on September 6 for payment for their upkeep. The alarm remained in effect until September 10, when officials decided that the Spanish would not return. The next fall, a Spanish expedition, possibly the same vessels, took part in a similar attack on Brunswick.
- North Carolina Historical Marker Program
And you know what else? The area around Beaufort and Core Sound was exactly where Blackbeard was harassing North Carolina ships, and Beaufort Inlet, right there offshore the town of Beaufort, is where the notorious pirate ran his ship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, aground, and he was killed in a battle with the British navy near Ocracoke Island, which is the banks island next in the chain after Core Banks. And all of this took place in 1718, when Enoch Ward was already living in the area.
So the next time anyone needs an interesting anecdote about an ancestor, there you go. And if anyone would like copies of old records pertinent to Enoch Ward, I have a ton, so just email me (there is a link at the bottom left-hand corner of this blog) and I'll get them right over to you.
In the next post, we will continue through the second half of the 1760's, looking at both Alexander and Elisha Stout. We'll have a considerable amount of deeds to get through, as well as some entries in the court minutes, so we might not finish the 1760's, but that's okay, because the final year of the decade has some interesting tax records that we can look forward to for the next time. See you then!
- Therese
