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.