John Moore Revisited - Part 1

Leaving No Stone Unturned

Hi all!  Can you believe it has been an entire year since I put up a post?  Obviously, I have been super busy!  I have done a bit of genealogical sleuthing during the past year, mostly to try and solve a few ancestor riddles so my nieces and I could stick the appropriate push pins in our homeschooling Ancestor Migration Map project:

Cool, huh?  (We're up to 1848.)  So, I've spent some time looking at Cheathams, going through the birth records of pretty much every one of our ancestral lines to track each family's movements, and began trying to solve the Anderson Foster mystery.  I've actually started a couple of posts that I have yet been able to finish.  Why might it take an entire year to do some research and write a couple of measly posts about my discoveries?  

Well, if you remember, way back when (okay, way, waaaay back when) I mentioned that my motto was "Leave No Stone Unturned."  I just can't bring myself to draw conclusions unless I've looked at every possible bit of evidence that I can find.  I mean, what if I decide that somebody did something at a certain time or in a particular place, or was related to so-and-so, only to later find a document that indicates otherwise?  Not so bad, but imagine if I were to publish my thoughts online for the world to see . . . . 

Anyway, back in the middle of May, while doing a quick look-up on Ancestry, I noticed that I had a message.  It seems that a distant distant cousin, descended from the sister of Amelia Virginia Blackshear Cheatham's grandmother, Judith Moore Blackshear, had contacted me, wondering if I had any more information about Judith's father (John Moore) and who his father might have been.  Well, my Ancestry tree has a "maybe" in his father's place, because I was busy researching Jacob Blackshear when I took the Moore side-trip and I just made a preliminary guess based on what I was seeing in the records I had viewed.  So, I figured that before I responded, I should take a closer look.  Little did I know that that closer look would take more than two months (sorry, Greg!).  

As it turns out, leaving no stone unturned is quite the time-consuming endeavor.  It takes looking through deed indexes and then looking up the deeds.  It takes looking for just the right map that shows the places mentioned in those deeds, many times having to combine the information from multiple maps in order to actually get the picture.  It takes looking through wills and probate records, including inventory lists of all the deceased person's "goods and chattels", and it takes reading through years and years of badly preserved court minutes.  It takes tracking down abstracts and transcriptions of documents when the original copies are not available.  It takes trying like a million different search terms to see if anyone has put up something useful online, and using your son's college log-in to read weird historical summaries and doctoral theses and genealogical treatises written a hundred years ago.  It takes thinking logically and outside of the box, and desperately searching for leads by looking everywhere, including the record of bastardy bonds, because who knows, maybe our ancestor was actually born out of wedlock?  It takes perseverance as well as luck, because finding the records of Old Albemarle County or the Hyde County bastardy bonds from the correct century, can be mystifyingly difficult on both FamilySearch and Ancestry.  

And then, sometimes turning over those stones is more like picking through gravel that has been buried under two feet of mud.  (I'm not even exaggerating.)

So, I naively began my endeavor - you'd think I'd know not to underestimate how much time these things take by now - by asking myself what I already knew.  In case any of you did not have the chance to read my original post about John Moore or would like a bit of a refresher, you can read it here.   I just read through it myself and was amazed to find that I actually failed to include one of the best primary source documents I had for John Moore.  Not only that, but I also failed to take into consideration a lot of the tiny tidbits of information that could have been gleaned from all of the documents I had downloaded.  (Okay, I'll be honest, I didn't even look closely enough to notice most of those tidbits!)  I guess I was so intent on proving that Judith Moore was Jacob Blackshear's wife that I didn't really care about her father at the time!  

Let's begin with the family chart that I created for John Moore:

Husband:	John MOORE
born married died	c. 1740
	Spring 1792, Jones County, North Carolina
Father: (possibly William MOORE)		Mother: (possibly Mary)
Wife:	Mary
born died
	(Ohio?)
Father:		Mother:
Children:	(probably all born in Hyde County, NC)
	Michal       b. c. 1764 (Michael)  d. btw 1786-92, NC	m. Malachi JOLLEY, 13 Mar 1782
	Mary     b. c.  1766               d. after 1815, OH	m. Benjamin STANTON, 11 Mar 1784 (m. David BERRY, 1812)
	Sarah    b. c. 1767               d. after 1832, IN	m. James MACE, 5 Mar 1786 m. Jonas SMALL, 1811
	A(r)melia   b.  c. 1768 (Milley)      d. (bef. 1814)	m. Zemeriah HARRIS, 5 Apr 1786
	Judith   b.  c. 1770               d. between 1840-1848, GA	m. Jacob BLACKSHEAR, (7 Mar) 1791
	Gideon  b. c. 1772               d. after 1810	m. Sarah (Sally) ENSLEY, c.1804/05
	(possible additional son) b. btw 1782-85 d. bef 1792 NC *I don't know what I was thinking with this birth range!

(Wouldn't you know, this blog is still messing up the formatting on my charts when I publish the posts!)

As we can see, we know a whole lot about John Moore's children, but not so much about him or his wife.  We know that they joined the Society of Friends in 1781, and that they attended the Core Sound Monthly Meeting.  We know that the family was actually living in the Mattamuskeet area of Hyde County during the 1780's because the Quaker records tell us so, and we know that by 1789 they had moved to Jones County because a deed from June of that year names John as a resident.  Now, I mentioned in my previous post that I had based John's birth date on the ages of his children, as well as the fact that he first appears in the deed records of Hyde County in 1766.  But that c. 1740 was really just a guess. We know that he died in the spring of 1792, because his will was written the 26th of January 1792 and the probate process was begun during the May term of court in the same year.  The Inferior Court usually held session every third month, which means the court met some time in February and John's will was not presented so he was most likely still alive at that point.   What else?  Well, I think that is all we know for sure.  We do know that John's wife was named Mary, and I think we can be confident with our reasoning that she could not have been Mary Person, but what her maiden name was remains a mystery.  Why did I place William Moore as the possible father?  Well, he was one of the only two Moores of the right age who showed up in the Hyde County records, and I had only found one document for the other guy, from way back in 1754.  Oh, and the will of William Moore names a son named John.  So that was my best guess at the time.  

So, there I was, just about two months ago now, and I decided to begin my quest by making a list of all of the documents that I had downloaded for the Moores in Hyde County (in case I needed to take a closer look at them in the future - you know, in case I ever decided to try to trace John's line further back).  This is what I had:

John - records dating 1766 (deed) - 1792 (death)
William - records dating 1741 (taxes) - 1781 (death)
Roger - record dated 1754 (deed)
Henry - records dating 1780 (deed) - 1798 (will)

Now, I had read each of the documents way back two years ago when I found them, so I had some idea what they all said.  I knew that the information they gave us was not enough to determine anything other than rough guesses on which generation each of the four men fell into.  I took one more look through the deed indexes of Hyde County, finding only other Moores who were doing their thing after 1790, and then moved on.

I was really hoping that this new quest could be easily done by simply looking online for blogs or old publications that listed a pedigree that included our John.  I know, wishful thinking, right?  Of course there wasn't one.  

But, looking for that did give me some websites that talked about where the North Carolina Moores originally came from.  I mean, that would be better than nothing, right?  

I found a whole lot of information about some famous Moores named Maurice and Roger who were the sons of a South Carolina-by-way-of-Barbados governor and who, along with a force led by their brother James, came to the aid of North Carolina during the Tuscarora War (1712).  They returned to North Carolina a couple of years later and settled first in the northern part of the colony, but ended up being huge slave plantation owners in the southern Cape Fear area.  They trace themselves back to some legendary Irish rebellion leader named Rory O'More (of course they do).  There were some websites where people talked about the genealogy of their own branch of North Carolina Moores, some of whom came from Virginia and trace themselves back to an Englishman named John who arrived in 1620, some from England and Ireland between 1730-1750, and then there is the branch who came over with Baron de Graffenried's Swiss expedition in 1710.  All of this information covered Moores from the Perquimans, Orange, Northampton, New Hanover, and Craven County areas, but nobody was talking about the Moores from Hyde or neighboring Beaufort aside from a family of free blacks who lived there in the early 1700s.  

So then I started to wonder just when and from where Hyde County was populated. That led me on a days-long wild goose chase.  I discovered that the original settlers in North Carolina came from Virginia in 1650 and settled in the northeast corner of the colony.  In 1665 and 1667, a fresh wave of immigrants from New England (fleeing repressive religious government) and the Bermudas arrived.  By 1672 there was already a Quaker settlement in the Perquimans precinct of Albemarle County (the northern of only two counties in the colony at the time, and the only place white settlers actually lived).  In 1676-77 many Virginians who were fleeing punishment from Bacon’s Rebellion ran south to North Carolina.  (Hmmm.  It's easy to see why colonial North Carolinians would have the reputation of being fiercely independent and ungovernable!)

Then, during the late seventeenth century, white settlers moved south from the Albemarle region (northeastern NC) along the eastern coast and settled inland along the Pamlico and Neuse Rivers.  (The Neuse River area is where the de Graffenried settlement was and where our Blackshear relatives ended up.)  In the Pamlico region, it appears that the area way in around Bath Town was settled first, and then settlers spread out to the west and east from there.  Bath Town was located at the juncture of the future Beaufort and Hyde Counties.  Thus, many of the early residents of Hyde and Beaufort most likely came south from the Perquimans, Pasquotank, Chowan, and Currituck precincts of old Albemarle County along the Virginia border.  

Here is a map to help you picture it:

Colton's 1862 New Topographical Map of the Eastern Portion of the State of North Carolina
Detail of Albemarle and Pamlico Regions 

(You'll have to ignore some of the county names, since this is a newer map, but it was the nicest one I could find that looked accurate.  So, as you can see, the first settlers in the colony were up in those "fingers" at the top.  Pretty much nobody lived along the southern coast of Albemarle Sound (where the map says Tyrrel) for a long time because it was mostly a miserable enough place that it was referred to on maps as a "Dismal Swamp." Also, this map says "Pamplico" Sound and River, but it was called by a whole lot of variations in the past, such as Pamtico and Pamlico.)  

One might assume, then, that any Moores found in Hyde might be descended from one of the Moore men found in the earliest records (1690’s – 1720) of North Carolina.  I looked at a bunch of old tax and corn lists, which were an early sort of tax record beginning in 1711 when a tax of corn and wheat was levied to pay for the protection of white settlers from Indian raids.  I found lists dating from 1711 to 1722 with the names of the famous Maurice and Roger, a Nathan who was probably their brother, and an Alia, Robert, Edward, Alexander, Coleman, and William Moore/Moor/More.  Although there were lists for the Beaufort and Hyde precincts, there were no Moores named on them.  Could that early William be the William from Hyde County?  At that point I had no way to know.  

This led me to a many-hour search for the records of old Albemarle County (of North Carolina, not Virginia).  I eventually came across something called miscellaneous papers on FamilySearch, but most of what I looked at was abstracts.   I found a Samuel Moor signing as a witness on a will or deed (I don't remember which - I just wrote "witness" in my research notebook!) in 16?? (Those early, early documents are really hard to read.)  Then there was Maurice in Bath Towne in 1715 and Nathan, Richard, and a strange abbreviation beginning with "B" on a 1717 tax list with no location named.  Nice.  I was beginning to think, though, that maybe the famous Maurice and his family had left some relatives behind in the northern part of the colony when they moved south during the 1720's.  

Next, I found a bunch of abstracts that allowed me to do a keyword search, and I found some other early Moores, mostly in Perquimans and Chowan, which wasn't so surprising when I learned that the seat of government for the colony was at the town of Edenton in Chowan precinct and Perquimans was an early Quaker settlement.  None of the names I found really told me anything useful, except for an entry on page 150 of the Jan. 1901 edition of the North Carolina Historical and Genealogical Register.  It had an abstract of some original document from Perquimans precinct that said, 

"April 1696.  Timothy Clare proves rights for himself, wife Elizabeth. . . Jane Byer proves her rights, self, Richard Byers, Laurence Nogall, Jane Byer, Robert Boge, Wm. Boge, Margaret Boge, Wm Moore, Jas. Loadman."

This is referring to the fact that North Carolina was so in need of settlers during the early years that it practiced the headright system in which a person received a certain amount of land for every person they transported into the colony.  So here we see an early William Moore coming in unaccompanied by any other family member.  Was he a young single man?  Was he a married man preparing a place for his family?  Did he come from another colony or on a ship from Europe?  We have no answers to these questions, but it is a good reminder that our first Moore ancestor in North Carolina might have been a wealthy planter or indentured servant, or anything in between.  

I continued searching and found some early deed abstracts and entries from court records and some really early wills, but once again, nothing that did me any good. So then I wondered where the early records of Hyde County could possibly be.  All I'd managed to find were corn lists and tax papers.  What about the early deeds?  After more searching online, I found out that Hyde and Beaufort were the two precincts of old Bath County, and then I had to do a bunch of digging to find those records.  Did I say a bunch of digging?  You have no idea.  I finally found them on FamilySearch in a really strange place after clicking on a link that didn't sound like the one that would take me there but actually did.

Of course, I had tried finding the Bath County records before I looked at the old Albemarle records, had actually given up on finding them, and switched to looking for old wills on Ancestry and the North Carolina digital collection.  I found a ton of wills in Perquimans, mostly from the 1750's.  None of those were actually helpful.  There were a ton from the six counties that were formed from the original Chowan County, and those weren't really helpful either.  I did find a 1670 will for a David Moore, even though I didn't come across a single other reference to this guy in my three weeks of searching.  That was helpful insomuch as it reminded me that just because someone is absent from the records doesn't prove that they didn't exist.  There's no telling how many records have been lost.  

Okay.  So my study of old wills got me nowhere.  I decided to try looking for the old Bath County records again, which is when I actually found them.  They were in remarkably good shape, which seemed kind of miraculous to me since they were stored for more than 200 years in a town that sits right on the water.  I scanned through every handwritten page of the book - all 450 microfilm images - looking for names.  The deeds supposedly covered the years 1696 to 1729, but there weren't very many of those really old ones in it.  The first 100 images went up to 1716.  I didn't find anyone with the surname Moore either buying, selling, or witnessing a transaction of land.  Images 150 to 199, covering the years 1711-1719, made a couple of references to the famous Maurice Moore.  Images 200 to 450, which covered the years 1718-1737, had Maurice Moore selling a bunch of land that I assumed came from land grants because he was selling way more than I had read about him having purchased.  And then, finally. . . . a reference to a William Moore!  A 1733 deed between two other men was witnessed by William More.  Of course, I hadn't come across a deed that showed him buying any land in the area, so I figured it was just my luck that it was lost.  

Oh, what's that you are asking?  What happened to images 100 to 150?  Well, I just discovered five minutes ago that I didn't read them.  You would now like to know why on earth I skipped them?  Well, I was reading them out of order, 50 images at a time - don't ask me why, because I don't have an answer for you - and I guess I got to the end and forgot that I had skipped a portion from the middle!  That's one of the many problems that arise when you are trying not to miss turning over any stones - you end up jumping around from place to place, because you find something, and that makes you think you should follow up on it by looking somewhere else, and that somewhere else turns into two or three somewheres, and the next thing you know, you've forgotten to finish going through the original set of documents and don't even realize it.  Wouldn't that be funny if I did a whole two week's worth of additional research looking for the information I needed and it was in those 50 images all along?  No, it wouldn't.

(And here I would like to say thank you to that elderly gentleman at the Family History Center who told me several years ago that I absolutely had to start taking research notes, and whom, at the time, I was not particularly pleased with for giving me a big lecture, but whom I listened to and started keeping a notebook anyway, because I never would have known that I missed those deeds without my notes, and I never would have found those strangely linked original records again so I could go back and read them without my notation of the film number.)

Well, it is going to take me some time to read through those 50 images (which is 100 pages of the deed book), so we'll all just have to wait in eager anticipation to find out if I find anything important.  For now, I'll just continue telling you about all those stones I turned over during the past month.

I decided that maybe my next tack should be to see if I could find a will that said something miraculous like "and I give to my son William (or to my son John), living in Hyde County..." or something.  (Hey, don't laugh - this actually happened in my quest for Anderson Foster, so it's always possible!) 

I began by looking for wills from Hyde County.  Nothing new there.  Since Beaufort County sits to the west, I also checked there for wills but only found one - a Thomas More who died in 1752.  Only one son and daughter were named, and they weren't any of the men from Hyde.  I knew Perquimans County had a large Quaker population, so I checked those too.  I knew this was a long shot, since our John didn't become a Quaker until well after he was living in Hyde County, but you never know.  I found lots of Johns and Williams and Samuels, but nothing that gave any indication that they were relatives of our John.  Well, there was one - a will for an unmarried young man named Gideon, which was the name of our John's son.  Gideon is a name that almost never comes up in the colonial records of North Carolina so what are the chances that there would be two Gideon Moores who weren't related?  The Gideon in Perquimans died in 1762.  His father, John Moor, had died around 1755.  None of the other information in their wills helped me out at all, but it was a bit of information to hold in my mind for later.  

I decided to expand my search to other counties nearby to Hyde.  I found a lot of Moores in the Bertie/Edgecombe/  Northampton/Halifax area to the northwest, but that branch seemed to be naming their sons entirely different names.  (There were a few John and Williams thrown in, but every surname had a million of those!)  There were also several John Moors in the Orange/Caswell area, but again, no discernable link.  I thought I might get somewhere by paying special attention to the spelling of the last name, but alas, no.  For the most part it was apparently just a matter of whoever was writing stuff down since there was no standardized spelling yet.  You'll never see so many different spellings of the same person's surname as you'll find for people living in the 1750's!  

Our John is no exception; I have found his name spelled Moore, More, and Moor.  Unfortunately, when I take down research notes, I am not very good at making sure that I spell it the way I found it, so if I don't know for sure I will probably just spell it "Moore."    A 1782 military document and the 1790 census both spell it "Moor," and in the only place in which we see John’s actual signature, his will, the “seal” overlaps the end of his last name, but it does appear to say “Moor” without the “e” at the end:

See what I mean? You have the darker signature that clearly ends with the "r" and the scalloped edge of the seal which is lighter.  We'll have to try to remember this because it just might help us out yet.

At this point I was beginning to think that I was just spinning my wheels and I was getting awfully tired of looking through ill-organized deed indexes and trying to decipher the poor handwriting of sloppy clerks.  So I went to the North Carolina Land Grant website (which is fantastic) and looked up the names Moore, Moor, and More.  I found no entries at all for Hyde County.  From the neighboring Beaufort, I found a John, William, Jacob, Jesse, Arthur, and Moses with dates ranging from 1728 to the 1780's, but none of the locations sounded like they were particularly close to the Hyde area.  

So there I was, feeling like I'd pretty much exhausted my resources.  I decided that I had two options left that might help solve this mystery.  First, I could read the Hyde County Deed Book A in it's entirety to see if any deeds had not made their way into the index, and also to see if John or William were mentioned in anybody else's deeds.  

(I would like to interject here that I strongly encourage you all to actually read through the deed books.  Yes, the entire book for the time and place you are researching.  Oh, you might end up with a crick in your neck, carpal tunnel syndrome, and a migraine, and you might accumulate a pile of unwashed laundry to rival the leaning tower of Pisa, but you'll gain a whole lot of insight into the time and place in which your ancestor lived.)

I did.  I read through 171 images, which actually contained a typed transcription of the 814 handwritten pages of the original deed book.  Now, I was pretty bummed that it was a transcription, because a lot of times the person typing it up misreads the original or leaves words out or makes typos.  However, in this case, it was a whole lot easier (which means faster) to read a typed version.  The book started in 1735 and went through 1762 and I found four references to Moores.  Yep.  Days of reading, and just four references.  These included two deeds I had already downloaded, an additional deed that William More signed as a witness, and another, from 1756, that made reference to " a little marshy flag gut . . . by a tarkine that Isaac Jackson and William Moore burnt."

At first I was like a tarkine?  What is that supposed to be and why did they burn it?  And then two things dawned on me at once.  First, that colonial North Carolina was a big producer of naval stores like lumber for ships, turpentine, tar, and pitch.  And second, that while watching The Curse of Oak Island just a few months ago, the archaeologists had unearthed what they determined to be a tar kiln, which was 

A device used to produce tar by melting it out of dead pine trees. A tar kiln consisted of a pit dug in the ground with a barrel in it to collect the tar. The pit was filled with resinous wood (lightwood) and covered with dirt. When the lightwood was set on fire, the tar ran out of the wood into the barrel.

And this is what it would have looked like while being built:

Who knew?  Well, now all of us do.  And to think, I just learned about this in like, February!

(The deed said that the tar kiln was by a "flag gut," which I figured was a typo, but it turns out that a gut is "a narrow coastal body of water, a channel or strait, usually one that is subject to strong tidal currents flowing back and forth."  This of course makes sense, since a lot of the land we are looking at is along the Pamlico River and Sound.  I still haven't figured out what the "flag" part means, though.)

Anyway, I was hoping to get more out of reading the deed book than a few moments of excitement that I had actually learned something recently that allowed me to understand a reference to our maybe possible ancestor or at the very least distant, distant relative.  It was far from a waste of time, though, because I was able to learn a few things about Hyde County, like the fact that almost all of the early deeds were for lands in a certain area, and the fact that the Arromuskeet/Mattamuskeet area was hardly named at all until the late 1740's, and I saw which people's names usually appeared together (meaning they probably lived near one another and were friends), and I took note of some names that would appear in other documents in relation to John and William Moore.  

I actually took a little side trip trying to figure out what the deal with the Mattamuskeet area was, and I discovered two things:

It turns out that the entire area around Lake Mattamuskeet was made into an Indian reservation shortly after the Tuscarora War, in order to appease the Indians who were still harassing the residents of Bath Town.  The reservation was for the mixed group of Matchapungo, Mattamuskeet, and - wait for it - Croatan Indians of the lost settlers of Roanoke fame.  (It really took some digging before I stumbled upon this!)  I didn't even realize that the Roanoke settlement was so close to this area, because we always think about the settlement being in the Virginia colony, but of course, the land that would later become the Carolinas was originally part of Virginia!  

(You can see Roanoke island over there on the right hand side by the outer banks. For an enlarged view, click here.)

Anyway, while reading the deed book I noticed that during the 1740's the tribal members began selling off huge parcels of their land to planters and men who appeared to be investors.  Over the next twenty or so years, the land would be sold off, and then gradually return to the hands of the original purchasers, and then be sold again, and then return once more . . . it was all very strange.

The other thing I discovered was that the entire eastern portion of Hyde county was actually a part of Currituck County (in the very northeast corner of the colony) until 1745!  That means that maybe some of the deeds I am looking for are in an entirely different deed book.

Okay, I've gotten a bit off track here.  Before the side trip, I thought I had two options left.  The first was reading the deed book, and the second was to go back and reread the Hyde County court minutes.  I had actually scanned through them once up to image 347, finding only one reference to William Moore (a grand jury list), and then gotten through them a second time through image 244 without finding anything new.  This is because they are an absolute mess.  On many, many of the pages the clerk obviously didn't care what the records looked like and needed to sharpen his quill or something, because the ink was all thick and black and the bleed-through was so bad you couldn't read but a couple of words on the entire page.  Other pages were so washed out I couldn't even figure out how to adjust the brightness and contrast to make it readable.  

See?  Both of these pages make reference to one of the Hyde County Moores.  Of course, these two weren't so bad that I couldn't find the names, but many pages were so, so, so much worse.  Some were even just mostly black fragments.   And then, on top of all that, many of the pages were out of order, and since every page was not dated, I was reduced to trying to analyze the handwriting and scratching my head trying to remember who the justices of the peace or clerk were in any given year I had a date for.  This was the part of stone turning that was like picking gravel out of the mud.  And guess what?  

All in all, I was able to find 38 references to Moores on my third go around.  Why was I able to find so many more?  Well, here you have one more reason to read through entire deed books.  You see, back in the day, people capitalized all kinds of words that were not names and did not appear at the beginning of a sentence.  This makes scanning for people's names really, really hard.  But after reading hundreds of deeds, the names of the people who lived there had become so familiar to me that they just jumped off the page. (Really!)  I only made it through the beginning of 1787, and I'm pretty sure there should be more mentions of our John Moore because he was given a subpoena to testify and I don't think the minutes covered that yet.  So I have to keep on reading.  Also, the years 1735 to 1744 are really patchy, so either pages are missing or those are the pages I can't read.  The years 1755-1758 had only one page for each term of court, so either pages are missing or they had a lazy clerk, meaning we probably missed some important information.  

Actually, I know we did, because one of the Moores, Roger, had a few things going on during that time.  He is actually the reason I decided to look at the bastardy bonds.  I don't even remember what I saw in the minutes, but I opened up the film of bonds and on the eighth image there he was, paying a bond to the parish wardens for getting a girl with child out of wedlock.  Four years later this Roger would be dead, and I really wanted to read the court minutes for these few years to see if I could get a better picture of what had happened, but no such luck.

I also wanted to read the portions of the minutes around the time of John Moore's land transactions, and - most importantly - around the death of William Moore.  Unfortunately, there was a typed page in the middle of the minutes microfilm that said the years 1767-1784 were in a separate book.  I haven't found them yet, but hopefully I will be able to.  

In the midst of my research I decided to see if I could investigate the Moore - Jolley connection to see if both families came to Hyde from the same place.  (Remember, Malachi Jolley was named by John Moore as a very good friend.  He was also married to John's oldest daughter.  His father, Phillip, appeared often in the records with William Moore, and Phillip's father, Thomas, was one of the original residents of Hyde.)  My searching revealed that Thomas Jolley, as well as the family of his wife, were some of the original residents of Beaufort County next door.  So I am really starting to think that the Hyde County Moores came from the Beaufort area when both counties were still precincts of old Bath County.  

So, on my to-do list is:

1. Finish reading the pages from the Bath County deed book that I had missed.  (I managed to do this before my final proofreading and publishing of this post.  The only Moore-related deeds were a whole bunch of deeds for town lots in Bath purchased, sold, or witnessed by good ol' Maurice.  So, no smoking gun there!)

2. Finish reading through the Hyde County court minutes up until the year of John's death, and then go searching for the missing years and read those.

3. Finish reading through Hyde County Deed Book B, which covers the years that John acquired his land in Matttamuskeet.

4. Try to read through the early Currituck County deed book. (I say try because I took a quick peek and the quality doesn't seem to be very good.)

5.  Look closely through all of the records I can find for Beaufort County, including wills, deeds, tax records, court minutes, and yes, bastardy bonds.

I think that might be it.  Actually, I hope that is it because, as much fun as I have doing this sort of research, this particular question sure has been dragging on for quite some time now.  It is constantly turning in the back of my mind, and I am finding it hard to concentrate on anything else!  Also, my research notebook is almost entirely out of pages.  (I didn't have any idea I would end up recording so much information, so I stuck it at the end of my still-in-progress Blackshear notebook, and now I don't have enough pages to finish the Moores or Blackshears!)

But that's how it goes with leaving no stone unturned: you end up not knowing when you start what is going to be relevant, so you either record a whole lot of information that you have to later throw out as completely useless, or you dismiss things that look irrelevant and later say wait a minute, didn't I see somewhere . . .  and then you have to practically reinvent the wheel trying to find it again.  And, once I finally get through that to-do list, I will be faced with the biggest problem of my research compulsion which is that, in the end, you have a mountain of evidence to sort through and try to make sense of, and make connections between, and then, finally, try to draw conclusions from.  

Here's what I have collected so far that we will have to look at:

John Moore

  Deeds = 3 (Hyde County), 2 (Jones County)

  Land Grant = 1 (Jones County)

  References from the Court Minutes = 22 (Hyde County)

  Tax Records = 4 (Hyde County)

  Census Records = 3 (Hyde & Jones counties)

  Military records = 1 (Hyde County)

  Quaker Records = not sure yet!

  Last Will and Testament = 1 (Jones County)

  

As you can see, these are all from Hyde or Jones counties, where we know for sure that our John Moore lived.  In addition to these, we will need to look at the deeds where John's lands were sold after his death, and I have a couple of pages from an estate sale showing some purchases John made, which tell us nothing about his father but are interesting nonetheless.

In addition to these, I now have 18 different records related to a Roger Moore, something like 38 records for a William Moore, at least 5 records for a Frances Moore, something like 10 records for a Henry Moore, and 8 records for a Sarah Moore, all of whom lived in Hyde County in years that overlapped with John.

And, of course, I'm betting I will come up with some new things from Beaufort County, and maybe even from the Currituck County records, so we'll have to look at those, too.

I'll be back soon to talk about everything I've found that I think might be even remotely relevant, and we'll see if we can sort through it all and finally answer the question, Who was John Moore's father?

                                                                                                                                                 - Therese