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From:
Subject: [TANKERSLEY-L] Nancy Tankersley
Date: 28 Mar 2004 08:18:41 -0700


This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list.

Classification: Query

Message Board URL:

http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/an/XRRBAIB/290.1.2.1.2

Message Board Post:

Katy, I take it back. I do seem to have a possible 1860 census record for that mysterious Nancy Tankersley. This is from Bollinger County, Missouri, and the family lived quite near other members of the Cape Girardeau branch. (I refer to them this way since Cape Girardeau is where they settled first, although they later scattered into several surrounding counties.)

Household #368:
George W. Tankersley, 25, born MO
Nancy, 17
William 1
Elizabeth, ?/12

This family lived next door to William Tankersley (c.1799-1861), and the 1850 census of Cape Girardeau County shows that William had a son George W. who was born c.1832. According to the old Charles W. Tankersley genealogy, which checks out pretty accurately on this line, William was the son of Charles Tankersley and Susan (Susannah in some records) Hanks. I don't have any record of the name of William's wife. His father Charles is said to have been the son of William Tankersley and Martha Nelson. This family was living in the Lincoln County, North Carolina area by the time of the Revolution, but Charles and his apparent younger brother George had moved westward to Cape Girardeau County by 1822. I don't know for sure about the Martha Nelson thing, by the way, because William Sr. was married to Barbara Clubb, daughter of Peter Clubb, by 1778. But the names "Martha" and "Nelson" both appear in later generations, so Barbara may well have been a second wife.

The only thing I should warn you about is that Levi Tankersley of Bollinger County, who was apparently the son of Charles' brother George, also had a son named George W. who was born c.1833. So, even though George W. and Nancy were living next door to William in 1860, we need to consider the possibility that George W. was William's nephew rather than his son.

If you decide to follow this up (which I'm starting to think you should!), I should warn you that we can't really take this lineage back any farther than the senior William. The CWT book, which you'll find in various forms all over the Internet, claims that William was the son of Richard Tankersley and Elizabeth Fountain, but I have major doubts about that. CWT seems to have been fairly sound on his post-1800 data, but he was an inexperienced research who ill-advisedly created his own parent-child connections as he went backwards. The trouble is, he was missing some crucial pieces of the puzzle, which led to some extremely serious errors, and I'm inclined to think that William was one of them. Frankly, except for the families that are clearly documented in will records, I trust almost none of his "data" on the pre-1800 American generations.

This may be a lot more than you wanted to know. But, on the other hand, it may help you solve your mystery. Please let me know what you think.

Harriet


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