Character Sketches

My 2x great grandfather

I've spent years researching my family history, finding ancestors and solving family mysteries. While I can glean some facts about my direct ancestors--where they were born, where they lived, their occupations as they settled lands in various southern states--I know little about them. That is, their appearance, their likes and dislikes, what talents they had, and what their character was like. That information has been lost to time.

I journal at times, but I only include details about what my family and I do, and what's going on in our lives. Since this has been on my mind lately, I've decided to include in my journals character sketches about myself and family members, so if my journals do survive the years, my grandchildren, their children, and their children will know who we are, where we've been, and why their "Papa" went into the ministry.

Do you have plans to pass down information about yourself and your family to your descendants? If so, how will you go about doing that?

Kentucky Reckoning

My roots are showing. Again.

Between family research and reading my friend's book, Cumberland Bride, Kentucky has been on my mind lately. I love the place and wish I could spend more time there, but I can't live there. The cost of living and familial conflict are far too high.

It seems my family and I aren't the only Kentuckians who left the state for those reasons. A book titled Hillbilly Elegy was released in 2016. It has an Amazon rating of four-and-a-half stars with well over 11,000 reviews. I haven't read it yet, but judging from the description, the story of the author's family appears to parallel that of my own. My grandfather moved his family from the Cumberland Plateau in the 1920s for a better life and an opportunity to work on the railroad in the northern part of the state and in Ohio.

In addition, I recently read an essay contained in a liberal (I roll mine eyes) response to Elegy. As with the author of Elegy, the story of this author's family parallels my family's down to the town in which we grew up. Our grandparents were part of the Appalachian out-migration, mine from Whitley County, hers from neighboring Laurel, though my grandparents left before WWII. Her grandmother was eventually placed in the nursing home in which several members of my family lived out their final years and others worked. Like me, she attended church downtown where a fiery preacher screamed God's wrath without mentioning redemption through Christ. (The Law guides and convicts us. Jesus fulfills its requirements for those who believe. Is that so hard to say?)

Reading it was a bit surreal. What I found fascinating though was the shared behaviors and attitudes of our families. The addictions and unwillingness to discuss their lives back in the Cumberland Plateau. Though my mother was born outside of the Plateau, she apparently adopted her siblings' attitudes about the region in which their entire family lived for nearly 200 years. I once asked why we never visited our great aunts there. Though she and her siblings spoke of the ladies with great fondness, my mother replied something to the effect that she didn't want to have anything to do with those hillbillies (at the time, we didn't know we were descendants of Squire Boone through Sarah.) As they covered the roots of their hair when the real color began to emerge, so did she and the others do their best to hide the roots of their culture and lives when those experiences and characteristics began to manifest themselves.

My generation of the family could never understand our parents and their attitudes. Elegy and the essay opened a door of understanding, and I hope to learn more.

The Killing of Lee Smith

Digging into ones family history often leads to unpleasant or heartbreaking surprises. While researching an elderly woman's family tree, I discovered her mother had delivered a baby out of wedlock before my friend was born and that the baby had died as an infant. I also learned a female ancestor of another friend was an inmate in the state mental hospital (though in those days, women were institutionalized for a variety of causes not related to mental illness.)

When I began to research my own family tree, I knew my great grandfather, Lee Smith, had been murdered. I'd heard the story often while growing up, though my aunts only knew a few details--that Lee had been ambushed and killed by a man, possibly over a women. After I began my research, I found nothing on the case until a fellow member of a genealogy group passed along a link to a newspaper archive site. What I found there and on newspapers.com, along with a request for court documents, led to a few sickening revelations.

From these articles, I learned the following: On November 11th (the 14th according to the indictment, but the article was dated the 12th) Lee Smith was walking near the train depot in downtown Williamsburg, Kentucky around 7:00 PM. Since it as November, it would have been dark at that time of day. And with the average temperatures in the upper 30s at night, the temperature was likely in the 40s by that time. While walking, he was shot in the back and left to die on that dark, cold street.

Google Street View: Looking down Main Street. Old L&N Depot is on right. 

A twenty year old man by the name of Giles Carroll was spotted running from the scene on that chilly dark night. Giles was born in Claiborne, Tennessee in August of 1880. His home on the 1900 census was listed as Court House, Whitley County, but he lived with his mother and step family. From the census I learned he was a farm laborer, as many were back then in that region, and that he could read and write.

From the articles, I learned that in 1901, he worked in the coal mines. For in April of that year, he nearly died--and a fellow worker did--when a load of shale suddenly fell from the above.

And yet, seven months after miraculously surviving that catastrophe, he chose not to extend that same mercy to another man. As the article relates, "After going a short distance, (Carroll) turned and ran back...entering a store very warm (in appearance I assume) and appeared to be much excited." The article ends by stating Lee and Giles had had a quarrel earlier in the day.

Giles Carroll was arrested and held without bond.

Thanks to a genealogy group that focuses on the area, I found a link that would allow me to order court papers. I did so and received the indictment, which I transcribed.

The Commonwealth of Kentucky

Indictment for Willful Murder
vs
Giles Carroll

A True Bill
E.N. Steely, Foreman of Grand Jury

Jan 15, 1902
(Name of clerk unreadable)

Witnesses:
James Mat Smith, Bob Thomas, Crit Goins, Mike Maloney, Milburn Moore, Charles McFarland, Bill Thomas, Bill Rhoden, Jake Stinson, Geo(?) Johnson, Dr J.D. Adkins, Lyza(?) Vaughn, Judy or Trudy (what looks like) Bowlin or Bowtin, Curt Walker, (Tim?) Martin, Mrs Mary Johnson, Matt (unreadable), unreadable-(at Arthur(?) Johnson, Evert S(unreadable)

The Grand Jury of Whitley County, in the name and by the authority of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, accuse Giles Carroll of the crime of willful murder committed in manner and form as follows, viz:

The said Giles Carroll on the 14th day of November 1901 before the finding of this indictment and in the county and state aforesaid, did unlawfully feloniously, willfully and of his malice aforethought kill and murder Lee Smith, by shooting and wounding him the said Smith with guns and pistols, loaded with power, lead and balls and other hard and explosive substance, from which shooting and wounding the said Smith did then and there die.

against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
James N. Sharp
Commonwealth Attorney, 28th Judicial Dist of Kentucky

According to jury instructions, the charges also included voluntary manslaughter, which, at that time, was defined as, "The willful – that is intentional felonious killing of another, without malice aforethought, not in necessary or apparently necessary self-defense, but done in such hate and passion, created by such provocation, as is ordinarily calculated to excite the passion to beyond control. Murder was defined as felonious, and willful-that is intentional-killing of one person by another with his malice aforethought, not in necessary or apparent necessary self defense."

Since the jury was given the option of voluntary manslaughter, they could decide if the murder was committed in the heat of the moment due to some provocation, namely, the quarrel the men had earlier in the day and whatever caused it. However, since Carroll ambushed Lee in the dark and shot him in the back with weapons (plural) that he'd taken the time to load with gunpowder, lead, balls and other hard/explosive objects, this indicates premeditated murder with malice aforethought.

The Verdict:

We the Jury find the defendant Giles Carroll guilty of murder and fix his punishment in the state penitentiary for life.

However, he served only eight years and was paroled. Why? I don't yet know. Nor do I know the actual motivation for the killing. He later married, but it doesn't appear that had children or descendants who could discuss the case, if they were even willing.

So I have more questions to answer. I hope to someday, even if I don't like the answers I find.


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Newspaper clippings are from chroniclingamerica.loc.gov and newspapers.com. Names are highlighted as they were search terms.

From Whence I Came

I've been involved in genealogy research for years. The bug began after hearing my uncle relate details about a great great grandfather that he found in the National Archives during a trip to D.C. Prior to that, the only thing we knew about the family was where they had lived before migrating to the northern part of the state.

I didn't have the resources to dig into our roots back then. That changed with the advent of personal computers and the internet. Even then, research was slow, and it depended on what information I could get from others on email lists and what I could find on genealogy software. I hit several brick walls. When I began working at an international corporation, I had to put it aside altogether.

The bug returned several years ago after I began to see commercials for Ancestry.com's ethnicity DNA test. Intrigued, I asked my husband for a test for Christmas. The results and a subsequent monthly subscription to public records available on Ancestry's site changed my perception of myself and my family. I solved a long-time mystery on my paternal side, and my volatile, hate-filled, drama-loving maternal side began to make sense.

My entire maternal line lived in the Cumberland Plateau along the Pottsville Escarpment in SE Kentucky, and they are everything outsiders believe a Kentuckian to be. Caricatures non-residents developed from their knowledge of the blood feud between the Hatfields and McCoys. However, while my "people," as my aunts called them, were often involved in litigation with others, they kept the actual feuding within the family.

As was typical back in the day, my grandparents had numerous children. Some inherited the cold, stoic, heartlessness of my grandfather's line, and others the emotional volatility and tendency to commit adultery from their mother's (a tendency that skipped generations injured by a parent's betrayal, but which was taken up with glee by an occasional offspring.)

Unfortunately, my mother inherited such destructive traits from both sides. While some of her siblings simply got angry and cut other family members out of their lives for a decade or two, my mother caused one raging blow up after another and pitted family members against each another (even her own children) in a constant rage formed by the warring sides within her. She caused more injury in her long life than good, and I never understood it until I learned about the two sides of her family.

James Balwin, author of Go Tell It On the Mountain, wrote, "Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came."

I haven't read the book yet so I don't know the context, but for me, as a Christian who has experienced forgiveness and who has been taught to forgive, going back into my family's history and getting a glimpse of their hardships, their lives, and in some cases, their pain gave me a greater understanding of my "people" and the ripple effect their behavior had on my life.

I feel more connected than I ever have, and more objective about and compassionate for a family that once frustrated me to no end. I'm even still curious about them and would like to learn more. I plan to take a trip to the region in which they lived for over 200 years and, "travel their road." In doing so, I hope to learn even more about the ancestors and places from whence I came.

Family Ties II

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently connected with a third cousin and learned more about that side of my family.

It seems to be the month for discovering information I thought had died with previous generations. Thanks to a member of my genealogy group posting a link to archived newspapers, I learned the name of the man who killed my great grandfather in the line mentioned above. The articles used the word killed instead of murdered as was used in other articles pertaining to criminal cases, which I found interesting. That seems to indicate an accidental killing, but I won't know for certain until I receive the files on the trial.

I ordered the files after a member of the aforementioned genealogy group pointed out case files from that time period were available through the state archive. Hopefully there's enough left after 116 years to give me insight into my great grandfather's death and the motivation of the man who killed him.

Details to come as soon as I get them.

Genealogy Groups and Circles

We have a mystery on my father's side of the family. My father's paternal grandfather suddenly appeared on the scene in 1910 despite the fact he was over the age of sixty. The lack of records after the 1930 census indicates he passed away before the 1940 census began. He was born in Mississippi, died there as well, so we should have found an abundance of records regarding his life before 1910.

Though our family is spread around the United States, several of us began discussing the mystery, me passing along info to one person and they to a few others and vice versa. Finally, I threw out the possibility that my great grandfather had changed the spelling of his name after his father died. The discovery of a few records seem to confirm that suspicion, so I searched my Ancestry.com DNA matches for both surnames. I found none using the spelling my great grandfather (and thus, my family) used, despite having been matched to numerous people descendent from great grandpa's wife's side. When I searched on the alternate spelling I'd found, several matches appeared.

We may have found my great grandfather's real name, but we still don't know who his father was or where they came from. Ancestry may soon help us on that front. As I understand it, they're soon placing their DNA donors in circles based on DNA. At the time of this writing, Ancestry's circles now consist of those whose DNA matches and who have a common surname on their family trees.

In other words, at the moment, we're only placed in a circle after we fill out a family tree and Ancestry detects a common ancestor. Soon, we'll be placed in circles based on just DNA, even if we don't know how we're related. I couldn't be more pleased. This may eventually be the break we need to find our family's origins.

To keep everyone up to date, I created a family research group on Facebook. The moment I find information, I post it to the group site to inform other researchers and family members interested in our history.

So family is bringing together family. When my husband gave me the Ancestry DNA kit for Christmas, I had no idea how much that gift would continue to give. Did I mention I couldn't be more pleased?

From Dublin to Alabama

I discovered one of my 7th great grandfathers sailed to America from Dublin in 1683 as an indentured servant. I have no idea what Walter Newman thought when he sailed across the sea or whether he came by choice, but he worked seven years in Maryland, then at some point married and had my 6th great grandfather, Samuel.

Samuel and his wife moved to Spartanburg County, South Carolina. There, their daughter (my 5th great grandmother) married into an extended family who had strong ties to what would later become another line of my family. From what I've seen, the two clans lived closed to one another. A generation or two later, the two families along with one, possibly two other families in my line received land grants and moved to Pickens County, Alabama.

It's a shame Edward couldn't have lived long enough to see his family grow into settlers and landowners. Perhaps it would have made up for the years of degradation he suffered with the hope of something better.

Adventures in Family Ancestry

I had to put away the family tree for a while and work on my novel. Eventually though, I found myself once again scouring census records trying to identify generations past. It's an addiction fueled by one discovery after another.

In the past few days, I learned one of my husband's great grandmothers was born in the same rural county in Mississippi where my family lived. This being the south, I joking told friends I was getting nervous. I also solved a puzzle regarding my great grandmother and her parents. A mystery that involved a name change, not two separate individuals as we'd originally thought.

I found a physical description of a great, great grandfather, a description that closely matched mine, then identified my 3x gr grandmother with the help of the 1850 census.

The discoveries keep coming. In the past few weeks, I learned more than I did back in the late 90s when I attempted to research my family. Unlike then, services such as Ancestry.com (no, they're no paying me or giving me free services :) have millions of records online making research fun and easy. My husband certainly got his money's worth out of that Christmas gift.

My Ancestry DNA results have yield some interesting results. Family lines for twenty-two of my 300+ DNA matches have now been established, and I've been placed in four circles based on common ancestors.

I checked the ethnicity of members in two circles, and I'm beginning to see which ethnicity came through which lines. I've learned much about myself and my history in a short amount of time, and with more generations to establish and DNA connections to be made, there's still far more to learn.

Genealogy Update: Sticking with the Basics

An Ancestry.com subscription isn't required to see one's Ancestry DNA ethnicity results, but it is require to view DNA connections. Such connections are made based on DNA, not surnames. When I started all this, not knowing how it works, I purposely did not fill out a family tree. I didn't know if such information would bias results. It doesn't. I have over 300 DNA connections in Ancestry's database and several of those individuals have yet to fill out a tree as well.

While connections are based on DNA, a tree filled with surnames is necessary to see how we're related. Curiosity got the best of me, as I'm sure Ancestry knew it would. I signed up on a month-to-month basis and began filling out my family tree. Public records began popping up everywhere, and it wasn't long before I had generations of direct ancestors and their siblings on the tree, along with my husband, his direct ancestors, and their siblings.

So I was surprised when only four of my DNA connections came up with shared surnames. Yesterday, I did myself a favor by deleting the entire tree and starting again with only my direct ancestors. Without the competition of all those siblings, more hints relative to my direct line popped up. I found more names in my ancestry than I had before, and I was able to record more of my history.

Now, relationships with nineteen of my DNA connections have been established. More are forthcoming as I work out a puzzle in my ancestry and fill out even more info. It's exciting, and once again, I'm hooked. Well played, Ancestry.com. Well played.

Hunting Down My Ancestry: A Look Back at Poverty

My great grandfather died at the age of fifty-three from a condition called pellegra, which is apparently a lack of niacin in the system. It happened four years into the Depression and they lived in a somewhat isolated town in the SE mountains of Ky. According to the 1930 census, all he could find was odd jobs, so malnutrition is likely to blame.

I never stopped to think how his death and absence affected my great grandmother. The only information passed down about her was that she was mean. Knowing that side of the family, I wasn't surprised, but I just found her on the 1940 census and learned she had become a cook and was renting her home. The country was still deeply entrenched in the Depression, and she still had five children at home to care for.

The census included her address, so I went to Google maps to see a street view. The house is gone, replaced by a park, but the surrounding houses are far from grand. I can only guess the type of poverty the family endured and the struggle to stay alive. Perhaps that explains the meanness my aunts observed in her during their visits, and the bitterness her son, my grandfather, carried with him despite getting a good-paying job with the railroad.

Ancestry Update

My Ancestry.com DNA results have matched me to several individuals on the Ancestry site who have an "extremely high" probability of being my 3rd cousins. I checked out two in particular. One connects me to my great-grandmother on my father's side, and one connects me to my gr, great grandfather, who we knew little about. Just that his name was Johnson and he was, from all places, North Carolina. Where, we didn't know.

The Ancestry user's Johnsons are also from NC--from the mountains that I feel so connected to and love so much. As with my Johnsons, the Ancestry user's Johnsons also moved to Kentucky. And.....one of their main ethnicity is Scandinavian.

I feel blessed to have found these connections, and I look forward to learning more about myself.

Finding Out Who I Am

I love history, my favorite time period being the War Between the States and now early Carolina settlement. However, my own history is about as murky as that of the Lost Colonists. Growing up, I believed myself to be the biological child of my beloved dad and therefore, the ancestors of his "people", as we Kentucky folk call them. When I was thirty, I learned my mother had, in fact, been previously married, and her first husband was my father. After a search, I found him and my family only to discover little was known about his paternal side.

To make matters more complicated, I'm not the only one on my maternal side with a broken surname line. My family always believed my great-grandmother to be Vica Witt. After obtaining her vital statistic records, I learned she was actually Vica Johnson who originally hailed from North Carolina. Her name had been changed after my gr, gr, grandmother was "taken in" (we have no idea what that means) by Washington Witt.

Consequently, I knew little about my ethnicity. The name of my maternal family indicated I was Scotch-Irish. My biological paternal name indicated that side was Italian. No one on either side was entirely certain, so when I learned about Ancestry.com's ethnicity DNA test, I jumped at the chance to take it.

The results came in on Christmas Eve, and I instantly learned I'm not what I believed myself to be. While I knew my paternal grandmother came from an Irish line, the estimated amount of Irish in me is far higher than I believed. Scottish? None. Instead, the test estimates I'm twenty-eight percent Scandinavian.

Scandinavian? That explains my bright-white complexion.

There are other, lower estimates as well. Great Britain, Iberian Peninsula and more. I have just a trace amount of Italian in me. The results are so low, it can't be guaranteed.

Though I'm the person I have always been, I feel like a new person. I'm definitely not the Scotch-Irish/Italian I believed myself to be, and now I'm curious to confirm the results and to learn more about who and what I am. My father plans to take a Y-DNA test to examine his ancestry through his father's line. His sister, my aunt, plans to take the autosomal test I took through Ancestry DNA. We'll compare our results to determine my paternal side. I'll post my progress here.