The heat wave gripping the country is evident also in the SC
Lowcountry. Our heat indexes over the
past couple days have been in the 110s with actual temps in the high 90s. Brutal weather, which I think took its toll
on me Wednesday afternoon. I worked late
and was stressed to the max there, then emerged into the furnace for the short
walk to my car. By the time I got home
about 15 minutes later, I felt totally exhausted and ragged out. Went to sleep at about 6:30 and slept til
about 9, then up for a glass of wine with the wife before falling back asleep
for another 9 hours or so. I took a sick
day yesterday and decided to do the same today to try to recover a bit of
sanity and stay in the cool. Been
working on genealogy, too, and that has helped a bit.
Last weekend I visited the churchyard of one of the oldest
churches in Charleston, St. Michael’s Episcopal on the corner of Meeting and
Broad Streets. It was part of an
assignment for the NGS Home Study Course in American Genealogy which, as you know
if you’ve been reading my posts since December, I am in the process of
taking. The assignment was to visit a
local cemetery or a cemetery where my ancestors are buried and report on the
available records there, as well as picking a family plot of at least 4 graves
and transcribing the stones and mapping the plot. It was an interesting trip, and I submitted
the report on Sunday. No word back yet
from the graders. The next lesson and
assignment set deals with estate and probate records. I’ll need to go to the office of the probate
court in Charleston to report on the available records, and choose one probate
file to transcribe records from. Should
be an interesting assignment. Of course,
I’d like to use stuff that I already have for my family, but I think it is
important for me to go ahead and branch out of my comfort zone with unrelated
families to see if I can actually get into doing research on families I have no
connection with. So I need to check
online to see exactly where the records are and then make a visit. Wish me luck!
Now to my own family….
I made a minor discovery on Thursday having to do with my ggrandfather’s
sister, Malinda Lovelace. She was the
daughter of William and Cynthia Hollifield Lovelace, of Rutherford County,
NC. As you all probably know, this line
goes back to Barton “the horse thief” Lovelace.
Malinda was born December 1840, the first child of William and
Cynthia. She married William Pinkney Green
17 May 1862 and bore him 5 (or 6, depending on the source) children before he
died 10 Oct 1876 at age 35. On 21 Oct
1879, Malinda’s father William sold a parcel of land to his youngest surviving
son Morgan Ross Lovelace (one of Cuzzin Cecil’s Lovelace ancestors), and the
remaining siblings of Morgan, including Malinda, sold their interest in the
parcel, which was to be transferred to Morgan after the death of William and
Cynthia. Malinda signed this deed as M.
P. Green. This gave me a middle initial
of “P” for her, which I didn’t have before.
Always wondered what the “P” stood for.
Read on….
 |
| Malinda and second husband |
Cecil and others told me that Malinda had remarried before
her death, but nobody knew the identity of her husband, despite the fact that
Cecil obtained a copy of a photograph of her with her second husband. So his identity remained a mystery to those of
us who were researching the family. Fast
forward to earlier this year…. I
received my quarterly copy of the Bulletin of the Genealogical Society of Old
Tryon County, from which I have been extracting data since it arrived. One of the articles, titled “The Braddy/Brady
Bunch”, contains information on Margaret Braddy/Bailey, who married Lewis Green
Lovelace, a son of William’s brother James Lovelace (Cuzzin Creighton Lovelace’s
line). Margaret’s mother was Lucinda
Braddy, who, apparently after Margaret was born, married Benjamin Bailey. As I was going through the list of the
children of Benjamin and Lucinda, I came across their sixth child, a son listed
as Bery Israel Bailey, b. Mar 1851, who was listed as being married to Malena
Padgett. The information given for Malena: “… b. December 1840, d. 2 Jun 1917. Buried in Walls Baptist cemetery, Rutherford
Co., N. C. Her death certificate names
her as Malena Padgett Bailey, daughter of William Lovelace and Milly Hollifield.”
 |
| Malinda's death certificate |
Now I had missed this reference to William Lovelace in my
earlier scanning of the article. And
Padgett is a common name in Rutherford County.
In fact, the parents of Cynthia Hollifield, Malinda’s mother, were Elijah
and Emsy Padgett Hollifield. I was also intrigued
by the mention of William Lovelace and *Milly* Hollifield, so I went to
Ancestry.com and found a copy of the death certificate for Malena Padgett
Bailey. There as plain as day was the
listing of her parents… William Lovelace
and Sinthy Hollifield, not Milly. The
informant for the information on the death certificiate was S. B. Green, who I
am sure was Sidney B. Green, son of Malinda and her first husband William
Green. The date of death was given as 2
Jun 1917, and Sidney said she died of old age (77 years) without a
physician. She was also listed as a
widow.
So I now have a middle name for Malinda… Padgett, named after her maternal grandmother
Emsy…. and most probably a name for her second husband, Bery Israel Bailey. Could I find evidence of their marriage? I searched through the records of Bill Floyd,
who compiled tons and tons of data for his website before he couldn’t afford to
pay for it anymore and had to take it down.
But I was able to purchase CDs (from the genealogical society) of all
the data from the site (photos of marriage records, cemetery transcriptions,
indexes of marriage bonds, extracts of deed indexes, etc. etc. … a wealth of information on Rutherford County
and surrounding counties in North and South Carolina). So I searched through all the marriage record
indexes without finding anything. I
finally ended up back on Ancestry.com, searching for anything I could find on
Israel Bailey or Berry Bailey. No luck,
until I changed the surname to “Baily”.
Lo and behold, up popped a B.I. Baily in the 1900 census of Colfax Twp.,
Rutherford Co. When I opened the image,
I got a pleasant surprise…
B.I. Baily and wife M.P. Baily lived in household #144. In the previous house to them (#143) was Jim Lovlass and wife Ana. This was James Dolphus Lovelace and his wife Beuna Leanna Blankenship. And next to them (#142) was G. L. Lovlass and wife M.J. (George Logan Lovelace and Mary Jane Green), Malinda’s brother (my ggrandfather) and his wife. So this was surely Malinda Padgett (Lovelace)(Green) Bailey and her husband Berry Israel Bailey! And for those of you who are not aware, the 1900 census has a column for “number of years of present marriage”. This column had the number “15” for B.I. and M.P. Baily, showing that they were married c1885, which fit in nicely with the timeline I already had for her. So, on the basis of a listing of the family of Benjamin Bailey and Lucinda Braddy, I got a middle name, name of the second husband, date of death, approximate date of second marriage, and a lead to her death certificate and grave marker photo (also on Ancestry.com, and possibly in my unexamined stack of photos from Walls Cemetery way back when)!
What a great feeling it is to run across something like this! Even though it has taken a couple days to search and to compile all the data, I now have a more complete picture of Malinda’s life. Can anything be more genealogically gratifying???
And now… back to the article, to continue extracting the data. BTW… I have written to the president of the society, correcting the data about “Milly” Hollifield, and have asked her to forward the information to the editor of the Bulletin. We’ll see if a correction in print is forthcoming.
OK… Coffee…. [_]7
And then data….
