Swimming in Welsh Rabbit and Perfumed Doubts

By Bob Ferris

When I was young my mother would make us Welsh Rabbit or Rarebit (both are correct).  She poured the cheesy mixture on saltines rather than the traditional toasted bread and we liked it that way or did not know better.  I think about this concoction now as I am trying to sort though a chunk of my ancestors originally from Wales.  This process feels a lot like paddling through the aforementioned orange goo mainly because I cannot help but feel that I enter Google hell when trying to sort through those with two first names, particularly when those names are sometimes the same (And, yes, I am thinking about you, probable great-grandfather James James from Llanwrthwl.)  I suspect that it is all right there before me, but it is often covered by something that masks like this melted cheese with white sauce, sprinkled with paprika, and poured on crackers.

I am emotionally and intellectually supported in this by a newly discovered half-fifth cousin who I recently met online while trying to sort out our shared Randolph lines and false family myths about a supposed link to Edmund Randolph.  I say half-fifth cousins because we share a common ancestor in Frances "Frankie" Randolph but descend from Frankie's different husbands: she from Thompson Randolph and me from Samuel James.  But we are more than that too as our two lines from Frances, son Thompson Randolph (Jr?) and daughter Susannah James, married brother and sister Hannah and James Taylor.  This makes us 6th cousins as well.  Confused yet?  (For those of you keeping score that means our degree of theoretical relatedness is 1X2 ^-14 + 2X2 ^-16. This is more than just half-fifth cousins but still well less than half of one percent of relatedness.)

The Welsh preference for two first names and the calculation of the big toe-scale degree of relatedness with my cousin is only the start of the confusion and complications.  But let's digress some.  When my late brother Bill presented his first version of our family tree in 1993 he listed Samuel James' father as Moch James without any explanation.  Roughly six years later he revised the tree and named Samuel's parents as Evan James and Anne Foreman.  In this latter revision he cited work by my grandmother Edna Robb Settles who through most of her efforts was a very solid researcher and actually was able to interview relatives who interacted with those born in the late 18th century and early in the 19th.  My grandmother was a genealogical dynamo but this I only know second-hand because she had a stroke three years before I was born.  I never saw the brilliance and this probably colors my thinking, which in most cases it should not.

I have to admit that there are times when my lens of my grandmother creeps in.  For instance, while I was looking at Jacob and Mary Taylor in North Carolina, the parents of James and Hannah, memories of my grandmother intervened.   My confidence in her work disappeared in my recollection of the cloud of perfume she wore as her senses diminished and my time with her as she descended into the not knowing.  As I started to see several in the North Carolina counties of Onslow and Duplin with the last name James, the Evan and Anne connection felt a little twitchy at times and I got distracted by a James line in North Carolina that had a first name pattern very similar to the one used by Samuel and Frankie in naming their children (i.e., Samuel, Isaac, and Enoch).  But each well I dug seemed to come up dry.  None felt right or possible.  So back I went to Evan, Anne, and the lands around Fort Cumberland and headwaters of the Potomac.

Children of Evan James (1756-1810) and Anne Foreman (1756-1839)

Mary Jane James Deakins (?) b. 1774 (1)
Samuel James b. 1774-1775 (1,2)
Mary "Polly" James Lovitt or Lovett b. June 10, 1776 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Thomas James b. 1778 (1)
John F. James b. 1779 (1, 2)
Grace James Sigler b. 1779 (1, 2, 3, 4)
Susan James b. 1784 (1)
Nancy Ann James Poland b. 1787 (1, 2, 3)
Isaac James b. 1786 (1)
Susannah James Sigler 1790 (1, 2, 3)
Evan B. James 1792 (1, 2, 3, 4)
William F. James b. 1795 (1)
Elizabeth "Eliza" James unk. (1)

Evan and Anne are listed on many websites and are variously credited with having from one to thirteen children with only a few pages showing a child named Samuel.  There is uncertainty.  But here is where history and geography collide with genealogy.  Records show that Samuel James was married in Allegany County, Maryland in 1793 and that Evan James was buried in Westernport, Maryland in 1810, also in Allegany.  So I am thinking: Great, we can go to the census or tax records for 1790 and before to sort this out.  Except we cannot exactly because of the near constant border wrangling between Maryland, Virginia, and eventually West Virginia as well as the War of 1812.  Due to the former Samuel James could have been born in Virginia and married in Maryland without moving an inch from where his crib was rocked.   This made determining which jurisdiction would have kept the family's records difficult to determine and the War of 1812 made them nearly impossible to find because the British put many of these records to the torch.

From here.

But records for Evan James and his family do exist.  For instance, Evan James is listed as someone who settled west of Fort Cumberland prior to 1788 in several publications.  The root source of this information comes from the records collected by Col. Francis Deakins who was tasked with surveying Maryland's western border and creating the so-called Deakins Line perpendicular to the much more famous Mason-Dixon Line.  According to Deakins and his crew Evan James held lots 3542 and 3544 (see page 29 bottom right in the link) and his designation as a settler means that he probably did not serve in the Revolutionary War.  In other publications these "settlers" are described as squatters which seems harsh for these were folks who staked out lands on the edge of civilization when the risks of that action were pretty high.  The lots were generally fifty acres in size so Evan and Anne seemed to have both land and a large family which generally indicates they were farmers which is verified by the piece on grandson Andrew Jackson James above. 

Allegany County Land Records

As time passed Evan's holdings increased as indicated by the typed transcript above.  It is unclear whether this indicates total holdings or recent purchases as neither of the parcels listed in 1787 are included.  Of note are the notations for a property known as "Good and Bad" which is important because Evan James was buried in the Poland Family Cemetery which was derived from these lands.  This knowledge with other clues gives some indication of how the estate of Evan James was divided, the Poland coming from his daughter Nancy Ann's marriage and the subsequent sale of the remainder of this land by John Deakins' who was married to "Margaret" (Margaret was more than likely Mary Jane James) show that other acreage went to another daughter.  Anne, after Evan's passing, went to live with Polly James Lovitt and her family in Ohio.  Additionally, there are Allegany census records from 1800 and 1810 after Evan's death.  The 1800 census shows a household of eleven including three children under ten years of age.  These three could be Evan Jr., William, and perhaps the mysterious and less documented Elizabeth.  In 1810 the household is reduced to four including Anne (Ann).  The three remaining under 26 could also be those three mentioned above.

From here 1998.  John Deakins married Margaret (possibly Mary Jane) on June 8, 1797 

All of this leads to thoughts and questions.  Westernport was once considered for an extension of the C&O Canal that would run upriver from the terminus at Cumberland some 20 miles away.  It never was built.  How much of this figured in Evan's plans?  Moreover, the canal only functioned for a time and then was largely supplanted by the railroad which did come to Westernport, but not in Evan's time.   Ironically, spoils from some subsequent railroad construction in the 1940s covered Evan's grave much like the cheese at the beginning of this piece pouring on the crackers.

Through much of my modest research I often speculate on connections as well as circumstances and motivations.  The how and why being nearly as important to me as the exchange of genetic material.  This brings me back to Samuel James and Frankie Randolph,  a farmer's son in a household filled to the brim with siblings coming together with a young widow with one or more children traveling west over what was originally Braddock Road (see above and Note 1 below).   Since records indicate that Samuel and Frances were married on the same day as her cousin Elizabeth Prudence Randolph wed Jesse Reno in the same county and Frances, Elizabeth, and Jesse were all from Manassas, I tend to believe that the three were all traveling together as part of a larger group.   This fits a pattern as Frankie's brother Thompson had traveled to Kentucky with other families from Manassas and Prince William County roughly a dozen years before.  Elizabeth and Jesse could have been childhood sweethearts or their romance blossomed on the road.  Who knows?

Samuel and Frankie are trickier and more caprice must have been involved.   It seems strange the probable quickness of it all but then I remember that my parents William and Mary Ferris did a soup-to-nut courtship in a week's time in the closing years of World War II.  I remembered too that sisters Grace and Susannah James married brothers William and Peter Sigler just as their step-nephew and niece married the Taylor brother and sister all indicating a challenging dating landscape.  It could also be that things were getting crowded and conflicted for the teen-aged Samuel rubbing shoulders with Evan.  Frankie was also likely sensitive to the fact that she had lost a sister-in-law and nephew in an Indian raid near their destination about dozen years before.  So we have two pre-loaded souls colliding in a land of few opportunities traveling to land with even fewer.   Bubbling cheddar cheese meeting white sauce.  I don't really know as all is supposition until truly proven like many or even most parts of this narrative.  Time may tell or not.

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Note 1: This route beginning at Fort Cumberland rather than the more southern route through the Cumberland Gap which would have been the obvious choice for the Taylors in North Carolina, but not Randolphs setting out from Virginia is another reason to doubt the North Carolina Jameses.