Ancestry.com Takes Me Way Back and Surprises

I am totally hooked on Ancestry.com. So much so, I’ve forgotten to sleep and eat a few different times over the past few days. Wow. I mean, who knew? I obviously didn’t. It started innocently enough. I was working on my memoir and was reminded of a discussion with a colleague about her web search for those in her past. I thought that perhaps a free trial would be harmless in helping me fill in some of the blanks in my family mystery. ( I always call it that versus history). It was easy enough to find most of my father’s relatives as they seemed well documented down through the years. I had only a few names from a couple of generations, but it was amazing to find documented proof of their lives back 5 generations. It is my recently deceased mother’s mystery that has always been the center of my family. Things unsaid. Conflict based on painful memories shared sparingly. Would I be able to find anything?

I began simply with her and the knowledge of my grandparents names. I was able to find a very valuable 1930 census recording where everyone in the house at that time was listed. I was able to search the spokes of information found within. Where they lived. Who were their neighbors. Names of her siblings. Their dates of birth. From there I took this info and looked for each relative and found incredible things about my grandparents, all the way back to my great great grand parents and perhaps more. I worked backwards, filling in a mysterious tree with both online info and by remembering tiny facts or old stories that came to my mind during this process. Where the line ended, and where names stopped in 1803, I found the birth of David M__, a man from Wilmington NC who I believe began the secret that haunted my mother’s side of the family for many years. I have known for years that there was pain, that there was shame, and that it was related to heritage. I believe he entered my heritage as a slave owner and possibly as the father of Martha my great great grandmother. How did I find him? With Ancestry.com and a bit of online detective work that had me eventually leaving the site and finding even more interesting facts.

My mother was born in 1937. Although I have been told she had 17 siblings, on Ancestry.com I have to date found proof of only 15. My mother’s tree filled in and branched out on my computer screen in facinating ways. I found matched couples. The R’s in Raleigh and Rosana- my grandparents. The J’s in James and Johnie, my great grandparents. The M’s in Mack and Martha, my great great grandparents. Raleigh was born in 1893. There is no record of the day of his birth. I found a 1917 World War I draft registration card for him that shows at the time he was a 24 yr old who did not know the day he was born, but knew the year. He was also unable to read or write so the draft records keeper filled out the card for him and he was released from draft consideration. I was able to confirm other facts about him through the 1910 and 1930 census documents. Here is where I was also able to track his growing family which would soon include my mother. In the 1930 census record, I found that he had become literate. Raleigh disappeared after the 1930 census and I could find no further records of him. I will have to hit the roads of his hometown to find out what happened to him. There are now addresses and info to help me piece that together.

Records show Rosana was born in 1899 and died in 1987. As a side note, I was quite honored to see a pattern of many women on both sides of my tree living close to and way into their late 90‘s. I hope that I will be that fortunate. Grandmother Rosana is listed in the 1900, 1910, and 1930 census records, first as a child and then as a wife. I learned the names of her siblings. I lost the thread of info on Rosana’s mother Johnie, because I could not find her maiden name. But my great grandfather James was born in 1869 and died in 1923. His death record shows that he died of pneumonia, but important to my search, it was in this document that I found his parents names. His father Mack I quickly lost, but the tree continued with his mother Martha (1841-1936) whose maiden name was on her death certificate. On her birth record I found an oddity. Her mother is listed as unknown, while her father was listed as a David M__ from New Hanover in NC. Scanning through several records for a David M__ born in 1803, I found only one that seemed to fit the correct age, name, and location. An 1850 census record detailed his household being that of a wife, 6 children, and one male servant. A white family, with no black child. No Martha. Where was she? Was I wrong about David M__? The records of David M__ continued and suddenly an 1850 US Federal Slave Record came into view. I found that David M__ owned 16 slaves from ages infant to 36. There were two older female slaves and one young girl who was 9 in 1850, the same age my great great grandmother Martha would have been.

Could this man have been her biological father? Could he have been her owner? Is this a broken thread and not related to Martha at all? I found all the points troubling but intriguing at the same time. There was one nagging factor that I couldn’t find a connection for. If this is Martha in the slave record, how did she wind up in Ellenboro NC, where everyone after her seemed to grow from, completely isolated in the mountains of North Carolina? This potential slave thread began on the far coast near Wilmington. This bothered me for a couple of days until I was doing separate research on the area where most of my mothers people are from. Ellenboro is a tiny place where the census of 2000 recorded a population of less than 500 residents. I was curious as to what it might have looked like throughout the 1800‘s. An extra click on facts suddenly gave me a possible route for Martha. In 1880, Seaboard Railroad built a line straight from Wilmington to Ellenboro of all places. Did this railroad line bring freed slaves to the mountains? Did it bring a freed Martha and Mack and their children, one of whom was my great grandfather, to a new life? I can’t say for sure, but surely with Ancestry.com I have more tools to dig deeper into my mystery and see what comes up next. Ready or not. In the meantime I’ll be printing all of these great documents off Ancestry.com and compiling them for my own daughters time when the deeper questions of where she comes from inevitably arise. Especially after she reads my memoir.