Oops: Correcting an Incorrect Set of Parents for Malissa (Welch) Harris, 1844-1887

Despite our best intentions, we all make mistakes as we fill out our family tree. Perhaps we were baby genealogists and simply didn’t know how to analyze records or maybe we were copying another cousin’s tree without verifying the information. For whatever reason, errors can be corrected and we can improve the veracity of our tree. An early mistake I made in my research was attaching the wrong parents to my ancestor, Malissa (Welch) Harris. Several reasons contributed to my error and I wrote about them in the blog post: Caring for Your Family Tree: How to Prune and Graft Branches Based on Sources and Analysis. In this 52 ancestors post I’m returning to Malissa, my second great-grandmother, and telling her story.

Early in my research, a distant cousin sent me scanned pages of the Harris Family Bible which included births, marriages, and deaths. Before 1900, very few births were recorded on the frontier, so a family source such as a family bible is providential. The bible pages listed Malissa’s birth and death dates as well as her marriage to John C. Harris and the births of their children.¹

Malissa (Welch) Harris was born on 10 September 1844. Soon after her birth, her parents George and Lucinda Welch began their migration from South Carolina to Pickens County, Alabama.²

The family likely took the Old Federal Road from Georgia into Alabama for part of the journey. This road was like a modern-day highway for our ancestors. Of course, the road wasn’t paved and would have been muddy in the rain and dusty in dry weather. Deep ruts in the road would make for a bumpy road and people may have chosen to walk rather than ride in the wagon.

Sometime after 1850, the Welch family migrated further west to Texas and by 1865, Malissa had made her way to Burleson County, Texas, where she married John C. Harris.³

Malissa had four babies in the next five years: Martha, Margret, James, and Milly Jane. Sometime between 1865 and 1870, Malissa and John moved to the neighboring county of Milam where their young family was enumerated for the first time in 1870. Milly was born in December, six months after the enumerator visited the Harris household, so she’s not listed in the census shown below. ⁴

The family settled for a time in Milam County, and four more children joined the family by 1880: Parilee, Dove, Belle, and Sophia. The family lived an agricultural life, and Malissa would have worked alongside her husband and children milking the cows, churning butter, raising hens, gathering eggs, and much more. In 1879 alone, 300 pounds of butter were made on the farm, and 200 dozen eggs were produced from 100 hens. ⁵

In 1885, Malissa bore her son Sam and on December 29, 1886, her last child, Dock, my great-grandfather. Sadly, she died just one week after Dock’s birth on January 5, 1887. Dock never knew his mother, and perhaps that was why years later, he reported her name as “Lizzie Welch” on his sister’s death certificate.⁶ His own death certificate stated “Elizabeth Welch” as his mother. He died in the Eastern State Hospital at Vinita, Oklahoma, where he had resided for the last seventeen years. The informant for his personal information was “hospital records” that Dock would have provided.⁷ Although the name Elizabeth conflicted with the name of Malissa on the marriage record, 1870 and 1880 censuses, and family bible pages, we reasoned that those were nicknames or perhaps a middle name and entered the name of Malissa Elizabeth Welch into our database.

Because Dock was my great-grandfather, I had started with his information and looked for an Elizabeth Welch in the 1850 census who was born in South Carolina. That census found a likely candidate in the family of Meredith Welch and Susannah Welch. This seemed like a good fit, so we attached Meredith and Susannah to Malissa as her parents. We continued researching Meredith Welch, but couldn’t make any progress on the Welch line so put this research aside.

Returning to this research years later, Nicole decided to tackle the Welch family again and this time in using the name “Malissa Welch” in the 1850 census search, she found the household of George and Lucinda with several siblings for Malissa. Researching those siblings found their common migration to Milam County, Texas, where Malissa and John C. Harris lived between 1870 and 1880.

Additional research found Malissa’s mother to be Lucindrilla Keaton and placed her in the family of William Keaton of Anderson District, South Carolina. This opened up new avenues for researching the Welches and Keatons.

By returning to the research, we corrected a major “oops” in our family tree and finally placed Malissa in her correct birth family! When things don’t quite add up, there is usually a reason and it’s up to us to seek out more information.

1. John C. Harris Family Bible, scan of the original pages, sent by Carolyn Lauderdale to Diana Elder, 2003.
2. 1850 U.S. Census, Pickens County, Alabama, population schedule, Southern District, sheet 23 (stamped) p. 45 (penned), dwelling 190, family 194, George Welch household.
3. Burleson County, Texas, marriages volume 2, page 132, Harris-Welch, 1865; FamilySearch Family Tree, “Marriage Record for J.C. Harris and Malissa Welch,” Memories for Malissa Welch, contributed by Diana S. Elder, 11 February 2015, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/photos/artifacts/13361859 : accessed 4 February 2023).
4. 1870 U.S. Census, Milam County, Texas, population schedule, page 116 (penned), dwelling 855, household 860.
5. 1880 U.S. Census, Milam County, Texas, agriculture schedule, enumeration district (ED) 103, p. 50, line 8, digital image, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/1276/images/T1134_34-00496 : accessed 5 February 2023), citing NARA microfilm publication T1134, roll 34.
6. “Texas Deaths, 1890-1976,” Dovie Harris, 06 Jan 1925, database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:K378-MPH : 20 February 2021) ; citing certificate number 3179, State Registrar Office, Austin; FHL microfilm 2,113,744.
7. State of Oklahoma, Dept. of Health, Certificate of Death, D.H. Harris, 1957, # 12234; digital copy at FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/photos/artifacts/3171581 : accessed 5 February 2023).