Down the Research Rabbit Hole

I have said before that old Br'er not only scampers around the headstones in person but also online. Sometimes that is the only option available. Much as he might prefer to go where the graves is, when they are several hundred miles away, going there just ain't an option. So he is left with researching the family tree and when the folks is buried all on the webs.

Such was the case recently. Pushing out on some distant cousin lines ended up revealing an interesting story, and one, I daresay would have been utterly lost to history had Br'er not stumbled over it and pulled all the parts together.

It all started when Ancestry (an online genealogy research service for anyone who has been living in a cave or the deep Amazon basin for the past 10 years or so). One of the 'features' of the service is what they call "Hints." Essentially what happens is that certain algorithms and searches are automatically executed by the site for each person you have in your family tree. Potential records - census, tax, birth/death/marriage, and other resources - that may match the person are presented for you to review. These may or may not actually match your entry, so you need to evaluate each one carefully. Part of the background algorithms factor in what other people have selected and applied to what may be the same person in their tree. All too often, those trees are horribly wrong.

For women particularly, these hints can present a challenge. A significant number come up with her married name when you may not have a marriage and spouse in her tree. For example, you have Mary Smith in your tree, and hints start coming in for Jane Jones. Sometimes you can quickly determine that the hint is just plain wrong. Other times, though, you have to really dig in to figure out if the hint is or is not correct for your person. In this example, you find a marriage license with Mary Jane Smith, daughter of Sam and Lisa Smith (the parents of your Mary Smith), marrying John Jones and appearing in later census records as Jane Jones. Bingo! The hint was correct.

So much for the necessary background.

I was working down a branch because a name fascinated me: James Leonidas Lanham. Who names a child Leonidas? Granted, he was born in 1850 when 'classic' names were still popular, even among those of more modest backgrounds. Nevertheless, I was hoping there might be a family story about the name either for him or, if the name was handed down, for a descendant. Short version - neither happened.

But looking at one of his sons, I saw several hints for wives with the same first but different last names. Thinking 'that can't be right,' I start delving deeper. He first appears with a wife on the 1920 census along with a daughter and step-daughter.

Well! That explains that! His wife was either a widow or divorced. Both options are intriguing, considering her age and the period. She was only 31 in 1920, already married twice, and having two children. If widowed, there has to be a story there (if I can find it). If divorced, then there has to be a story there (if I can find it). That her daughter by the first husband is in the household with her second husband speaks to both of them being upstanding people.

Continuing my digging, I slowly start piecing the puzzle together. Very slowly.

The woman was born Carrie Elizabeth Helmick in 1888. As anyone who has done family research learns the hard way, the 1890 census was destroyed in a fire. So she doesn't show up until the 1900 census in her parent's home, age 12.

Carrie appears in the 1910 census, still in her parent's household. But now she is a widow! And with a one-year-old daughter to boot! That is a lot of changes in a decade.

While that answers the question of whether she was widowed or divorced, it raises the question of who was her husband? What happened to him?

More digging means more questions.

Right off the bat, his name is problematic. Steel. Steel? Seriously? But wait! It gets better!

I find where they married in 1907. He gave his name as Steel McDonald. Ok. That seems to be a fact. 

Next, I find an obituary index where he, Carrie, and their daughter, Ethel, are all noted. This is obviously for Ethel as it gives what I later confirmed to be her married name. His name? Steel Rail McDonald. 

You have to be kidding me. Steel Rail? Just damn. Still, things get better!

The only census record he appears on is the 1900 census, where he is listed as Steel B McDonald, 15 years old. Unfortunately, he died before the 1910 census was enumerated in the area they lived.

Now I am left to wonder how accurate his name on his daughter's obit index is. He died in 1910 when she was a year old, so she could not possibly remember him. She died in 2004. 94 years is a long time. I can easily accept that memories 'shift' over that many years.

I find his Find A Grave entry for Steel, complete with a photo. The name on the stone? Steel B McDonald. Guess that settles the question of whether his middle name is "Rail" or not, eh? He is not linked to either Carrie or Ethel in FindAGrave. Add that to the To-Do list if all this pans out, and I confirm the relationships.

More digging uncovers a photo. I would say a photo of young Steel, but considering that he died about age 25, that would be utterly redundant.

Brake. The person who shared the photo gives his name as Steel Brake McDonald. Brake does match the B initial. So, Brake it is. I looked for his death certificate in West Virginia records by searching for the first name Steel. Four results. None of them this Steel. Who would have expected that many men named Steel? 

Meet Steel Brake McDonald.

If I were to be a betting man, I would say that the photo was taken when Steel and Carrie married in 1907. Kinda looks like Alfafa from The Little Rascals to me.

In the end, I was able to link him to Carrie's and Ethel's Find A Grave memorials, and I reunite the family, so to speak, by linking all the memorials. I even get Steel's name updated to Brake.

Try as I might, I cannot find what happened to Steel. Someone shared a photo of a lumber mill, stating that it is where Steel worked there and dating it 1909. Given the snow on the ground, if the date is correct, then the photo had to be taken mere months before he died. All I can posit is that he likely fell victim to either an accident at the mill or illness. Though I can imagine any number of much more lurid possibilities.

From there, I moved on to Carrie. Where Steel left a minimal paper trail (Minimal? Damned near non-existent!), Carrie left a much more extensive record, two daughters, and a son from her second husband, my kin, Dennis Lanhan, including more photos.

Carrie, probably in the late 1910s to mid-1920s

Carrie, later in life

Cousin Dennis Lanham, Ethel McDonald (Steel and Carrie's daughter), and Carrie. I suspect that the Model-T is a prop in a photographer's studio because the background is obviously a screen. Look at it as it is pulled back in the lower right corner.

I did continue researching the branch down into the children Carrie bore by Dennis. But to be frank, that became even more sad and bizarre. One daughter, clearly hopeful, purchased a headstone intended for a married couple and left space for a husband, yet she died a spinster. The other daughter ended up marrying twice herself. And her second spouse already had married twice, making her his third wife.

Makes me wonder if bad luck (or bad choices) runs in Carrie's line. And it tells me that I should stop there, declare victory for the moment, and revisit this branch another time.

Oh, Captain! My Captain!

A preface: The phrase from Jurassic Park was "Life finds a way." The phrase from The Warren is "Life gets in the way."

This entry was started more than six months ago. It was shunted aside and left unfinished for too numerous to mention. I am in a "get things done" mode these days, so I am going back and either completing or deleting anything I started and left unfinished. 

Fortunately, this was mostly done, so it was really just a matter of adding the photos and touching up the text. 

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Poetry is, by and large, not my thing. So it is more than a little noteworthy when I reference someone like Walt Whitman. Be properly impressed.

I have a friendly competition with someone I have never met to see who can locate and photograph cemeteries in the counties where many of my ancestors resided. He is also aware of my efforts to clean select (Read: Interesting yet abandoned and hopefully historical) to properly clean headstones.

A few weeks ago, he suggested a stone that needs cleaning. Badly. And he was right.

Like so many other soldiers of the Revolution, Philp Tigner was awarded land on the frontier of Georgia. Finding details of that service is rather frustrating. While I am sure there are more details somewhere in a book on a research shelf, the best data readily available online comes from the Sons of the American Revolution organization's Patriot Research System; "He served in the Virginia Troops and also was Captain of the 5th Company of the 2nd Battalion of Georgia Troops." 

Was that to indicate that his service in the Georgia Troops was during the revolution? Or after? The database does not make that clear. The answer is probably in that book on a shelf somewhere. Then again, it may not be. This could be one of those things lost to history. Try as I might, I could not readily locate anything specific about his service.

What is clear is that he fathered some 13 children with two wives (Sarah Forbish and Nancy Hall). It is worth noting that there are probably a few additional children not recorded as they did not survive. The children, by and large, were born about every year. Except that there are a few substantial gaps between some of them. Having almost all one's children survive into adulthood in the late 18th to early 19th centuries would be close to a biblical miracle. I would not be at all shocked if the actual number of children was closer to 16 or 17. Or even more. But those names and dates would only be recorded in the family bible if they were recorded at all.

I muse about possible additional children in defiance of a letter in 1881 by one of Philip's sons, Young Fletcher Tigner, when Young Fletcher was about 78 years old, to one of his own grandsons relating some family history. In the letter, Young Fletcher names all 12 of his siblings and half-siblings, and names two who died in infancy. So that, at least, comports with the norm of families losing infants at the time. Still, there remain those nasty gaps between births - some a decade or so before Young Fletcher was born. And I know all too well how not every family story is passed along, so it may be that Young Fletcher only passed on what he was told. Or what he remembered. Or maybe he had it all correct. Who can truly say?

After passing away in 1819, Philip was laid to rest on his farmland, as was the custom of the time. Well, more a necessity than a custom back then. There were few alternatives. And the alternatives that were available were often impractical due to distance and the difficulty of travel in the area. Yes, there was the occasional graveyard at a church. But there were few churches, and they may be a good distance away. Transporting a corpse wasn't the greatest idea. And delaying burial was unwise. Trebly so in warmer months. 

So it was that most people were interred on family land relatively quickly. 

It is worth noting that the records indicate that Philip was, in fact, considered a Reverend (probably a Methodist) and had played a sufficient part in founding a church that bore his name! Tigner Church. The church building no longer survives, and the congregation was merged with another church which was later merged with yet another church in the ensuing decades. I presume that the original Tigner Church either had no graveyard or, if it did, Philip or his family opted to not lay his to rest there.

Hot weather was not a problem when Philip passed. Heat is seldom an issue in January in the South. Then again, dirt roads are less than conducive to wagon traffic in the winter.

Whether by his wish or out of sheer necessity, Philip was buried on his land and a stacked rock false tomb erected over the grave. More than a century later, when such a thing became available, the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a marker at the grave. Apparently, this was later stolen or vandalized (destroyed), and some decades later a Veteran's Administration issued headstone was erected in front of the false tomb. It is this latest marker that we planned on cleaning.

The site has only one obvious and certain grave - Philip's. But there are several highly probable additional graves visible. Some with, some without what may be a fieldstone marking its location. Again, logic would dictate that other family are also interred there. At least the second wife, if not both wives. (The gravesites of the wives and many of the children are not known. His first wife, Sarah, is almost certainly not here since she and Philip lived many miles away in Green County at the time of her death.) And perhaps unrecorded children or other family. Past estimates number additional possible graves around 10. Sadly, Census records of the time list only the head of the household, so we have no way of knowing who these people might be.

Yeah. I think we can all agree that this one needs some cleaning.

You can see how wooded and wet the area is. This does nothing to enhance the looks of the headstone. I have to wonder if the stacked stones remotely resemble their original placement or they have shifted over the decades. Though at this point I can legitimately say centuries since it has been more than 

two hundred years since Phillip passed away.

The staining on the headstone ran deep. Even after thorough scrubbing and a couple of treatments, stains remain. It will take time for the D/2 to work its magic. Still, I think it is safe to say we made a distinct improvement.

Better, yes. But still a long way to go. The plan is to give the D/2 a few months to work before returning and checking the results. Next spring, we will return and decide if a second treatment is warranted.

We opted to leave the false tomb untouched. 

Let Me Ask Grandma

You know you are dealing with an almost forgotten cemetery when the individual trying to tell you about it needs to go back and check with Grandma for details.

And you know someone is in bad shape when they turn to ol' Br'er for help. Talk about going to a dry well.

I suppose some kind of explanation is warranted. If not, then I failed to pique your curiosity.

I was contacted by someone in the Social Media wasteland who was impressed by my ability to find cemetery data relatively quickly. I would not say my skills are that good, but, on the other hand, a few decades as an IT analyst may have paid off. 

Nah!

Anyhoo, the person recalled a cemetery from her childhood. Unfortunately, the area is under development, and she was concerned that it may be destroyed. 

Ok. A noble effort. 

The first thing was to see if the cemetery appears in FindAGrave. Short answer: It did not. At least where she thought it was located. But it has been decades since she was there. Her memory was fuzzy. Thus the statement, "Let me ask Grandma." 

I cast a wider search net to see if the cemetery might not be exactly where her memory placed it. I found one, 13 graves (actually 11 - there are two duplicates recorded) not too far away. It was not the one she was remembering. But as I soon learned, it has one of my 1st cousins 5x removed with her husband and some descendants. This I file away as somewhere to visit the next time I am in the area.

Once we had a more precise location, I rechecked and confirmed that it was not recorded. My contact also went to it and photographed the markers. That allowed us to search FindAGrave for their individual memorials.

Nada. 

What we have here is a missing, almost forgotten cemetery and a number of unrecorded graves.

Before taking any other steps, I built out a family tree to see if I could link the names on the headstones. Was this a family cemetery? Was it a church cemetery? (Ok, church graveyard for the pedants in the crowd.) 

I learned that there are two primary and two secondary families involved. Specifically, there are three Middlebrooks sisters buried there, two with their husbands and one child of one sister. The two husbands are Hollis and Montgomery. Additionally, there is an infant Montgomery. Lastly, there are two grandchildren.

I named the cemetery Hollis - Middlebrooks for the two primary families. Hollis came first because that was the first name I came across and because it is the name that appears the most on the headstones. Middlebrooks came second. In retrospect, I think this was a Middlebrooks family cemetery, and the husbands just ended up there. More on that later.

Until I had done all this research, I was considering just passing the information along and seeing if someone more local might be interested in picking up the torch. But now I was hooked. I had to see it through. 

Recall the second cemetery I noticed earlier on? The one with one of my distant cousins? While I cannot prove anything, it appears that her husband is a first cousin to the Hollis I am researching! 

Unfortunately, the location is almost an hour away from the warren. This is going to take the better part of the day. I make certain to take all my cemetery excursion tools with me, including my ground probe. 

Oh, yes. I am compelled to take up this one myself! I have too much invested at this point!

Once I arrive, I let my contact know I am there and starting on the research, and she joins me in a few minutes. 

The first thing we do is walk the perimeter to ensure it encompasses all the graves. There is one fieldstone that is not marked with a grave flag outside the line. I probe around it and the probe easily sinks several feet down. This is a good sign that the soil has been disturbed to that depth. Undisturbed soil - soil that has never been dug up - has much greater resistance. The probe seldom goes in more than a few inches. So we secretly move the flag a few feet out so that the probable grave falls within the overall cemetery perimeter.

After creating the cemetery record in FindAGrave, I begin adding each grave, linking families, adding more photographs, and setting GPS locations for each one.

Good thing I reserved substantial time for the effort!

B. M. Hollis was where I started my research and why I (almost certainly incorrectly) first named the cemetery Hollis. Would you believe his name was Bartley? Most likely Bartley Martin Hollis.

T.C. Hollis turned out to be Talithia C. (Middlebrooks) Hollis, 1st wife of Bartley (he married a few years after her death and fathered several more children with her). She was the first Middlebrooks I noticed but should not have been, as I will explain later. No clue as to what the 'C' stands for!

As best I can uncover, little Isaac S. Hollis was the only son of Bartley and Talithia. That had to be soul-crushing for them. 

Permelia, here, should have been the first Middlebrooks I noticed. But I was not paying close attention and missed the obvious appearance of her name on the headstone. She is a sister to Talithia.

Permethia's husband - Bluford Terrell Mongomery. So help me, his name was Bluford. It appears that way on many records with it clearly spelled out. No chance for mistaken handwriting!

I am confident in saying that I don't think I shall ever encounter a living Bluford!

Little Hale passed at a mere 9 months and 9 days old. He was a son to Marcus Judson Hollis and his wife, Laura Felix (Haile) Hollis. Seriously, all the records list her name as Felix. It may have been Felicia, but it was not recorded that way so far as I could find. Marcus and Felix are buried in the nearby Rutledge City Cemetery.

Marcus was a son of Bartley M Hollis through his second wife, Mary Ann (Gresham) Hollis, making Hale one of Bartley's grandchildren.

Speaking of grandchildren, Little Pearl Stanton is another of Bartley M and Talithia's through their daughter, Ollie Jane Hollis.

Ollie Jane married Isaac Anderson Stanton. There is a marker next to their graves in Circle View Cemetery in nearby Social Circle. It reads, "In memory of Little Pearl Stanton Age 1 year." That FindAGrave memorial gives her dates as Dec 1878 - 9 December 1879. 

I am convinced that the Circle View stone is a cenotaph, and Pearl's actual grave is here. Her parents passed away in the early 1930s (Isaac in 1931 and Ollie Jane in 1934) - more than 50 years after Pearl passed away. Circle View lists only about two dozen or so graves dating from 1879 or earlier, and the cemetery is several miles from where Isaac and Ollie lived at the time. It would make no sense for them to take an infant daughter that far for burial where there was an existing family cemetery much closer. Further, looking at the two stones, the one here is clearly of the right look for the period, whereas the Circle View stone looks much newer in style.

My theory is that they wanted something closer to their gravesites to remember their infant daughter lost a half-century earlier. 

Oh! The Circle View record mentions a Middlebrook Family Association. Put a pin in that for later!

The following two graves are less certain. I have to speculate on who they are based on what I could make out on the stones and what I could learn building the family tree.

First up was a child's grave. My ugly boot in the lower left-hand corner gives something for scale (I did not have a banana. Sorry. Internet joke there.). 

I could just make out what appeared to be a J or T and F Montgomery. Looking at the family tree, I found Talulah F Montgomery, born about 1863. She was a daughter of Bluford and Permelia and only appears in one record - the 1870 US Census, where her age is listed as 7. That page was enumerated on 1 June 1870, so the odds favor her being born between June 2 and December, 31 1862. That is a 7 month period vs. the alternative period of January 1 and June 1, 1863 - a 5 month period. The age recorded on the census is "as of last birthday," so she had to be born in one of those two periods (Ok. Was probably born in one of those two periods, assuming whoever answered the census did not screw up. Like that would ever happen.) 

Perhaps someone will clean the stones with D/2 one day, and more can be learned from the stone.

Second up was an adult's grave. The top slab was leaning next to the false tomb base.

There is clearly a lot on the stone, but all I could make out was the beginning, "Sacred to the memory of Martha Jane Roberts." But, again, D/2 might reveal more.

But I had Martha Jane in the tree already. She was born Martha Jane Middlebrooks in 1829, a sister to Talithia and Permelia. 

Martha Jane married Silas Robertson in 1851 and had at least (probably only) one child, a son William Franklin Robertson in 1854. She passed away before 24 Aug 1859, though the exact date remains a mystery. I know she passed away before 24 Aug 1859 because of her father's will. That is the date he signed it (he lived until 1861). In the will, he names William Franklin Robertson as a grandson receiving the share of the estate that would have gone to his deceased daughter, Martha Jane Robertson. 

 This will was that of Isaac S. Middlebrooks. He was the father of Martha Jane, Permelia, and Talithia. All the evidence now leads me to speculate that he and his wife, Olly (Phillips) Middlebrooks, are in two of the 20 unmarked graves here. That makes the most sense when you consider three sisters are buried here. If I had to bet, I would place my money there.

I mentioned earlier that I found that there is a Middlebrook Family Association. And it appears to be active. I have dropped a message to several listed association contacts sharing what I have found. No replies yet, but it has only been a few hours. 

Still, I cannot imagine they will be anything less than ecstatic at all the new data.

I can't believe how much time I have sunk into this. And I am not even related to them!