RLP 256: Alford/Johnson Research – Interview with James Johnson

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 256 Alfred Johnson research interview with James Johnson. 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 genealogist professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team@familylocket.com and the authors of research like a pro agist guide with Robin Wertland. 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.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com, break down genealogy brick walls with a subscription to the largest online newspaper archive. Hi everyone. Welcome to research like a Pro.

Diana (56s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (58s):
Great. I’ve been making great progress on my dire research project. How about you?

Diana (1m 3s):
Well, I’ve been trying to work on my royston research project, but I keep getting interrupted with other things. Imagine that. But I did wanna talk for a minute about the part I read in the book that I am reading. Everybody knows I love the Brooks Blevins books, history of the Ozarks, and I’m right in the middle of volume two, which is all about the Civil War and it’s right there in northern Arkansas and southern Missouri. So I thought this was such an interesting statement where he says, this is after the Battle of Pee Ridge, which is like the major battle that took place there in northern Arkansas. But after that he says it was an unqualified victory for the smaller army of the southwest.

Diana (1m 49s):
One of immense strategic importance for its solidified Missouri status as a union state and secured it against the threat of an invading Confederate army capable of accomplishing meaningful military and political objectives. Hence fourth confederate efforts in the Ozarks of southern Missouri would be limited to periodic raids and the disruptive activities and depredations of bands of irregulars. So when I read that, I thought, oh my goodness, that is exactly what we have learned as we’ve studied our ancestors who lived through that, that it was this con, this continual kind of gorilla warfare where little bands would descend from different factions of both confederates and union armies and just completely disrupted and destroyed the people’s lives and their livelihood, you know, burning the farms, taking everything that they had.

Diana (2m 37s):
So I am just really enjoying this little step back into history and imagining our ancestors living through that.

Nicole (2m 45s):
It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it? It helps though to read the book and to understand for that specific locality what exactly they might have gone through.

Diana (2m 54s):
Yeah, it really does. And I’m just getting so many little tidbits. You know, I don’t usually mark up my books. This is a nice hard cover copy, but I have my red pencil out and I am marking it up cuz it’s pretty dense with such good information. And like when I come to something that’s, that I really wanna maybe return to or use in a research report or a biography of our ancestors, I’m, I’m marking it up. So I feel like that’s a good use of my red pencil in this book.

Nicole (3m 22s):
Fun. Well, for our announcements today, our June research like pro webinar is going to be by Diana. She’ll be presenting about Elijah Dillard and if he is the brother of Cynthia Dillard Royston and it’s a d n A case study. So if you haven’t joined our research like a pro webinar series yet, we invite you to sign up for that. You can watch all of the previous month recordings and you can attend the Zoom lecture live or watch the recording as well. The next research, like a pro study group, will begin in August and we’ll be having registration starting soon. So make sure you get into our newsletter so you can get those reminders.

Diana (3m 59s):
Well thank you for going through those. I just wanted to make a note that I’m doing the Dillard case because someone specifically said, I wanna hear you talk about your Cynthia Dillard project. And so I will be doing kind of a recap of my research to date with Cynthia and then talking about Elijah, who I discovered through dna. And so that’s going to be a fun webinar. Well, today we are excited to have a guest with us. We have James Wesley Johnson. Welcome James. Thank

3 (4m 30s):
You. Thank you for having me.

Diana (4m 31s):
We’re so excited to talk with you all about your research and an exciting discovery that you made in your family. So I’m just gonna let you introduce that. Okay, let’s just say that this was 120 year family secret. So tell us all about how that happened. Yeah,

3 (4m 50s):
Like most secrets, you don’t know what you’re getting into until you get into it. So early in the, in 1980, my, my father who really didn’t know his father since he was six years old, when hi his mother separated from him, decided he wanted to find his father and by doing that he had to, you know, ask his mom who his dad was, what the names were. And he got a couple of names. He got his dad’s names James Howard Johnson and his grandfather’s name Charles Johnson. But he didn’t know where they were from. He knew they were from Arkansas. But back then you didn’t have Ancestry or find a grave or family search. You mostly had what were called bulletin boards and list servers, CDs from the library, that kind of thing.

3 (5m 34s):
And my dad got in touch with a lady who was actually going to grave sites and writing down names and she came across a really small cemetery in West Arkansas at Westline. And it had Charles Johnson, it was c h s Johnson, she said, I don’t know if this is who you’re looking for, but right next to him is another guy who has your name, James William Johnson. Well that was intriguing enough for my dad to get in the car with his wife and drive out to Westline from Florida and they found it, it was a great really small, in the middle of nowhere, west Arkansas, there were a lot of Johnsons there. That was James Johnson, Sarah Johnson, many of ’em that he never even heard about.

3 (6m 18s):
And somebody who lived near the graveside walked up and said, are you related to the Johnson’s? He said, yeah, my name’s James William Johnson. He goes, well, you know, you got some cousins down the road. So he took a road that when it was paved and then it turned dirt road and it was pretty far back in the woods. Now he’s from Arkansas himself, middle Arkansas. So driving down dirt roads was nothing to him, but his wife was getting a little concerned about it. But he came across Charles Johnson who was sitting on his front porch with a shotgun leaning against the wall and they pulled up, you know, and his dad describes it, the chickens and the pigs kind of ran away and his wife said, I’m not getting out of the car.

3 (7m 3s):
So he, he got outta the car, he goes, I’ll do this. And he walked up and Charles said, you know, who are you? And he said, my name is James William Johnson, which made Charles stand up and said, what’d you say? And he told him his name again. He goes, who’s your dad? And he said, James Howard Johnson, wait a minute, you’re Howard’s boy. Mildred, get out here. It’s Howard’s boy. So now he was part of the family real quick. Charles had a bunch of Johnson names and phone numbers and knew Howard Johnson knew his dad’s mom. So coming from that, dad was able to get back home and start calling all these Johnsons who were scattered across the country.

3 (7m 43s):
Some of ’em Mississippi, some ’em in California, some ’em in Oregon, you know, they were just everywhere, Arizona. And he started interviewing and that’s really how this whole thing kind of started.

Diana (7m 56s):
Oh my goodness, I am just envisioning that moment on the front porch with the gun and just the whole countenance of Charles Johnson changing when he found out who it actually was at. Such a great story. I love that. So fun. It’s

3 (8m 11s):
Very southern.

Diana (8m 13s):
That’s awesome. Makes me a little worried about going, trying to track down some of my ancestors in Arkansas and their places. Oh my

3 (8m 21s):
Goodness. If you need, if you need some assistance, dad’s pretty good at it.

Diana (8m 26s):
That’s

Nicole (8m 26s):
So neat. James, can you tell us more about these interviews that you had with family members?

3 (8m 31s):
Absolutely. So dad started asking questions, mainly still trying to track down his dad. And while he was talking to him, he found out that his grandfather’s father was James William Johnson, just like the graveside said. So that’s who my father was obviously named after. And that he had two known siblings, uncle Dick Johnson, his name was Joseph Richard Johnson and Aunt Bell from Texas. Everybody knew Aunt Bell, everybody knew that that was, I’m gonna refer to the older James William as j w. Everyone knew that that was J W’s sister and that they were all from Tennessee.

3 (9m 13s):
I, I want to preface these interviews with, there were a lot of other interviews that were outlandish, you know, like my dad’s grandfather died wrestling a bear. There were, you know, there were all these, you know, kind of crazy stories. So when I tell you these particular interviews, it sounds like, well why didn’t, you know this makes a lot of sense. But you kind of had to take some of this information out and figure out what was real, what wasn’t. Because there was a rumor that Uncle Dick got in trouble with the law and he and JW got run outta Tennessee for horse Steven that was just, you know, let us interview off to the side with one person.

3 (9m 53s):
Nobody else confirmed it or knew anything about it. So it was just kind of one of those, you just kind of, hmm, maybe so. And, and one of the interviews was he was part of the Jesse James gang. Okay, so you kind of had to like really weigh what if you were saying to you. So unfortunately nobody knew anybody further back than jw Aunt Bell and Uncle Dick. So then dad decided he went to Tennessee to try to see if he could find them in Roan County. And there were no Johnsons that fit any descriptions of these guys. So he was kind of at a loss and decided to go collaterally with the brothers and sisters. He started with Oppel who lived in Dallas and he found her obituary.

3 (10m 37s):
But instead of her being born in Tennessee, she was born in Illinois, which really confused him. And he’d go back to those interviews and go back, talk to him. And they all said, no, she’s from Tennessee, we all know she’s from Tennessee. Okay. So then he decided, he had already gotten J W’s death certificate, who, by the way, father was listed as Robert Johnson from Tennessee. And he got Bell’s death certificate, which listed her father as unknown Alfred. And that was the first time we ever saw that word. So then he decided to get her marriage license and on the marriage license it listed her maiden name, which was Susan Isabel Alfred.

3 (11m 19s):
Now, not only was he confused, but so were all the Johnsons and some of ’em were saying that the, all the records were wrong. There was a lot of, you know, confusion. So since it, she was from McCoon County, Illinois, he decided to look at census records there. Now, by now it was kind of easier to get census records online. Things were starting to move a little bit better. This was like 98, 99. Things were a little bit better. So he did find a census record from a Coen County with a family of Robert since J W’s father was Robert, but it was Robert Alfred. And in that list was a Susan Alfred and there were several other siblings.

3 (12m 2s):
This was the 1870 Senses. There was a Patrick Alfred, there was a Tom Alfred, there was a George Alfred. Patrick Alfred would’ve been about nine years old. And j W’s birth was 1860, but it was July. So when he went to the census, Patrick wasn’t there. This was before we, we realized that the census was taken in June 1st and he was born in July so he wouldn’t be listed. So we were still pretty confused. Now I wanna go back to the interviews. There was one interview that talked about J W’s fourth child, Elsie Jane. When Sarah Jane gave birth to her, Sarah Jane passed away.

3 (12m 45s):
So the story was that there was this really nice lady from Texas named Rebecca or Becky and she took the child and wet nurse her in Texas, which, you know, that happens, strangers friends do that and it’s really kind of more of a sibling thing. And as it turned out, Becky had a son at the same time. So her name was Rebecca McFadden. And in this is another little key though, in one of the address books of one of the Johnson’s, their parent had written Becky McFadden and in parentheses Alfred.

3 (13m 25s):
So that kind of, we didn’t understand that either. Like, okay, well was she part of this deal too? And there was a Rachel in the census, so he did what any good genealogists did he got on the phone and called information, He called Arlington information. Now luckily McFadden was spelt kind of uniquely, it was M C F A D I N. So he asked her and he goes, there’s several of ’em, and gave him about 10 names and he started calling, well about the third call there was a guy who said, you know what, I know what you’re talking about and I don’t have the answers, but I know someone who does. And he gave him the phone number of Margaret McFadden.

3 (14m 5s):
So dad called Margaret McFadden and said, my name’s James William Johnson and I’m researching my family and I keep coming across this name Alfred and I’m just wondering if you know anything about that. Well, Margaret broke down in tears. She started crying. She said, I thought I was gonna die before anybody would come ask. So she said, hold on a second. She went to her closet, got a box out and started telling dad the story of the fact that j w was actually Patrick Alford and had changed his name cuz he and his two brothers had got in trouble with the law in Texas, not Tennessee.

3 (14m 50s):
It was really interesting. She, she would talk about Patrick and JW and she would mix in the word mace and Dad would’ve to stop her and say, well who’s Mace? Well that’s Patrick, it’s Patrick Mace, Alfred. She said it was his middle name. We kind of think so too. We really have no proof of that. But Dad heard the story of the name change. He got a lot of information outta Margaret. They stayed in touch. And of course all this time he and I are kind of going over the records and he is showing me I wasn’t interested at first, now I’m interested. So then Dad called me up one day and said, I want you to do me a favor. And I said, what? He goes, I want you to Google Mace Alfred. And this is like 2000, Google was actually working by then.

3 (15m 32s):
And I typed in Mace, Alfred and up came this modern day article out of Fort Worth called Bad Guys Win the Day. And it was all about a gunfight, these horse thieves named Tom Mace and George. And that the deputy sheriff, that’s how this one describe it was shot in a, in a gunfight. And the bad guys, one of ’em got arrested but he got off on technicalities. All right, now I’m super excited cuz now I got Outlaws Wild West outlaws in my family, this is pretty good. So we got in touch with the guy who wrote the article and he got us in touch with a historian at Fort Worth who had been researching this from the newspapers.

3 (16m 21s):
He also gave us Texas Appeals court decision that allowed us to read that too. So now we have a better picture of this whole thing. This is how the whole court case went down with the Alfreds. Tom had a horse and he sold it to a guy and somebody said that’s a stolen horse. Took it from him. The guy who said it was his force said that he got an indictment out for a John Smith. Now there’s some little argument on whether or not that’s like a John Doe or not, but there were like 13 John Smiths in the county. So it might have legitimately been a John Smith. This warrant was handed to a young man who really wanted to be a police officer but wasn’t, and he wasn’t sworn in as a deputy sheriff, he was just giving it to him and said, go find him.

3 (17m 6s):
And he was smart enough to follow the fellow that bought the horse back to Arlington from Fort Worth and found Tom George and, and Mace, he arrested Tom tied him up, said he had a warrant for his arrest, but what he had was a warrant for John Smith, which he took a pen and wrote through and put Tom Alfred on it and started on their way. But Tom wanted to get his clothes. So Patrick went back to get his clothes and he and a friend of theirs, bill Idle came back and the kid jumped off and guns started firing and the young kid died. And so did their friend Bill Ile, Tom George and Mace got away, George got arrested, went to trial, was convicted of murder.

3 (17m 50s):
It went to the state appeals court and they overturned it basically because the warrant was wrong. The guy wasn’t a police officer. And if you try to arrest somebody and you don’t have the right rights to do that, that’s not arresting somebody that’s false imprisonment or kidnapping. And you have the right, especially in Texas to to rescue somebody who’s been falsely imprisoned. And if the level of violence raises to gunfight, you can get away with shooting somebody. And it was Bill LE’s Gun that shot the kid and the kid shot Bill Lyle Tom received a bullet wound in his back, but it’s unclear whether or not Mae shot his gun or not.

3 (18m 33s):
So the case went back to the courts and George was let off. That wasn’t the real problem. The real problem is the Alfreds came from Illinois and this is 1880 in Texas right after reconstruction. And all of the ex confederates that actually fought in the war were really in charge. The Marshall was ex Confederate, the sheriff was ex-con confederate, the judge was ex Confederate, the mayor was ex confederate. And when they started canvassing the area, even though the Alfreds would claim they were from Tennessee, which originally Robert Alfred was Word got out that they were from Illinois. And once that happened, that family, some of this came from Margaret, they couldn’t sell their goods, they couldn’t buy groceries, they couldn’t socialize, they couldn’t go to church.

3 (19m 24s):
So the girls all married off and changed their names. Elsie the mother took the youngest back to Tennessee where her family was and Patrick and George changed their name and moved to West Arkansas next to a town called Ultima Doula, which actually means the end of the world. And it literally is, there’s nothing there. And it’s on the border of Oklahoma Indian territory, kind of the perfect place to hide out and and start a new life.

Diana (19m 56s):
Wow, this is such an interesting story and I love the fact that you brought in that conflict between the ex-con Confederates and the ex union soldiers there in Texas because that was a real thing and it makes perfect sense that they would have to change their identity and become somebody different. I was just curious how many years this all took from the beginning of your dad ending up on that porch and, and you know, finding the, the family to where you are actually researching the court case.

3 (20m 33s):
So dad started looking for his father in 1982, but you know, research in 1982 is slow and and difficult. I mean if you want a death certificate, you basically had to call the court, find out how much it was, go get a registered check, put it in the mail, send it to ’em, let them look it up, mail it back to you. And it was three months before you would even hear anything. And either they would go, oh you know, we couldn’t find it, here’s your check back or here it is. So a lot of that documentary research in the early goings were really slow and meticulous that he didn’t just go to a database and search for it like you can today.

3 (21m 16s):
So, you know, dad’s got a lot of those original ones that came in the mail and now they’re all on ancestry, you know, he didn’t put ’em there. Yeah. So he ended up on Charles’ porch in 1998. So

Diana (21m 31s):
No, he did research for a long time trying to figure this out. Yeah, yeah.

3 (21m 36s):
Well you know the whole idea of the Alfred situation though, I mean he was up to 1998, he was just trying to find the Johnsons. Yeah. And then things started happening really fast once that happened, mostly because there was a small reunion in 2000 of all the Johnsons, they wanted to meet dad cuz he was bugging him on the phone. So they wanted to finally meet him face to face. But things started happening pretty fast once he started seeing the name Alfred and especially when he got the marriage license of Bell and reconciled that with the census record in McCuen County, Illinois of Robert Alfred in 1870.

Diana (22m 17s):
That was a key record and because he had done the research, he had something to, to put that together with. You know, he could do some correlation there.

3 (22m 26s):
Well it it, it made the interview with Margaret make so much more sense. Yeah. Cuz Margaret kind of filled in a lot of the holes. Now there’s a couple other things that were interesting. I mentioned that Rachel, Rebecca Wetters, Elsie j W’s daughter, there was a census record in 19 hundreds when that happened that Liz Elsie Jane in the house of the McFaddens as Janie Alfred because she was really Alfred because JW was Patrick Alfred and Rebecca was his sister.

Diana (23m 4s):
That Alfred name just kept popping up.

3 (23m 6s):
It certainly did.

Diana (23m 7s):
Could not ignore that. That’s

Nicole (23m 9s):
So amazing that all these little clues and the census records and things finally came together when your dad was able to interview a Margaret McFadden. Yes. How great that she had that information, just waiting to share that. Let

3 (23m 23s):
Me say something about that. That is great because her husband was in the military, so she had been all over the world with that cardboard box going from place to place, always keeping it. And here was the deal. She told them that she had promised her mother that she would never reveal to any of the Johnsons that they were Alfreds unless a Johnson came and specifically asked about the Alfred name.

Nicole (23m 50s):
Hmm huh Well now that your dad figured out the secret, did he feel obligated to share that with the rest of the Johnson family?

3 (23m 59s):
Yes. So we actually organized another reunion in 2002 and about that time Apple had like iMovie and that kind of thing where you could create DVDs and I was pretty good at creating presentations and stuff. So I created a presentation on iMovie that actually broke down the whole thing at this point. We had enough old pictures of the family that we were able to kind of put it together really nicely and tell the story. But I remember the day we presented that and dad and I were so nervous. I mean here we are really estranged from the Johnsons, right? And they have all their lives been told they were Johnson’s and never knew this story.

3 (24m 44s):
And from our perspective, it didn’t have the emotional impact that it was gonna have on them. And the more, the closer we got to that day of revealing it, the more worried we were. They were just gonna say, get back in your car and leave. And, and a couple of them didn’t believe it and still this to this day don’t. But most of them were like, this makes so much sense. And then they go to explain, you know, one day lc Jane and and her husband were visiting us, her husband said, you do know your last name’s not supposed to be Johnson. And she didn’t know what he was talking about. She said, what’s it supposed to be? And she remembered him saying Buford.

3 (25m 25s):
So there were all these little things that kind of came out after the, the reveal that connected the dots for the family and made Made a lot of sense.

Nicole (25m 36s):
Yeah. That one clue that didn’t make sense. All of a sudden with the full story people start to connect the dots.

3 (25m 41s):
That’s right.

Diana (25m 44s):
I think that’s so interesting and we are seeing that a lot with DNA now. We’re gonna talk about DNA in a bit with, with this case, but so many times people will say Yeah I just never felt like I was a Johnson for example. Right. You know, I didn’t look like anybody else. I didn’t fit in with them. So I think it’s a very interesting thing that sometimes there are these little questions.

3 (26m 6s):
I do want to throw this in before we we go on to dna. It was pretty impactful. The whole thing with me and the stories about Aunt Bell, she was pretty independent person and the things that went on that she did for the family and with the family, she was a family hero basically. My wife and I adopted twins out of Fort Worth of all places where, where the guys got in trouble. So I talked to my wife into naming their middle name after Susan. So one of ’em is Michaela Isabel Johnson and the other one’s McKenzie Susan Johnson.

Diana (26m 43s):
Oh that’s really neat.

3 (26m 45s):
Well, you know, kind of carrying on the tradition, if you look at the names of the Alfred family before the name change, the Johnsons have the same given names. Yeah,

Diana (26m 57s):
Those names were important. They had to keep something of their past. Yeah, since they couldn’t keep the surname, they kept their first names and middle names. That’s great. Well let’s take a break and do a word from our sponsor newspapers.com. Did your ancestor disappear from vital records? Maybe they moved or got married. newspapers.com can help you find them and tell their stories. Or have you ever had trouble figuring out how people tie into your family tree? Newspapers are filled with birth notices, marriage announcements and obituaries. Items like these are a great resource for determining family relationships on newspapers.com. You can explore more than 800 million newspaper pages from across the us, uk, Canada, and Beyond in just seconds.

Diana (27m 42s):
They’re easy to use. Search feature lets you filter your results by date, location, a specific paper and more. When you find something interesting, the newspapers.com clipping tool makes it a snap to share it with family and friends. You can even save it directly to your ancestry tree. For listeners of this podcast, newspapers.com is offering new subscribers, 20% off a publisher, extra subscription. So you can start exploring today, just use the code family locket at checkout. Well James, you wrote a book about this, not necessarily about the reveal, but about that gunfight and I love the looks of it.

Diana (28m 23s):
It is titled A Horse, a Gunfight and the Law, A Historical Account of Our Alfreds in Texas and it’s on Amazon. I love the cover, it just looks fascinating. So tell us a little bit more about the book.

3 (28m 38s):
So we had decided we were gonna write a book probably late two thousands and it was probably going to be more like the narrative I just gave, but another book came out called Written in Blood. And it was actually written by that historian from Fort Worth Police Department who, who was retired at the time. And he had a chapter called Deputy Marshall George White, who was the young man who arrested Tom and his narrative read a little more like Louis Lamore and really kind of made it sound like our guys got off on really light technicalities and something simple.

3 (29m 18s):
So we decided to actually tell that story in in more detail because we thought we owed it to the family to understand legally what had happened and how it happened. And we even consulted, there’s another fellow podcaster named Ken Wise, he’s a a sitting appellate court judge in Texas and he does wise about Texas where he talks about Texas history. So I got in touch with him and kind of told him a little bit of the story and asked him to review the case and tell me if he thought it was technical or not. And he goes, no, this is not technical. These are United States federal rights that everyone should have. So at that point we decided to tr really tell the story from the family all the way from where they started in Tennessee to where they ended up in Texas and what had happened and then what had happened afterwards.

3 (30m 10s):
And in that I had to do a lot of what you guys would call fan research where I went and looked at where they came from in east Tennessee and they moved to McCoon County before the Civil War. And I’m from Tennessee and I took Tennessee history and I was never taught some of this. East Tennessee was a a big unionist, antis, slave area. Actually a lot of the big abolitionists came out of east Tennessee in 1820s they got run out of there. But most of East Tennessee wanted to stay in the union and were not very pro-slavery. There were a lot of reasons for that. Most of it was economical because most of these farmers had to compete with free labor.

3 (30m 52s):
And before the war broke out all of the Alfreds and about three other families migrated to McCoup and county Illinois over a time period from 1845 to 1858 just before the war. And of the Alfreds, a lot of Patrick’s cousins, about four or five of ’em, five of ’em. And one of his uncles fought for the union in the war. And the Robert family lived there from 1858 to 18 75, 8 76. And I think that by then they thought the animosity and things like that would’ve been gone. And they had a cousin living in Arlington and Arlington was just starting up and they decided to pack up, move Robert’s whole family down to Arlington.

3 (31m 41s):
That’s where I was talking about earlier. I had to also find out the real animosity that was there that had continued from before the war, through the war and after the war. Anybody who lived in the south and lived through reconstruction felt like the government was just punishing them. They took it serious and there was a lot of retribution about that. So I, I thought, I felt like I needed to tell the story from historical perspective of those places because it really does put it more in perspective of what was happening. Did Tom steal a horse? I don’t know. I don’t think so.

3 (32m 21s):
Did he sell a stolen horse? Yes. Did the gunfight result in death? Yes. Was the death legally warranted? Well yeah, it was really, and truly what we’re looking at is really bad policing. If that kid would’ve gone and found, Tom went back to the sheriff and said, Tom’s right right there. Tom would’ve got arrested and had to deal with the stolen horse thing and those charges eventually got dropped cuz there was no evidence that Tom stole the horse. He even had a bill of sale for it. But because a gunfight broke out and because it was somebody that the town of Fort Worth knew and in fact the local paper labeled him as a Deputy Marshall, although there’s no records in the actual city records that he was, there was a lot of animosity toward the Alfreds and that rolled from Fort Worth right into Arlington.

3 (33m 10s):
And they had a really tough time as a family. Like I said, the girls had to marry out of that name Elsie, the Rob Robert’s wife moved back to Tennessee and in 1887 Robert Alfred was found with his head chopped off in an accident. His head,

Diana (33m 26s):
Oh my.

3 (33m 27s):
The newspapers report that it was some local Mexicans that he had hired that did this, but it’s the same Mexicans he had put to in front of the door to guard because he knew that his life was in danger. So dad and I speculate, I got no evidence of this whatsoever that that animosity continued on until Robert’s death.

Diana (33m 47s):
Well that makes sense. It took a long time for that to go away.

3 (33m 51s):
In many, many ways we’re still dealing with it. Yeah,

Diana (33m 53s):
Yeah. Back to your book, you decided to put this out on Amazon, which is such a great way to self-publish. You know, so much better than back in the day when you had to guarantee an payment to the publisher for 500 copies and then try to sell it to all your family. So

3 (34m 11s):
Yeah. And you end up with a, a closet full of books. So I didn’t write the book really to sell to the public by itself. It was really, I used it to distribute to the family. Now anybody could buy it, anybody could read it, think it’s worth a read, but that’s my personal opinion. We really used it to help distribute it to the family. And if you use K D P Amazon’s self-publishing and you do it right, you can do it without spinning a dime with Amazon. Cuz Amazon prints these books on demand. They’ll make money if you sell a hundred books, they’ll make money if you sell one. So if you’re willing to put the time in and upload the files and they pass, they don’t care if you sell it or not.

3 (34m 57s):
I mean they, they’re gonna spend a lot of time trying to get you to market it and they’re gonna spend a lot of time trying to sell you editors and and ghost writers and that kind of stuff. But if you know how to write a research paper and you know how to write your family story and you can put it in your words and you know, source your own things and your book doesn’t have to be 500 pages, it could be 30 pages and you can still get it published and be able to distribute it to your family.

Diana (35m 24s):
It really is a great thing. And it’s so easy for people to order and it gets delivered right to their house. You don’t have to do anything

3 (35m 32s):
And it gives the family something tangible. Right. You know, something to put on their shelf. And anybody in the future that wants to look back and see this, this is, this is why dad wanted to do it in a genealogical way, we’ve got everything sourced. You can go look at it, you can decide whether it’s the evidence is real or not, but we made it easy for whoever looks at it in the future to find out where we got it. All right.

Nicole (35m 55s):
That’s so great. I love that. You know, we used Amazon K DP to publish our books Research like a pro and research like a pro with dna. And I have often wondered maybe this could be used by other researchers, just like if you’ve done it. So thanks for sharing Yeah. How you distributed it to your family at little cost and just such a great easy way for people to find it and order it. So let’s dive into the DNA now. So what did you notice with the DNA evidence when you first started looking at that?

3 (36m 25s):
Before we asked for professional help with Diana and Michelle dad had submitted to Family Tree, his Y D N A and he did fall into the haplo groups of mini Alfred’s, including one Jack Alfred who turned out to be the grandson of Robert Alford. Patrick Alfred’s brother. I know there’s a lot of Roberts, but that’s in Patrick’s generation. When we got the advice from Diana to use autosomal d n a, it was a game changer because we could take that and look at through lines on Ancestry and we were connected to a lot more Alfred’s, many of them connected to Robert Alfred’s brothers.

3 (37m 5s):
Many of them connected to Robert Alfred’s father and some of them connected to Robert Alfred’s father’s father. So that really solidified a name change.

Nicole (37m 16s):
Wonderful. It’s so great to hear that all of the documentary evidence lined up perfectly with what you saw in the Y D N A and autosomal D N A and how you were able to piece that all together. What did you feel the need for hiring a professional genealogist do?

3 (37m 33s):
Yeah, that’s a good question. You know, dad and I have tossed around the idea of getting credentialed, but I kind of have a job and a family and things to do and I don’t wanna ruin a good hobby by trying to do it for a living. But having a professional to overlook your work and give kind of a stamp of approval goes a long way. And the reason it does is it’s not just me and my dad saying these things anymore. We’ve actually had people that are trained to look at it, agree with the research, and then you can use that professional stamp of approval to join, you know, social groups like the Sons of Union veterans.

3 (38m 14s):
You know, those guys ask you to show their DNA line and you either have to have a lineage of father that had fought in the union or you would have to have your father’s brother or his wife’s brother fight in the war to join. And as it stood, now I’m a Johnson and then if you go back my line, it’ll stop at James William Johnson who came onto the map in 1885. And there’s nothing before that, you know, and that’s where Patrick Alfred stopped being on any documentation. So it’s very difficult to go to those groups and say, yeah, there was a name change here without somebody else saying, yep, there was a name change here.

3 (38m 55s):
So it’s very helpful and it also helps the family finally come to grips with that. There was a name change and as I said earlier, dad and I being estranged from the Johnsons, we were emotionally disconnected from that. It could have been any name for us, but it was the name that they knew all their lives and and were told that their parents and grandparents and their parents were Johnson’s. So having a professional look at it and put a stamp of approval on it really made it much better for a lot of the family.

Diana (39m 28s):
Yeah, and I remember when I first talked to you and your dad, it was so fun to hear this story and I was excited about, you know, working with one of our researchers, Michelle, on this, and it was such a fun project that I actually asked her to write a series of blog posts kind of showing how she did it. And so, you know, listeners, you can go read those blog posts about her process of taking this great story and you can imagine kind of the challenge of taking these years of research and adding DNA to it and then having to put that into a report that anyone could read and have all the source citations and have everything in an organized format.

Diana (40m 9s):
So it’s really neat just to think back on this project. I loved it and it was fun working with you and your dad and Michelle in doing this. And we are going to have Michelle on and a podcast coming up where she’s going to talk about how she put all of your research into a good form so it could be shared and you could use it. So

3 (40m 28s):
It was a really nice report. We were super excited.

Diana (40m 31s):
Yeah. And we’ll share that with our readers and listeners if you want to go find that. So thank you so much James for coming on and telling your story. I never get tired of this story because you know, I have some of those Texas ancestors too, and Arkansas ancestors and Tennessee ancestors and we actually have a gunfight in our history and you know, so, so we really relate to all of this. I don’t have the name change thing, but it’s just been such a pleasure working with you and your dad and doing this project with you and really learning more about your family. So thank you so much for coming on and telling your story.

3 (41m 8s):
Well thank you Diane. Thank you Nicole. And we really appreciate all the work you guys put in in the research.

Diana (41m 14s):
Well that is what we do and we love doing that. So thanks for being such amazing clients.

3 (41m 19s):
Thanks for having me.

Diana (41m 20s):
Well, thanks everyone for listening and we’re excited to talk to you next time. So have a good week everyone. Bye-Bye

Nicole (41m 27s):
Bye. 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 book sellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at family lock.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@familylocke.com slash newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each of you and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to research like a pro.