My head is spinning most of the time these days. Truth be told, I can scarcely remember a time when it wasn't spinning, but that's neither here nor there.
I walk up to the nearest library branch a few times a week to make use of their Ancestry.com Library edition. Since I don't have an Ancestry.ca subscription there are often names I can't get information on because they are only accessible with a subscription. Using the library's service I'm able to view more than I can at home sometimes. Very handy indeed!
Even so, unless I'm reading an actual historical report of some sort (birth/marriage/death records, family bibles, etc) often all I can find is whatever other people have listed on their own family trees, which is not always all that reliable.
Lately I've been focusing on a Samuel Gray who married a Mary Mangum. Their dates line up with the time Capt Jesse was born, same geological area, Jesse did have a brother named Samuel, and the Grays and Mangums are intertwined all over the place. Capt Jesse's own sons, James and Jesse jr, both married Mangum girls. So it is entirely possible that Samuel was Capt Jesse's brother. Maybe.
I recently got a copy of a note my Aunt Carrie had written about what she'd been told about Capt Jesse when she was growing up.
From this letter we can tentatively confirm a few things:
- he grew up in NC
- he came from a family of some prestige, as they did have their own plantation and owned many slaves
- his uncle may have not had any sons of his own (living) since he was planning to leave his estate to his nephew, Jesse
- it was a slaver family long before the Jesse/Samuel/Postell incident, as Jesse had a slave boy follow him to school and take the horse back home
- he did fight with the British Loyalists, reaching the rank of Captain and later Major
- his wife was Sarah Moulton, daughter of Wells, they had 14 children and lived in Kemptville, NS
It's so exciting to get a note like this, hand-written by my own aunt about someone I'm desperately trying to find information on. I try very hard not to live my life with regrets, but if I must I do acknowledge that I have two. One, that I didn't get my Uncle Merrill (Aunt Carrie's husband) to teach me to play the fiddle. And two, that I didn't start my search earlier while my grandparents and their siblings were still alive to tell their stories.
It seems from this letter that Capt Jesse's parents may have died while he was very young, as he was raised by his uncle. I had been considering that maybe his brother Samuel was not an actual brother at all but maybe a cousin that he was raised with and considered a brother, but if that is the truth it's unlikely that Samuel was this particular uncle's son or he would more than likely have inherited the plantation himself.
There are a number of names that repeat themselves throughout the Gray family history for the past few hundred years. Names like Moulton/Morton, Goodwin, Mayo, Prence, Gwaltney, Harding, Andrews, Mangum, to name just a few. Some pop up where I don't expect them at all, linking a section of the tree to another section in the opposite direction.
So .... around and around and around we go ......
