RLP 230: Finding a Female’s Father – Research Log and Report

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like A Pro episode 230 Finding A Female’s Father Research Logging and Report Writing. 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 authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go.

Nicole (42s):
Let’s go Hi everyone. Welcome to Research. Like a Pro

Diana (48s):
Hi Nicole How are you doing today?

Nicole (50s):
I’m doing well and I’ve been having fun playing with the My Heritage artificial intelligence time machine.

Diana (57s):
Oh, me too.

Nicole (59s):
That has been so interesting. Plugging in, you know, photographs of myself and my family and seeing us transported in time to be back in the American frontier or French 18th century time period. And it’s fun because they show you pictures of yourself at that time period.

Diana (1m 18s):
It is really fun. And I found that some of them were better than others. You know, some of the ones where you’re standing, the face was kind of weird looking, but I really like my closer up ones and I know it all depends on what kind of pictures you send them. You have to upload pictures of yourself and all different angles and they want just pictures of you. So that can be tricky finding just you by yourself, not with a bunch of other people. So I think it really depends a lot on what you send them. And I know I sent some of, when I was younger, some you know, just really recent so that was kind of fun too to see yeah, the conglomerate.

Nicole (1m 58s):
But when I was reading the FAQs at the bottom it was like, you know, just send pictures of you yourself all within three years. And I think it confuses the AI if you send old ones too. So maybe just choose a time period of pictures to send like the last three years and then if you don’t have any pictures about yourself, it’s pretty easy to have someone just take 10 pictures of you send them in

Diana (2m 20s):
Different angles, you know, full body shots. It was fun.

Nicole (2m 24s):
Yeah. So How are you doing, what have you been working on?

Diana (2m 27s):
I’ve been working on getting some client projects finished up and sent out and one of them was so interesting, I think this happens a lot. We have a woman who is just named in a child’s death certificate and she has just a first name. And so that was this latest project that I reviewed and it was through dna, through the network graphs that we discovered this really substantial group of DNA matches to a certain surname in Arkansas that lined up with where the family was living. And so we now have a very probable family of origin for this woman who only had a name in a death certificate created like a hundred years after her life.

Diana (3m 9s):
So it’s really neat to see what DNA can do.

Nicole (3m 12s):
It is, you know, and it makes me wonder if Susan ever had her name recorded anywhere else other than that one place because there were burned counties and, and it’s just amazing how DNA can open up that possibility of okay, maybe she was a daughter of this family. You know, we’ve got a couple here, we’ve got clusters from the mother’s side of the couple clusters from the father’s side of the couple. And so it’s really showing that she’s probably a child of the scuffle but there’s just not gonna be any documents

Diana (3m 41s):
Probably. Right, right. This family lived in an area of Arkansas and all three counties that are all clustered there together up in the top, the northeastern part are severely burned counties. So no marriage records, no probate records, no deeds until the late 1880s. And that is what we rely on. You know, if you have a marriage record that’s so helpful with getting a maiden name of course. And then also can point to other associates that are in the the record to give you clues. Or the same way with probate, you know, a man leaving property to a daughter or Deed property to a daughter. But without any of those records you are pretty well stuck and so many of our brick walls are just like that.

Diana (4m 25s):
And that’s actually what we’re talking about today. My same scenario with my my Clumsy Kline. So we are excited about dna, that’s for sure.

Nicole (4m 33s):
Right. Well let’s talk about your project. So when we’re researching female ancestors who don’t have very many records naming them, it’s helpful to do that research for their friends, associates and neighbors, that cluster of people around them in their community. And this works for males as well. But for this project we get to focus on our female ancestor, Clumsy Cline. We think her full name was Mary Clumsy Cline. And she was born about 1817 in Alabama and died after 1880 in Wise County Texas. And the original analysis showed three individuals that were part of the community.

Nicole (5m 13s):
So Jacob Cline, John Cline and and Mahala Cline. And there were three locations for research. Morgan County, Missouri, Wayne County, Kentucky, and Isard County, Arkansas. And so after creating a Locality guide and looking into those counties, there was a research plan created. So now we’re going to talk about the findings and the conclusions that came from this research project. So Diana, how did you set up your research log?

Diana (5m 41s):
Well, I love the Airtable research log and I had initially done a research log for Clemsy in a Google sheet. So I transferred everything over to Airtable and I knew that I was going to add DNA to this project. So I have have all those DNA tables to use later on, but I just kind of move them all to the side. You, you can move those all over to the side. And I focus on the timeline. I had a timeline for Clemsy but her husband is a Weatherford and so I also have a timeline for WeatherFords because I was trying to understand some of the different WeatherFords that were in the family tree and I wasn’t sure if that would be important to my project or not.

Diana (6m 25s):
So because this was my first time logging this in Airtable, I just set up a timeline for her husband and his clan and then for the clients and all of those related people. And then I also had an old census study of the 1850 census of Morgan County and I put that in there too. I just wanted to have one air table base for all of these different pieces of projects I’d done over many years. So it’s really nice to have ’em all combined and it’s easy to copy over from an Excel spreadsheet or a Google sheet spreadsheet to you know, an air table base. So now I have all my research on this family in one place, but then I created a new research log just for this project and in our template we have all the basic fields for research log, you know, date, Locality source, citation, notes, comments, those types of things.

Diana (7m 18s):
But I also added a field and if you don’t know about Airtable, that means a column. So I added a field for person because I was tracking Clemsy fan club, her friends, associates and neighbors. And I had already discovered several that I wanted to track. And if I have a special field just for them and I can just enter their name like Mahala Cline, Jacob Cline, Don Cline, then when I am doing my analysis I can group the log by that person and have just a little mini timeline of just each person and then I can ungroup it to put ’em all back into chronological order or group it just by Locality to see all the records for say Wayne County Kentucky.

Diana (8m 1s):
So I just added that field a person, which is really, really helpful. The other thing that happens with Air Table, if you have more than one person in a record, so let’s say I put Jacob Cline Jr and there’s a Jacob Cline senior, I put ’em both in that field. Well then when you do your grouping, it puts them in their own special little group. You know, all the people that you put together show up together in their own group. So that’s kind of neat cuz then you can see all the records that people showed up in the same place.

Nicole (8m 34s):
So did they appear in their own grouping as well and the one where they’re together?

Diana (8m 41s):
No they don’t. So Airtable just puts them into a separate group. So that’s something you have to be aware of and so you might want to have separate rows for each person. So in this instance it was a, a county history that they were both mentioned in, it was a county history for Jacob Cline Jr. And then he tells the story or whoever’s writing it tells the story of his father’s coming into the county. So if I didn’t wanna have them grouped together, then I could just do a separate row and just have each one separate.

Nicole (9m 14s):
You know what you could do this might work better is if you’re wanting to see all of the rows that mention one person like Jacob Cline Jr. You could instead of grouping it, you could just go up to filter and choose to filter just to records that mention Jacob Cline Jr. And then they would all be yeah, listed in their result.

Diana (9m 33s):
That is true. Filters are great and then you, you eliminate all the other people that are, I shouldn’t say messing up your research log but you know, that are all interspersed through it. So that’s a great feature also of the filters.

Nicole (9m 46s):
Yeah, I’ve been using the filters a lot lately and it, it works really well for that kind of thing. And then the grouping works really well when you just have one person or thing per

Diana (9m 56s):
Per

Nicole (9m 56s):
Row per sale or whatever. Yeah. But if you have the two then it makes those special groupings that are like okay this has Jacob Cline and Jacob Cline Jr. And Jacob Cline Senior and there’s just one record with both of them and that’s a special little group and that’s not as useful.

Diana (10m 9s):
I agree, I agree. I love that idea of just using the filters to see everyone or just to see all the records for one person. Yeah, the flexibility of Airtable and doing the analysis is so nice. I like it cuz it’s so easy to use. I know you can do some of these same types of things with Excel, but I’m not a Power Excel user and so with Airtable it’s really easy and I can go back and forth with grouping ungrouping sorting and sorting. So I do love that. Going

Nicole (10m 39s):
Back to the clients in the Weatherford, so we hadn’t really read the research objective, but basically your objective is to find somebody who could have been Mary Clemsy Klein’s father and all you know is that she, she married William Henderson Weatherford about 1839 in Arkansas. So that’s great that you were able to include information about the Weatherford family in your log because they are part of her fan club. You know, she married into the Weatherford family and it’s important to look at records for the Weatherford family as well and just make sure you’re not missing any clues from their family associations with clients out there maybe and kind of gathering up all of the relevant details from her whole fan club.

Diana (11m 21s):
That’s exactly right because her husband is a very important part of that, you know, fan club and so I felt like I did have to do a timeline for the Weatherford just to put her in context. And I discovered in doing that, that none of them were in Morgan County, Missouri at all where these, this cluster of clients were appearing. They were just out in Texas and so there were no clients out in Texas that I could see around them. So I decided to to just put them aside and not focus on them for this project.

Nicole (11m 52s):
Yeah, that’s really great that seeing that they’re not around kind of makes you think, okay, the reason they’re in this Locality is not for the Weatherford family, it’s for the Cline family.

Diana (12m 1s):
Exactly. And it looked like they moved to Texas to be near the Weatherford family. So it kind of helps the migration pattern to make sense because that it seemed pretty family based.

Nicole (12m 12s):
Right. That makes a lot of sense. All right, well you did your research, you recorded it in Airtable in your various tables, you had a timeline table, you had another timeline table, then you had your research log table. So you’ve got everything organized in Airtable, now you’re ready to write the research report. So how did you set up your report?

Diana (12m 33s):
Well it was really an interesting project because usually I do this all within a few weeks or days. You know, I’m doing it very focused, but this time because I was doing it as part of our study group, I had done the research and then we went on this trip, a 10 day trip to Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri. And then I came home and was writing the report. So it’s a little tricky when you’re breaking things up because your mind has not been on this research. But I was really, really happy because as I was researching I kept it in Airtable but I had a specific bit of the research that was more complicated and I decided to write that up as I was doing the research and I’m so glad I did because when I came back and couldn’t remember anything about this project, I read that and I brought it all back.

Diana (13m 21s):
So that’s just a little plug for writing some things as you go. And what I wrote about was tax records and land patents in Ezra County, Arkansas. And it was just confusing. It helped me work through it as I was writing. So for this project I did a little bit of writing as you go and then of course I just pulled it all together from the research log for the final report. So that said, my report template has basic categories, the objective limitations, results summary, background information, research findings, conclusion and future research suggestions. And I love having a template because I just have to look at that section and then start writing.

Diana (14m 3s):
So very, very helpful to give me a the skeleton of a report.

Nicole (14m 7s):
Perfect. Well the first section is the objective. Putting that at the top of the report is helpful for the reader and the writer to remember exactly the purpose of that phase of research. So the overarching research question is to discover Clumsy client’s father, but in this phase you were just focusing on finding a candidate for the father that you could then test with DNA evidence,

Diana (14m 30s):
Right? I knew that there was no way I was gonna find her father in this project. And I did set a limitation for myself just like I do with clients to try to limit this to about 20 hours. And the reason I say 20 hours is because if you give yourself unlimited amount of time to research and write your report could be really, really long. Like if you’re researching for 30 or 40 hours and you go to write it up, that can be overwhelming. Whereas if you just research for 10 hours and then you write for another 10, that is a report you can actually do turns out to be maybe 20, 25 pages. No, you can actually read that again and understand what this particular phase was about.

Diana (15m 12s):
So I highly recommend not having over long research projects.

Nicole (15m 16s):
Yeah, it’s hard to write a report that’s that long. It just takes a long time.

Diana (15m 20s):
It does. And this one actually turned out to be just 14 pages. I didn’t put a ton of images or tables or things in it and that’s probably why sometimes if I add a lot of those it’ll be longer. But one other limitation that we’ve already talked about a little bit was this record loss. Isard County Arkansas is a key location and their courthouse burned twice and so before 1889 there’s just hardly anything and that’s really limiting when your ancestor lived there in the 1830s and 1840s. So that was a big limitation and I like putting that in a section at the beginning. So anybody reading my report is not going to wonder what my problem was and why I couldn’t find things they’ll know right up front.

Diana (16m 5s):
Okay, we only spent 20 hours and it was a limitation of record loss. So that can be helpful to put your limitations in.

Nicole (16m 12s):
All right, the next section is the results summary and usually this is written at the end of the report writing phase, but then we insert at the beginning kind of like an executive summary to summarize kind of what was found, just a quick bulleted list or a paragraph that says here’s what was found in this space.

Diana (16m 32s):
Yeah, and I like doing that just so I can really quickly review and remember what this project was about. What I found, I don’t add source citations, it’s just easy to write, you’re just summarizing what you did. And I do that at the end. I do like the way I’m doing it now with grouping things a little bit more than having so many just specific bullet points. I think it makes it easier to read and to understand. So in my result summary, the first one I talked about some of the background information and then I started talking about the Isard County Arkansas research and then I shifted to the Wayne County Research and then finally talked a little bit about discounting a Virginia connection.

Diana (17m 15s):
So I really like doing it that way.

Nicole (17m 17s):
Well what was the next part of the report?

Diana (17m 21s):
Next part is the background information. And this is where I discussed the problem with researching a female in the early 18 hundreds. And then it gave me a chance to talk about what I actually knew about Clemsy based on the research that we had done previously. And that was just three censuses of her life as a typical female. That is all I had. And so I talked about those and the localities of those and the information gleaned from that. And then I talked about her fans and those were identified from the 1850 census. That was a key census. It was the first one that she’s named before she would just be in the household of her husband as a tick mark.

Diana (18m 5s):
And really important was in the 1850 census she has a family of clients living just a few households away. This is Jacob Cline and then Jacob Cline has and Mahala Cline in his household as a border. You know, in the 1850 census they were instructed to have the head of household, the wife, the children, and then any other people like borders or laborers. And so Mahala is separated, she’s at the end of the group with a Robert Cline age five Mahala is 22. You know, I thought okay, this is not coincidence. Plus in Clemsy and Henderson Weatherford’s household on that same census, they have two Cline children in their household listed at the end as borders.

Diana (18m 49s):
So I just had a feeling, you know, these people are all important, they’re all connected somehow. So anyway, my background information explains that and then I give just a little bit of a hypothesis about Clumsy s Father and I hypothesized he would’ve been born in Virginia before 1800 and it perhaps he migrated south to Alabama where he met Clemsy mother reportedly born in Georgia. So Clemsy lived long enough to have the 1880 census. She’s the head of household, she reports her father’s born in Virginia and her mother in Georgia. You know, assuming that she gave the information. So I put in my hypothesis so that I kind of have an idea of what her family makeup would’ve been like.

Diana (19m 32s):
And I hypothesized that her parents could have been married about 18, 15 or before. So that was all in my background.

Nicole (19m 39s):
I have a question about the 1850 censuses that you were talking about. So you had said the instructions to the 1850 census takers was to include all the household members first and then anyone else like borders afterward. But I’m looking at your report and you do talk about the 1850 census does not state relationships and then you have this citation to the 1850s census instructions about how they were instructed to list the head of household, why the children, and then the other household members such as laborers or borders. And that’s That’s so helpful.

Diana (20m 13s):
It is helpful because just knowing what they were supposed to do, whether they followed the instructions or not, is really good information for us when analyzing these records. So sometimes we wanna study the record and its formation and instructions as much as we do the information in it because it gives us more clues to what is in that record,

Nicole (20m 31s):
Right? And it’s so easy to just say, oh well the 1850 census doesn’t give relationships so we just don’t even know who these people are. But no, we can actually go and make a more educated guess a better hypothesis. And I love that you have done that here with these clients who are listed in the household with Henderson and Clemsy, Weatherford DA and John Kline are there. And then the same with Jacob Klein’s family, how he has and Mahala Cline and a Robert Cline and you know, maybe the Kline family, you know, the parents must have died cuz these people don’t have anywhere else to live except for with their probable siblings.

Diana (21m 1s):
That is exactly what I am thinking with wanting to trace them because it’s just too much of a coincidence. Right. So the other thing I pointed out in the report on this part was that Mahala was born in Alabama and Clemsy was born in Alabama. So those are two, you know, kind of random locations where everybody else is born in different places. And then there these three younger client children, Robert Talitha and John in two different households that are all born in Arkansas. So it seems like somebody was pretty careful in noting locations. Yeah. You know, rather than just like, oh everybody’s born in Missouri cuz they’re in Missouri.

Diana (21m 42s):
You know, sometimes they’ll see SEPs like that, oh

Nicole (21m 45s):
I hate those kind.

Diana (21m 46s):
So when you see really specific things and you can go, okay, the head of household likely gave good information here. So I like that.

Nicole (21m 55s):
Right. And I like how you’ve abstracted or extracted this census data just in a simple bulleted list. You know, it’s not a super fancy table that would’ve taken longer. Like there are a lot of ways to present information and this way works really well here for the 1850 census. You just have each person their age and their birthplace. And then the head of households, you added the occupation at how much they owned in real and personal state. And that just worked really nicely

Diana (22m 20s):
And it makes it a lot faster for me when I’m trying to stay within a time limit because I’ve already put that information in my airable log in a cell say, can literally copy and paste that into my report, adjust the formatting a little bit. And it’s really easy. You can spend a lot of time doing complicated census table. And I recommend that if it’s a complicated census, you know, 1900, 19 10 where you’re trying to show parents’ birthplaces and so much information. But for something like this it worked really well. And then I bolded people who were the probable borders in the household just to show in the report these are the extra people and let’s just take a look at them.

Nicole (23m 1s):
Yeah. So this was in background information because you already had found these census records in the past and you, you kind of were starting with this as your starting

Diana (23m 10s):
Point. Right, exactly. And I knew that there were these clients, I had looked at this before but I’d never done a focused report on them. It’s one of those situations where you have a feeling you should research it more, but you just haven’t done it yet.

Nicole (23m 23s):
You’re like, I know there’s something here, but it’s

Diana (23m 25s):
Gonna be hard

Nicole (23m 25s):
Until you dive in and really do it, then you don’t really know what it means. Yeah. And that’s exciting when you have these good clues like this with, you know, you knew Clemsy maiden name. Remind me how you knew her maiden name was Kline.

Diana (23m 39s):
She has two children, one is our ancestor, Isabella Weatherford. And then the other one, one is Samuel Weatherford who is living with Clumsy in 1880. They both have death certificates that name their mother’s maiden name as Kline.

Nicole (23m 54s):
Oh

Diana (23m 55s):
Perfect. And so correlating that with the people in her household, you know, these clients actually in her household and then Jacob Cline a few households. Dan, I didn’t really have a question that she wasn’t a client. It it all came

Nicole (24m 6s):
Together. Yeah. You just always known that she’s a client. Yeah. And it seems like the family knew she was a client too cause Yeah, you know the informants for Isabella and Samuel knew that there was a Kline family that that was where she originated.

Diana (24m 19s):
Yeah. And it makes you wonder if she did keep in touch with her Kline family later on. I would love to find, I have to leave that

Nicole (24m 26s):
Behind and going to Texas.

Diana (24m 28s):
Yeah, well that’d be so fun if I actually find something, you know, like one of her sisters that we don’t know about that married someone and they’re just living right there by her. That can happen. So, oh yeah,

Nicole (24m 39s):
That’s happened to me a few times in Texas where you see the census page, you don’t recognize any names, then later you come back to that same page to look to cuz you’re tracing a sister forward and you’re like, oh I’ve already been here before. I’ve seen this page

Diana (24m 51s):
Before. There they are,

Nicole (24m 52s):
They’re right next door.

Diana (24m 54s):
Yeah. Yeah. So especially where Samuel was born a little bit later, he was born in Texas. So either the family, you know, she kept alive, her made a name of Cline, kept in contact with Cline family, he knew it. I love that little bit of a clue. Somebody knew that.

Nicole (25m 11s):
Well good job on your background section and just so everyone knows, Diana has shared her report for all of you to go and read. So make sure that you take advantage of that. You can go look at the PDF and read the whole thing. Okay. So let’s go on next to the research findings section. So this is the part of the report that you know is the longest part. It has all the new findings from this phase of research after following the research plan, following the clues that were in this background analysis and what was new that was found. So it’s helpful to break this up with subheadings and figures and maps, bulleted lists, anything to help the reader. Here are the headings for this research project.

Nicole (25m 51s):
First there was Isard County, Arkansas and then the next section was Arkansas Tax and Land Records. Then there’s a section on John c Cline, then a section on Mahala Cline, then Jacob Cline of Morgan County, Missouri, then Rockingham County, Virginia Kline Connections. So let’s go through these sections. Tell us about the first one.

Diana (26m 15s):
Well I wanted to start with Isard County, Arkansas because that was the earliest known location for Clumsy and Henderson Weatherford. He had been found in the tax list for 1839 and 1845. And that was the very earliest that I had them. So I hypothesized they were married about 1838 cuz their oldest daughter was born about eighteen thirty nine, eighteen forty. And so I figured that that would be a be a good place to start. You know, is this where they met? Is this where Clemsy was a young woman and she met Henderson? So I wanted to start there and knowing that ARD County was severely burned, I knew there were these tax lists and I knew we had federal land patents.

Diana (26m 58s):
Those were two records that do exist for the area. And so I had to go back up to the Family history library where the tax book is and I was excited to find a client. I found a John c Kline and tax records for him. His first tax was in 1841 and he paid a poll tax and a land tax for two land plats and then he wasn’t anywhere else in the tax list. The problem is that even though we have some of these tax lists, there are still some gaps, you know, as you can imagine, just they didn’t get all of them saved.

Diana (27m 39s):
Oh. But I at least found John Cline. So I knew that there was a client, but I didn’t know anything about him. You know, the tax list only said he paid a poll tax. So I knew he was between 21 and 60. That’s a pretty big range, you know, is he a contemporary of Clemsy or a possible father?

Nicole (27m 55s):
So in 1841 he paid a poll tax and you know his land, so that’s good you found that. Yeah,

Diana (28m 1s):
Yeah.

Nicole (28m 2s):
But that’s interesting that he wasn’t on any other tax list even though there was the 1839 and 18 43, 18 44.

Diana (28m 9s):
Yeah, and it’s just, I think one of those instances of just not having complete records possibly, who knows. But when I went to federal land patents, that was fun. There was no federal land patent for Henderson Weatherford, but I did find more Cline, I found John Cline and the land description matched up with his land description and the tax record. So that correlated great. But then I found a Mahala Cline and a John Cline and I was really excited to see the name Mahala Cline because I felt like that correlated well with the Mahala Cline on that 1850 census. So that was exciting.

Nicole (28m 47s):
That is, she must have been a widow to be patenting land.

Diana (28m 50s):
That was my hypothesis. I’m still not sure about that and I, I’ll reveal a little bit more of that in a minute. So as you can imagine, you know, I had all these clients and I had the tax records and I have these different land descriptions, but I couldn’t quite visualize them. And so I created my own little annotated map and put a star on where they would’ve been in the county. I, in one of the books that I was using, I found a map of Isard County with the sections all you know, drawn out. And so I could actually figure out where they were in this county. And so for instance, John Cline was the Northwest Southeast section one range nine West Township 18 north.

Diana (29m 38s):
And when you’re reading those descriptions you’re, you’re thinking, okay, I really have no idea where this is. But when you plot it out, then you can make much better conclusions. So what I noticed was that Mahala got a bit of land very close to John Cline and he got his land patent in 1844. She got hers in 1848 in both instances. So I thought that was very interesting. Could she be a daughter of John Cline and possibly, oh got old enough that she could patent land on her own. I don’t know, I just thought that was very interesting. There’s a connection there. And then this John Cline has three land patents in a little bit different area.

Diana (30m 22s):
I mean not not super far away, but he’s got three all in his own place. But his were later his were two for 1849 and one for 1850. So I have this little group of John, John C and Mahala Cline all pretty close. I mean looking at it, they’re probably just within a few miles of each other. So that was a really nice little grouping of clients to find and I like the naming patterns that I was seeing there. One more thing I wanna say is I looked at the actual image on the Bureau of Land Management website. You can click on the image and see the final land patent image. And it was interesting because Mahala was a Fulton County and Don Cline was a Fulton County and then a Pulaski County.

Diana (31m 10s):
So then I looked at my maps and Fulton County had been created from Isard, it’s right on the border. And so that makes sense, you know, they created a new county and they ended up living in Fulton even though they were patenting this land in Ezr. And of course I was excited about Fulton County as a new area to research until I found out it was also severely burned and didn’t have records there either. No. Yeah. So anyway, Pulaski is a possible, that one did not burn, but Pulaski is in the central part of the state, so not sure what’s going on with this John Cline of Pulaski and a Fulton. So future research on that for sure.

Nicole (31m 52s):
Great. So to summarize this section on Isard County tax and Land Records, you found some clients in Land and tax. You mapped them out to see that they were all next to each other. Just a question, how did that correlate with Henderson Weatherford and his location at that time?

Diana (32m 9s):
Oh my gosh, it’s so sad. He only paid a poll tax and the tax list gives no land description and it’s a book so it’s just alphabetical. I don’t have anything else as a clue of where he was living in Isard County. And I’ve never been able to find ’em on the 1840 census of Isard County. And I did a page by page search and cannot find their family. So I don’t know if they’re living with someone else or if for a brief time they popped over to a different county. So I don’t know know where his, I wish I knew exactly that Henderson was right there, you know, that’d be great.

Nicole (32m 44s):
So you have Henderson Weatherford on the 1839 and 1845 tax list in

Diana (32m 50s):
Ard. Exactly.

Nicole (32m 51s):
But I just don’t know exactly where. Yep. And was it organized by district or something?

Diana (32m 56s):
It’s just alphabetical these

Nicole (32m 58s):
For the whole county. It was just one big alphabetical list.

Diana (33m 1s):
Yes. And it’s not, it’s not the original list. So those,

Nicole (33m 5s):
Is it like the state copy?

Diana (33m 6s):
Yeah, it’s the, the compiler is Desmond Walls Allen. And so he has just gone through and made this book. He has compiled a book and you find chronologically your ancestors name and then it tells you the year and any other information. And so he’s done a great service in compiling all these records. And I don’t even think that they are available anymore because I couldn’t find anywhere to see the originals for some of the areas. He’s done this for several counties in Arkansas. For some of them the Arkansas archives have them but they don’t have desserts. So really the only source I have is this book.

Nicole (33m 47s):
Well that’s frustrating but at least you have that. And it is cool that you can put Henderson Weatherford and Jacobs Cline in the same county in the 1840s. That’s cool. Yeah. Great. So next you had a section on John Cline. So tell us the findings for that section.

Diana (34m 4s):
Well I was pretty excited to find John Cline to find another person to research. And so I didn’t have this in my original research plan to research him cuz I didn’t know about him. Right. But I added that and I, you know, we teach research planning, we always show it as a kind of a winding road. And this is a good example of that because of course I can’t just let him go, I’ve gotta find him. And he was right there on the 1850 census and he was in Fulton County. So that new county that had been made of Isard and his household was very interesting. It had a Milky Kline age 43. First of all, Jacob is 65, so immediately we know he could be a father for Clumsy.

Diana (34m 47s):
He’s old enough. But he has this much younger woman, 20 years younger Milky Kline as a probable wife. Again, no relationships. But that was to be the order. And then he’s got four Cline children, Jesse Abner, Ann and Amanda. The older two born in Illinois, the younger two in Arkansas. John was born in Pennsylvania milk, he’s born in Virginia. So again, wow, that’s pointing to some migration isn’t it?

Nicole (35m 15s):
Right. And that is so common for that time period in the 18 hundreds with people leaving Virginia and going out to these new lands that were opening up. I’m just having to try and remember when was Clumsy born?

Diana (35m 28s):
Okay. So I had done a hypothesis of her birth year based on those three censuses cuz of course they’re all different. One says 18 17, 1 says 1820 and 1, 18 25. But I think between 18, 17 and 1820 are more accurate. The one that says 1825 has a bunch of stuff wrong on the family. I just feel like it’s one of those outliers that whoever gave the information didn’t know the family well.

Nicole (35m 55s):
Okay. So let’s say she’s born in 1820, John c Cline in 1850.

Diana (36m 1s):
So he would’ve been born about 1785.

Nicole (36m 4s):
Okay, great. So he’s definitely of age to be the

Diana (36m 7s):
Father. Yes. And he could be the father of Jacob Cline of Morgan County. You know, the guy who’s right by Clemsy Jacob. Cline has a birth year pretty solid of 1811 because of his headstone. You know, we have his burial, so I’m figuring he could be an older brother for Clumsy and that would still fit with being a son of John Cline. That’s still possible. Oh.

Nicole (36m 32s):
Great. So you’ve, you’ve got this all kind of hypothesized out in your mind now with this guy is probably the dad and we’ve got a brother and a sister possibly. That’s

Diana (36m 43s):
Great. Right. And Mahala born about 1828 according to that 1850 census again, could be a younger daughter, they all three could be his child. So that was really exciting to find him and see how old he was because I finally have a candidate for somebody. And I love having some children there to follow for Descendancy, for dna. I mean that’s super exciting.

Nicole (37m 7s):
Totally. And what about this Milky? I mean, first of all, I’ve never heard of someone named Milky like milk with a y

Diana (37m 14s):
I know, right? I don’t know about Milky. She’s 43. She could be, as we know in 1850, she could be a first, second or third wife who knows. But don’t know about her yet. But I did find, going back another 10 years to the 1840 census, I did find a John Cline in the Blue Mountain township of Isard County, Arkansas. And that household correlates really well with the 1850 census. And it does have two females, one of which could be Mahala. So that 1840 census, I was trying to decide, you know, who could be in this family. It wouldn’t have Clemsy in it because she was already married I’m guessing.

Diana (37m 58s):
And so anyway, trying to do a little bit of figuring out what that census

Nicole (38m 4s):
Yeah, I like that you’ve put those names, your hypothesis for who they match up with from the 1850 census right there in brackets. So you think Clumsy and Henderson Weatherford got married around 1839 and Isard, but the marriage records are lost for that time period. And when did they have their first child? Like sometime right after that?

Diana (38m 22s):
Yeah, Eliza is 10 on the 1850 census. So she was born about 1840 and I believe tracing her out, I found her birthdate was a little bit closer to 1839, you know, right in in there. 39 40.

Nicole (38m 37s):
Yeah. So you’re thinking Clemsy and Henderson Weatherford married about 1838. They had a child around 1839. And so she wasn’t in her father’s household in 1840. So the 1840 census for John Cline still fits the hypothesis that he could have been the father

Diana (38m 53s):
Clumsy. Right. He is a little bit younger there, which is always tricky because he was supposedly 65 in 1850 and 1840 Census has him as 40 through 49. So he could have been 50, 65. I mean, you know, those are the things we see that not everything correlates perfectly darn it with the censuses, but the, the household makeup did correlate pretty well. So that, you know, you, you just have to keep researching.

Nicole (39m 21s):
Yeah. A little conflict there. But you know, when people were older like that, often their ages changed a lot on the census and they’re not always perfectly lined up.

Diana (39m 31s):
Yeah. And it could have been just 60.

Nicole (39m 34s):
All right, well next, in your report you had your section on Mahala. So tell us, did you find more about her?

Diana (39m 40s):
Yes, I did. And I basically said the Mahala Cline who patented land in 1848 could be the Mahala Cline who lived with the Jacob Cline household in 1850 in Morgan County. You know, outside we always use qualifiers like likely could be, probably, possibly. But I did wanna discover more about the Mahala who was 22 years old as a border in Jacob Klein’s household because I wasn’t sure if she was a widow or not. Had she been married and her husband died and that’s why she moved to Morgan County to be with perhaps her brother and sister. And so I did some more research on her, found that she married Thomas Shockley in 1854 in Morgan County, Missouri.

Diana (40m 25s):
And again I thought, okay, she could have just been going by her maiden name. Right. We see women whose husbands died and their widows and then they used their former married name. They don’t go back to a maiden name in a marriage record. So I hypothesized she still could have been a widow when she got married. But following them they were quite easy to research. Found them in the censuses in Missouri, just boom, boom, boom. Found they had at least five daughters and she died in 1899 and one of her daughters lived all the way till 1965 and her death certificate states her parents as Mahalia Kline and Thomas Shockley. So that tells me that her maiden name was a Kline.

Nicole (41m 9s):
Nice.

Diana (41m 10s):
So that clarifies that she was an unmarried woman and she could be a sibling to Clemsy and Jacob.

Nicole (41m 16s):
So interesting that she had land in her name at such a young age.

Diana (41m 20s):
I know. And

Nicole (41m 21s):
As a single

Diana (41m 22s):
Woman. And I’m really excited because my next phase of research, I’m going to order the land patent applications and see if that gives me any clues to all these clients in Arkansas. You know, sometimes those applications do give some information, often they don’t. But it is something else to to look at. But I was excited when I found that, that she was a client. It seemed like she was not a widow and married to a client. And it also raised the question of these other client children. So she has a Robert Cline age five with her in that Jacob Cline household. And then Clemsy and Henderson Weatherford have these two client children, Toletha age 10 and John age eight.

Diana (42m 8s):
So don’t really know exactly who all these people are, but getting a little bit closer. So one other thing I wanted to talk about was the exciting thing about finding Mahalia Cline and Thomas Shockley and their household of daughters. I have a mitochondrial DNA test taker for Clumsy who’s already taken the test. I have those results. So if I can trace down those daughters, I can maybe find a mitochondrial DNA test taker to compare with our Oh great test taker.

Nicole (42m 39s):
So a descend, a matrilineal descendant of Clumsy has tested. Now we just need a matrilineal descendant of Mahala Cline to

Diana (42m 46s):
Test. Wonderful.

Nicole (42m 47s):
That’s really exciting. Know Cause we already have our person out there waiting for results and I’m waiting for a

Diana (42m 52s):
Mattress. I know. And I figured, you know, with that many daughters, five daughters, somebody’s gotta have another daughter who had a daughter. Right.

Nicole (42m 59s):
Yeah. You have a good chance there. Yeah, that’s nice that you can work on tracing that forward in the future research. Well, we’ve talked a lot about Jacob. So tell us what you found about Jacob Cline next.

Diana (43m 8s):
Well I was excited to tackle Jacob in Wayne County, Kentucky. That county histories talk about him coming from Wayne County Kentucky with his wife’s family, the RS a r D. And so I went to Wayne County, did some original research there, found Jacob Cline and Talitha Aard married on 18 March, 1835, and looking at the marriage register, no witnesses, parents, no other clients. What I found was that he paid a poll tax in Wayne County in 1835 and 36. So right there when he’s getting married. And he never owned any land, but he was taxed for two horses by 1836.

Diana (43m 50s):
And then he disappears. There are no other clients in land or tax records for Wayne County whatsoever, which suggested that he just traveled to the county as a single man. He wasn’t there with a group of clients because Wayne County has existing tax and land and census. There was just nothing else except for just this brief period of time where he marries Talitha and then they take off with this whole group of arts to Morgan County, Missouri.

Nicole (44m 19s):
Oh. So to Letha Art’s family, we’re all going to Morgan

Diana (44m 22s):
County. Right, right. So that leaves me with my hypothesis that he could have originated down in Isard County, Arkansas, then he could have just taken off by himself, you know, as an adventurer for whatever reason. And gone up to Kentucky, who knows what the poll was there. And then, you know, got married and moved with the arts, which if he was settled in Morgan County and there was something that happened down in Arkansas and Clumsy Cline and Henderson Weatherford and, and Mahala Cline all needed someplace to go. You know, they could go up and they were near Jacob in Morgan County.

Nicole (44m 60s):
That makes sense that if their father died, they needed somewhere to live and their older brother had set up a nice house, they could have come and lived with him.

Diana (45m 8s):
Right. So, you know, trying kind of drawing a few more lines in the picture of this family. So it was good to know that there wasn’t just a whole group of clients in Kentucky that I needed to worry about. You know, sometimes negative searches are great and it did does become negative evidence that Jacob was just there by himself, which I do like that. I also wanted to do a little bit more in Morgan County. I was hoping to find maybe more information about Jacob. You would think there would be quite a bit because the county history talked about him being a doctor. I just really couldn’t find much more about him. But I did find where he was buried.

Diana (45m 48s):
There’s a Cline cemetery, which I already knew, but in one of the books I used at the Family History Library, there was a map of all the cemeteries in Morgan County, which is super cool. Nice. So I located where he was, he was had moved up to more the northern part of the county in the census. In 1850, the WeatherFords and clients were all down in Buffalo Township, which is the southwest corner. So they had taken off to Texas by 1860 and he’d moved north by 1860. One other thing was very, very interesting. So online trees have the father of Jacob Cline as being a John Cline out of Rockingham County Virginia. And so far I have just found nothing to show that Jacob does have Virginia as his birthplace.

Diana (46m 34s):
So that’s it for the 1850 census. We have that. And as I was looking at county histories for Morgan County, I found this Daniel Cline, and he was born in 1846. He was the son of Samuel Cline and Elizabeth Sch, Walter German immigrants to Rockingham County. And Daniel didn’t migrate to Missouri until 1878. Jacob Cline was long dead by then. So I don’t think there’s even a connection, quite honestly. I mean, maybe there is, and I’m just hypothesizing that maybe people just found Daniel Cline coming from Rockham County and assumed that was Jacob’s birthplace. I don’t know. But that was the only place I found anything about Rockingham County as a possible location for Jacob.

Diana (47m 18s):
And it’s not even for him really.

Nicole (47m 20s):
Well, it is good to put that in there and to just, you know, get those clues written down so you don’t forget them. And who knows what that all means. But it’s helpful to see, okay, there’s, there’s a couple Rockingham County Virginia clients. Somebody thought that was connected, but that’s an authored source. So I’m not putting much stock by that. And just going forward with the really good clues you found this time, and you know, your Jacob Cline did say he was born in Virginia, but then the John c Cline, who the father of all these kind could have been said he was born in Pennsylvania or the census said he was born in Pennsylvania.

Diana (47m 53s):
Right. And so he could have done that very common migration path down to Virginia, traveled on down to Alabama, Georgia, and then over to Arkansas. You know, we’ve seen this so many times in our own family and in other client work that we’ve done this very similar migration all over the place in the West.

Nicole (48m 13s):
Right. Well, and it does kinda make sense that Kline isn’t that like a German name and maybe he came from Pennsylvania, like with all the other Germans that went through Pennsylvania.

Diana (48m 22s):
Absolutely. Likely. This is a German connection. I think that that actually could correlate really well. And it’s possible that the Daniel Cline is a connection.

Nicole (48m 33s):
It’s just a future research project. So what’s your conclusion then? Well,

Diana (48m 38s):
Did we always go back to address the original objective and it was to find a possible father and then I added family for Clemsy because I did find this grouping and I put that it was met in the discovery of the Isard County Cline, John Cline, Mahala Cline and John Cline in the land and tax records. And then I wrote Mahala is the connecting link with her at parents also in Morgan County, Missouri in the 1850 household of Jacob Cline where Clemsy Cline Weatherford lived nearby and had two Cline children in her household. John c Kline born about 1785, could certainly be the father of Mahala, Jacob John and Clemsy. It’s exciting to have found a candidate to research.

Nicole (49m 19s):
Yes, it is fulfilling to have met your objective for this phase of the research.

Diana (49m 24s):
And one thing that I don’t think I mentioned that also was interesting there is that John Cline in the land patents of Fulton and Pulaski County. Well there was a John Cline right by Jacob Cline in the 1840 census of Morgan County, Missouri. So there is a John connection there too, with this other John Cline that I’m thinking could be another sibling. So

Nicole (49m 49s):
Right. Another sibling

Diana (49m 51s):
And yeah. Yeah. And he was in Morgan County as well. So did he go up to Morgan County, then came back down to Arkansas and did a land patent. So I’m, I’m just finding some connections between the, the two counties, which is cool.

Nicole (50m 4s):
That is really good. You know, I just had a thought I had to say with Jacob Cline going up to Kentucky and then he was a doctor. I wonder if there was some kind of schooling or training he was doing in Kentucky.

Diana (50m 16s):
Oh, well that’s a good idea. Never even thought of that. And Jacob Cline in that 1850 census does have a son, John m Cline, and he has a son named Jacob Cline after himself. I’m, I’m guessing. And then in Clemsy household there’s another John Cline. So we’re seeing a lot of John Klein’s. I mean John is a common name. Right. But, but still,

Nicole (50m 39s):
If it was their dad’s name, of course they would wanna use it.

Diana (50m 41s):
Right. I’m just very curious about this family still. And you know, of course our next section that we end a report with is future research. That is what I’m super excited about. My future research is going to be some DNA because I have got a nice group of people to try to explore. I’ve got John c Klein’s household listed. I can do some Descendancy work on his household from 1850 and also Mahala and Thomas Schley’s household and see if I can find any DNA connections, you know, autosomal, I’m gonna do a network graph, see if I can find a cluster of clients that maybe go with these people.

Nicole (51m 22s):
Oh, that would be so gratifying. I hope that that is a successful avenue. And it sounds like it will be one thing you might wanna start doing right now is just adding in these people to your ancestry tree that’s attached to your DNA results so that it can start picking up things in through lines.

Diana (51m 40s):
I know that’s a great idea. I should start doing that because I do have a couple hour or a couple of hours, I have a couple of months before we start the DNA study group. And that’s a fun thing to do to start doing descendancy work in my ancestry tree for these people. So that’s exciting. Yeah,

Nicole (51m 57s):
That is fun. And sometimes it’s just kind of easy to, when you’re relaxing in your armchair with your laptop to build descendency lines down.

Diana (52m 8s):
Exactly. While you’re watching a Hallmark Christmas movie.

Nicole (52m 12s):
Hey, that sounds like fun. Oh goodness. Can I come

Diana (52m 15s):
Over? Yeah, come on up. Well, and I’m also excited to order those land patent applications just to see, you know, I, I could hit the gold mine and and they say something that gives you more information it

Nicole (52m 29s):
And are you gonna get those ordered right away or will you wait until we start the next study group in February?

Diana (52m 34s):
I think I’ll get ’em ordered right away. My researcher gets ’em really fast and I just wanna know. Yeah, no,

Nicole (52m 40s):
No reason to wait. Do it while you’ve got it on your mind.

Diana (52m 42s):
Yeah, yeah. And I can take a look at those. I can transcribe them, have ’em all ready to go for analysis and work with the DNA coming up. So it was really gratifying to work through this complete project and to now have so many leads where before with Clumsy, I just had this idea that there’s some clients that she somehow connected to. You know, now I’ve really identified some hypotheses and found some new people. So it’s super exciting.

Nicole (53m 9s):
Well congratulations on a well-written report and I encourage everyone to go read the client research project report and we’ll put that in the show notes, which will be up on Family Lock It and also in the description of this episode on whatever you’re listening to.

Diana (53m 25s):
Right. And you can go to the blog post that goes with this. I have some screenshots of my air table log. And so if you want a little bit more information on that, you can go take a look at that as well. But hopefully you will enjoy reading through the report and seeing how I put all of that kind of complicated, confusing research together, which is always the challenge of a report. But the reason we love writing reports, it is such an important part of the research process. I made so many connections as I was writing this out. Right. It was invaluable.

Nicole (53m 58s):
Well, thanks everyone for listening. We hope you enjoyed this and we will talk to you again next week.

Diana (54m 4s):
All right. Bye bye everyone.

Nicole (54m 6s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.