Hidden Names

Don’t you wish our ancestors made more generous use of their middle names? I have at least three men whose full given names elude me, though there is plenty of room for speculation.  Deeds, probate papers, marriage records (these are before birth records and no baptismal records have come to light) -- all carry very specific, but unrevealing, middle initials. And these names might lead to more family history, if I knew them.

Here is one:

John M. Cain (pictured at right), was born in Kent County, Delaware in 1810, the son of John Cain and Elizabeth Morgan. So what are the odds that his middle name is Morgan? He is not their first son (that was Cornelius, my gr-grandfather), so naming patterns don’t seem to be in play.  However, this is the only of John and Elizabeth’s seven sons to even have a recorded middle initial.

Another later example: Daniel M. Howard, my grandmother’s half-brother. who died in the Civil War. His father was likely named for a circuit-riding Methodist preacher by the name of Samuel Parker. Daniel’s younger brother was Jasper Newton Howard -- there were many Jasper Newtons born around the same time, possibly named for a pair of then-popular Revolutionary War heroes. So, in this family at least, so-called naming patterns are completely out the window.

The third puzzler is Thomas E. Sherwood (b ca 1795, KY), my great-great grandfather. His daughter, Nancy Jane Sherwood, named her first two children William Enoch (b 1850) and John Edwin (b1853).  The family, so far as I have been able learn about it, had no males with names which had “E” initials. The boys’ father, David Hammond, did have a half-brother named Edwin. Does that leave Enoch as Thomas’s middle name?

So, tantalizing clues, but no definite answers. So far.

Led astray by the census! Or, being sensible about public records.

My Sherwoods have been a fascinating -- and exasperating -- puzzle. I wrote some about this last time, but there have been new developments, and they might shed light on some of your genealogical problems.

My ancestor, Thomas E. Sherwood -- what IS that middle name? -- seems to have been born in Kentucky between 1790 and 1800, and is in Bartholomew County, Indiana, by 1828, when he is involved in a land sale with Azalad Maskal, a relative of his wife’s previous husband.  Got that?

Elizabeth Evans Maskal Sherwood had three children (including my great-grandmother, Nancy Jane) then died, about 1835. Thomas married again very shortly, to a woman whose name was recorded as Jane Fisher. They had two children and Thomas died three years later.

Some of  Thomas’s children were still young enough to be in the family household as late as 1850, and since that year’s census is the first to name everyone in the household, with age and birthplace, it seemed like a good place to follow up on this group.

I could find just one Sherwood household in the county.  It was headed, the enumerator wrote, by James Sherwood, male, white, age 40, b VA.  Three youngsters were listed, two of whose names I recognized.  The third was a girl, Susan, age 18, also b VA. All had ditto marks for the Sherwood surname.

So who was this James?  He seemed about the right age to be a brother of the deceased Thomas. And even if Thomas lived and died in Kentucky he could have been from Virginia, especially since that state’s counties extended to include Kentucky until 1792.

To me, it appeared from this census record that Thomas’s second wife, Jane, had also died and a Sherwood relative had stepped in, bringing a child with him.  

Then … I found evidence that Jane Sherwood had not died, as she is shown in court records as late as 1857 acting as guardian for Susan FISHER and the two youngest Sherwood children.  

This made me revisit the 1850 census and take a hard look at “James”, the 40-year-old male. It soon became obvious that despite the well-defined handwriting -- no mistake in interpretation -- this was JANE, and Susan [Sherwood] was Susan Fisher.  The enumerator must have asked one of the children, or a neighbor, and misunderstood the reply.  I’ve seen mistakes in census records before, but none like this!

The lesson here is: look at ALL records with a skeptic’s eye.  Seek out additional sources. Go back again and again to that puzzling entry and study it carefully. 

Of course now that I know Jane was guardian of a Fisher child, I am ready to seek a record of her earlier marriage, to the child’s father, and of course, her own birth name.

Happy Distractions

Why is it I can’t stay on course with a single  line of research?  Ever ask yourself that? A few weeks ago I found a wonderful online index to Bartholomew County, Indiana, public records which had references to my Sherwood surname in several documents from the 1840s.  For the princely sum of six dollars I obtained photocopies of  27 pages of material. [Thank you, archivist Tina Jeffries]

So of course when the envelope came in the mail I dropped everything else and set to work making transcriptions. 

Nancy Jane Sherwood

Fortunately most of the handwriting is easy to read, but I came across a few unfamiliar words. With the help of Barbara Evans’ A to Zax : a Comprehensive Dictionary for Genealogists and Historians, I discovered that coparceners are “persons who have an inheritance which has come to them jointly and who hold it as an entire estate.”  I wasn’t sure I had remembered what next friend meant in court parlance, and Evans neatly defines the term as “a person, not a guardian, but one who files a suit in behalf of an infant or a person incapable of handling his own affairs. This is usually a relative who assumes the court costs.”  And I was reminded that the term infant simply refers to a minor. 

The interesting thing about transcribing a document word for word is that there are bound to be new discoveries.  Names of witnesses, “next friends,” guardians and their wards, buyers and sellers of land -- all are potential clues, offering more opportunities for research and making connections.

I am dealing with an ancestor, Thomas E. Sherwood, who married twice, died before 1840, and left five children by two wives, Elizabeth Evans and Jane Fisher. There seemed to be a dispute between the children of the first wife and their widowed stepmother, and my mental picture of the situation was pretty vague, so I decided to make a time line.  Not just for one individual -- but for  both his families, his wives, and the establishment of county boundaries at the time. It has been a great help.  

Now, where was I before this bonanza arrived in the mailbox?


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