Research Trip to North Carolina and Tennessee

By Linda Blais

At our June meeting, Mary Kathryn Kozy gave us some practical tips for preparing to take a genealogy research trip.  Listening to Mary brought back memories of the last research trip I took to North Carolina and Tennessee with my cousin who acted as my research assistant. It also brought up some "aha" or "oops" moments on a couple of things that didn't go quite as planned, even though I had spent months preparing my itinerary.

Here are some basics about the trip. My goal was to visit as many historical sites, libraries, museums, courthouses and archives as I could in 10 days that were relevant to the life of Sarah Barton Murphy, who lived in North Carolina as a child between 1753 and 1760 and in Tennessee as an adult between 1781 and 1802.  She is not my ancestor, but I am in the process of writing a biography about her. Her claim to fame is that she founded the first Sunday school west of the Mississippi in 1805. The research I do for an ancestor is the same that I need to do to write the life story of a historical figure. I wanted to walk in her steps as much as possible to get a feel for the places she had lived and traveled through and what her life might have been like before she landed in Missouri.

If you have taken a genealogy research trip, this recap may sound exhilarating, but then again it may sound exhausting. It was both. Between September 5 and September 13, 2014, my cousin and I flew to North Carolina and then proceeded to drive 1,329 miles in the next eight days visiting ten historical sites, five libraries, four museums, and three county courthouses/archives in both Tennessee and North Carolina before flying back home to Seattle.

Some of the locations we visited include:

Salisbury, NC where Sarah's family lived when she was a child and where the family met Daniel Boone.

The recreated Fort Dobbs at Statesville, NC, which was attacked by Cherokee Indians in 1760 within a few days of the time that Sarah and her family had to travel past the area fleeing Salisbury, NC on their way to family in Franklin, VA. (Photo of a modern painting of the original Fort.)

The still active Sandy Creek Primitive Baptist Church, in Liberty, NC. built in 1802. It is on the same

property and built in the same manner as the original Sandy Creek church that had been built in the mid-1700s and where Sarah's husband, William Murphy had preached. (Notice the steep stairs in the back – the balcony was where the slaves would sit.)

The Oconaluftee Indian Village in Cherokee, NC to get a feel for how the fierce Cherokee Indians

lived in the time frame that Sarah and her family were in North Carolina. It was here that I missed an opportunity to record a wonderful recounting of Cherokee life and the dances and music that were common in the 1700's and are still practiced. I took multiple pictures but didn't realize my phone could be used as a video recorder until the very last day of my trip after visiting the village. (My cousin – fourth from the front of the line -learned a Cherokee dance.)

In Knoxville, Tennessee we visited the East Tennessee History Center which has an amazing museum and collection of records from the areas that Sarah's family lived. 

Outside of Knoxville was Marble Springs, the plantation of the second governor of Tennessee, John Sevier, who was also a Colonel in the Battle of Kings Mountain during the Revolutionary War and long-time friend of the Murphys. The visit was to gain insight into how Sarah’s home and out-buildings might be arranged on their property. 

One of my favorite places was Rocky Mount, a Living History Museum in Kingsport, Tennessee. There were guides in period costume who shared secrets of life in the 1790's. My favorite guide was the lady (a retired college professor) who spoke from the perspective of a slave who was the cook and maintained the family's kitchen garden. 

While in Tennessee another of those "oops" moments occurred. I had checked the hours of all the courthouses and repositories that I wanted to visit but still misread the hours of the most important county archive I needed to visit when putting together my itinerary. The Murphy family had owned property in Grainger County that had at one time been part of Hawkins County. Grainger County courthouse was up in the East Tennessee hills and was in an area that I had been warned against going to on a previous research trip to Tennessee on account of the "Malungeons." They were considered legends with roots in the early days of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky and mostly, a dark-skinned, mixed racial group of people who were thought to originate from a "lost Portuguese colony." They supposedly married with both Indians and the slave population and were reported by the docent at White’s Fort in Knoxville to still live in the hills of East Tennessee and Kentucky.

Disregarding the scary stories of being greeted with guns if we strayed off the beaten path, we planned to visit both the Grainger and Hawkins county archives in the same day. When we arrived at the Grainger County archive, it was all locked up. Not a soul to be found. We drove around the building and finally got out to look at the sign with their hours. Guess what, they were not open on the second Wednesday of the month, and that was the day we came. My heart sank, but there was nothing we could do but go on to visit the next county archive, which was open, and no gun-toting people barred our way. Anyway, lesson learned! Check those archives with every other week or only open certain days carefully against your itinerary.  Sadly, I have never been able to go back to visit that county archive!

It was also in Tennessee that we had a wonderful experience. While at the Carson-Newman University in Jefferson City, Tennessee, investigating the large Baptist history archive in their Stephens-Burnett Memorial Library, the archivist pulled out a stack of discarded books from their basement and gave them to me. They were by Glen Toomey, the author I was researching who had written histories of many of the churches that Sarah's husband and brother, Isaac Barton, had helped to start. What a treasure to bring back with me even though they added extra weight to my luggage.

The trip was amazing and added many sights, sounds, and details for me to use when telling Sarah's story, which I am still writing. All-in-all, the months of preparation paid off with an amazing and mostly uneventful trip if you don't count the couple of “oops” moments and driving up a twisting mountain back road between Tennessee and North Carolina on a stormy night to get back to our hotel. Par for the course on a research trip, right?

Linda Blais