Late July (27 Jul 2012)

(Originally posted on 27 July 2012)

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 her 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….