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Names
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NAMES
As most of you know I fiddle around with genealogy strictly as a pastime and as a matter of interest. In doing so I have been amazed at how flexible and changeable is the thing we call ”name”. Back even as recently as the eighteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds names were much more changeable than they are today. There were far less government dictated records of births and deaths. Even as late as 1905 when my father was born there was no organized way to record that birth and name other than in church records (baptism, confirmation, marriage and death) or more reliable really was the family Bible which almost invariably had a page to record births and one to record deaths. I once read in a family Bible at my great grandfather’s home a family Bible which had a list of the children of J.A.A. Turrentine and Jemimah Dora Turrentine and listed a George Franklin Turrentine and gave his birth date identical to my fathers. I remarked upon it to my great grandmother and she said, “That is your father but he didn’t like the name George and kept only the Frank.” But family Bibles were themselves fragile. They were subject to destruction by fires and floods and sometimes they were simply lost. Many people of that time were born with no record whatever of their birth. When my father went to work for the Atomic Energy Commission at Oak Ridge Tennessee he had to have a birth certificate and one did not exist. He had one created on the testimony of two individuals who were “personally aware of the birth” and his name was recorded on this birth certificate as Frank Turrentine only. It is also true that many marriages were made and consummated without any lasting record of the marriage. I don’t know when marriage licenses became a requirement but I do know that many pioneer people met at a church social, had their marriage blessed by a minister of questionable credentials and that no government agency recorded that marriage yet in their society they were acceptably married. It is also true that literacy was not as common in those days as it became later (and I fear is disappearing again). People spelled things including names as they sounded to them and there was no standardization or check to assure commonality of name from parent to child.
Let me illustrate just a little how this can be a problem to the genealogist—especially to the amateur such as me. I dearly loved my great grandmother Mary Ann Dennis nee Shipley although I was very young when she died. She was my playmate and she died when I was just four years old. She was almost crippled by arthritis–rheumatism as she called it–and she dubbed me “Dr. Flathead” and I spent hours rubbing her knees with a magic elixir of windmill water with a few drops of red cake coloring in it. She guided my pursuit and slaughter of savage Indians out the dining room window and consulted with me on the proper materials for bows and arrows. She was my buddy and hers was the first funeral I remember ever attending in my life.
A few years ago I begin to try to trace her back a bit to see if I could identify her forefathers. I knew that her maiden name was Shipley and that her father’s first name was Sterling. It wasn’t too long before I identified a Sterling David Shipley born in 1821 which looked promising and who had married as his second wife a certain Laurania Tansy Buttram on the first day of September 1850 in McMinn County Tennessee. I was doubtful about this because family legend held that Mary Ann Shipley’s mother was named “Luvena” the marriage certificate in Tennessee definitely held Sterling’s wife to be named Laurania Tansy. Laurania was born in 1825 in Wayne County Kentucky and she died on 6 May 1860 in Marshfield Missouri—but there was another link to family legend. Mary Ellen Dennis Hamilton, my grandmother, had told me that her mother lived and died in Marshfield Missouri. So I kept digging and eventually came across a reference in which Laurania’s sister had told someone that Laurania had intensely disliked the name Laurania and demanded that her family and friends call her “Luvena”-So this fairly well settled the fact that I had the right person for my great grandmothers mother—but then I began having trouble with her father’s name. Her father was Noah Buttram who was born in Kentucky on May 7 in 1804 and died in Arkansas on July 10 in 1851. The trouble was that Noah sometimes signed things and represented himself as Noah Bertram and he married a woman named Ann Huffaker in Kentucky on December 27, 1821 who sometimes spelled her name H-u-f-f-a-c-r-e and other times spelled it Huffaker. Noah’s father was consistently Jacob Buttram and Jacob’s father was consistently William Buttram (he was born in Maryland in 1735) but William’s father (Lo and Behold) was John Butterum. So we progress from Butterum to Bertram in four generations.
Second marriages give one quite a bit of trouble also. Mary Ann Shipley was evidently the only child of Luvena Shipley nee Buttram during the ten years that they married ---yet Mary Ann Shipley had talked of “her brother” and both Mary Ellen and Rowena had at one time met this gentleman whose name I believe was Price Shipley—an unusual first name which raised yet another question that I have not been able to verify as yet. There was a rather famous Confederate General Price of some heroic proportions who gained his fame in the Battle of Vicksburg in the Civil War. This General Price was from Marshfield Missouri—the home of Sterling David Shipley–Luvena Shipley’s husband. The question raised is whether Price Shipley was named for General Price and if so why? Sterling David Shipley was born in 1821 so he would have been 41 years old when the Civil War started—not at all too old to serve—there were lots of Confederate soldiers in their fourth decade but also there is no indication that I can find that Sterling David did serve in the Civil War. But it is something for me to keep my eyes open about. Also I have not yet dug out Sterling David Shipley’s parents or other ancestors. And the question still remains—did Sterling David Shipley have any other children other than Price by his first marriage and any other children other than Mary Ann during his second marriage to Laurania Tansy (Luvena).
So these are given as just a very few of the problems encountered by the amateur genealogist when he or she sets out to course through history and look for their ancestors. I am sure this might be the ultimate of Dullsville to a lot of people but I find it exciting and exhilarating and I intend to clear up all these mysteries before I go on to meet these people in the great beyond—or those of a certain kind that is.
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