The Family Tree Problem Solver: Tried-And-True Tactics for Tracing Elusive Ancestors (14 page)

NUCLEAR FAMILY:
A family group consisting of mother, father, and dependent children.

STEPSIBLING:
Is one related by virtue of a parent's marriage to an individual with children by a former marriage or relationship. While there is no relation by blood, there can be strong ties of emotion and tradition between stepsiblings.

UNCLE:
In American society may refer to a man in four different relative positions: father's brother, mother's brother, father's sister's husband, or mother's sister's husband.

Let's outline the research steps that can help you identify collateral relatives and use the records they produced or are mentioned in to analyze relationships.

The easiest ways to identify relatives are through vital records, recorded marriages, bequests in wills, estate divisions, and land partitions. But because collateral family members may be more difficult to identify, we must look at the family's recorded associates, including witnesses at weddings, witnesses of wills, executors of estates, guardians, grantees and grantors of land, sponsors at baptisms, and of course, unidentified individuals appearing in their households in the census. Investigate those who joined the church at the same time as your family, who filed for land at the same time, and who supported their pension applications. If an individual applied for federal land by preemption (land granted by reason of residence and improvements for a specified time, depending on the congressional act), he would have needed individuals to support his statements regarding when he settled, whether he was married, and whether he had a family. The individuals supporting his claims often were family members. You can find these affidavits in the federal land case files, filed by the case number and land office to which the individual applied (see
Figure 4-5
).

You can also identify collateral family by looking for unusual given names, names uncommon to the time period, names that could easily be surnames, or names that appear repeatedly in the records.

Figure 4-5
Affidavit of Patsy Morris, Bureau of Land Management, Springfield, Missouri, land office, case file #233.

When researching the Nathan Brown family in Preble County, Ohio, I found that a man named Nathan B. Caldwell was mentioned in the records of my family. It would have been negligent not to check into the family of this Mr. Caldwell. Further research showed that he was the son of Mary Brown, daughter of the immigrant Nathan Brown, and wife of William Caldwell, which obviously couldn't be right. It alerted me to look for other people with the name “Nathan B,” and I found that Nathan B. McDill, Nathan B. Magaw, and Nathan B. Wilson were also related to each other.

Your research with names, however, must take into account popular naming patterns outside the family. Naming children after such patriotic figures as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson was common, and military notables such as Francis Marion, Wade Hampton, Sterling Price, and Nathanael Greene were also popular namesakes. A child could also be named for a renowned minister, such as James Guillian, Cyrus Byington, John Knox, or Lorenzo Dow, or a political figure such as Albert Gallatin, James Knox Polk, Martin Van Buren, or even for the doctor who delivered the baby. When studying naming patterns, know your history and chronology. A child born in 1800 may have been named for the heroic “Swamp Fox” of the Revolutionary War, Francis Marion, but the Francis who was born in 1870 was more likely named after someone in the family who had been named for the “Swamp Fox.”

Evaluating naming patterns can be a helpful tool in research, but it can also take you far astray. We may never know what motivated our ancestors to choose some of the names they did. Perhaps they respected a particular member of the community, or read an interesting book and named their child for one of the characters, or were intrigued by a charismatic minister who had passed through the neighborhood the night before the child was born. Do examine naming patterns, but be ready to discard a theory if no data from other sources can be found to support it. Onomastics offers wonderful clues, but creating a relationship based only on naming patterns is fraught with danger.

Don't just look at your ancestor's records in order to identify relatives.
Study everything he did as well. For whose child was he guardian? Whose will did he execute or administer? To whom was he indebted? Family members are often more willing to loan money.

William Cawlfield of early Greene County, Missouri, left a detailed probate record, but I couldn't connect any of the individuals mentioned in it to him, nor could I use it to identify his wife, who he apparently married after he moved to Missouri. The probate records gave me no clues as to his previous location. Because some of his associates had come from Tennessee, I checked the 1830 Tennessee census index, but found no one named Cawlfield.

William Cawlfield served as administrator for a man named John Fitch while Thomas Cawlfield served as bondsman. I then searched that probate record. I learned that James and William Cawlfield had served as guardians for two of John Fitch's children. Owen Cawlfield owed John Fitch money and Jane Cawlfield attended the estate sale. That many associations between the Cawlfields and the Fitches were too many to ignore. I looked for a John Fitch in the 1830 Tennessee census index and found him in Bedford County, Tennessee. On the same page was “Owen Coffield,” with one male twenty to thirty years old living in his household. The household also included Jane Coffield, a fifty-to-sixty-year-old woman who had several children living with her, including one male age fifteen to twenty and two males ages twenty to thirty, who were later identified as Thomas and William Cawlfield of Missouri. John Fitch had married Margaret Cawlfield.

But how to find William Cawlfield's wife? William Cawlfield had died as a relatively young man. Who was involved in his estate? He left minors, so I investigated the guardians of his children. In this case, they were Benjamin Boone and Alfred Horsman. How do they fit? If they weren't from his side of the family, perhaps they were from his wife's. Onomastics was helpful in this situation, as were the surviving county marriage records. Two of William Cawlfield's children were named Daniel Boone Cawlfield and Rebecca Bryan Cawlfield. Alfred Horsman married Mary Boone 23 April 1841, Greene County, Missouri. Levica Cawlfield was too young to be a daughter of Daniel Boone, but finding the probate of Nathan Boone, Daniel's youngest son, who died in Greene County, wasn't difficult. There was the proof of Levica's marriage to William Cawlfield. Benjamin Boone was her brother, Alfred Horsman her brother-in-law.

After identifying the collateral relatives or those you believe may be related, record the data for those families. Always list your sources. Avoid grouping the individuals into family units until you find supporting data. Hasty assumptions and conclusions can quickly take you far afield. You will still gather data on families who are not related to you just as you did when you gathered only surnames, but because these families lived in the same community and were affiliated with your ancestors, your search is much more likely to be productive.

Search the records produced by any families you feel may be connected. It's easy to protest that following every collateral family will produce too many surnames to keep track of. True, you can't possibly remember all those names, but a computer will help — it's amazing what that little search tool can turn up in your files. But you can also benefit from using slightly different methodology and tactics than you used while searching for surnames only.

First, geographically bracket the community in which the family lived. Notice I do not say county — usually a community is smaller than a county, and may overlap county and even state boundaries. It becomes a community because the people who live there share common backgrounds, beliefs, traditions, and values. For instance, I soon learned that what became known as the “Coon Creek” settlement in St. Clair County, Missouri, consisted primarily of individuals related to one another; the same was true of those who settled on “Twelve Mile Prairie” in Dallas County, Missouri. You identify those communities from the local histories, including county and church histories. Often a community organized around the church of a particular denomination. Knowing who founded that church and its early members often leads to information about family relationships in the area.

When tracking collateral relatives, don't focus on names alone.
Learn about the community and culture of the people.
Each community and culture creates its own set of records outside of those required by the government. Were diaries and journals common? Did the church keep more than membership records?Was there an active fraternal society?Was there a particular occupation common in the area, and thus an organization representing it? Find those records and then look for the associates found there.

I try to make the people I am studying real people. I want to make them live again. Surely you know the personality and idiosyncrasies of your living relatives and friends. Try to learn the personality and idiosyncrasies of your ancestors and their associates as well. I attempt to find something unique about each person I study so that I can remember them. For instance, Alexander Appleby was the man who spent his wife's entire inheritance in less than ten years. James Thompson was a judge, so I call him that. Dr. Gilmer was arrested in Concordia, Kansas, for selling liquor to a patient when Kansas was a dry state. The Reverend Marion Morrison was a great-uncle to actor John Wayne. Professor John Valentine (who knows where he got that name?) Brown died in St. Louis the night before he was to make a speech. Anna Wherry Strain was one of the first women mayors in Kansas — elected before women could vote. Allie Glenn was orphaned when she was four, and her brother Harvey died in a Civil War hospital in Vicksburg, Mississippi. I can remember individuals better when I think of them as real people rather than just names.

When studying collateral family lines you must first identify the individuals, then record the data they created, noting the names of those who show up repeatedly in your family's records. At some point, you will know instinctively that some relationship stronger than a casual business or community connection must exist. Perhaps the record that proves a connection will never appear, but with enough evidence, the conclusion will still be a firm one. New evidence may emerge that proves your hypothesis incorrect, but you are much less likely to be wrong when you can demonstrate that strong associations, connections, interactions, and mutual records exist among individuals than if you try linking them purely on the basis of “the name is the same.'