Where's the Proof: 52 Ancestors

This game of Clue starts in a Wichita attic in 1949.

The first topic of discussion between cousins old and new in one branch of my family is whether any proof of our Native American ancestry has been found. We have a strong family legend and a rumor that there was proof, last seen in 1949 by my grandmother's first cousin. This blog post is shameless cousin bait to see if someday, someone, somewhere knows what that proof is and where it is now.

Where do you share your knowledge, your private proofs, in a way that you know will persist?

One of the challenges of blogging and of the many family history sites is that web sites come and go.

I would lean toward Family Search as the one web site that will exist in perpetuity. It's not a commercial site, but rather a church-sponsored site. However, the ability for anyone to edit the master tree does make for a mess. I shudder each time I look at my family branches in that tree.

Ancestry and MyHeritage and similar sites are commercial. They could cease operation at any time and all the data could just vanish.

WikiTree was non-commercial and may still be. Someone has to pay for and support it. It also is at risk of vanishing. And of course comments posted to this blog are moderated by me. When I leave this earth, the blog may remain, but no new comments would be visible to anyone.

So if you have private proofs for any part of your family tree (or mine), please share them online somehow. Please place a copy, or the originals, with a local archive. Your family will be grateful.

Who Has the Proof? Spelling Doesn't Count!

Here are the surnames involved in this puzzle. If you've arrived at this post from a web search, take a moment to look at the list because you may be distracted by spelling later.

• Maddix, Maddox, Maddux
• Greaton, Guaton, Gratan, Gratton (many variations)
• Knoles, Knowles
• Long, Neff, Alkire
• Davis, Schroeder

This branch of my family has as the current root couple Lazarus Maddox and Elizabeth Greaton of Pickaway County, Ohio. Due to an unclear name in the marriage book, her name was listed as Elizabeth Guaton in an important Ohio marriage index. Her father signed a marriage consent for her with the signature David Greaton, so that is the spelling that I use.

They had eight children, four sons and four daughters. The daughters married men named Knoles, Long, Neff and Alkire. The proofs for this family are in the Pickaway County land and marriage records at the courthouse and at the Pickaway County Historical and Genealogical Library.

The supposed proof of the Maddox family Native American ancestry was found in the Wichita, Kansas, attic of their great-grandson, William Aaron Maddix (Wid Maddix), at the time of his death in 1949. Wid's ancestral story was told in the post telling how he got the nickname Wid. But it is to his descendants and siblings that we need to look to find the private proofs. So today I'm describing what I know of Wid's extended family.

Wid Maddix had two younger brothers and four children. Four of those six branches have died out, leaving two branches that may hold the answer.

Brother Pearl Edwin Maddix married Jeannette Moore in 1903. They had one son, Edwin, and soon divorced. Pearl moved away and Jeannette remarried to Bret Hart. Young Edwin took the Hart name. He died in Texas, without issue. Pearl died before Wid. It seems unlikely that any family documents would have come to this branch.

Brother Gerald Embry Maddix married twice and appears to have had two children, based on census records. He died in Barton County, Kansas, in 1952. There is a slim possibility that this branch holds the family documents.

Son Harold Thomas Maddix never married and left no known issue. He died in Kansas in 1978.

Son Ralph Ellis Maddix married, but had no children, He died in Orange County, California, in 1988.

Daughter Grace Evelyn Maddix never married. She was very likely to have taken the proof. She lived and worked in the Washington D.C. area, so might have deposited documents in one of the many archives in that area. After retirement, Grace returned to Kansas, dying there in 1986. So Kansas archives also might hold the documents. Her burial arrangements were made by a nephew, Tom Davis, which leads to the most likely branch.

Daughter Edna Lucile Maddix married twice, first to Elbert W Davis. They had two children: Patricia A Davis and Thomas A Davis, both of whom are now deceased. Lucile second married Preston E Diehm, but there were no children from that marriage.

Patricia Davis married Virgil D Schroeder and had at least one son.

Thomas Davis retired as a Lieutenant from the Wichita Police Department. His marital history is unclear. His 2016 obituary lists two sons: Roy T Davis and Michael W Davis. Three grandchildren are also listed.

So the question goes to my distant Davis, Schroeder and Maddix cousins: do you know where the proof is of the Maddox (Maddix) family Native American ancestry?

Digging for Courthouse Treasure

Ever since I learned, though this newspaper clipping, that our Maddox family legend about a murder was true, I wanted to find out the story behind the legend. As I researched the story, I decided that I wanted to write a fictionalized account as a book.

Unfortunately, there's a gaping hole in the court records. The murder case dragged on for years, with each session of the circuit court continuing the case until the next session. Suddenly, at the end of 1874, the case file just stops without telling what happened.

One of the men had left the state. But were either of the two remaining men convicted of murder? Were they acquitted? Did the state drop the charges? Inquiring minds want to know.

In August, I returned for my third visit to the scene of the trial in Scott County, Illinois. The opportunity to do so was a big part of rescheduling my Illinois research trip to add three days. Priority number one was to find the missing puzzle piece in the courthouse.

Many of the old records are housed in a special vault. It's lined with brick, protected by a double metal door and is dark and musty. Disturbing the old books raised dust and mold, which made me sneeze and sent one allergic worker to an early lunch.

On previous visits, I thought that my cousin Lorna and I had covered everything of interest, but there just had to be more. I dug more deeply into the deed books and, when I was done, had found no new information pertinent to the murder. I had collected some other notes about family members, so it had been time well spent.

I walked the narrow aisles of the small vault, just looking at the record sets. What about mortgages? I knew I hadn't looked at them. I found where the family had signed multiple promissory notes to their lawyers, using the farm as collateral. I knew the lawyers had forced foreclosure, but now I saw the details of how the finances worked for the trial: who was owed how much and why.

But what else? I still needed to know the verdict or verdicts. I was tired and hungry, but I knew the answer had to be somewhere in this courthouse. There were some very narrow books at floor level near the back of the vault. What were they? In desperation I pulled my small flashlight from my purse and shone it on the spines.

Paydirt! 

The books were Court Dockets, labelled by year. I looked for 1874 and 1875, but couldn't find exactly what I wanted. Some books were even blocked by other shelves. But I did find a couple of books for the right time frame. I'm sorry to say that in my excitement, I don't recall exactly which book showed what, but I do believe the 1874 answer was written in a book labelled as either 1873 or 1875.

I've shown you a court docket entry before, so I won't show you this one. I do have to keep a little bit of mystery about the end of the story. But the point of this post is that obscure record sets can flesh out the stories of our ancestors. You have to be willing to dig deep and not just look online and in the library.

Court dockets aren't exciting or sexy. It's just names of plaintiffs and defendants, dates, case dispositions, court costs, etc. This docket gave me three lines: the date the jury was seated to try the main defendant, the date the jury returned and their verdict, and the disposition of the case against the remaining co-defendant.

Someday dockets might be digitized and indexed, but don't hold your breath. I think they'll be near the bottom of the priority list. I'm sure that the Scott County record keepers thought they were useless, thus placing some in such a way as to be inaccessible. However, this is the third time I've found dockets to be informative: once for a divorce and twice for criminal cases.

What Next?

So now that I have the final piece of the murder mystery, I can write the book. But should I? As books disappear from shelves and stores, it seems I wouldn't want to publish in paper form. And I'm not much good at writing fiction. It's probably more challenge than I want to tackle.

My thinking now is to write a series of biographical sketches on the key players and their extended families. I can "publish" the sketches via Ancestry and/or Family Search and can compile them as a PDF book to share with family. This approach is more in keeping with the way we share and research today and yet can be the sort of research book that has helped me along my own journey to find the story behind the family legend.
 

52 Weeks of Abundant Genealogy, Week 7, Historical Documents

Who Killed William Maddox, Sr.?

As well as scrapbooking heritage photos, we can use documents on scrapbook pages. Scanning or photographing them lets us adjust the size, use copies, and also protect the original documents from further damage. The documents on my sample page were collected during an extended research trip.

My cousin's wife, Lorna, and I visited several states together to research the Maddox heritage. You met my great-grandmother, Daisy Myrtle Maddox, last week. The most dramatic family legend said that Daisy's father had killed her grandfather. Lorna and I wanted to prove or disprove the legend. Our research took us to Scott County, Illinois.

Here's the story of our findings as I told it on the scrapbook page:

Day 11 - Friday, September 27, 2002

When asked what the best part of the trip was, Lorna and I were in agreement — this was the day! The courthouse in Winchester welcomed us with friendly people and wonderful records. We collected more cemetery lists, photos of a Civil War memorial plaque, a probate file, a recorded deed to sell the family farm, and a marriage certificate with an attached permission note for a minor to marry. The probate file verified the date of death, but we still had no proof that the legendary murder had actually taken place. Down country back roads we drove, looking for the old farm. The fields were full of grain and the creek ran dark with silt. There was no sign of the old log cabin of legend, though none was expected. We did not attempt to speak with the current residents, since we had not called ahead.

We drove north from the farm, soon crossing into Morgan County, the home of the Lake family. The gravesite of Lindsay Lake turned out to be totally inaccessible, so we instead decided to visit the Jacksonville library. I wanted to view microfilm for the year Lindsay Lake died, but Lorna was most insistent that we should also look for information about the murder. I thought it would be time wasted, but conceded to make the effort. Amazingly, she was right. We found no obituary for old Lindsay, but did find our proof of murder in an article about a Circuit Court session. We wanted to scream and dance! At closing time, we floated to the van and headed to Lorna's home in [Northern Illinois].

Birth of a book: Murder at Mauvaisterre

This single small newspaper clipping from 1869 fired my imagination. Since that day Lorna and I have again visited Scott County and surrounding counties, collecting court files and other documents. We've also visited the family's previous place of residence in Pickaway County, Ohio. I've collected at least 18 inches of files on the Maddox family, from 1800 to the present. I've started a book about the murder, which was committed, not by my ancestor, but by his older brother, Lewis Maddox. His brother William Maddox, Jr., and cousin William Knowles (Knoles) were charged as accessories. I'll no doubt write a lot about the Maddox family in weeks to come.





Sample Scrapbook Page

Day 11 Page Closed

For each day of that research trip, I created a scrapbook page to remember the highlights. This page contains images of several documents we found on that exciting day.

• the newspaper clipping
• a landowner map with the farm highlighted
• a photo of the spine of the deed book with the sale of the dower portion of the farm (the rest was foreclosed)
• under the book image are photos of the deed (no copies were available that day)
• miniatures of our ancestors' marriage license with the permission note are tucked in a little clear envelope
• the miniature outside jacket of the inventory from the victim's probate file is also in the clear envelope

Part of Day 11 Page Expanded

This is an interactive page that requires the viewer to flip and pull to see everything. This is one way to pack a lot of information into a layout.

I'm sure you'll find ways to include your family's historical documents in your scrapbook pages.