Oroboros

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Oroboros, free image courtesy of Magnific.com


Oroboros, or: Haven't I been here before?

The value and danger of digging into FAN club members who are part of an "allied family" and part of the pioneer generation of settlers, is finding the same names over and over. Sisters marry brothers, people marry spouses of their same surname or their mother's surname, and occasionally first or second cousins. I became dizzy as the tree filled. I imagine the snake in the ancient symbol above is feeling woozy too.

Family, Friends, Associates & Neighbors sometimes play all three roles in the early generations and rural locations. Lately, my first action when looking at a census record is to open the index and scan the neighbors, before looking at the person and their family in the image. When I've researched more deeply into their history, another look at the index reveals even more, as future spouses lurk nearby. Moving back to an earlier generation reveals more of the same at a deeper level, because folks followed their former neighbors, family members and church congregants to free or cheap land, or more job opportunities.

A newspaper hint for another Nancy McBee* sent me into the latest project, identifying all the nieces and nephews of Arvesta Hamilton Stone, a wealthy widow who divided her estate among lots of names I didn't know, including a Nancy McBee. The search has been a merry-go-round. It took me all around Missouri, and while in Schuyler County, I may have finally found the link between "my" McBees, whom I wrote about recently, the Hamiltons, and a long-time McBee researcher with whom I've been working since the Rootsweb days! We'll have to see how that turns out; it may rely on Y-DNA evidence in the end, to prove our relationship.

I wanted to dig into the Hamilton family for lots of reasons. None so far are ancestors, but over and over they intermarry with my ancestral families. My great-great grandfather William McBee left his family in Missouri to go find gold in Yreka, California, and lived there with a Willis family, relatives of his mother, Martha Willis McBee. In the 1860 household with the rest of the family was a young boy: Mathew Hamilton, age 6, born in Oregon! Of course there are no birth records in Oregon Territory that early, nor any records I can find so far of Hamiltons moving west on the Oregon Trail, never to return. I suspect that the parents died, and the Willis family took in a relative as they traveled south through Oregon to Yreka. Mathew eventually used the Willis surname, and died unmarried. The pioneer generation of Hamiltons had a Willis mother, and it is likely to be my third-great grandmother, Martha Willis' sister. McBees, Hamiltons and Willises also share other ancestral families from the same area of Tennessee.

One newspaper legal notice got me started on this journey, and it ended with a contested probate, and linking all the legatees to that legal notice. Along the way, I found MUCH more information about both the Hamiltons and their multiple links with my McBee family in Grainger County, Tennessee, and the McBees who went to Schuyler County. Those McBees took a different path than mine did, going directly to Missouri. While William McBee and his family stopped in Missouri, where my great-grandfather was born, they then headed up to Illinois, then south to Decatur County, Iowa Territory and Harrison and Mercer Counties, Missouri. Some of the Hamiltons also came to Decatur, Iowa early, and went to both the nearby Harrison and Mercer Counties and also Schuyler, Missouri. 

One thing this journey has taught me is that the reality of people's lives can never be entirely told in the records we can find about them. There are endless stories which have been lost, and we can find and tell some of them. What an awesome job that is! 

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* This Nancy McBee is not the Nancy Jane Booth McBee, my great-grandmother whom I recently wrote about, in a legal notice that they were losing their property in a Sheriff's sale.

Valorie Zimmerman


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Send your stories to m.strickland@skcgs.org






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