VACULPEP-L Archives

From: Cynthia Claytonroberts <>
Subject: [VACULPEP] Green's Notes & etc.
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 10:08:33 EDT

Woke up this morning with "Green's ain't proof" still ringing in my ears
- which is tangled up with "All the Records for ________ County were
Burned in the Civil War - yes, I know, that's the same one as the War
Between the States, cousins, (fill in whichever county you absolutely
have to be searching in for your ancestors),

and I guess before I get anything done today, I am going to have to send
in an encouraging word or two <g> for anyone who may be giving up before
they begin.
Please bear with me before you break your #2 pencils in two and toss your
notebooks away.

No Green's ain't "proof".

But I understand it's based on Rev. Slaughter's, "History of St. Mark's
Parish", which is based not only on his dad's faulty reminisces, but also
on some tattered parish journals recording day to day events and the
changing of the guard over the years; Bishop Mead's Old Virginia
Churches, family legends (mine's the old Major Philip Clayton and that
ridiculous catalpa tree which somehow in the mushy writing appears to be
dragged around from Essex or New Kent? by his grandson Major Philip
Clayton which doesn't make any sense at all. Hansbroughs don't descend
from him either of course but Sarah Ann Edwards Clayton Wallace's kids
marry a couple.).

And then there's that Clayton daughter (who supposedly married a
Crittenden) who doesn't belong to anyone, at least not to old Major
Philip. I haven't seen Green's Notes except for the wayward catalpa tree
anecdote someone sent email, it did point me to New Kent Co.where I think
I've nailed down my Sam Clayton & "widdo" Susannah, living along the
Mattipony River before the 1700s in a boundary description of Capt.
Leigh's (Lee's) patent. It all helps.

I do have a copy of Slaughter's work and Old Churches is online at
ancestry.com. Having nothing better to do, I input Slaughter's in my
master gedcom & cited the work for each individual input. (Somehow this
project of mine grew to include half of the 1700s Culpeper families and
their travels)

I also input a few thousand DAR records since besides the Vestry, the
other source of husbands in my family, seems to have been the Revolution
& cited DAR as the source for birth & death & whereabouts (some dates
have got to be typos online, but there is a fairly decent time structure
and where the officer died & where the descendant DAR daughter was born).


Found a lot of corroborating evidence in deeds and wills on line from
Spotsylvania County, as well as baptismal, marriage, death records from
all over including Maryland where some families landed before they
settled in Virginia. Way back a number of these family vitals got
included in some of the biographies of all places, West Virginia!, which
didn't even exist as a place back then, but the families carried their
history with them as they relocated to places where the records weren't
"burned".

Being able in this century to search by SURNAME is uncovering many of
those "lost" records. The "real proofs". Land transfers require a
"title search" of some kind to determine past ownership, in those times
involving a who begat whom as the estates went primarily to the eldest
son. Deeds in other counties, you wouldn't think to look in, often
reference the lost history as the land was re-inherited, redistributed
when the widow remarried, traded for equity in other land, and these
proceedings took place in other county courts.

It's out there folks, the chain of events. And corroborating evidence
accumulates. Chalkley's "Chronicles of Augusta County" ain't all that
bad either. If you can construct a dated framework you may even be able
to tell at a glance which Philip, Samuel or Thomas, an actual record
refers to <g>. The Library of Virginia digital base on line, if you can
wend your way through it and wait for the original letters, patents,
Bible records, diaries, etc, to download, has some amazing old stuff
you'd never have found at the Culpeper Courthouse anyway.

So before this turns into a full length novel, I'd just like to say that
ultimately I found fewer errors in Rev. Slaughter's original work than
say the speculation that is published regularly in Wm. & Mary Quarterly.
(It may startle us swearing on cemetery inscriptions to learn that even
though folks are sometimes buried near each other does not necessarily
indicate a marriage bond between them). A good deal of that educated
guess linkage has been popping up on line too.

Cite everything you input with where you found it and then look for any
evidence to support it from deeds and wills and all those transcriptions
of tattered handwritten registries that pop up in the strangest places.
In no time you will begin to see which sources are more reliable and
ultimately you may find a Deed or Will that states things unequivocally
like, " I bequeath to my THREE children, Lucy, Samuel and Susannah
Clayton (Elizabeth Clayton Anderson Pendleton is old Major Philip's
sister, not his daughter, she's on her papa Samuel's Will) and it will
all fall into place.

A whole lot of genealogy is by process of elimination. And back beyond
what we know for sure, we have to start somewhere. Disproved links are so
much easier to "erase" in a computer database. And we have some real
nifty tools today the old researchers never dreamed of.

Now if someone could just tell me who in the world really married this
Crittenden guy.

love from Cynthia










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• [VACULPEP] Green's Notes & etc. by Cynthia Claytonroberts <>