When shared information doesn't add up, Part 2

So up to this point, I'd been relaying the background on a Williamson family that I have been tracking in Parke County, Indiana. New evidence seems to be pointing to Greene County, Tennessee as their place of origin, or at least, where they lived before moving on to Indiana. To begin my search there, I started looking at the Ancestry.com message boards looking for others who may have already dug up some useful info on Williamsons who may have been living there at the same time as Clement. All of his known children claimed Tennessee as their birthplaces and this group goes back to 1817 so I knew that I should be able to track them there at least that far, and thanks to familysearch.org, I was able to locate an exact marriage date for his presumed daughter, Elizabeth Williamson, and her husband, George Basinger, who were both mentioned in Clement's probate file in Parke County as heirs. With all of the information I collected, it set up an estimated birth date for Clement between 1780 and 1790. I didn't find anyone of that name mentioned in the Greene County, TN message board, however, there was another Williamson found of a comparable age. Thomas Williamson married a woman named Kezziah in Greene County and had several children. More importantly, he left a will which named several heirs. There were quite a few posts from people claiming to be descended from Thomas and considering the closeness in age, I thought that perhaps he could be a cousin or brother. So my first question to the message board was if anyone had done any work on Thomas' extended family, including siblings. I didn't get an answer to that, but I did get a response from someone who had some information to share, though none of it was sourced. What she told me points a big fat red flag at the current state of Williamson genealogy.

It appears that Thomas Williamson named a daughter in his 1836 will named Elizabeth. More importantly, Thomas' descendants are attributing that 1831 marriage between Elizabeth Williamson and George Basinger to the daughter of Thomas, not the daughter of Clement who they may or may not have known about in the first place. Now this creates a problem because either there were at least 2 Elizabeth Williamson's living in Greene Co, one a daughter of Thomas and one a daughter of Clement, or there was just one, the daughter of Thomas and upon his death, Clement adopted her or at least took her into his own family and from there, they left for Indiana where they continued to live in close proximity to one another.

So which one is it? Were there 1 or 2 Elizabeth Williamson's? And if there were two, which is which?

When shared information doesn't add up, Part 1-the background

One of the projects I've been working on lately has been on rebuilding the family group of the Williamsons of Parke County, Indiana. On my most recent trip to Rockville, the county seat, I was fortunate enough to find a probate file for a previously unknown Williamson in the county which included a list of heirs which included both my ancestor and a man I suspected to be his brother, as well as others that I hadn't known of before. This gave me several new leads to follow so I've been keeping busy trying to figure out where each new piece fits.

I started working with this family about a year ago when I was able to take my line back to a William Williamson, born abt 1825 probably in TN, and died in Parke County, IN in 1858. William's file provided some indirect evidence of a relationship between a Conrad Williamson who was only about 2 years older than William and who petitioned the probate court on behalf of William's widow and called himself brother to the deceased (though I do know that that is not always to be taken literally in early legal jargon, it did point to a relationship of some kind). He too was seen in census enumerations with a Tennessee birth place and that, along with the closeness of age and the petition made a pretty good case for believing Conrad could have been William's brother. So since both had been born in Tennessee, the task was to find out when they came to Indiana and where they came from. I ran into a brick wall.

The probate file I found a couple weeks ago was for a Clement Williamson who died about 1843 (the early probate files rarely give the exact date of death so you usually have to go by the earliest document found in the file to get an estimate) which explains why he didn't show up when I had been seaching for other Williamsons in the county in the 1850 and 1860 censuses. The probate file names his widow as Mary, who is shown in the 1850 census still living in Parke County with her family, and cites William, Conrad, Henry, James and George and Betsey Basinger "formerly Williamson" as heirs.

Clement did show up in Parke County in the 1840 census, along with a household which included 1 male aged 15-20, 1 male aged 5-10, and 1 male 50 to 60. The male aged 15-20 fits the age William would have been at the time and also fits knowing that he didn't marry until 1843. This means the male 50-60 would be Clement himself giving him a birth date estimate of 1780-1790. Directly above Clement's household in the census is George Basinger including a female, aged 20-30 which fits in with "Betsey's" birth date range when tracking her to the 1850 census. Clement Williamson is not found in Indiana in the 1830 census, however, there is a Clement Williams found in Greene Co., Tennessee in that year with a family group fitting. Thanks to familysearch.org, I was able to see that a marriage took place in Greene Co., TN in 1831 between Elizabeth Williamson and George Basinger (which also tells me that the family was still in TN at the time of their marriage). Also found in 1850, living with the widowed Mary, was James Williamson, age 20, which fits in with the male living in Clement's household in the 1840 census and Henry Williamson, age 32.

So from this, so far I can pretty confidently set the family up as Clement and Mary as the married couple, with William, Conrad, Henry, James, and Elizabeth/"Betsey". To find out more about Clement, I figured I needed to start looking at records available in Greene County, Tennessee. So I headed over to ancestry.com's message boards and started searching for Williamsons in that area. I was fortunate to find several posts regarding a Thomas Williamson there who appeared to be of a comparable age to Clement. Here is where things start to get sticky...

New Territory

Ok, so as you ProGen 3'ers know, this month's assignment was to write up a research report on either a simple or complex issue based upon the models given in the chapter and/or the models given in the BCG Standards Manual. I chose a pretty simple issue to be solved and ended up finding myself in brand new territory.

My focus was to find the William Williamson family of Parke County, Indiana in the 1860 census. I had found them in 1850 and believed I had them pegged in the 1870 census, though the family group was drastically different, but couldn't find a single family member in the 1860 census no matter what name variants I used in the search box on ancestry.com. So my first instinct was to draw up a neighbor list and right off the bat I hit paydirt recognizing the Samuel McMasters family within a page of the Williamsons in the 1850 census and only two households away in the 1870 census. The surname was dead giveaway that this family was the key because I knew that in 1871 William's son, Perry, married a Susannah McMasters. Playing the name game, along with the neighbor lists, won the race and I was able to draw up a pretty neat report complete with thoughts for future research.

What brought me into what I have deemed "new territory" was trying to figure out who in the world Samuel McMasters was. I know what you're thinking, "since Perry married Susannah McMasters in 1871 and the family was living so close together for so many years, wouldn't he have been Susannah's father?" Big fat negatory on that one. I already knew that Susannah's father's name was Emsley McMasters from Randolph Co., North Carolina. So I say again, who in the world is Samuel McMasters? And what about the other McMasters families living in Parke County, Indiana between 1850 and 1870; Lewis McMasters and James McMasters, especially. Lewis, James and Samuel all appear on the same census page in 1860, all in close proximity to the William Williamson family, including Perry. But none of these men is the father of Susannah, thus placing her as one of Perry's closest neighbors (though they did live in the same township between the above years).

Well after some serious census searching, and the assistance of a wonderful family website at http://www.jamesmcmasters.us/ , I was able to piece together the family group. James McMasters, b. abt 1791, was the father of Lewis, b. abt 1817 NC, and of Samuel, b. abt 1826 NC, and they all came to Parke County together. Susannah's father, Emsley McMasters, b. abt 1817 NC, was James' nephew through his other brother, Elisha, b. abt 1789. Did ya get all that? Yeah, I didn't either the first 1000 times I was trying to put it all together. I had to draw myself a couple of diagrams complete with a ton of ink scratch-outs. Understandable or not, the bottom line is that the Williamsons were surrounded in their neighborhood by a large family group for more than twenty years and though they may not have been "next door neighbors" to the parents of Perry's future wife, they were "kissing close" to her uncles and cousins.

So now my research is taking me into North Carolina, and this is an entirely new realm for me. I know absolutely nothing about the genealogy of that state. On the up side, it does look like the McMasters family has been researched quite a bit in the past so getting caught up on all of the research should be an interesting path.

My other surprise, stemming from what was initially thought to be a simple research problem, is that it appears that James McMasters' grandfather, also James McMasters, is DAR eligible and led a fairly interesting life. Though he did not actively serve in the Revolutionary War as a soldier, he falls under the eligibility requirements because he appears in the payment rolls for "services rendered"; according to the James McMasters website, given above, he appears to have given the revolutionaries use of one of his horses. He was also apparently blind for the majority of his life and may even have had roots near Chester County, PA, where I have other family ties.

So quite a bit has already come from this "simple" problem for a ProGen homework assignment and so far I think this may be one of the most rewarding practical assignments in the course, as of yet, because of it. You really just never know what you're going to stumble into and genealogy is one of those things that takes every opportunity to remind you of that fact. And now it's time to go, I've got to learn everything I possibly can about 18th and early 19th century North Carolina records and genealogy :)