Tracing Back the Blackshear Line, part 22
Hi everyone! It's been a few (!) months now since I've put up a post, and since I don't see any end in sight to my busy-ness (well, maybe by the time summer vacation rolls around . . .) I've decided to try just doing some short posts for the time being. I know, I know, I've tried this before but somehow my short little posts don't stay short once I start working on them. I'm really going to try this again, though, so maybe I can still get some stuff up on a somewhat regular schedule.
Today, then, I'm going to to talk about what I've been working on for the past two days. I had originally intended to pick up where I left off and talk about Alexander Blackshear's activities during the 1760's. I began by scratching my head, trying to remember everything I had discovered about him over the past year.
Then, I decided I had better re-read my posts, because all of the details were pretty hazy. I read through the posts, only to have it all pretty much go in one ear (eye? I was reading silently, so . . .) and out the other.
So then I said to myself, Huh. This really isn't working. So, I decided to start making Alexander's timeline page, even though I probably won't be finished researching him for like six months or something. That actually worked out pretty well, because it forced me to go through each post more slowly and look for specific details as well as the proof that would need to be cited.
So there I was, trying to fill in the births of his children, and all I had was a bunch of date ranges and some speculation regarding his daughter's husbands. While double-checking those date ranges and trying to narrow them down, I started to take a closer look at all of Alexander's daughters - those long-ago women we tend to push to the side since there are so many more records available for men.
I had that nifty chart I made last time with the information from the Blacksheariana, but since it sort of ignored the whole will of Benjamin Simmons, son (in-law) thing, I went back and looked over Alexander's will to see exactly what it had to say about his daughters. I saw that his oldest daughter, Eleanor, had married a man named Bailey. His other daughter, Sarah, married a man named Clifton. He then named a granddaughter, Susanna Fordham, meaning that there had been a third daughter, who married a man named Fordham. (There is actually quite a bit of controversy surrounding this daughter's identity - I'll get to that later.) So that's three daughters with clues in Alexander's will. Of course, I strongly believe that there was a fourth daughter, the one I mentioned in my last post, who married Benjamin Simmons but who had already passed away by 1761.
Let's take a quick look at that daughter first. We know that she had passed away by 1761 because she wasn't mentioned in her husband's will. He only names one child, and leaves everything to her, with the stipulation that if she did not live to produce any heirs, everything would then go to his own siblings. This could mean that this daughter was still quite young, which could mean that Alexander's unnamed daughter had died in childbirth. Of course, this prompted me to do the math, figuring if she had died as late as 1760, and assuming she was a newlywed at the time and between the ages of 18 and 21, this would give her a birth year between 1739 and 1742. This fits perfectly into the timeline of Alexander's children. If, however, she did not die shortly after birthing her first child, or if her surviving daughter was older than an infant, her birth year could be pushed back earlier, which still fits the timeline without any problem.
Oh! It just occurred to me that I should look for any other record that could give us a hint at how old Benjamin Simmons was. I did some looking and discovered that he purchased 100 acres in 1754 and received a land grant in 1755. The 1754 deed called him a planter, implying that he already owned a considerable amount of land, but it was a much more recent typed transcription and the beginning portion didn't make a lot of sense - it seemed to have some lines possibly mixed up, so maybe the word "planter" was not in the original. Either way, it is looking more likely that Benjamin and this unnamed daughter were married closer to the mid-1750's, pushing the possible birth year range for Alexander's daughter back to 1736-ish, which allows us to confidently place her between Eleanor and Elisha Stout.
One down, three to go.
The next daughter I looked at was the oldest, Eleanor. Alexander's will said she had married a man named Bailey, but that she was a widow by 1786. Hmmmm. I wondered if I could find this husband on Ancestry. When I looked at the profile page I created for Eleanor, Ancestry was only giving me four hints, all of which were perfectly worthless. So next, I decided to try looking for a will from a man named Bailey who lived in Craven County and died before 1786. Easy peasy.
Well, not really, because Ancestry throws wills and estate papers and other stuff related to death in a whole number of different databases. The one I managed to find first only had estate papers and no wills. Of the men with papers in this database, there was only one Bailey who died in the correct date range. I wasn't holding out much hope that the estate papers would name his wife (they rarely do, unless the wife was the executrix), but that was the only lead I had so I gave it a go.
There was only one page in the record - an inventory for the estate of Abraham Bailey, who died in 1774:
Okay. No wife named. I was about to just toss it aside when I took a closer look at the person who signed the paper: Janes Blakshea. Well, that could be James Blackshear with poor handwriting. James Blackshear, who was Alexander's oldest son. James Blackshear who would have been Abraham Bailey's brother-in-law if Abraham was indeed Eleanor's husband.
This was a promising development, especially because there were no other Baileys in the records who died at the right time. Actually, I thought it was more than promising. I thought it was enough evidence to make it highly likely that this Abraham was Eleanor's husband.
And then, for some reason, I was looking back at the French & Indian War militia list that I posted last time. Remember how I found Alexander's son-in-law Benjamin Simmons on it? Guess who else I just found? Yep. Abraham Bailey. See?
North Carolina Militia List
French & Indian War
Daniel Simmons Company
There he is in the right-hand column, six names down. My argument is looking pretty good right about now, huh?
Since I was now pretty sure I'd found the right guy but really, really like to cover my bases, I decided to just do a general Ancestry search for Abraham Bailey from the 1700's in North Carolina. I got three more hits for wills and probate records, one of which was actually his will:
Well, look at that. His wife was indeed named Eleanor, and both James and Elisha Stout Blackshear (Eleanor's brothers) were named as his executors. And to top it all off, Eleanor's younger brother, Abraham, signed as a witness. (Do you have any idea how good it feels to have a research hunch proven true?) So now we have a first name to stick into the tree. But what about information to narrow down Eleanor's birth year? Nothing yet.
Abraham Bailey's will mentions children and implies that the oldest at least was a male, but other than indicating that all of the children were minors, it doesn't really tell us anything else. The Ancestry search turned up a hit for an early tax list (1769) from Onslow County, but it was just an entry from a database. Luckily, I knew that digital copies of the original 1769 tax lists from North Carolina are available online, so I looked up the one from Onslow County:
The entry for Abraham Bailey actually shows "Abraham Bailey & Son." Aha! This tells us that there was a son in the household who was already 16 years old, but not yet old enough to be out on his own. And that tells us that Eleanor and Abraham were married a minimum of 17 years earlier (ages for tax lists in north Carolina were calculated as of January 1). So, 1769 minus 17 gives us 1752. Once again, going off the 18-21 year range that was common as the age of marriage in colonial America, we get a birth range of 1731 to 1734. We have estimated that Alexander's oldest child, James, was born in 1732, which allows us to narrow Eleanor's birth year to 1733/4. Voila!
Of course, after I was feeling all smug for figuring this out, it occurred to me that if this child was already 16 on January 1 of 1769, he would have been 21 years old when his father died in 1774. However, Abraham Bailey stated in his will that all of his children were minors! So I told myself it is possible that this son had passed away before his father did, right? Or maybe he had already gotten his inheritance? Hmmm.
And then I got worried because Abraham Bailey died in Craven County in 1774 but was on the 1769 tax list for Onslow County, which is the neighboring county to the south, but he apparently received two land grants in Craven County in 1753 and 1755, and I thought, what if those were two entirely different people and my math was all for nothing?!
I thought I had seen something showing that the inventory was for an estate in Onslow County, but I couldn't find that in the records, but theeeeeen I looked back at the inventory page again and the very first entry under the title says "1 Plantation in Onslow County." (And just to double check that it was all just one person, I looked up the Craven County index to deeds and saw that Abraham Bailey sold the 1753 tract of land in 1762, and then in 1764 he sold the land from the second patent to Elisha Blackshear.) I guess that tells us, then, that Eleanor and her family had moved to Onslow County, but that for whatever reason, Abraham was in Craven County when he was injured or fell ill and so that is where he actually died. Whew! Sometimes I think I'm losing my mind!
Of course, while double checking the tax lists to make sure I didn't get something wrong, I noticed that a mysterious Nicholas Bailey pops up in 1770 and Abraham is listed with a son named Thomas that year, so maybe Nicholas was an older son who did have his inheritance already or who had passed away. But, if that were the case, he would have had to have been born by 1749 to be out on his own by 1770. And that means that Eleanor would have had to have been born before her brother James, in 1731. I guess that explains why I've seen her as the oldest of Alexander's children in a couple of trees. Blah. Just when I think I've gotten things all figured out, I find another bit of evidence and my nicely shrunken date range gets even bigger than it was to begin with!
Oh, well. (This whole endeavor is starting to be a little less fun than it was ten minutes ago.)
So that's two daughters down, now.
Let's take a look at the daughter with the unknown name who had married a Fordham. As I mentioned above, the evidence for this daughter comes from the presence of a granddaughter named in Alexander's will. Her name was Susanna Fordham, and it seems to be commonly accepted that Benjamin Fordham was the man responsible for giving her this surname. There were unsurprisingly a million different Benjamin Fordhams (okay, so actually like six or seven) living during the 1700's in Craven County and their dates overlap enough that a cursory inspection will not help you figure out any sort of relationship between them. If you do a search on the Ancestry public member trees for Benjamin Fordham plus a Blackshear wife, you get something like 35 different trees all saying that his wife was either Mary Blackshear (born 1733) or Susanna Blackshear. (According to these trees, Susanna supposedly married him in 1790, four years after Alexander named her in his will, not to mention the fact that he specifically says she is his grand daughter, and not one of these trees has even one source cited.) I think it is pretty fair, then, to throw the Susanna getting her name from being married to Benjamin Fordham out the window.
That leaves this Mary. Of the trees that name her, only a couple cite sources - two to be exact - both of which are world tree type things which just means that some researcher decided that Mary Blackshear was the missing daughter of Alexander and that she was married to Benjamin Fordham. Believe it or not, there are also nearly 2,000 trees on Ancestry showing one Mary Susannah Blackshear married to Benjamin Fordham. These trees have the same citations as the others, plus a FindAGrave page (great for getting research hints but not a credible source) and a Sons of the American Revolution application, that just lists her as "Mary" the wife of Benjamin Fordham.
Is any of this information enough to make us feel confident that the Mary who was married to Benjamin Fordham was our unnamed Blackshear daughter? There are a whole lot of conflicting names and relationships out there in those tree databases and millenium files and even FindAGrave pages! I did come across an interesting ancestry message board post a couple of years ago that was addressing this daughter in question. Here is what it had to say:
It seems to be a well-established "fact" that Benjamin Fordham (1743-c1810) married Mary Blackshear, daughter of Alexander Blackshear and Agnes Stout. There are also a few who think Benjamin Fordham married the granddaughter of Alexander and Agnes Blackshear. Both assertions seem to be based on a bequest made in Alexander Blackshear's will to his granddaughter, Susanna Fordham.
I have been researching this for quite some time and can find no evidence to support either claim. In fact, all evidence suggests something quite different. Everything hinges on identifying the Susanna Fordham mentioned in the Blackshear wills. After making several bequests to his sons, Alex: Blackshear (in 1785) leaves the remainder of his household and kitchen furniture, as well as his stock (horses, cattle, etc.) to be divided among his two daughters (Eleanor Bailey and Sarah Clifton) and his granddaughter Susanna Fordham (to whom he also gave a slave). This was not an insignificant gift, and the fact that it was equally divided elevates this Susanna Fordham to the level of Alex:'s daughters.
When Agnes Blackshear wrote her will (in 1793), she made a few specific bequests, but she primarily left everything to be divided among her two daughters (Elender Bailey and Sarah Clifton) and her granddaughter Susana McKinsey "according to my husband Alexander Blackshear Will." The wording tells us that Susanna Fordham and Susanna McKinsey are one and the same.
That leads to the next key issue: determining the age of this Susanna. We know from Bible records that Benjamin Fordham was born in 1743. And, if the Bible records are to be believed, his first 6 children were born between 1767 and 1776. The Benjamin Fordham Bible record is available through the NC State Archives, but their copy does not include the names and dates for the rest of the children, including daughter Susanna. I have reviewed the document in person and it appears that the bottom portion of the page is missing. There are some books and online "trees" which give the names and birth dates for these children. Susanna Fordham, daughter of Benjamin was supposedly born 31 March 1779. If we accept that Benjamin's daughter was born in March 1779, then she was just age 14 when Agnes wrote her will in July 1793, calling her Susanna McKinsey. Based on the evidence, I have to conclude that Susanna Fordham, granddaughter of Alexander and Agnes Blackshear, is NOT the daughter of Benjamin Fordham. I must also must conclude that Benjamin Fordham did NOT marry the granddaughter of Alexander Blackshear. As proved above, his granddaughter married someone named McKinsey (McKenzie) between 1785 and 1793.
We are unfortunately left with Benjamin Fordham marrying a completely unknown woman named Mary. We are also left with an unidentified and unlinked Susanna Fordham. Fortunately we find another clue to Susanna's identity in the will of Benjamin Fordham's father (Benjamin Sr. for purposes of this discussion). Benjamin Fordham Sr. wrote his will in September 1777, leaving significant property (a lot in the town of New Bern) to HIS granddaughter, Susanna Fordham. This Susanna Fordham was obviously born well before the daughter of Benjamin Jr. The gift Benjamin Sr. left to granddaughter Susanna was more generous than the small gifts he left his two grandsons. I believe the evidence suggests (but does not prove) that Benjamin Fordham Sr. had an unidentified son who married the unidentified daughter of Alexander and Agnes Blackshear. This couple, both of whom were deceased by July 1777, had just one child, Susanna. Both of Susanna's grandfathers made sure that she was taken care of. I welcome any additional evidence, ideas, or comments. - pampearson1
So. We still don't have a name for this daughter of Alexander Blackshear. If we accept this proposed identity of Susanna Fordham, however, we get a bit more evidence to help us pin down her mother's birth year. If our unnamed daughter's daughter (Susanna) was married as late as 1793 (the year Agnes wrote her will), she should have been born around 1772 - 1775. But if she was married shortly after Alexander wrote his will, she should have been born around 1764 - 1767. Taken together, this gives us a (very) rough date range of 1743 - 1757 for the birth of her mother (Alexander's missing daughter), which has enough wiggle room to accommodate Susanna not being the first of her children. This confirms that our unnamed daughter must have been born after her brother Abraham, making either her or Sarah the last (surviving) child of Alexander Blackshear.
Which brings us to Sarah.
Ah, Sarah. When I reached this point in writing this post, I hadn't done a single bit of research into her yet. All I knew was that she had an unmarried daughter at the time of her father's death in 1786. But the more I looked for clues, the more of a conundrum she became.
After about three hours of research, I'd found some interesting stuff. I did an Ancestry search for "Sarah Blackshear Clifton" and came up with trees showing that she was married to a man named Ezekiel. I also found wills for both Ezekiel and Sarah, naming the exact same children so I know that these two were indeed married. The question is, was this Sarah Clifton our Sarah?
The third page of Alexander Blackshear's will says that his granddaughter, Mary Clifton, was to receive Susanna's inheritance in the event that she died without any heirs. Unfortunately, neither Sarah nor Ezekiel Clifton's will name a daughter Mary. They do name a daughter "Molsey," which I suppose could be a nickname for "Molly," which is a common nickname for "Mary," but if both of her parents used a specific nickname for her whole life, you would think that Alexander would have called her that as well, right? Of course, it is possible that this daughter had died sometime during the six or so years between the writing of Alexander's and Ezekiels's wills. I would say then, that the lack of a Mary does not rule this Sarah out from being Alexander's daughter, even though it leaves a bit of doubt in my mind. There are some other clues to help us determine her relationship, though.
First, when Ezekiel died in 1792 (Sarah wouldn't pass away until 1811), his will names "Stout Blackshear" as one of his executors. This, of course, refers to Alexander's son Elisha, showing that Ezekiel had a strong connection to the family. Second, while checking the index to deeds for Craven County to see if it could give me any more clues, I came across a 1793 entry in which Susanna McKinsey (formerly Fordham as discussed above) and her husband (who we now know was named Alexander) were selling a plot in the town of New Bern to Sarah Clifton. (This was probably the lot Susanna received from her Fordham grandfather in his will.) So that is another link to the family. And third, which is actually the real important bit of evidence, there were no Cliftons in any of the records in either Craven or Jones counties other than Ezekiel, Sarah, or several of the children named in their wills. So, I think we can be sure that this is our Sarah.
Okay, so that gives us the name of her husband for a tree, but what I was really looking for was something to place her birth. Since almost nobody in the family can be found in any marriage records, we have to look for other clues. The first clue is that in Ezekiel's will, his two oldest sons had apparently already come of age, although his third son had not. This doesn't really tell us a whole lot, since it means Sarah could have been as young as 40 at the time, which would put her birth year around 1750-ish, or she could have been considerably older, placing her birth much earlier.
The second clue can be found on the 1790 census:
1790 Census
Jones County, North Carolina
This record shows that, in 1790, which was two years before Ezekiel's death, he and Sarah had two sons who were at least 16 years old, but not yet the head of their own household. We can guess, then, that they were probably under the age of 21 at the time. Of course, this document doesn't tell us if they were actually the oldest children or not, because the ages of the girls are not specified.
If we look back at Ezekiel's will (you can view it through the link below), he gives one of his adult sons 50 acres of land and a horse, and the other son a slave, a colt, and a saddle. I was guessing that this tells us that the son who received no land was definitely out on his own by that time, and that the other son was at least 21 years old. (The will does not give last names for the daughters, so we do not know if they were old enough to be married yet or not, but since they were all still at home on the 1790 census, they were probably all under the age of eighteen at that point.) Since both sons were at home in 1790 but at least one was out of the house by 1792, we can probably safely bet that he was not older than twenty in 1790 either. If we guess that this is the oldest child, and we guess that he was born within Sarah's first year of marriage (I know, this is a lot of guessing, but at least they are educated guesses!), that would give the two sons birth years within the range of 1770 to 1774, giving Sarah a birth year of about 1749 - 1752, confirming that she was one of the youngest two daughters of Alexander Blackshear.
Well. That all sounded pretty cut and dry. And then I decided to go looking for land records for Ezekiel Clifton to see if they would give a clue about how old he was. And that is when nothing seemed so simple anymore.
First, I discovered that he received a land grant in Craven County in 1762. This tells us that he was born by 1741 at the latest. This isn't a real problem even if Sarah was born as late as 1750, although it does suggest that she might not have been his first wife, which could also suggest that one or more of the older children weren't her own. However, I suppose Sarah could have been older, and married earlier, and either her first couple of children had died or some of the girls were actually the eldest.
Then, I came across another application for the whole Sons of the American Revolution thing, and it showed that Ezekiel was born in 1741 (which of course is probably just a genealogical guess), but that Sarah was born in 1740. It also said that one of their two older sons, Daniel, was born in 1773, which is the year I had come up with on my own when doing the census math. Unfortunately, if he was one of the two older sons and Sarah was born in 1840, she would have already been 33 years old at that point with possibly four to five more children still to be born, which is possible but maybe a bit iffy in my opinion.
At this point, I figured I'd better actually go back and read her will instead of just glancing at the names in it.
Here are the children named in the wills of Sarah and Ezekiel Clifton:
Ezekiel’s Will | Sarah’s Will |
Nathan | | Nathan |
Daniel | | Lovesy |
Ezekiel (Jr.) | | Molsey |
| Elizabeth | Daniel |
| Visey | Ezekiel |
| Molsey | Nancy |
| Nancy | Sarah |
| Sarah | |
So, I noticed that, in his will, Ezekiel did the whole boys-are-more-important-so-I'll-list-them-first thing, while Sarah mixed them up with the girls, most likely because she was naming the children in birth order. She listed her son Nathan first (so much for thinking he must have been the younger of the two because he received land in his father's will!), and Daniel as the fourth child, and the son who was a minor when the father died was the next child listed with two girls younger than him. This means that, if Daniel was indeed born in 1773, her first child was probably born about four to six years before that. Huh. That actually still gives her a birth range of about 1746 to 1751.
So then I tried looking for Sarah on later census records to see if that would help narrow her age down. Here is a detail of the 1800 census:
1800 Census
Jones County, North Carolina
Sarah Clifton
I know you don't have the heading of this to see the categories, but this shows that, eight years after Ezekiel's death, Sarah had one boy (age 10-15) in the household, three girls (one age 10-15 and two between 16-25), and herself, under age 45. If Sarah was at the most 44 years old in 1800, that gives her a birth year of 1756 at the earliest (which incidentally would have been about the very last year her mother could have been having children.) Unfortunately, this doesn't fit with having her fourth child in 1773. Wait. Actually, her fifth child, since Ezekiel named a daughter Elizabeth who was presumably deceased before Sarah wrote her will. In fact, the 1800 census for Nathan Clifton (the oldest son) shows that he was between the ages of 26 and 45, but if he was older than 26 he could not have been birthed by Sarah unless she was younger than eighteen when she birthed him,
IF we are to believe her age on this census record. Of course, we also have the added problem of the other people in her household - the two youngest could have been the children of her late daughter Elizabeth, but only one of the two older females falls into the right age category for any of her daughters.
So what does the 1810 census say?
1810 Census
Jones County, North Carolina
Sarah Clifton
Well, Sarah is now in the 45+ category, which makes sense, the other three females also jumped up one category like we would expect, but the adult male has jumped two age categories instead of one and there is an additional male child in her household.
That was not helpful at all.
Do you think maybe Sarah Blackshear Clifton was like my husband's late aunt, who lied about her age for her whole adult life (even on her driver's license!) to appear younger?
Somehow, after all of this, I noticed that Ezekiel Clifton was on the 1769 tax list for Onslow County. Onslow County? That was where Sarah's sister Eleanor was living, remember?
Unfortunately, this doesn't mention females. The 1774 tax list looks exactly the same. Not helpful either. But that made me think, what if I could find him in the records of Onslow County? I looked him up in Abstracts of the Records of Onslow County North Carolina by Zae Hargett Gwynn and some publication of abstracts of Onslow County court minutes from FamilySearch. You wouldn't believe what I found.
Remember how I mentioned that Ezekiel Clifton had land grants in Craven County in 1762 and 1763? Well, by 1767 he started purchasing land in Onslow County. He purchased a total of 799 acres plus one town lot between the years of 1767 and 1773. He purchased most of the land for ridiculously low prices and then later sold it again for a profit. Even though he had so much land, never once was he named as a planter in any of the deeds. In fact, the court minutes of Onslow county say he was granted a license to keep a tavern in 1771, and in 1772 he sold 599 acres to Eleanor Blackshear Bailey's husband and the court minutes proving the deed say that he was a blacksmith! In 1779, he began to acquire land in Jones County, where the rest of the Blackshear family lived, and he gradually sold the land that he had left in Onslow County.
Now, you are probably saying, okay, that's quite interesting and all, but he's not even in our family line so why do I even care? Well, I am trying to give you a glimpse into Sarah's life. Also, the fact that Ezekiel lived in Craven County, the same county as Alexander Blackshear's family up until 1767, and then moved to the county where Alexander's oldest daughter lived, makes me guess that perhaps he and Sarah were married around the time the move took place, which fits nicely with my estimate that their first child must have been born around that same year.
I also wanted to share this because, while looking through the abstracts of the court minutes, I found this:
Onslow County, NC
Court Minutes
April Term 1771
Whaaaaaat? Could it be that Sarah Blackshear was first married to John Pollock?
I looked through the Blacksheariana and there were no other Sarah Blackshears of anywhere close to the right age listed in the book. Now, it turns out that this John Pollock served as a justice of the peace in Onslow County with - get this - three relatives (brothers/first cousins) of Elisha Stout Blackshear's wife. Could it be that there were enough family connections that all of these people were familiar with one another and recommending potential marriage partners to each other?
If Sarah Blackshear was married to John Pollock first, however, the picture would get a whole lot muddier. This is because John named several children in his will. For the sake of making things easy, here is the abstract:
Abstracts of the Records of Onslow County
Abstract of Will of John Pollock
When John Pollock died, he had five children who were still minors (he says the boys hadn't come of age and the girls were not yet married) and either knew or suspected that his wife Sarah might be pregnant. John Pollock first shows up in the land records in 1756, meaning that he was born around 1735. If this is indeed Sarah Blackshear the daughter of Alexander, this would fit perfectly if she was born just after Eleanor. But what about the jumble of children, with only the names of two daughters being the same across the wills?
I suppose it is possible that Sarah was John Pollock's second wife, so all of his children were not also her own. I suppose she could have also been Ezekiel Clifton's second wife, with some of the children also not being her own. If her son Daniel was born in 1773, and she married Ezekiel in 1771 after John's death, Daniel could have been just her second child with Ezekiel. It's a possible scenario, right? I mean, this kind of thing happened all the time back then. I did the math and any of these scenarios would work for Sarah getting married and having time to have so many children; it just changes her birth order from being Alexander's third child to being his last.
Of course, I wasn't ready to make such a wild leap without doing more research to rule out every other possibility, which is a good thing, because I finally came across this:
1771 Tax List
Onslow County, North Carolina
Abraham Blackshear
This tax list shows Abraham Blackshear with two slaves, Cezar and Clary. It just so happens that John Pollock left his wife Sarah two slaves named Cezar and Clary in his will. So it looks like Abraham Blackshear, Alexander's youngest son, married Sarah, the widow of John Pollock, and that explains the reference to "Sarah Pollock alias Blackshear" in the court records. And I didn't find her in the Blacksheariana, because it just says that the name of Abraham's wife was unknown! (Of course, he would have been about 29 years old when he married the widow Pollock, so it is possible that he actually had a first wife as well!)
Whew! You can see how people end up with erroneous "facts" in their family trees. I've been working on this supposedly short post for three weeks now, because trying to leave no stone unturned takes an awful lot of time. And also, sometimes, luck!
So, I've covered all of Alexander Blackshear's daughters now. But guess what? We are going to have to go back to the one who married Benjamin Simmons. Why? Because while searching for anything else I could find about Sarah and Ezekiel Clifton by searching for things related to their children, I popped in the name of their daughter Lovesy (Visey in her father's will) and actually ended up with this instead:
Headstone of Lovisey Simmons Cox
Cox Family Cemetery
Fort Barnwell, Craven County, NC
Do you see that? This is the headstone of one Lovisey, the daughter of Benjamin and Agness Simmons, born August 4, 1759. If you remember, Benjamin Simmons died in 1761. His wife, Alexander Blackshear's daughter, died before that. He named one daughter in his will - Louise. And we speculated that she was quite young still when Benjamin died. Alexander's wife was named Agnes, so to have a daughter named after her makes a lot of sense. I didn't find any mention of any other Benjamin Simmons in any records from Craven County. And who puts the names of their parents on their headstone when they die as an adult? Maybe somebody who wants the relationship to be marked and remembered for some reason? Maybe because the parents died when the person was a young child and were therefore not the ones who raised said person?
I don't know about you guys, but I'm sold on the argument that the older unnamed daughter of Alexander Blackshear was actually named Agness. (And to think, I stumbled upon this completely by accident!)
Okay then. I am going to assume that this daughter probably died in childbirth or shortly afterward. I am also going to assume, therefore, that Lovisey/Louise was her first child. So now I can confidently give probably-Agness Blackshear a birth year of about 1740.
Now, you might be wondering why I didn't give her a range like I've been doing for this entire post so far. Well, during the course of my past three week's research, I discovered a couple of things. First, while reading through over a thousand (that is not a typo) pages of the original Craven County court minutes, I discovered that whenever a female was bound out to learn a trade, she was always released from her indenture at the age of 18, as opposed to age 21 for males. And second, I came across a super interesting article by Alan D. Watson called "Women in Colonial North Carolina: Overlooked and Underestimated." (It was published in The North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (January, 1981), pp. 1-22, but you can read it here.) The article contains a quote from John Brickell's 1737 book, The Natural History of North Carolina:
"she that continues unmarried, until Twenty, is reckoned a stale Maid."
Ha ha! That's too funny. I also found out that girls were actually allowed to marry as young as 16 with their father/guardian's approval, so I guess from now on I'll make all my estimations based on a girl getting married by the age of 18.
(And by the way, the article actually talks a lot about marriage, and indicates that it was not altogether uncommon for a man to remain unmarried until his thirties, so I guess we don't necessarily need to assume that Abraham Blackshear or Ezekiel Clifton had been married prior to the unions we discussed here either.)
So this is what my chart comparing the information given in the Blacksheariana to what we have discovered looks like now:
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Husband:
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Alexander
BLACKSHEAR
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born
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c.
1708 why???
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married
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Btw.
1730-1735 c. 1731
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Wife:
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Agnes
[STOUT]
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born
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c.
17?? c. 1713 (assume married
1731-ish)
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Children:
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James b.
c. 1735, DE 1732
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Eleanor
b. NC c. 1733 (poss. 1731),
DE
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prob. Agness (married Simmons), b. c. 1740, DE
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Elisha
Stout
b. c. 1736, DE c.
1738-41, DE
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Abraham b.
c. 1742, DE or NC
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Sarah
b. c. 1749, NC
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Daughter (name unknown, married Fordham) c.
1754, NC
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I'm actually feeling pretty good about the information on my chart now. The only problems are the fact that I still have a date range for Elisha with Agness plopped right into the middle, and the two possible years for Eleanor's birth, which means I can't adopt a definitive birth order for Alexander's children, as well as the fact that there is a five-year gap between the last two daughters, suggesting that there may have been one child or more born during that time who did not survive.
And I'm sure this chart will get at least one more revision before I am finished with it, because I still have a lot of records to look through and some of those (especially the court records) might help us narrow things down a bit.
Before I go, though, I would like to point out that both Eleanor and Sarah remained unmarried after their husbands passed away, despite the fact that they were both in their early forties and had minor children to support. The will of Eleanor's husband stated that all of his property, including his plantation, be sold and the money used to support his wife and children. Twelve years later, Alexander bequeathed her the use of the "small dwelling house" on his own property, along with an adjoining acre of land, and an anual payment of five pounds to be provided by his son Abraham. Perhaps she began living there immediately after the sale of her plantation and so had no need to find a new husband. The will of Sarah's husband stated that she would have the use of his entire plantation during the term of her widowhood, so she too would have had a place to live and a means to support herself.
According to the article I mentioned above,
Of course, the married woman in colonial North Carolina was at a distinct legal disadvantage. Upon marriage her identity merged with that of her husband who became her head and lord. Single women, spinsters and widows, were fully competent for purposes of private law, enjoying the privileges of making wills, suing in court, consummating contracts, executing deeds, administering estates, and serving as guardians. Wives, on the other hand, were legal nonentities.
Some women in early America preferred the single life to remarriage. A measure of legal competence, control of property, and personal liberty was appealing.
Perhaps once Eleanor and Sarah had a taste of living as independent women they didn't want to give that up. Sarah would go on to get two land grants of her own after her husband's death, and she bought the town lot in Newbern, maybe so she could open a tavern or inn, which was actually done by more widowed women than you would expect. And curiously, two of Sarah's daughters appear to have never even married - they were still witnessing deeds with their maiden names into their 30's. I'm not sure what that was all about, but maybe they saw that single life worked out well for their mother and so they followed suit.
Okay. Next time we will be back to Alexander Blackshear himself. I had intended to start with his goings-on during the 1760's, but I stumbled across a few more things from the 1750's so we'll get those taken care of instead. See you then,
- Therese
