RLP 226: Using the FANs to Find a Female Ancestor’s Father

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 226, using the fans to find a female ancestors’ Father. Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the creators of the Amazon bestselling book, The Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone and Welcome to Research Like a Pro

Diana (47s):
Hi, Nicole How, are you today

Nicole (49s):
Doing well and you?

Diana (51s):
I’m Doing. Great. I’ve been working on my Clemsy Cline research project, which is going to be the subject of our podcast today and having so much fun trying to come up with new approaches to this challenge.

Nicole (1m 7s):
Can you remind me where the name Clemsy sounds so familiar. Is there another person in the family with the name Clemsy?

Diana (1m 15s):
Nope, just this one. But we do talk about a Clemsy in our classes because I have this Clemsy daughter, Isabelle Weatherford marries Robert Royston, and they are enumerated twice in the 1880 census of Johnson County, Texas. And we use that a lot as an example of how two different enumerations of the same family can be different. And in one enumeration the child age four is named clumsy and in the other enumeration the child age four is named Mary and it’s because she is a stepdaughter. And so we think that in one, the mother is naming her as a daughter and giving her, I guess the nickname may be of Clemsy.

Diana (2m 1s):
And then the other one, it’s all more formal names and it seems like that would be the father and he called her no relationship. Anyway, maybe that’s where you, you remember seeing the name Clemsy?

Nicole (2m 13s):
Yeah. So who is that person?

Diana (2m 15s):
Well that Clemsy would be a granddaughter of this one.

Nicole (2m 20s):
Okay. So in Isabelle Weatherford’s first marriage, she had a daughter named Mary who she called Clemsy. Yeah,

Diana (2m 27s):
After her mother. Yeah.

Nicole (2m 28s):
Okay, so this is Isabel Weatherford’s mother Mary Clemsy Cline.

Diana (2m 32s):
Right. And in Isabelle’s death certificate, the maiden name of her mother is Cline and that is corroborated with her brother Samuel Weatherford’s death certificate, which also names his mother as a Cline. Okay,

Nicole (2m 45s):
Great.

Diana (2m 45s):
I know it’s so confusing, right? You, you see these names and hear these names and actually I don’t know if Mary was the actual given name and then Clemsy became the surname, but I think I have her on my family tree is Mary Clemsy Cline. But I’m really only taking that from that little four year old who was named Mary in one census and clumsy in another. I’m just guessing that that was perhaps her given name, but I don’t know if that correlates to Clemsy Cline at all.

Nicole (3m 13s):
So this is an interesting challenge because a lot of us have this problem with a woman who we haven’t fully identified and we just have a few clues about their maiden name and we have like an estimated birth year but no marriage record and maybe we have some conflicting birthplaces from census records. So this is a pretty good brick wall with a woman and trying to identify her. So one proven methodology is to research the woman’s fan club, her friends, family, associates and neighbors and see if any of those end up being her relatives. And so this is such a great project to illustrate that methodology.

Diana (3m 47s):
Well it is and as I am getting into it, I’m finding more possibilities as well. It’s really fun for me to revisit this with a little bit more experience. I’m excited to work on it. So let me give you a little bit more detail about her. I’m just gonna call her Clemsy Cline. I really don’t know if she was ever named Mary. It’s just easier to call her Clemsy. And I don’t have a marriage record for Clemsy and her husband Henderson Weatherford yet don’t really even know where they were married to start looking. But it’s not in any of the major databases. It hasn’t popped out anywhere. They really are kind of a mystery and as I said, I only know her maiden name because those two children live long enough to have their death certificates.

Diana (4m 30s):
So it’s Really great that they both agree on the surname of Cline. That’s very fortuitous. And then I only have her in three censuses in each of those of, she’s just with her husband Henderson Weatherford. So she’s Clemsy Weatherford. And those are 1850, 1860, 1880. And of course they don’t agree and the estimated birth range is anywhere from 1817 to 1825 and she was either born in Illinois or Alabama. So there’s quite a difference there, isn’t there?

Nicole (5m 2s):
Where there two for Alabama and one for Illinois?

Diana (5m 5s):
Yes. So I’m leaning more towards Alabama.

Nicole (5m 8s):
Yeah, maybe the Illinois was an outlier.

Diana (5m 10s):
Yeah. And I’m leaning more between the 1817 or 1820 rather than the 1825 in Illinois. That one does seem to be an outlier. Yeah,

Nicole (5m 19s):
That is a pretty small amount of starting point information and it’s tricky when it does conflict like that. But that’s interesting about Illinois and maybe that’s a clue to somebody else in her, you know, family. Like one of her parents maybe was from Illinois or something.

Diana (5m 32s):
Could be. Or it even could be from the Weatherford side cuz there is a significant group of WeatherFords out of Illinois that I believe are connected to Henderson, her husband. But his line is confusing too. I feel like there’s a lot of wrong information in there that I haven’t personally researched that yet. Sorting out all these WeatherFords. So there’s, there’s an Illinois connection there, just not sure how it connects, you know, maybe she was, was in Illinois for a bit. I don’t know. That’s why I’m doing this research to figure it

Nicole (6m 2s):
Out. Yeah. So there were a lot of things that you don’t know about clumsy Klein. What did you ultimately focus on for your research question or objective?

Diana (6m 10s):
Well I decided for my research question, it was who was the father of Mary Clemsy Cline born about 1817 in Alabama and died after 1880 in Wise County, Texas. So in that one I did put her name as Mary. I just put that in there because I thought that might be a clue going down the road. And I chose the 1817 in Alabama to identify her even though it could have been Illinois or a later date, I just kind of chose one. So I decided I wanted to identify her father because I will be using DNA to test this and typically it’s easier to find a father than a mother. And with DNA you have to focus on one parent.

Diana (6m 51s):
So I decided to phrase my question like that.

Nicole (6m 53s):
I think it’s tricky when you’re not sure yet what the DNA will show to pick which parent, but it’s fine to pick one and just go with that and see what happens. Right,

Diana (7m 2s):
Right.

Nicole (7m 2s):
Especially with, you know, her surname is Kline and that might be a more helpful way to focus on looking for clients basically.

Diana (7m 10s):
Yeah. And then as you said, I I will likely have several phases for this. So that’s my overall research question, trying to identify her father. But for this specific research phase, I created an an objective just for it. And so I wrote the objective of this research phase is to discover a candidate for the father of Mary Clumsy Klein. And then I give that same identifying information. She was born about 18, 17 in Alabama and died after 1880 in Wise County Texas Clems. He married William Henderson Weatherford about 1839 in Arkansas. So I’m again hypothesizing there just a little bit because the oldest child was born in 1840 and they were living in Arkansas.

Diana (7m 59s):
So I don’t know, I, I did find out doing my locality research that all the records in Arkansas were burned with several fires and like no marriages exist until 1889, which maybe would make sense if that’s where they were married, that that’s why I can’t find a marriage record. Sometimes we use that as negative evidence. Right?

Nicole (8m 22s):
Yes. What county was that in? Arkansas,

Diana (8m 24s):
Izard County up in the north.

Nicole (8m 27s):
That’s Izard County. Yeah. Disappointing that Izard County was a burned county and that they lost their marriage records. But that’s great that you can pinpoint him there. You know, Henderson Weatherford in 1840 on the census there and, and that’s probably a pretty good hypothesis of why you don’t have the marriage record.

Diana (8m 42s):
Right. And so I’ll just point out I wrote this objective based on what I know, kind of based on a hypothesis and sometimes we have to do that, you know, we just do our best with putting some estimates in that objective, but at least gives you a clear roadmap of what you think may have happened. Yeah, sometimes in your objective you actually know everything, but in this one I didn’t really know everything. So next I reviewed all my records, you know, I created a brand new air table for this project and did the timeline and I have done research on this previously and so I had to gather together some old things. I had research previously in research ties in that program and I had a couple other documents where I’d made some notes.

Diana (9m 27s):
So just like any project, we gather up all of our research and I looked at the family search family tree, I looked at my ancestry tree just trying to get everything that was known on clumsy. And you might think, well you only had those three censuses and that’s so true. But I went through each of those and took information out of each of those to create this timeline. So you know, I mentioned those three birth dates of eighteen, seventeen, eighteen, twenty in 1825 and I gave each one of those its own row for birth because I wanted to remember where am I getting this date and where am I getting this date and who was the informant, you know, trying to judge which one might be the better date.

Diana (10m 11s):
And so putting those separately in the timeline really helps.

Nicole (10m 14s):
I agree. I think that’s really nice to have the sources for those conflicting pieces of information really laid out there.

Diana (10m 23s):
Yeah, and I really leaning to that 1817 date in Alabama because Clemsy was the head of household in 1880 and it’s the only one that we have of more of a specific date. The other ones she is 35 or 40, you know, kind of rounded, which makes me wonder if it was Henderson giving the information, you know, that husband was supposed to give the head of household and I wondered if he just really didn’t know and just gave her kind of an estimated date. 35 sounds good, but she gave the specific age of 63 and it would’ve been her age. And I’m just again hypothesizing, she was the head, head of household and gave the information. So that’s my best guess at this moment.

Nicole (11m 6s):
Well I love that reasoning and I’ve gone through this a lot of times with some of my other projects for women and whenever I try to figure out which date was right, feel like I can figure out a reason for any of them to be right. And so it’s like no matter, like yes there could be possible things like, but in 1880, maybe she just forgot her age too. Like one of the things that we typically do with censuses is put more weight in the earlier ones. But I like your reasoning that because she was the informant, maybe she was giving a more accurate one, but it’s good to just remember that it’s just a guess.

Diana (11m 43s):
Right. And 1850, it was pretty close. It was Alabama and 1820, so So those two, the 1850 and 1880 were, were close between 18, 17, 18, 20 20 in both Alabama. So that 1860 really was the outlier, the one where she was 1825 in Illinois. And I’m just wondering if maybe one of the children gave the information or a neighbor and they knew other WeatherFords who were from Illinois. I don’t know, I’m just wondering why that one was so different just 10 years later.

Nicole (12m 14s):
Yeah, and it’s too bad you don’t have the 1870 census for them.

Diana (12m 20s):
I know and 1870 is notorious in the South for being lost because it was such a hubub after the Civil War and especially in Texas. Oh my goodness. You know, things were bad in Texas in 18

Nicole (12m 31s):
So, it wasn’t technically lost, but a lot of people are missing from it.

Diana (12m 36s):
Yep. And she, you know, they’re not the only household that I have that’s lost in 1870 in Texas in the dark hole of Texas of that year. So that’s my guess and I need to do more research on Henderson Weatherford and look at tax records and some different things in Texas. But that’s a different project. So I have some good clues that I’m going to follow for this one. You know, ordinarily we say with a female we use the fans and the most important fan would be her husband. Right? But the time in Texas is less important for this project than her time in Missouri. And that is because on 1850 census also in the household of Clemsy and Henderson, our two Cline children, John Cline and a Talitha Cline age eight and 10.

Diana (13m 25s):
And then just a few rows down there is a Jacob and Talitha Cline household with several children. And then after their nuclear household of children, there’s another adult Mahala Cline and she was also born in Alabama and she has a son Robert, who was born in Arkansas. So I’m getting a similar migration to that of Clemsy and Henderson from Arkansas up to Missouri. So that fan club right there of those clients are when I’m going to follow for this project.

Nicole (13m 58s):
Wow, that’s really cool. So they had some Kline children in their household and there’s a couple, I’m thinking possible siblings with the Kline surname living really close to them.

Diana (14m 10s):
Exactly. And especially with Mahala being born in Alabama like clumsy and she was 22, Clemsy was 30, you know, they could be sisters or maybe sister-in-laws if Mahala was married to a Cline, you know, maybe that’s what we’ve got going on.

Nicole (14m 26s):
Oh

Diana (14m 26s):
Yeah, yeah. I don’t know. And then we’ve got Robert who was born in Arkansas, which correlates with all the he weather for children who were born in Arkansas as well as the Talitha and John Cline who were born in Arkansas. There’s just so many different possibilities and I just feel like that’s, that’s my fan club. Those are people I’m following those Clines gotta figure them out.

Nicole (14m 49s):
Yeah, it’s crazy to look at our family tree and just see this big gaping hole for Mary Clemsy Cline’s parents and I’m excited that you’ve got some possibilities to follow here.

Diana (15m 1s):
I know now Jacob Cline, who was a head of household there in 1850, he is born in Virginia and he’s age 39, so he’s older than Clemsy. But the interesting thing about Virginia is that in 1880, Clemsy identifies her father as born in Virginia. Oh nice. That’s a good tie in. And then she identifies her mother as being born in Georgia. So that makes me wonder about a Virginia to Georgia migration for the parents got married, some kids were born in Alabama and then Jacob ends up marrying in Kentucky. So either he takes off just by himself and goes up to Kentucky and marries Talitha or the whole family migrates up there.

Diana (15m 46s):
You know, I don’t know, there’s a lot of locations or a lot of migration going on. Should be fun to see what I can find out with some research.

Nicole (15m 58s):
When you started adding the information about Clemsy Cline to the timeline and you started seeing all of these other people with a surname Cline, how did you track that information?

Diana (16m 8s):
Well you can either just add them all to one timeline or you can create a separate timeline for them. And so I just decided to add all the coins into the same timeline with clumsy and I added a field for individual where I put their name like that. This record is either for Clemsy or Jacob or Mahala. Then I can group, that’s the thing I love about Airtable so much is that I could group by individual and then see a little mini timeline on Jacob and same for Clemsy. Or I could put ’em all together chronologically and see how all their records fit together. So that’s what I ended up doing.

Diana (16m 51s):
And it was really interesting to see Jacob Cline, you know, born in Virginia, married in Kentucky, several of the children born in Kentucky and then they have a move in about 1839 to to Missouri and he is on the 1840 Morgan County Missouri census. And interestingly enough on that census there is a John Cline. So John got added to the fan club because he looks like he could be another brother. Oh. Because he was of an age, I think 20 to 29. And in Jacob’s household in 1840, there’s an older couple like age 70 ish who could be his parents or they could be his wife’s parents or you know, who knows who they are.

Nicole (17m 36s):
So you have an older male and an older female that you’re kind of hypothesizing or a couple there.

Diana (17m 42s):
Yeah, in 1840. So I’m excited to dig into the records of Morgan County Missouri because those records are actually extent they

Nicole (17m 50s):
Are, it’s not a burn county.

Diana (17m 51s):
I was so happy to find that when I was doing my locality research. So I think there are a lot of things I can explore in Morgan County to maybe give me some answers to this group of clients who were there and it would make sense that Henderson and Clemsy moved north from Arkansas up to this county if she’s got family there.

Nicole (18m 12s):
Yay.

Diana (18m 12s):
You know, I’m kind of thinking at first I was thinking that Talitha and John in her household, the 10 year old and the eight year old were just children of Jacob and Talitha, the other household members. But those children were supposedly born in Arkansas unless, you know, just the reporting, you know, all these children are born in Arkansas and that wasn’t correct. You know, it’s hard to know and there is a place that those children could go into the household of Jacob and Talitha, but Jacob and Talitha already have a John, they have a John M. Cline. Oh age 12, would they have named another child John, age eight? You know, I don’t, I kind of question that.

Diana (18m 55s):
Yeah, kind of wonder about that. So I’m kind of wondering if maybe there was a brother who died and these are all his children. Well

Nicole (19m 8s):
What if they’re younger siblings? Even Mahala, Robert and John, all of them were younger siblings and their parents died and so they just got, who knows.

Diana (19m 17s):
Yeah, they got split up and they sent to relatives. Yeah. And maybe that’s why they moved up to Missouri to be altogether. Yeah, that’s a good hypothesis too. The only problem is that county and Arkansas, our county is burnt and so that’s not gonna give me a lot of information so I’ll have to continue looking for other avenues to figure this out.

Nicole (19m 42s):
Yes. But now that you have these people in documentary research, there are concrete people you can trace forward and check to see if there’s DNA matches. Right,

Diana (19m 53s):
Exactly. And even records I can continue to work on trying to nail them down, figure out who they are, who was Robert Cline, you know, who was Talitha, who was John, and really work with that. One of the interesting things is that the John Cline, who is in Jacob and T’s household is mentioned in the county history of Morgan County and it talks about his parents and that he’s got some siblings. So I have some clues from that. I love county histories where they give information about generations and they were, he was a doctor, Jacob Cline was a doctor. So that will be fun to learn more so because he was well known in the county.

Diana (20m 34s):
I’m hoping there’s going to be plenty of other records that I can use.

Nicole (20m 40s):
Wonderful. So how will you find out about what records are available? What’s your plan for that?

Diana (20m 46s):
Well I’ve got the, My Locality guides going for Morgan County and Isard County and then with that connection of Wayne County Kentucky for the marriage of Jacob Cline and Talitha ar I think I’m gonna do a little bit of research in Wayne County just to see if there is a group of Clines there as well. Or if you know, Jacob was just the lone guy that went up there. You know, sometimes you don’t know if your ancestor went with a group. I mean generally they go with their group, but was it a family group? Who else is in Wayne County, Kentucky? So I ended up doing three locality guides and we’ll do a little bit of research, probably most of it in Morgan County, but a little bit in in Wayne County.

Diana (21m 29s):
And then for Izard County, the only thing I can research at that time period are the tax lists and look for any clients in the tax lists, which I haven’t done to this point. And that’ll be good to do.

Nicole (21m 43s):
Are there any state censuses in Arkansas?

Diana (21m 45s):
Nope.

Nicole (21m 45s):
Dang.

Diana (21m 46s):
Yeah, it’s, it really is a a little bit difficult. No land records.

Nicole (21m 50s):
I’m trying to think other federal records that could help with that. Maybe like civil war stuff

Diana (21m 57s):
Maybe, but they were pretty much gone by Civil War and it was a federal land state. So Henderson Weatherford doesn’t have a land grant but maybe there are some clients that do. Oh

Nicole (22m 10s):
Yeah,

Diana (22m 10s):
That could be, That could be helpful. And I could look at track books and things so I have more to do.

Nicole (22m 16s):
So your next step is to really flush out all of the locality guides you are gonna start and really learn what you can do in each county.

Diana (22m 26s):
Yes, I’m working on finishing those up and then doing my research plan because I, I could go a lot of different directions with this and I wanna make sure I’m prioritizing and really thinking through what would be a good strategy. Often with our migrating ancestors, there’s a lot of research localities and it’s kind of hard to know which one to start with. But stay tuned to everybody cuz I’ll reveal my research plan next episode that we talk about this.

Nicole (22m 57s):
Yeah, and we are supposed to be writing up our research plans for the study group this week, so I need to go work on mine as well. One of the things that is hard about research planning is having so many different clues, different leads to follow, you want to do them all, but it is helpful to do the exercise of prioritizing and thinking which one would be be the most helpful. And I like how you’ve been hypothesizing all along as you make your timeline about who these clients are, coming up with those different hypotheses helps you really think about what records you could look at to test the hypothesis and see if that’s possible. And So, it is really good for your research plan to do that.

Diana (23m 35s):
Yeah, and it really speaks to the value of that foundational step of doing a timeline and analyzing every single piece of information in a record. It just brings up so many ideas and possibilities when you do that, that, and I love my table for the fan club so I can clearly start seeing some of these connections, some of these people who are showing up and I’m hoping having created that, that when I’m looking at other records, say in Kentucky or Arkansas, perhaps some of those fans will appear and I can see some more connections. So that’s the value of having all those different names in there. I just basically took a lot of the neighbors on the censuses for the fans.

Nicole (24m 20s):
Yeah, it’s really helpful when you can see the same neighbor migrating with the person because then you know, okay, these people are somehow connected. Like I can research this person and feel confident that there, there’s a clue there.

Diana (24m 34s):
Yes. That they’re the same people. When you have people same name and Klein is not really uncommon. And so, you know, finding a John Klein or a Jacob Klein, some of those names in the census is in one location. How are you gonna know that’s yours? And if you have a neighbor that shows up in, in Morgan County and they were also in Kentucky, that really helps to tie it together.

Nicole (24m 58s):
Absolutely.

Diana (24m 59s):
Yeah. That’s a methodology that we’ve used over and over and I’m excited to continue working with that on identifying this female who’s been a brick wall for so long and if I can just get a candidate, you know, I don’t have to figure it out in the space, I just want a candidate for her father that I can test with DNA and if I have this group of Clines put together as possible siblings and some of their descendants, you know, it’s gonna really set a great foundation for the DNA study group when I continue with this.

Nicole (25m 31s):
Hooray. Yeah, I’m already planning to take my John West research project into the DNA study group next year. It’s been so illuminating to work on that in the study group and make the research plan. Right now I’m also doing the fan club methodology and there’s some connections that I wanna investigate and, and there’s been a DNA test taker who’s a patrilineal descendant of John West. So I just got those results from my cousin today and I’m excited to dive into those. It’ll be hard to not wanna do all the DNA work now, but I’ll have to just kind of glance at it and keep going forward with the documentary for now.

Diana (26m 7s):
Right. Yeah, I kind of like this process of doing documentary for one study group and then adding DNA for the next one. And if I remember right, I believe I have identified a couple of good matches on this Kline line, so I might need to reach out to them and ask them to share DNA results with me on Ancestry and you know, have some more DNA to work with. Also, the neat thing about this line is I have a mitochondrial test for one of the descendants of Mary Clemsy Cline. Yay. One of my cousins took that for me. So I have mitochondrial to work with. If I actually get a hypothesis couple, I can maybe trace another tester and compare. So

Nicole (26m 45s):
Yeah, and a lot of that work is documentary work, but I think it is so helpful to do the DNA hand in hand with the documentary. And so it’s good that we’re thinking about it as we do the documentary research right now so that we can like maybe prioritize some descendency research or think about setting up a good amount of test takers so that when we dive into it in the spring of next year, we’ll have a goodly number of people to analyze.

Diana (27m 11s):
Exactly. We’ll already have some things going that will be super

Nicole (27m 13s):
Helpful. Well good job mom. You’re doing a great job on our shared ancestry.

Diana (27m 20s):
I know, it’s great. It’s fun to return to her. I know someone was saying, you know, when are you gonna return to Cynthia Dillard? Right. But I’m giving Cynthia A. Little bit of a break and working on clumsy, giving her her own due time. So we have to sometimes change, change our focus a little bit and then come back to a previous problem.

Nicole (27m 42s):
Yeah. Maybe we’re just waiting for a certain group of test takers to really help us figure out that Cynthia Dillard one. Yeah, maybe in like five years or something there will be some more data.

Diana (27m 52s):
Right. With with dna, that is the exciting thing that as more people test, you sometimes will get new evidence.

Nicole (27m 59s):
Yeah. And that’s what’s been happening with the dire y dna. We got a new Imagine kind of blew up the case, so that’s another one that I just can’t wait to work on. Just gotta finish that portfolio. Right.

Diana (28m 13s):
Yep.

Nicole (28m 13s):
Then I can do all these other projects I put on hold. Yeah.

Diana (28m 19s):
Yeah, it’s fun. Well, if any of you listening have a female ancestor and you just have no idea how to proceed, hopefully following my case will give you some ideas and you know, you just gotta look for her fans. I got lucky with this one with having so many fans named Surname Klein right there in the area. But the fans for your female might be, like I said, her husband, you know, tracking his rest records or any of her children, you know, you just have to think of all the people she came in contact with and start seeing who else you can research to eliminate your case.

Nicole (28m 57s):
All right. Well we hope you guys all have a great week and we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye.

Diana (29m 4s):
All right, Bye-bye everyone.

Nicole (29m 2s):
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