Statues ... learn from them or destroy them ...

I was just reading Todd Gray's article on the destruction of statues and monuments that's been going on recently.  It's happening everywhere and to be honest, I hate it.  It's like seeing an old stately home being torn down and replaced by a modern condo.  

In Victoria, BC they took down the statue of John A MacDonald because of his role in the poor treatment of the First Nations people of Canada.  There's an article listing "15 racist statues in Canada that people want removed".  They should change that to ... that SOME people want removed (keep in mind that 9 of these statues are of John A MacDonald).  I get it that there are statues of people that at some point in their lives did horrible things.  Who of us has never done a horrible thing (though not necessarily to that degree)?  Some of these people also did great things.  John A MacDonald was Canada's first Prime Minister!  That's something that should be respected, not destroyed.  It's happening everywhere, in the UK, the States (no surprise there), Canada, and no doubt other places that I'm too lazy to look up right now.  It breaks my heart to see history destroyed in any form, and it worries me that they'll escalate into destroying documents, books, buildings, and other things that represent things of our past, whether good or bad.

Capt Jesse Gray was a slaveowner.  It's a fact.  His family had a plantation and they had slaves.  He brought a few of his to Nova Scotia, it's documented in many books.  With him being my ancestry brick wall and the American Revolution and slavery records being my main source of information on him, these destroyers of historic things could very well end my whole search for his origins, thus my own.  It's like they think they can erase every bad thing that happened just by destroying the evidence/proof that it happened. 

The incorrigible President Trump (I cringe every time I even hear his name) said in one of his many, many tweets or speeches, that he was "changing history".  He actually thinks he can change history LOL ... I guess he must have a time machine we don't know about, since that's literally the only way that can be done.  

History happened.  It doesn't have to be celebrated, but it should be documented, it should be learned about and from, and we should grow into better people by knowing not to do those horrible things in our own lifetimes because we have learned from it.  If they don't want the statues out in the public because some people are offended by them, then put them in a museum or something, don't go vandalizing them, or bashing them to bits and tossing them into harbours. 

I do realize that I'm one of those of "white privilege", which I also don't get because I don't feel privileged.  I don't think I'm any better or worse than anyone else, I don't think I deserve any different treatment because of the colour of my skin any more than the colour of my blood, but maybe people think I don't understand it all as personally and deeply as others might.  But white privilege or not, I'm not stupid, or unfeeling.  I've done ancestry research for a good friend of mine who happens to be black, and it is nearly impossible to get beyond a certain point in her lineage because the records simply do not exist.  That breaks my heart too.  I watch shows like Roots, or others on slavery, or read the books or the historical records in the archives, and I sit there and literally cry over the treatment the people had to endure, and I'm grateful that I wasn't one of them and I feel deep sympathy for those that were.  

It appalls me that things like what happened to George Floyd are happening in this day and age when we should know better.  We should DO better.  But doing better doesn't mean destroying what came before us.  It doesn't change what happened 200+ years ago.  It means working together towards a better future.  Despite what Trump says, we can't change history.  But we can learn from it.

Wistful ...

It's an interesting range of feelings that come over me when I'm documenting cemeteries.  Some of them, like the one out in Brenton, are full of people that are so distantly related to me (like the grand-nephew of the husband of a 2nd cousin 4x removed) that until I photographed their stone I had no idea they'd even existed.  For these unfamiliar ones I just go through the area respectfully cleaning them off for the best photo possible, straightening what I can, taking the picture and moving on to the next one.  In a cemetery like that I can usually get through it pretty quickly, even more so if it's overrun by mosquitoes.  It's a rare one, though, when I can get through an entire cemetery without encountering a familiar name, related to me or not.

Then there are the ones like Kemptville, Plymouth, Pleasant Lake ... I grew up in Plymouth, went to church in both Plymouth and Pleasant Lake, and much of my family came from Kemptville.  Going through these spaces is an altogether different experience.  In the cemeteries in Kemptville I recognize most of the names as ancestors, whether closely related or not, they are family.  Some stones I feel closer to than others, even if they aren't direct ancestors like grandparents ... many are distant aunts, uncles, cousins, however many times removed.  A Gray on a stone makes me smile, those are guaranteed to be my people.  The smile isn't always a happy one, sometimes it's more of a sympathetic one ... like for Joseph Gray and his wife Caroline (Woods).  They had 13 children altogether, almost half of which died in infancy, often just days after birth.  I see these stones, the names, the dates, and I can't even imagine what they went through.  I tend to spend a little more time just standing there, being present for them.

In Plymouth and Pleasant Lake although parts of the cemeteries are very old, they also hold people that I knew personally.  I get the same feeling for the old stones as I do in the other places, but inevitably I end up looking down at a name that I grew up with.  The parents or grandparents of someone I grew up with, my own grandparents, aunts and uncles, my mother.  As with the unfamiliar ones I still clean up the stones, straighten what I can, pull the weeds from around them, tidy up the area if it's needed.  But as I do this I'm filled with a rush of memories.  

Thelma Sims was the "boss" of Sunday School, she led the singing (will anyone who was there ever forget the day she asked for requests and Stacy Newell wanted to sing "Jesus watches my children while I go shopping"? lol).  Ruth Purdy played the organ in church.  Jean "the bean" Scott played as well, and taught S.S. classes. Going sledding down the big hill next to Aunt Bernice's house, later Aunt Carrie & Uncle Merrill's house (next door to the cemetery).  Uncle Merrill standing by the record player playing along on his fiddle as Aunt Carrie played piano.  Skating on the various ponds throughout Plymouth, sometimes with a nice bonfire on the side for marshmallow roasting and warming up. Ralph Churchill driving the school bus.  Grampie also drove it, #22 ... later taken over by Dad.  The day little Andy Newell died.  The list goes on .....

When I drive through Plymouth these days it's obvious that it's no longer the village I grew up in, the landscape of the area has completely changed in so many ways but it's also so much the same as it always was.  I see the old homes and recall who lived where, who I'd see when we went Trick or Treating every year, it's like nothing has changed at all.  And then I walk through the cemetery and see the stones of these people I grew up knowing and I'm filled with feelings of melancholy, wistfulness, sadness.  I feel richer for having known them all, and a sense of loss for their absence.   They say you can never go home again, and in this case it's literally true, as the homes I grew up in are no longer there at all.  But when I do go home and walk through these places it takes me more than twice as long as anywhere else.  These are my people.  I knew them ... I know them.  I take a little extra time at each one and just remember.  I may not be able to go home again, but I can never forget where I came from.

Fact Checking Frustrations ...

I've had a fair number of emails and facebook messages from people who have also been on their own search for Capt Jesse Gray's roots over the years.  Some have been very helpful, mainly in regards to more recent ancestors, like Capt Jesse's grandchildren or great-grands.  This information is often provided via old family bibles, which is an excellent source.  I love getting copies of these pages, mainly because they were usually written down as the events happened, so how much more accurate can you get?  Headstones are often mis-named in spelling, or name order (mixing up first and middle names according to how they were used, rather than how they were actually named), and sometimes if a stone isn't placed immediately after a person has passed the dates are guesstimated and often off by a year or so, but the bible records can usually be counted on to be pretty accurate.

Then there are the people who have done their own family tree online and have read something somewhere on someone else's tree and copied it over to their own.  This is great IF that information is correct, but unfortunately is often is not.  Too many people still figure if it's on the internet it must be true.  I have news for you people:  THE INTERNET LIES.
I fell for it too at one time, for about 3 minutes, then once I saw the unsubstantiated claims of "truth", lack of documentation, waaaayyyy too much guesswork, I pretty much stopped believing most of what I see online unless it's in an actual official document.  And even then sometimes you have to take it with a grain of salt.  Always try to remember that the information recorded online is only as accurate as the person who put it there.

There are two lines in particular that several people have decided are Capt Jesse's family.  These trees do both have a Jesse Gray in them, and in theory if you're not really looking closely they could be plausible.  I'm not going to say right out that it's impossible, because at this time I just can't prove it beyond a doubt.  But I will say that both are highly unlikely.  Like super sky-high unlikely.  I do have my reasons, so I will elaborate. 

One of them is the family tree of Henry Gray and Sarah Harding.  We do have many Harding relatives sprinkled throughout the tree, so even there we could be related to her, but I haven't found a link there so far.  This is probably the most common tree that people have brought to my attention, swearing up and down that this is IT.  Nope, sorry people, I do not believe it is.

Henry Gray  (1714-1773) and Sarah Harding/Hardin (1702-  ) did have a son named Jesse.  They lived in Virginia, which is one of the possible places Capt Jesse may have come from.  Their son Jesse was born in 1738.  Now here is why I don't believe he's my guy.
Capt Jesse Gray died in Kemptville around 1843.  I don't believe he was 105 when he died, that would have been extraordinary considering the rough life he led and it would have been documented somewhere as such.  Plus his youngest child was born in 1815 .... I really don't think he was still making babies when he was 80, which is how old he would have been if he was born in 1738.  Plus every family story and historical records of the American Revolution state that he had a brother named Samuel.  Henry Gray did not have a son named Samuel.
Now, it could be that one of Henry's sons was the father of Capt Jesse & Samuel Gray, but so far I haven't been able to find anything that indicates this.  I haven't given up on that idea, but I'm pretty much convinced that Henry Gray and Sarah Harding are not the parents of my Capt Jesse Gray, so unless you have absolute definitive proof that they are, please stop insisting the ridiculous.
If you look in my Patch of Gray tree on Ancestry you will find them there, but not because of the Grays.  Rather, my connection to them is through Henry Gray's nephew James Samuel Gray who married into the Mangum family.  Yep, the same Mangums that married 3 of Capt Jesse's sons, or cousins of them, but the same gang nonetheless.  So there is definitely a connection there, and to me it's too much of a coincidence to ignore, so I'm still looking for other ways Capt Jesse could fit in there, but I haven't found it yet, I just know it's not Henry.

There's one other family that many people have also tried to convince me are the roots to Capt Jesse.  This would be the family of William Gray and Lydia Anderson.  They, too, lived in Virginia.  William's parents were John Gray (1690-1751) and Agnes Rose McGowan (1695-1759). William and Lydia have sons Jesse and Samuel.  It's always been a story in my family that Jesse & Samuel were twins ... whether that was true or not, I don't know, but we do know they were brothers.  So far, so good, right?  Nope. This Jesse Gray was born in 1765, which is both logical and likely for my Capt Jesse.  But this particular Jesse moved to Kentucky, where he was married twice and died in 1819.  See what I mean when I say it pays to do your homework.

One thing I've learned over the past few years is how bloody common the name Jesse Gray was in the southern states in the mid to late 1700's.  There are a LOT, like seriously a LOT of Jesse and Samuel Grays and it's really hard to distinguish them from each other unless you do a ton of serious digging and reading.

I do appreciate each and every piece of information anyone offers me that they've found in their own search, and I will do my utmost to try to prove or disprove whether it's valid or just another wandering trail to the wrong family.  So please do keep messaging me and keep sending me whatever you have or think you have and we'll go from there.

For now, the search continues .......

What it takes ...

Every year after a trip to NS I return home with many, many cemetery headstone pictures.  By "many" I mean literally hundreds, often over 1,000.  A lot of actual work goes into all of this, I often wonder if people realize exactly what's involved.  I know I didn't when I first started this project.  I figured hey, I'll just pop out to a few cemeteries, take a few pics of stones, no big deal.  That first time turned into taking pictures of ALL the stones in 13 cemeteries.  

Over time I figured out that the time of day needs to be taken into consideration when photographing certain cemeteries, certain stones.  Some stone materials don't photograph well in bright sunlight, others aren't great in shadows.  It's nearly impossible to go to any given cemetery and get perfectly fantastic shots of every single stone the first time out ... there are always some that have issues.  I am getting better at narrowing my original photo to the stone and just the stone ... the less cropping I have to do later, the better.  And I've learned to get a picture of the cemetery sign before I start doing the stones, even if I'm just popping in for updated shots or scouting for new stones.  I used to think "Oh, I'll remember I did that stone at this cemetery".  No, I won't.  There are just too many to remember exactly where each one was.  So a shot of the cemetery sign then the stones within it, another sign, more pictures, makes it so much easier to figure out what goes where.  Live and learn.  Once a cemetery is done, it's still not actually done.  Every time I'm there I revisit all the ones I've previously done to check for updated or new stones.  Plus some cemeteries could have done maintenance work to clean up old stones, which is a great opportunity to get a clearer picture.

The flour will be a must-have from now on.  I'm going to have to experiment with darker concoctions to use on the unreadable light stones like Louisa Cook.  I know her name, and where she lies, who she's among, whose plot she's in, so I can guess who she was, but without being able to read the actual stone info it's pretty much all guesswork.  This one has been edited on the computer to try to better define what's etched on it, but it's still not very legible.  She's a mystery to me, that Louisa, but I'll figure her out in time.


I keep a copy of all my cemetery pics on my home pc and on a memory stick so I have them with me no matter where I am.  That way I can use them when I'm away in NS, or at the library, or wherever.   Plus, a backup is always good to have just in case.  Once the photos are all uploaded from the camera and my phone they have to be cropped and sometimes fiddled around with to make them brighter or more easy to read, then renamed from the image number to the actual names on each stone.  Yep, every. single. one.  Each is saved in a folder named for that particular cemetery.  I have done about 28 cemeteries now, some aren't yet finished being cropped and renamed from my latest visit.

I maintain a few different trees on Ancestry, but  my main one is A Patch of Gray, my original tree in my Search for Capt Jesse Gray.  It quickly spread out to tens of thousands of entries, demonstrating to me how we really are all related, so I decided to make the Yarmouth County, NS tree.  So now I try to use A Patch of Gray for stuff more closely related to me, and everyone else goes in the Yarmouth County one.  Once the stone photos are all renamed and ready to use I head to Findagrave.com.  Some cemeteries are already started or done or partially done on there, some I've done completely myself.
Findagrave is great if all you're doing is looking for someone that has already been documented.  You find your person, and if it's done well it's got the photo of the stone, maybe even a photo of the person, with links to their parents, spouse, children, etc.  Getting all that information in there is a mammoth task.  Here's where my multi-screen computer system at home comes in super handy.  I have 3 screens and I use them all, with a couple of Findagrave windows open, plus Ancestry, census, NS Vital Statistics, and other cemetery registries.  With one stone entry on Findagrave I have to enter the person's full name, date and place of birth and death, then add the photo, then edit the entry to add parents and spouses.  If it's a relatively recent death (like within the last 10 years) I also look online to see if there's an obituary.  This helps out a lot in figuring out relations, often there's a photo of the person, and I also copy the obituary to the Findagrave page. There's no quick and easy drag/drop way to do this, it all has to be done manually and it's SO incredibly time-consuming, but I get such a sense of satisfaction when I finish up a family and can compare it to Ancestry and see that everyone is there and linked up properly.

When I'm doing a tree that has already been entered or started by someone else I tend to get a bit annoyed because it's rare that they've been as thorough as they could/should be.  Often the page is just the name and year of birth and death.  No exact dates (that's why I keep the NS vital stats open, so I can find these nitty gritty details) or places, and rarely are they connected to the rest of their family.  I appreciate the effort, but like I always say, any job worth doing is worth doing well.  I hate to see someone half-ass it, then take credit for the "wonderful" job they did after I've had to go in and do all the actual work.  It's kind of like those people that take a picture with a bazillion filters to make it pop and sparkle, then post it for all to see and people oooh and aaah like they're some kind of fantastic photographer.  Sorry people, give the credit to photoshop.

As each photo is entered on Findagrave I also add them to the correlating profile on Ancestry.   My trees are public, so anyone can see them and have the photos ... that's why I'm doing it, after all.  Why take all these pictures of other peoples' family stones if I'm not going to share with them? 

So this whole adventure started with a "few" photos in a couple of cemeteries and has exploded into thousands of photos in many cemeteries.  I foolishly started out just taking pictures with my phone ... ohhh so silly, no phone has that much room LOL 
Now after doing this for a few years I have cemetery gear that goes with me to every one.  This includes my actual camera (with 2 32gig memory cards), a notebook, a tablet (paper, not computer, though my other tablet may be added in the future), pens and pencils, a good stick (for scraping off lichen - sorry Dad, but I need to read the stones), a small bag of flour (next trip there'll also be something for the light stones), a rag to wipe off dirt or excess flour, moist wipes, and rubber boots.  I made a bag to carry all my stuff in (it's reversible, pockets inside and out) but I may have to make a bigger bag ... my gear just keeps increasing as I discover new obstacles in my photo-taking. 

It may sound like I'm complaining about all the work it takes to do all of this, but believe me when I say I'm not at all ... I truly love it.  I love the cemeteries, the older the better.  I love walking among the stones and feeling the history that surrounds them.  I love the feeling of a job well done when I've got everyone all linked up and documented.  And it's not something that I have to worry about what I'll do when it's done, because it'll literally never be really done.  I'm not looking for thanks or praise for the work either, though it is very labour intensive, I'm happy to do it and love it when I see a message on ancestry that someone has benefited from it, especially people that live far away and want to know about their people.  And I love a good mystery ... like my friend Louisa Cook mentioned above.  If you have a brick wall, or someone you can't figure out and they're buried in Yarmouth County, I will do whatever I can to help figure it out.

Hard to leave ...

During my visit this year I spent a lot of time on my own, just driving around visiting cemeteries I've already done to get updated stones, or looking for new ones to photograph.  Then of course I had to visit Capt Jesse's house, which is looking worse with every passing year.  This breaks my heart but there's nothing I can do about it, nothing anyone can right now besides the people that own the title, and they're not interested apparently.  I've often thought about how cool it would be if I were living back in Nova Scotia and could buy the house and have it moved to wherever I'm living, stabilize it so it's safe, and reconstruct whatever needs it (likely that's pretty much everything, realistically) and then use it as my quilt shop.  Now that would be cool.  An unrealistic dream, but that's why it's called a dream.   Another spot I always make time for is this beautiful spot in Kemptville.  It's a branch of the Tusket River that runs under the Gray Road just around the corner from Capt Jesse's house.  It's beautiful and quiet, all you hear is the water ... I could stay there all day.

Of course I had to spend some time in the Tusket Lakes Cemetery, which continues to be my favourite.  Not because it's full of Grays, because it isn't, there are only 2 Gray girls there ... one married an Andrews, the other a Hurlburt.  But the residents of this particular cemetery are among the oldest in the area, so to me it resonates as something special.  Plus it's so secluded and quiet, with the stone wall and trees all around, I do love it there.  When my time comes I figure I'd like to be buried either there or in the Plymouth Cemetery.  My sister and I came up with a "plan" for all that, for a chuckle you can read the Tale of the Ancestral Eye.

I learned a new trick before my trip this year.  I had been contacted a few months back by a distant (7th) cousin and we were working together online in working out some old family mysteries on her tree, which of course connects to mine in a few ways.  I was able to clarify some things for her, which was great -- it's funny how satisfying it is to solve a mystery, even a small one. 

Then she told me about a neat trick she'd seen on a video online to help read old dilapidated gravestones.  All headstones are not created equal.  There are some that are so old yet stand the test of time so well that they are still easily read hundreds of years later.   Take this one of Sarah Crocker Hatfield ... it's 182 years old yet still in great shape, well made and clear to read.  I don't know anything about stone itself, but just from my experience and wanderings in many cemeteries it's obvious that is is one tough cookie when it comes to longevity.  

Then we get the ones that don't hold up so well, and they aren't even this old. This one on the left is a great example.  It happens to be in the Arcadia Cemetery, but I find them everywhere.  It's another type of stone (to my eye anyhow), and it does not hold up well over time.  To the left is how it just normally looks now.  Then I watched the video she sent me and tried the method they used and voila - AMAZING!   As I travel around from cemetery to cemetery to the Archives, all over the county, I take a few things with me everywhere:  camera, notebook, pens, scrap paper, a stick, a rag, and now included in my little bag of tricks: flour.  Yep, regular all-purpose flour.  You just wipe it on the stone and it fills in all the engravings and suddenly you can read it all.  It took some practice, especially on a windy day which, let's face it, is almost every day in Nova Scotia.  But I quickly learned that if I cup a bit of flour in my hand, start at the top of the stone and work my way down, gradually smooshing (yes, that's a word ... or it should be) the flour into the crevices as I go, then I wipe off the excess with my rag and take a perfectly legible picture of the stone.  Of course it doesn't work on very white stones, but I'll work on a remedy for that.  I tried adding some coffee grounds to whole wheat flour and using that on a white stone, and it helped a bit but not really.  But being able to at least finally read these ones with the white flour is an awesome thing.  No more incorrect dates or wrong names because I had to guess at what it might say, and the best part is -- it's only flour!  It blows off into the wind or washes off in the next rain with no damage done to the stone at all.  My little cemetery bag is gradually getting full with all the new supplies I'm dragging around, I may have to make a new bag before I go next time. 

Branching out ...

Along this journey of tracing back my family tree and taking photos of all the cemeteries I've visited, I'm noticing more and more how the whole "6 degrees of separation" is really true, and not only in regards of friends.  The theory states that "Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other so that a chain of "a friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps."  

Where I grew up everyone always joked about how we were all related.  I don't think many of them really realized how very true that is.  Maybe not first or even second cousins, but as I go back in time I'm finding more and more links between families that I had no idea were even remotely related.  

I guess it's inevitable in a small community, even one that has grown into a small to medium sized town and the county that surrounds it.  We have an interloper here and there that I'll come across a stone for and kind of scratch my head as I think "where the heck did this guy come from, he's not one of ours!"  But for the most part, at some point, any family that has been in the area for a few generations is no doubt in some way related to the others that have been there just as long or longer.

As my own Patch of Gray tree on Ancestry grows and branches out, I often find myself spending a whole day just filling in names, dates, spouses, children of a husband of a 2nd cousin 7 times removed.  I don't mind that they're not more closely related to me, I don't feel like I'm wasting my time in discovering their families and filling in their information, doing a little extra digging to find out some hidden truths, but yesterday it did give me pause and I made a decision.

Rather than just fill this information in on my own tree, which is fine and helpful for all, I decided to create a tree and name it Yarmouth County, NS, since it is growing far beyond my immediate family.  I get a lot of my information from books such as Yarmouth, Nova Scotia: A Sequel to Campbell's History, plus various other historical texts, both online or in the library, and I do get some info from other people's trees or findagrave.com.  The last two I have to be careful, as I'd encourage anyone else doing family research, as some (too many) take what they see on other trees as gospel and just copy it over to theirs, then someone else does the same and so on and so on until nobody is sure at all where the information even originated or if it's correct.  And too often it is not.  

I'm not giving up on Jesse ... he's elusive but I know he can be found, I find new lines of research all the time, but after a while it gets so frustrating that all I want to do is fill in names and dates of sure things.  

I encourage anyone who views or uses the information they find on my Yarmouth County, NS tree to please let me know if you find any errors or have any additional information or photos that could be incorporated on the profiles.  I'm always open to suggestions and would like to be sure that the information I use is as accurate as possible.  Please - check it out!

More stones, more stories, more mysteries ...

I just returned from another trip to Nova Scotia, where I got to spend 2 more weeks visiting the cemeteries, taking pictures, poking around through the archives at the Tusket Courthouse, and of course visiting family.  This time I had my dad's company for most of my cemeterying, which was great in a bunch of ways.  

There were a couple of cemeteries that I had done already but the light wasn't good or I missed a few stones so I went back to re-do them.  Then there was one I'd heard about through findagrave that I hadn't even seen because I hadn't gone all the way through a back road, just went in one end and back out the same way.  Note to self: don't do that.

It was good for Dad to get out to these places that he hadn't been to in years, or maybe ever, like Capt Jesse's house. We peeked in the window like Tracy and I had a year or so ago, it's in worse shape than it was even then.  Since the chimney was taken down and they didn't bother patching the hole in the roof where it had been, it's been a victim to the elements ever since.  Thus the floors are all rotted and sloped, likely it's home to any number of critters.  

As we visited the various cemeteries (I think we saw 7 over a 2 day period) he saw the names of people he'd heard stories about over the years ... seeing these old familiar names jogged his memory about all sorts of things.  Then every now and then we'd see a Gray stone with a name he was totally unfamiliar with, so that was my turn to tell him what I knew. 

We also went out to the Old Burying Ground in Plymouth.  This is where the stone for Abner Barrows has been found and now lays in the yard of the current owners of the property.   When I was a kid, old Mrs Bradley lived there and denied that there was a cemetery on her property, regardless of the fact that Dad clearly remembered cutting through there (before her house was built) on his way to school and jumping over the gravestones.  He knows for a fact that his great-grandfather Benjamin Gray (1820-1890) and great-grandmother Judith Hayes (1822-1914) were buried there.  He knows this because a. he saw them there, and b. he saw the notes about them in the cemetery log books when he was the Plymouth Cemetery caretaker.  Back when they started using the current Plymouth Cemetery, Benjamin had been given a plot for himself and his wife but he had given it to his son, Edgar, stating that he would be buried in the Old Burying Ground as he had originally intended.  Dad and I went poking around (I had warned him ahead of time to bring boots, it's a good thing we did!) in the trees, alders, pickerbushes, and swampy brush down the hill from the house where he remembers the stones being, but all we found were a bunch of broken trees, sinky swampy ground, and garbage.  He figures the actual cemetery was likely covered over by landfill when they built the Bradley house years ago.  Likely the excavators at the time figured it was so old nobody would remember or care and just plowed right over it and now the stones and plots are under 20 ft of soil.  Sorry guys, somebody does remember, and we're not impressed.

That was a little adventure for us, one of a couple (like driving way out on a dead-end dirt road that was being worked on looking for a cemetery that wasn't there - OMG my car was so dirty after that! LOL ).  I ended up getting new photos of some I needed redone, plus 2 cemeteries I hadn't done at all before, in all I took over 800 pictures.  Now I get to edit them, rename them according to who they belong to, assign them to their profile in my tree on Ancestry, then build the cemetery in findagrave.  Sounds like a lot of work?  You bet your boots it is, but it's work that I love doing.  I learn so much from every stone I do.

I usually spend a couple of half days at the Tusket Archives in the old courthouse, which of course I did.  I was slightly more prepared this time, I had made a list of all the files I wanted to take a look at, which I'm sure made their job that much easier than me just walking in and asking for "Gray info".  I talked to Cody and Judy (Judy works there, I think Cody is a volunteer) and they were very helpful.  Near the end of my visit my sister, who homeschools her kids, wanted to do a little history field trip with me so I took them out to my favourite old cemetery, Tusket Lakes. I took them around to all the stones there, explained who these people were, how they relate to us, everything I could remember about each of them.  There are a few new stones in there from more recent years that have nothing to do with our family, but besides them we are related to everyone else in there, just as we are with every other cemetery in the area.  There are only 2 actual Grays in that cemetery, but I just love that it's probably the oldest one in the area, it's right off the main road but sheltered by trees so it's quiet and private-ish, I just love it there.

Then we went over to the Argyle Township Court House and Archives.   They wanted to do the tour of the old courhouse and gaol, so I went over to the Archives to continue working on what I had left out from the day before.  Peter Crowell, one of the main archivists there, had been conducting their tour over at the gaol.  When the tour was finished he came over to see me in the Archives.  Apparently he'd heard from Judy that I'd been there already that week and wanted to talk to me in person, since we'd never met but have so much in common, including a direct link to Capt Jesse.  It was great talking to him, we both had so much to say and bounced information and ideas off each other until it was time for me to go.  He showed me some binders of photos he'd been given of Grays in Kempt, plus all the houses in Plymouth from years gone by, so I returned the next day to go through all of those and get some copies for myself.  I could talk to him all day, he knows so much and is as interested in it all as much as I am.  

Peter had an interesting theory about Capt Jesse that I had actually been considering myself just a week earlier.  Jesse's wife, Sarah Moulton, died in 1817, just 2 years after their youngest child was born.  At that time they were still living at Morris Island.  Shortly after that he got his land in Kempt and moved out there.  After that we know he was off doing slave trading and whatever else it was he did with his brother Samuel, back and forth to and from Nova Scotia to the lower States.  So all that time, who was taking care of his many young children?  I had considered that likely it was one or more slaves, and there were a few on his property at that time.  But Peter told me something I hadn't known.  He had heard from someone he considered a reliable source that the Sarah buried with Capt Jesse in Schoolhouse Cove was not Sarah Moulton ... that after she died Jesse had remarried another Sarah and it is she who is buried with him.  This makes complete sense to me, since when Sarah Moulton died they weren't even living in Kempt yet, so she likely is buried at Morris Island, probably on the property they were living/squatting on at the time.  So if he married another Sarah, who was she?

Anyone listening in on us would have thought we were crazy with all the different ideas and things we were tossing around, but to Peter and I things were starting to make some sense.  He also mentioned the "Mr Mood" that is mentioned in various texts as being buried in Schoolhouse Cove with Capt Jesse and his wife Sarah.  He didn't have time to really elaborate on that, as my ride was ready to go and it was near closing time for them, but it did get me thinking.  

Jacob Mood, the "Mr Mood" mentioned, was married to Sarah Eldridge.  He died in 1824, leaving her a widow, just a few years after Sarah Moulton had died.  I'm wondering if maybe Sarah Eldridge could have been the 2nd Sarah that Jesse later married.  Sarah was a very common name, so it could have been any number of women, but this one in particular is one I'm working on now ... particularly since 2 of Jacob & Sarah's girls married 2 of Jesse's boys.  And if Jacob was buried at Schoolhouse cove it would make sense that his wife be buried there too, along with her new husband.  I've been out there, a couple of years ago, and it's a shame that there are no stones or markers remaining.  If only I had unlimited funds and could get out there with ground penetrating radar to see what's really there.  While we're at it we could take the radar out to Plymouth and find Benjamin and Judith....

All in all it was a great trip, though way too short.  There were a few friends I had hoped to see but just didn't have the time, a few more cemeteries I'd have liked to photograph.  I love getting out there in the country and being surrounded by my history, my family, even though most of them are all gone now.  Some day I will get back and stay.

Frustration ...

I have a few guidelines that I've set for myself while researching:

• try to be thorough
• try to be accurate, or as much as possible
• try not to speculate any more than I have to.  
• think rationally
• don't jump to conclusions
• consider all the possibilities

I like to know the reason for certain things ... like how do I KNOW this person married that person, how do I KNOW they had this many children and lived here, where did I get this date from, etc.  If I don't know the exact date or location of something I'll put what I do know and where I got it from rather than guess.  If I'm reasonably sure of something but not 100% I'll sometimes put a ? indicating that I could be wrong.

It annoys me to no end that so many other people do not do any of these things.  I'll go on Ancestry to cross-reference some things from other people's trees and end up so annoyed and frustrated at their stupidity, it drives me crazy.  Just today I saw a tree that had a John Gray married to 3 different women at the same time, kids from all of them with dates all over the place, resulting in over 50 children altogether (35 from one wife!), right up until the day he died.  Now seriously people, how likely is that?  I know they tended to have large families, but that's a bit ridiculous.  

I know I'm not perfect, but I do try to be reasonable.  I just wish other people would do the same.  It would make researching so much more pleasant for everyone.

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.

Taking the time to get it RIGHT ...

One of the main stumbling blocks I've come across on my journey to find Capt Jesse is actually, believe it or not, other people trying to do the exact same thing.  When I do a search in Ancestry for information I try to stay away from other people's public trees.  I know they are on their own quest to find out where they came from, and they very well may be on the same route I'm on, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're after the same thing ... if that makes any sense at all.

Yes, it's good to share .... yes, it's good to link up names that go together, and often other people's trees are the only way to do that.  BUT ... and this is a big BUT ... some of them are just WRONG.  There is a guy in particular that I've gradually come to accept that I should never accept his family tree as being valid information.  He tends to find hints, take them as gospel, fill in his tree without further research, then moves on to the next one.  Then all of these newbies come along and think that since he has so much done on his tree, he must be right.  They copy his tree info into theirs, now we've got 2 invalid trees, and from there it grows exponentially.  I've sent him a number of emails asking for sources for some of the things he has posted ... of course I never get a reply.  

I do end up checking his tree every now and then as comparison to mine, take it all with a grain of salt, then go looking for verification sources to back it up.

With all the work I've put into this search: reading wills, obituaries, birth-marriage-death certificates, letters, cemetery inscriptions, anything I can get my hands on, I try my hardest to be able to list sources for my finds.  Not always, but as often as I can.  My ultimate goal, of course, is to figure out Capt Jesse.  Until then I try to keep my records as accurate as possible, in regards to spelling, dates, places, etc, with sources for as much as I can possibly manage.

Backtracking for another look ....

A few times now I have gone back to the family tree of Henry Gray & Sarah Hardin/Harding.  It has been suggested, even recorded as truth by several people also doing genealogy research on this family, that Capt Jesse is their son.  That I do not believe ... mainly because the dates don't match up.  Their son Jesse was born in 1738.  My Capt Jesse was born closer to 1760.  But that doesn't mean he's not in the next generation.  Henry's brother, Richard, was the father of James Samuel Gray, who married Mary Mangum, cousin to Sarah and Mary Mangum that married two of Capt Jesse's sons.  There isn't a lot of information readily available on the rest of Henry Gray's family, the descendants of his brothers.

Looking at Capt Jesse's own family, his first son is James.  James married one of the Mangum girls, and his first two sons are Henry and William.  He has another son named James F Gray ... I don't know what the F was for, but I think I should find out.  

I think for now I'll focus on that ... try to find more information on them all and see where it leads me.......

Spelling and Math ....

One of the resources I rely on often in my research is the Census. It is in a way both very reliable and yet very unreliable at the same time. It does tell us who was living in the house at that time, usually indicating with some degree of accuracy what their relation was to the head of the household. Ages are often wrong. I expect it's because the person giving the information didn't know the actual birthdate of each person and just gave their best guess. Like "oh .... I'd say about 9" ... not remembering that 10 years ago at the previous census the child had been recorded as being 2. 

Some census years are better than others in the areas I've been focusing on, and I imagine it's the same everywhere else. The census taker probably didn't lay eyes on everyone he was listing, so he may not have noticed that someone was older or younger than recorded, or if it should be listed as Male or Female. Some often put down the nickname of a person rather than their actual formal name. So little "Gussie" listed as being a 9 year old boy may have actually been Augusta, an 11 year old girl. Spelling varies greatly from one census to another ... if a person lived long enough to span several censuses you could see a whole slew of different spellings. 

I can't be too hard on them though, seeing as many had little to no actual schooling and were doing the best that they could with what they had. I guess I should be grateful that I haven't come across a census with "One-eyed Willie" listed in it.

Following the slaves ....

Lately I've been reading a couple of really good books:  The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, and Black Loyalists by Ruth Holmes Whitehead.  Both excellent books, full of information, some of which I had never heard of before.  As usual, every time I read anything I'm constantly on the lookout to any reference to the Grays or other names I've seen associated with them along the way.

Of course I couldn't read The Book of Negroes fictional novel without having a look at the ACTUAL Book of Negroes.  Among the many lists are 5 slaves listed as such (the names in parentheses are in possession of the slave at that time):

Nero Denton, 40, stout fellow, (Cornet Gray, B. Legion). Formerly the property of William Denton of Goshen; left him in 1776. GMC.

Dalkeith, 25, stout fellow, (Cornet Gray, B. Legion). Formerly the property of James Ronaldson, Smithfield, Virginia; left him in 1778. GMC.

Toney, 20, stout wench, (Cornet Gray, B. Legion). Property of Cornet Gray per Bill of Sale.

Jem, 1, (Cornet Gray, B. Legion). Property of Cornet Gray per Bill of Sale.

Nicholas, 20, stout fellow, (Cornet Gray, B. Legion). Formerly the property of Benjamin Fisher, Pennsylvania.

Cornet was a rank in the British Legion equivalent to 2nd Lieutenant.  Capt Jesse's brother Samuel was a 2nd Lieutenant when he was in St Augustine, this I know.  I don't know if he was also the Cornet Gray listed above, but it is entirely possible.

In Ruth Holmes Whitehead's book, Black Loyalists, she makes reference to a letter from John Cruden, commissioner of sequestered estates, to the local magistrate, George Nibbs in 1783 advising that a Mr. Gray was transporting Negroes from Carolina under the pretense of setting them free but then selling them in the British West Indies.  A few weeks later Cruden wrote to the Honorable J. Fahia, Esq, president of the council at Tortola, about the same thing.  Cruden believed this Mr. Gray to be either Capt Jesse or his brother Samuel.  

We do know that when Capt Jesse went from St Augustine to Nova Scotia, they did detour to Bermuda before heading north.  We also know that in 1786 Samuel bought a number of slaves from Gov Tonyn in East Florida.  Samuel was later recorded as living in Jamaica in 1817.

In Ruth Holmes Whitehead's book she speaks about Boston King, a former South Carolina slave.  King had been the property of Richard Waring of Charlestown, SC, he later worked as an orderly to a militia Capt Grey/Gray in SC.  We know that Mary Postell had also been the property of a family by the name of Waring in Charlestown.

Upon doing a bit of online poking around I was reading through some ads posted for runaway slaves in the newspaper in South Carolina in 1783-85.  You can see them here.  On Sept 2-6, 1783 and Jan 3-6, 1784 a Henry Gray was looking for 4 runaway slaves.  The part that set off my alarm bells was that they had been purchased from Postell and Waring .... BOTH names associated with Capt Jesse, Samuel, and Mary Postell.

Hmmmmmm.........

So ... factual information, I have none.  Well, it's all factual and it's all information, but it doesn't all necessarily belong to me.  It is thought provoking though.  A bit too coincidental for my liking ... I am definitely going to have to do some more investigating into these areas.

Working the numbers ....

That's what it all comes down to ... the numbers.  If the dates don't line up within reason, then certain names and associations go right out the window.  This is one of the 3 main reasons I have discarded the many Jesse Grays I've come across until now, the dates just don't work.  The next reason is locations.  Based on the bits of information I do know about Capt Jesse since the American Revolution, I can reason out certain places that just don't make any sense.  This goes along with the 3rd reason, which is common names.  First names were handed down through the generations, naming children after parents, grand-parents, uncles, etc.  Often a child would be given the mother's maiden name as a first name.  They also married locally, so often we have brothers marrying sisters or cousins, with common surnames popping up all over the place within that particular section of the tree.

Using these 3 main processes of deductive reasoning I've eliminated pretty much every Jesse Gray I've come across.  Every now and then I get an email from my dad asking if I'd checked out a name he'd gotten from Uncle Gary (his brother).  So far every one I've been able to definitively tell him they're not the one we're looking for.

But every now and then I get a family line that looks too good to NOT be ours.  There's a Fielding Gray who was born in 1799 in VA, died 1850 in TN.  On the face of that it doesn't look like anything.  Just another Gray.  His middle name is Wells.  Interesting ... Capt Jesse's father-in-law's name is Wells.  Still, not much to go on.  Fielding's father is usually listed as James Gray.  Again, no big deal, there are lots of James Grays out there.  Then I discovered his name is actually James Samuel Gray and he married Mary Mangum, of the same Mangums that my Capt Jesse and Samuel had dealings with in the Mary Postell trial and more.  Capt Jesse has 2 sons that married Mangums.

James Samuel Gray didn't, to my knowledge so far, have a brother named Jesse.  But he did have a cousin Jesse. 

On the face of it I'm only related to these Grays through the Mangums:

James Samuel Gray (1750 - )

husband of 2nd cousin 5x removed

Mary Mangum (1775 - 1800)

wife of James Samuel Gray

Micajah Mangum (1730 - 1787)

father of Mary Mangum

Joseph Micajah Mangum (1710 - 1762)

father of Micajah Mangum

John Mangum (1674 - 1737)

father of Joseph Micajah Mangum

William Mangum Sr. (1706 - 1787)

son of John Mangum

William Mangum Jr. (1736 - 1818)

son of William Mangum Sr.

Mary Mangum (1800 - )  ***** married to Capt Jesse's son, Jesse jr. ... she is 2nd cousin to the Mary that James Samuel Gray married!

daughter of William Mangum Jr.

Benjamin Samuel Gray (1820 - 1890)

son of Mary Mangum

Edgar Athlene Gray (1863 - 1925)

son of Benjamin Samuel Gray

Keith Albert Gray (1908 - 1976)

son of Edgar Athlene Gray

Keith Gerald Gray (1940 - )

son of Keith Albert Gray

Deborah Gray

No matter where I start to dig and add names to fill in holes in the branches, I always have to return to these people.  The dates line up.  The locations are plausible.  The people are familiar.  I have to keep at this until I can definitively say that these people are or are not Capt Jesse's people.  Then I can either do a happy dance or roll up my sleeves and set this branch aside and move on to another.