Conflicting opinions ...

Since I started my quest for Jesse I have been discovering all sorts of distant relatives that I had never known existed.  I've had emails from people who have seen the blog, the facebook page, or my tree on Ancestry, each with their own stories on their search or questions on things I have recorded, all sorts of great information. 

Most recently I got in touch with another distant cousin, Dale, who has been researching our Capt Jesse much longer than I have, with many interesting theories of his own.  He's of the school of thought that our Jesse is the son of William Gray and Lydia Anderson, William being the son of John Gray and Agnes McGowan, immigrants from Ireland.  On the surface it looks like a tidy package, since William did have a son Jesse with a brother Samuel, they lived in North Carolina, they were in the American Revolution .... but I'm not entirely convinced.  Not convinced at all really, for a number of reasons.

First off, our Capt Jesse joined the Fairforest militia in the Ninety-six District Regiment in South Carolina.  All of the military information that is available online about the Jesse in that regiment state that he was from South Carolina.  Sure, he could have moved to SC just before joining up, but wouldn't something mention North Carolina somewhere?  Nothing does.  He went to St Augustine, Florida when South Carolina was evacuated in 1782.  He bought Mary Postell in South Carolina, and when he evacuated South Carolina his household list included himself and 2 slaves, Postell and her husband William Wearing, also from South Carolina.  All of the court documentation in Shelburne, NS regarding Jesse and Postell state he was from South Carolina. 

I've often considered this line of Grays myself in my research, because it does make a tidy storyline, but every time I go back to it I come away feeling less convinced than ever.  I've actually named the tree I use to store this information "Not my Grays".  Here are a few more reasons ...

When William Gray of North Carolina died in 1794 he stated in his will "I give unto my son Jesse one hundred and twenty acres of land whereon he now lives ...".  Whereon he now lives.  In 1794 Capt Jesse was in Nova Scotia with his wife Sarah, making babies.  Granted, it is believed that he traveled back and forth between Nova Scotia and somewhere in the States to do business with his brother Samuel, whom we have very little information on after the war (he's another story altogether), but he didn't LIVE in the States.  There is also an 1800 United States Federal Census for Guildford County, NC (picture shown) on this family of Grays listing a bunch of them, including their Jesse, showing him as having himself, his wife, and one other person living there.  It doesn't show the categories at the top of this page, so it's unclear if the other person is a child or a slave, but regardless, my Jesse wasn't living in NC in 1800.  He had a wife and 8 kids in Nova Scotia by that time.

Probably the most convincing piece of information I have though, is DNA.  My dad is what he likes to call "pure Gray" (I often think he's pure something, not necessarily Gray, but that's beside the point) because he is a direct descendant from Capt Jesse through both of his parents.  His mom, Helen Geneva Gray, descends from Capt Jesse's son Samuel, and his dad, Keith Albert Gray, descends from Capt Jesse's son Jesse.  There are a few others who are "pure Gray" for similar reasons, but not many.  Needless to say, his blood/DNA is about as straight a line as possible to Capt Jesse Gray.  Dad got the results of his Ancestry DNA and it shows that he's 86% Great Britain, which includes England, Scotland, and Wales.  7% is Scandinavian, 2% Ireland, and the last 5% is spread out across Europe.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd think that if Jesse was of Irish descent as Cousin Dale believes, we'd have more than a mere 2% Irish blood.  

So anyhow, everyone has their own reasons for what they believe is the truth about where Capt Jesse came from ... this is just my reasoning for where I believe he did NOT come from.  It doesn't mean I'm necessarily right, but to my mind this line is a dead end.  

The search continues .......

New information inDEED ....

This past summer/fall I started corresponding via email with a Gray cousin, Todd, that my Uncle Gary had told me about. After a bit of back and forth emails it turns out that we are 3rd cousins.  I sent him some documents I have on Capt Jesse, like the will, pictures, etc, and he sent me this page, which at first appeared to be a deed to some land in Florida with Capt Jesse's signature on it.   It turned out that it was actually a petition Capt Jesse was making in an attempt to get compensation for the house and horse he'd had to abandon when he left Florida to move to Nova Scotia.  Compensation for this was not granted because he couldn't provide the necessary receipts, deeds, or other required proof of ownership.

It's pretty faint and hard to read but I'll attempt to transcribe it here:

William Mangum and Robert Clark  ? ? and examined the? above claim.

Wm Mangum knew Jesse Gray in East Florida that he lived at St Johns Bluff in a house which was said to be his property.  That said Gray owned ? ? house which he supposes to be worth fifty pounds sterling.  Robert Clark also knew Gray at St Johns Bluff that he owned a horse there worth in his estimation seventy pounds sterling and they both say he lost this house and horse upon the ? of East Florida when he removed to Nova Scotia.

The foregoing Examinations

taken in Council at Halifax

this 7th of January 17?9 before one

(signed by) William Mangum, Robert Clark, Jesse Gray  

I'm still plugging away at documenting all of the cemeteries that I photographed in May, though it's slow work.  So far I've finished Plymouth, and started Kempt Corner and the Hatfield Cemetery on the Gray Road, also in Kemptville.  As with anything else historical, there are some people who have also been working on documenting them and have not done their research, thereby linking up names that have no business being linked up, or inserting speculative or false information.  That really annoys me.  It's frustrating enough to not be able to find something or hit a roadblock in researching, but it's worse still when people go tumbling along all willy-nilly, making assumptions or just plain making things up.  This is partly why it's taking me so long to get my own documentation done.  For each entry I put on FindaGrave.com I am checking and double checking the information in my own family tree (for those that I am related to, which are a LOT), plus I go into the NS Historical Vital Statistics site and check information there, like parentage, dates, etc.  It's a long, slow process, but I believe that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

Well, Hello there old friend .....

In May I flew across Canada and spent 2½ weeks in Nova Scotia.  It had been a few years since I'd been back so it was nice visiting with friends and family, catching up, exchanging stories.... but I have to admit I was most looking forward to spending some serious time in cemeteries all across Yarmouth County, and that's exactly what I did.  I had gone with the intent of taking headstone pictures in a couple of cemeteries.  I ended up taking almost 2000 pictures in 13 cemeteries!  It was awesome!

It had been many years since I'd been out to Kemptville and I wasn't sure I even knew the way anymore, but thankfully I have a great friend who was kind enough to be my guide.  It was raining the entire day we spent out there, he really was a good sport to hang in there and show me the area.  A few days later I went out on my own and got a few more pictures, then my sister, Tracy, and I went back for more.  

I had been in touch with Justin, a distant Gray cousin who had said that he lived in an original Gray house, plus his land led to the spot called "School House Cove" where Capt Jesse is supposed to have been buried.  When Tracy and I were out there we stopped in to see Justin and check out the old site.  He took us for about a 10 minute walk down an old tractor road behind his house, then off into the woods to the spot where the old meeting house is said to have been.  There was still a semi-cleared area where we could see large flat now mossy stones that were likely used for the foundation.  Justin had grown up being told that the burial ground was off to one side of the area, but unfortunately no markers remain.  

Capt Jesse's house used to be down there on the shore of School House Cove, but had later been moved further inland, away from the immediate shore.  Then in later years it was moved yet again to where it currently stands near the Hatfield Cemetery on the Gray Road.  Nobody currently lives there, and I wouldn't take the chance of walking around inside, after over 200 years I'm sure the floors could use a bit of work!  I'm just impressed and pleased as punch that it still stands and that I was able to find it (again, thanks to Justin for great directions).   We did get up near the house and take a picture through the side window ... it's a bit of a mess inside, but still very cool to get a peek into what used to be my 4th great grandfather's home in the early 1800's.

So although I wasn't able to lay eyes on Capt Jesse's grave, I did find a whole lot of other Grays all over the county.  When I'm doing ancestry and filling in names and dates, often some information is vague or incomplete or just not available from certain sources.  Written records don't always clear things up, sometimes they muddy the waters even more, but I find that information chiseled into stone is rarely wrong, or at least I like to believe it's so.  

One of the main cemeteries I'd planned to document is the one in Plymouth, where I grew up.  I knew already that there are a LOT of Grays in there, which was quickly confirmed.  Some names that I had been hoping to find and clarify some information and dates on were not there, which was disappointing, but I did get some other things sorted out.  I'd been hoping to find Jesse jr's wives, but neither was mentioned anywhere.  Neither was his twin brother, Samuel.  His son, Watson, is buried right next to him.  I'm still a bit obsessed about that name ... ok, more than a bit ... sooner or later I will figure it out.

 I was pleasantly surprised to find the one and only Mangum stone (to my knowledge) in the county.  I admit, I haven't been to EVERY cemetery and there may be more Mangums in the ones I have yet to do, but so far this is IT.  I also found lots of Hemeons, Moods, Crockers, and so very many Hurlburts.  

This one family has touched my heart many times.  Joseph Gray & Caroline Woods.  Joseph was a brother to my great grandfather Edgar.  Like most families, Joseph & Caroline had lots of children, except that many of theirs died as infants.  When I was just filling them in on my Ancestry tree with the information from NS BMD files I'd find the birth of a child, then almost immediately the death of that child.  In East Kempt I came across this stone, listing 5 children ... one died at the ripe old age of 13, the others only lived a few days or weeks.  Imagine what that poor family went through, losing baby after baby ... heartbreaking.

I try to do a bit of Ancestry digging every day, and it has gotten to the point that some names have become embedded in my mind, to the point where I'd be photographing a cemetery and come across a stone with names that I have seen so many times, it felt like finding an old friend.  You can walk through a cemetery full of people you don't know and all you see are stones with strangers' names everywhere.  This experience was the exact opposite for me.  These aren't just stones with names on them.  They were people who lived where I lived, and a part of them lives in me now.   I spent a lot of time standing in quiet contemplation, surrounded by people who all had a hand in my family tree.

I already know that on my next trip to Nova Scotia I have many more cemeteries to do, I've only just scratched the surface.

3 arms and a tail ...

I get that back in the good ole days it was harder to get around from one community to another, and the population wasn't as dense as it is now, people tended to marry their neighbors and, as it turns out, often their cousins.  As I've mentioned before I'm finding as I move through Capt Jesse's children, grandchildren, and further down the line that a few surnames tend to repeat themselves along the way.  Some are quite prevalent, like Hemeon, Hamilton, and Hurlburt.  Oh. My. God.  The Hurlburts alone are mind boggling.  There are so bloody MANY of them, and so many of them married other Hurlburts, plus they share many of the same names.  In one case I'm sorting through some lists showing an Isaac and Catherine Hurlburt and all of their kids, then there's a David and Caroline Hurlburt and their bazillion kids.  Then the names Catherine and Caroline are swapped, like maybe they were used as nicknames for each other, causing me to wonder if these couples weren't maybe actually the same people??  Maybe he was David Isaac or Isaac David?  I'm thinking now they're not, it seems that they were actually two separate families, though absolutely related.  I haven't gotten around to actually deciphering how they're related, though no doubt they're all first cousins.  

Capt Jesse's daughter Eleanor/Penelope married a Hurlburt.  His other daughters Sarah and Rebecca each had sons who married Hurlburts.  That's just the tippy tip of the iceberg, there are many, many other Hurlburts in the tree.  The Hemeons and Hamiltons are plentiful as well but not quite as confounding as the Hurlburts.  I've been fortunate enough to be able to get in touch with Brian Hurlburt, a distant cousin who has done much research into his family tree and is proving very helpful in sorting them all out.  I don't know where I'd be without him.  

So many cousins marrying cousins, including my own grandparents, I'm just constantly amazed that I don't have 3 arms and a tail.  Thank God for the occasional adventurous soul who, for work or whatever reason, left the village and went out of the family to find a spouse.  The gene pool will be forever grateful for that bit of stirring up the pot. 

Damn Yankees ...

It seems that every time one of my Grays has left Nova Scotia, it was to go to Massachusetts.  So the question arises, Why Massachusetts?  

Obviously just because Capt Jesse was an outlaw in the Carolinas doesn't mean the rest of the family was banned ... and if his origins of having come from there have been passed down as far as me, surely the rest of the family knew it as well along the way.  So why not go down there and reunite with whoever was left behind?  And what happened to Capt Jesse's brother Samuel?  Did he marry?  Where are his kids?  Where did he die?  And what the hell is so damn great about Massachusetts that we keep going back there?

Filling in the names and dates ....

I just realized I haven't posted anything since March!  It's not that I haven't been digging, I just haven't really come across anything new that seemed post-worthy.  Pretty much every evening before I go to bed I get out my laptop and log on to ancestry, go through some censuses or cemetery listings or something and fill in some names and dates in my tree.  I link up whoever I can and fill in spouses' family names, which often leads me way off into the great beyond where I'm filling in the names and dates of people I'm scarcely even related to at all. 

It's interesting, though, that quite often I get off on some random branch of an inlaw's family tree and discover that it links up again with other people in my own tree at other points.  It makes sense that this would be ... in a small community with large families inevitably they're all intermarried with each other at some point over the years.  

I was thinking the other day how when I was a kid and when people heard I was a Gray they'd ask if I was related to this Gray or that Gray and I'd always say no, we were the Grays from Plymouth, not those other Grays.  After all the work I've done in the past few years I know now that more likely than not I was probably related to all of those other Grays.  Not to mention the Goodwins, Hemeons, Eldridges, and numerous other family names that were in the pot.  

This week I've been doing some research into the Moultons.  Capt Jesse's wife Sarah was a Moulton, of Wells Moulton and Kezia Goodwin (there's those Goodwins again!).  They were also called Morton in some parts over the years, which of course doesn't confuse things at all ...

There were a few Moulton families around in the area with Capt Jesse so I'm linking up the names, working on figuring out where they all came from and if they are from separate Moulton clans or if they all come from the same group at some point.  

I'm also still focusing on unusual names, like with Watson.  Though I didn't get very far with that theory ... yet.  Some names were carried down from the spouse's family, which does help to figure out who belonged to whom sometimes.  It's interesting how often a name is repeated in the same family ... like the EXACT same family.  I mean like in a case like Rebecca Elizabeth Moulton and Joseph Nelson Kinney.  They had a son, Charles, born 1862 who died in 1864.  So then they had another son in 1865 and named him Charles, too.  I guess they figured they liked the name and since it didn't "take" the first time, they'd give it another go.  Seems odd now, I can't see people nowadays giving a child the same name of its deceased brother or sister, but I've seen it fairly often in the past.

Anyhow, I'll try not to be so neglectful of my postings like I have been lately.  The search continues ...

Not so elementary, my dear Watson ...

Names.  Over the years, some names have become more and then less popular, depending on things like trends, media, creativity ... and some have maintained a steady level, usually due to simple tradition.  Some names are repeated over the generations to keep them in the family, or to honour or commemorate those who have passed.  Sometimes the maiden name of the mother or grandmother was used as the first name of a child.  I knew a woman who had twins and named one of them after her husband, the other after the man who actually fathered the children ...

Nowadays it seems people are sometimes just making up names off the top of their heads, to invoke some kind of individuality for their child.  Names like Edith, Archibald, Maud, or even my own Deborah aren't used as often now as they once were.  

In the not so distant past though, traditional names handed down from generation to generation were very important.  Often in a line of grandchildren you would see several cousins with the same name, after their grandfather or grandmother.  I'm sure this would have made for a very confusing family reunion with all these cousins called Robert or Sarah.

Which brings me to Henry and Watson.  Capt Jesse's eldest son was James.  Nothing spectacular there, James has always been a very popular and traditional name all the way through history and even today.  Likely he had a brother or uncle or even his father named James ... not much to go on.  James named his first son Henry.  Also a popular name, although less so than James in some parts.  Capt Jesse had no sons named Henry.  James' wife's father and grandfather were not named Henry.  She did have an uncle Henry but he died in infancy.

Capt Jesse's second son, Jesse jr, named one of his sons Watson.  Now that's an unusual name.  One does not just come up with a name like that out of the clear blue sky ... not in the 1800's anyhow.  Watson was not commonly used as a first name, but it was a surname in some parts.  

So, this is where I'm looking now ... Henry and Watson had to have come from somewhere ... either his father, grandfather, uncles, brothers, or his mother .... Yes, that's casting a hugely wide net, but when you factor in the relevant dates and geographical possibilities and likelihoods it narrows up just a little bit.  Hopefully just enough to help me figure out a bit more of the puzzle that is Capt Jesse.