Genealogical Mind Games

This is the kind of crap I spend HOURS doing.......pouring over census data, other people's genealogy research and anything else I can get my hands on via online.
I am SUCH an Uber Nerd, aren't I?lol

A lady left a comment a few weeks ago on a post from 2011 I wrote for my public blog.  It had to do with the history of the area of rural South Central Virginia where my mother's folks come from.
Among the stuff I rambled on about was the plantation called Roxabel in Charlotte Court House, Virginia.
Here's a photo of the house I found online.
The cousins who bought it together, are using it to host weddings/receptions, etc.
Please excuse the bride in the photo.
She is my 1st cousin once removed evidently, yet I have never met her.  Even worse, I am old enough to be her mother. 8-(

At some point after the turn of the 20th century my maternal great grandparents acquired this place.
Of course, it wasn't a plantation anymore at that point, just an old large brick home and a huge piece of land.
Anyway, this commenter said she was descended from slaves who had lived there(and thusly, been owned by the man who owned the plantation).  She had information about the original owner of the plantation, which was something I had never felt the need to look up before.  After all, my kin bought the place well after the slavery days, so they weren't any relation to the wealthy planter class.

And that's when I started wondering if some how, some where way back in the blood lines if my family actually had a connection to the Family who had owned that plantation.
Could I use my skills at "Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon" to find a pathway from me to the Landed Gentry of Charlotte County, Virgina.

So I started excavating......
And today I found a link......albeit a WEAK one, but it's there. ;-)

Let's begin with a man named John Wilkins Marshall I.
He was born in 1714 in England and came to America before 1739, as that is the date he married a woman in Lancaster, PA.
They eventually settled in what was then the Lunenburg County area of VA and grew their family.  They were some of theearly settlers in this area. This county is also adjacent to Campbell and Charlotte County VA and this family line settled in this general 3 county area.

Here's a map.
I've circled the 3 counties I'm talking about in red.

So John Wilkins Marshall I has 2 sons.....he had more but these 2 are the ones I need to talk about....

William Marshall 
John Wilkins Marshall II

And each of these 2 sons had a son....
John Marshall
David Marshall

And each of these 2 sons had a son.....
Hunter Holmes Marshall
Charles Richard Marshall

Hunter H. Marshall is the man who owned Roxabel Plantation.  He was a lawyer and a judge as well as a plantation owner.  He was much better at lawyering than planting though and he ended up moving away to Richmond in his older years after the Civil War.   The plantation was located in Charlotte County, just outside of Charlotte CourtHouse proper.

His oldest son was killed at the tail end of the war and 2 of his other sons fled the state, due to their being implicated in the murder of a newly freed black man(their father's butler)during a political speech.  From what I gather, the eldest daughter of the judge married in 1868 and lived with her family in the house and the land was farmed out and her Husband ran the operation.
This daughter moved away sometime around the turn of the 20th century and we find her living in NYC.

So to continue down the 2 bloodlines of Hunter Holmes and Chas. Richard Marshall--each had a daughter....
Mary Ann Marshall (Gaines)
Addie Marshall (Holt)
 

So here is the diagram I made to show the twisty/turny line that links my kin to that of the Marshalls.

After the direct lines down, then we need to Do-See-Do a few times to the side.

Addie Marshall marries Olifia Wooding Holt.

Olifia Wooding Holt is the son of Charles Calvin Holt, so we go over and back up one generation.
Chas. Calvin Holt is the brother of Elizabeth Frances Holt.
Elizabeth Frances Holt marries John Harper.
John Harper is the brother of James M. Harper.
So we have made 3 lateral moves.

James M. Harper has a son named Robert W. Harper. (down another generation)
Robert W. Harper has a son named Wirt Ross Harper. (down another generation)
Wirt Ross Harper has a daughter who is my mother. (down another generation)
My mother has....me! 8-) (down another generation)

See!
I told you it was a twisty and turvy.
So through marriage I can link to the Marshall clan and the original owner of Roxabel.

But you know what the funny thing is here?
This side of my family that has this tenuous link?
It's NOT the side the bought the house and farm back in the early 1900's!
That was my mother's mother's family, not her father's family.

I know I know.....this is about as exciting as watching paint dry.  What can I say.....I am weird.

Sluggy

My Virginia Ancestors Part I

My Virginia Ancestors  Part I

My mother was born in 1934 in rural Virginia.  She was an only child.  If I could go back in time and ask my grandparents why they only had only 1 child, I would do that in a heart beat because that question haunts me.

I know that my grandmother was 1 of 12 siblings, 6 boys and 6 girls.  She was #5 in the birth order, the fourth of the six girls.  She was born the year World War I broke out in Europe, though I feel that the war had very little affect on her life as a child in the rural hills of Virginia.  None of her siblings were called to war(being toddlers)and I have yet to unearth any extended family that enlisted, though I have found registration cards filed for some of  her Uncles on her mother's side.  Living a rural, agrarian life as they did, food restrictions implemented during the Great War had little effect on my Virginia ancestors.  They lived a life where they grew their own food and didn't rely on stores and money to buy groceries. 

When my grandmother, Lillian Grace, was 10, her mother, Lucy Ellen, my great grandmother, had delivered her 9th baby at home.
There was  a baby born when my grandmother was 2.5, another at 5.5  and again when she was 7.5 years old.  After the 9th sibling born when grandmother was 10, yet another baby followed when my grandmother was 11.5, and again another 6 days before grandmother's 14th birthday.  The last child my great grandmother had was born the same year my grandmother, a married woman, had her first and only child, my mother.
This was 3 months AFTER my grandmother had my mother.  This made my mom older than her youngest Uncle.

Living in rural Virginia at the end of the 1800's and the beginning of the 1900's was a harsh life. 
Most folks were farmers.  Many hands were needed to get the work done.
The 'work' was to feed and clothe your family.  If you could also make a few extra dollars to make your lives easier(by purchasing appliances or better wagons or fancy yard goods, etc. or by putting currency aside for your old age)that was a bonus.  But most work involved just keeping your family whole and out of poverty.
The more children you had the larger your work force.  Childhood was short and very different from today's idea of that time in life.  You were raised up to pull your own weight in a family and you often began doing chores before you could string a few words together.
Schooling was only for the basics of reading and writing and arithmetic so you could function as an adult.  As soon as you learned enough....around 4th grade or so.....you left school and started working around the farm.
The work you did on the farm was mostly dictated by your sex.  Boys and girls had very different jobs on the farm and mostly you didn't do the other sexes chores unless there was a grave need to.

The boys learned the Manly jobs of plowing and planting, weather prognostication, running the machinery, carpentry and caring for and/or butchering the animals.  There was often a side job that brought in money, such as milling lumber if you had forested land, or selling wooden items if your carpentry skills were good enough to allow you to make salable goods to the town folk, etc.  And there was also bootlegging if you were so inclined.

The girls learned the Womanly jobs of food prep and preservation, cooking, cleaning, kitchen gardening, laundry, sewing(and weaving often times) and small time doctoring.  Along with all these jobs women were also wholly responsible for giving birth to the workforce and childcare.

I feel that given my grandmother's birth order and the ages of her sibling, she was called upon to care for all those younger siblings her parents had.
She was sort of a mother's helper as it were.
My grandmother's 3 older sisters where probably involved in the harder housework like cooking, laundry, cleaning, due to their older ages.  The 1 older boy was probably out learning how to run the family farm with his father and the hired help.

If this is the case-that my grandmother helped raise up the siblings that came after her until she married and left home, then I don't doubt it was a conscious effort, this having only one child.  Nature and her God may have had something to do with it too, but I feel she had had enough of raising babies and wanted something else out of life besides changing diapers and feeding babies.

And this whole having your first child 3 MONTHS BEFORE your own mother gives birth to her last child is just awkward to me with my modern sensibilities.  I guess back in the day of large families it was not unusual for 2 generations to be "in the family way" around the same time, in the same years.

Another reason why my grandmother may have only wanted one child was because of who she fell in love with and married.
Fram what I saw of their relationship as a young child, having my grandfather was very much like having another child for my grandmother.
I see their family as being composed of 1 adult and 2 children.  My grandmother was the adult and my grandfather and my mother were her "children".  If you have a spouse who is more like your child than your husband, it would be a very big incentive to me at least, NOT to have more children.

To Be Continued......

Sluggy