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 the early 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 Court House 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

And Thus It Begins

Ok.....deep breath.....
I don't know why I am nervous because frankly anybody reading this is someone I've invited here, which means I trust you.

I just celebrated my 53rd Birthday a short while ago.
I am 53 years old.
Still trying to wrap my head around that one!

I am 53 years old and I haven't accomplished a whole hell of a lot in this world.
I am 53 years old, parts of my life and psyche are a mess and I have issues. I know everyone has issues. And my issues may not be anywhere near as bad/big/demoralizing/crushing as the ones some other folks have, but they are real to me and they are seemingly insurmountable at least in my own head.

I feel I am the victim of bad parents.
I have always felt disconnected from my family because of my age and how I was raised.
I have often felt I was not loved growing up, at least in that unconditional "we love you no matter what" way parents are suppose to love their kids.  Now I am not saying that this is how my parents felt or were toward me.  It's just the impression I had as a child and it's how I view my life in regard to my parents and immediate family.

Add in that one side of my family kept many things hidden away.....those skeletons in the closet one hears about.
Yes, we've got skeletons.....not as big as some people's skeletons but skeletons nonetheless. Keeping secrets has divided generations of people. Maybe that's why I have always felt alone in my life?
I have always felt that there is more to where I came from but little information was every given to me about about some of the people I came from.

I have always loved history and puzzles.
Then 2 things happened to goad me to finally take this step.

First my oldest brother died. He had a stroke in January of 2009 and fell into a coma, eventually dying in June of 2010, never having regained consciousness. When he had the stroke he had just turned 58.
Our immediate family has never communicated well and now it was down to just me and my other brother left. There was so much family history I could not get back the time to find out about.

Back a couple of years ago a show came on tv called "Who Do You Think You Are?".
It is/was about celebrities having their ancestors traced to discover who they were and how they got to where they are.
I found it fascinating! At that point in my life I knew a few of the family stories but hadn't really done much to put the genealogy pieces together and collect the side stories of our family's history.

Now at 53, I feel my time on this Earth is running low and I'd better get busy on this project to discover who I am and where I came from.
Besides leaving something behind for my children for when they finally decide to take a look at where they came from, I want to get my thoughts and feelings out into the open on my own psychological issues. Not that anyone cares or wants to hear this crap but I think typing it out here will serve some therapeutic need in me and help me to one day heal the very real as well as imagined wounds I feel.

To this end, I have finally broken down and paid for a subscription to Ancestry.com.
If you know how spending money on stuff pains me, you know how important to me paying for the honor of poking through old documents to find the missing pieces of my family on that site is.

So let the flinging of the closet doors open and the whining about my miserable life begin!

Sluggy