RLP 257: Alford/Johnson Project – Interview with Michelle Mickelson Part 1

Nicole (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 257, the Alfred Johnson Project Interview with Michelle Mickelson Part one 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 at FamilyLocket it.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.

Nicole (42s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by newspapers.com breakdown Genealogy Brick Walls with a subscription to the largest online newspaper archive. Hi, everyone. Welcome to research. Like a Pro.

Diana (55s):
Hi Nicole. How, are you doing

Nicole (58s):
Great and you?

Diana (59s):
I am doing well. What have you been working on or reading?

Nicole (1m 3s):
Well, I have to tell you that I’ve been trying to consolidate my timelines for the Dire project and I’ve done so many projects on them in the past that it’s been kind of one of those things that I didn’t want to do. It just didn’t feel like it. So finally I made myself find my most recent timeline and it was in Google Sheets and then I had to follow the advice I always give to other people when they want to take research that they had previously done and put it into Airtable, which was to make the same columns in Airtable in the same order as where you’re copying it from So. I kind of adjusted the Airtable template in the timeline table so that all the columns were in the same order as my Google sheets.

Nicole (1m 46s):
And once I had that ready, then I could just go ahead and select all of the stuff that I wanted to copy over and paste it into Airtable. And it was pretty seamless. It was great.

Diana (1m 56s):
That’s great. Did you add some fields like the person, some of the things that we didn’t have in Google Sheets or the fans column?

Nicole (2m 4s):
So that stuff was still an Airtable, but it was just blank. And so after I pasted in all the stuff, I went through and added John Robert Dyer as the person for everything, right?

Diana (2m 13s):
Yeah.

Nicole (2m 14s):
Just kind of filled it down. And then I had in a lot of events for his children, like his children’s births and marriages and a couple of their deaths. So on those events I added another person to that row a record. Then for the event type, I had to fix all of those because they were like longer and more specific. And in Airtable I have it as a dropdown list of more generic things. So instead of Birth of Child Augustus’s Washington Dyer, I had to change it to Birth of Child. So that was pretty easy to do. And once I had fixed a couple things, added all the people, then it was ready to go. I don’t know why I waited. It wasn’t hard. It only took like 20 minutes. So

Diana (2m 53s):
I know you’ve got an Airtable and you can do all your fun analysis with it. It just makes it so much easier once you have it there, doesn’t it?

Nicole (3m 1s):
Yeah. and I had found a lot of people from the fan club in that research project when I made that timeline and So I pulled up the report and I just started adding in some of the fan club people that I had found because I hadn’t tracked them very well in Google Sheets. And Airtable makes it so much easier to track the fan club. And that was fun too.

Diana (3m 23s):
That is exciting. Such a good feeling. I did the same thing with my Royston project, added a ton of rows from my research log to my Airtable base. I think I had 150 and you probably had as many or more than that. If you’ve been doing several different projects, So, it might seem like it’s duplicating your work to do that, but when you can just copy and paste and do a little bit of adjusting, it’s really great.

Nicole (3m 48s):
Yeah, it was really nice and it, it wasn’t as many bros as yours, it was just a timeline of John Robert Dyer’s life, which we don’t have that many things from. We do have some, but maybe like 60 records or rows. And what the next step I think will be is to put in timelines for all these other possible relatives that I’ve found through D N A and I’m trying to link them all together to a common ancestor So. I’m trying to decide how I want to do that, but I’ll probably just use different views. An Airtable to have different views of the timeline for these different people.

Diana (4m 22s):
Yes. That was going to be my next question. Would you create a whole new timeline table or just put it all in one and then use the views So

Nicole (4m 31s):
I, think the views. I think that’s the answer that I like the most.

Diana (4m 35s):
I do too. Because then you don’t have so many different tables cluttering it up and it’s just so easy. They’re all in one place. I’m loving the views. Me too. That’s been so, so brilliant.

Nicole (4m 47s):
Well, let’s talk about our announcements really quickly. If you’re wondering how to use Airtable, we do have an Airtable quick reference guide for genealogy research Logs that teaches you how to do that. It’s available on our website for $10 as a P D F download, and we have our Research Like, a Pro Webinar series for 2023 with monthly case studies. We’d love to have you join us there. You can watch the recordings of the previous months and join us for the live Zoom calls for the future months. We are coming up quickly on our next study group. The Research Like a Pro study Group begins this fall August 30th and goes until November 8th. And registration for that is ongoing. And if you’d like to have complimentary registration, you can join us as a peer group leader and just apply on our website and make sure you join our newsletter if you’re a new listener so that you can receive our monthly Monday email that has notifications of new content and any sales or coupons.

Diana (5m 45s):
Well, we are excited today to have a guest on our podcast and we want to welcome Michelle Mickelson. Hi Michelle.

3 (5m 52s):
Hello Diana. Hello Nicole

Diana (5m 55s):
Michelle is one of our FamilyLocket Genealogists researchers and so we get to work with her all the time and we’re excited to have her on today talking about the research that she did on the Alfred Johnson Research Project. So on the previous episode, episode 2 56, we did an interview with James Johnson and he told us all about how his father and he had discovered this family secret that instead of being Johnson’s, they really were Alfred’s and there was the situation in Texas that caused them to change their name. and they did so many interviews with family, did a lot of research and they had DNA tests that showed this Alfred connection, but they wanted it written up and researched professionally.

Diana (6m 43s):
So they came to me and I had Michelle work on this project and she has such great strategies for how to tackle something that was a pretty big, you know, a name change is a pretty big deal and you wanna make sure you get it right. and they wanted a source sided report and the professional stamp of approval on their research and So. it was really fun to work with Michelle and the Johnson’s on putting this together. So we’re excited to have you here Michelle to talk all about how you did this.

3 (7m 16s):
I’m excited. It was such a fun project, a lot of information to take in. I felt like my part was to analyze the evidence that they presented and correlate the facts to prove the conclusion. It is a fun project.

Diana (7m 32s):
Yeah. And sometimes, well, a lot of the time our research projects are breaking down brick walls or trying to figure something out, So it. Sometimes it’s fun to have a project like this where you are working with existing evidence and then just putting it all together. But you did plenty of extra research as well. So, we’ll, we’ll be talking about that. We’re actually going to go through each of these steps and Michelle has written a blog post. She’s written a three part series, so you can go read all about it, see some fun pictures that the Johnson’s provided for us of the family, and get more details in the blog.

Nicole (8m 7s):
That’ll be wonderful. So let’s start at the beginning with the objective of the research project. Can you tell us about that?

3 (8m 15s):
Yes. So the objective I wrote was using DNA and documentary evidence rite, a family narrative, proving James William Johnson was born, Patrick Alfred. James was born on 20th of July, 1860 in Palmyra, MCCN County, Illinois, and died in 1934 in Westline, severe county Arkansas. James married first Sarah Jane Duncan on 10 September, 1885 in Caruthersville, Penasco Missouri. Then he married Dempsey, Tennessee Clark on the 2nd of March, 1899 into Queens severe Arkansas.

3 (9m 0s):
Lastly, he married Rosa Ellen Ayers. He was born Patrick Alfred to parents Robert f Alfred and Elsie or Elsa Evans. I went ahead and I’ll use the name Allison because that was in most of the records that I read. So

Nicole (9m 19s):
Yeah, that’s an interesting name. Elsa.

3 (9m 22s):
Yeah, and it was passed on to a lot of the children in different forms, but I just think, you know, the way we have accents or we speak in different parts of our own country can come across as a different spelling. So

Nicole (9m 36s):
It,

3 (9m 36s):
It is a pretty name

Nicole (9m 38s):
Agreed. That really comes into play I think when pe, especially when people move from one part of the country to another and someone else is trying to spell their name based on how they pronounce it and

3 (9m 48s):
Right.

Nicole (9m 49s):
Comes up differently every time.

3 (9m 51s):
That could be interesting.

Nicole (9m 52s):
Well great. That is a great objective and it’s helpful to hear kind of all the different players and places and dates and we can see there’s some immigration going on and some normal types of immigration patterns for this time period of people moving west and going into new areas. I like how you had put in your objective that you were going to use D n A and documentary evidence and that you’re working on a specific hypothesis that you’re trying to prove this idea that James William Johnson was born Patrick Alfred. So that really makes it clear right away. And then the identifying information that, you know, we have this James William Johnson with all this birth and marriage information.

Nicole (10m 33s):
Then we have Patrick Alfred who was the son of certain parents and trying to put those two identities together.

3 (10m 39s):
Yeah, there was a lot of information that had been collected by the Johnsons, which was so wonderful to be able to bring all that together and put it in a way to prove this case.

Diana (10m 51s):
Well, with getting this large amount of information, you had to have some kind of a strategy. And so what did you decide to use to correlate and analyze all this evidence that you were provided with?

3 (11m 5s):
Well, I first wanted to establish the identities of Patrick Alfred and James Johnson. Originally, there was only one document that had his name, there was nothing else. And so to be able to prove a relationship without documentation was a bit of a challenge. But I find that when I name parents, spouses and children, it helps me distinguish one individual for another. So specifically for this case, I had to determine that the person named Patrick Alfred, who was born on the 20th of July, 1860 in Palmyra, Illinois, was the same person as James William Johnson who said he was born on the same day, the 20th of July, 1860 in Tennessee and then died 1934 in Westline Arkansas.

3 (12m 3s):
So there was some conflicting information between the two records, but that’s what had to be worked out in the writing. I

Diana (12m 10s):
Think it’s so interesting that they had the exact same birth date. I mean, you know, if it’s the same individual, you maybe would think that when they changed their identity that they would change their birth information. Right. But you know, this was pre-internet age where people can track things down, So it easily, and they probably never thought that anybody would try to connect the thoughts there. So that’s very cool that there was that exact birthday.

3 (12m 36s):
It helped a lot in the comparison and the analysis of the records because he was pretty consistent in the early census records and then in the later death records. And he did not vary from that which, which made it really nice.

Diana (12m 53s):
So what was the one record that you had for him for Patrick?

3 (12m 56s):
I had one piece of evidence for Patrick, it was his name in an 1870 census. So this was an original source. It had primary information most likely given by a parent. There was just the family living in the household and it indirectly answered the question of who Patrick’s parents and siblings were because there were no relationships mentioned in 1870. But that means that it would’ve had to be combined with other records to prove Patrick’s identity. So I determined that in 1870, the person who provided the information would’ve had no reason to misreport the details.

3 (13m 42s):
So as Genealogists, we have to work under certain basic and fundamental assumptions. So I proceeded under those assumptions to test these theories, and so that helped bring that together.

Diana (13m 56s):
Right? We don’t automatically assume something’s wrong unless we run into a conflict and then we start looking at it more carefully. But we always do keep it in the back of our mind. Okay, what could have been happening in the census? So I. Think that’s Really. good point. That in 1870 there would be no reason for them to have changed anything there. How old was he in 1870? Let’s see. If he was born in 1860, he would’ve been 10. Yeah, he

3 (14m 19s):
Showed up as nine or 10 in the the census. And so what I found was that in step two of the Research Like a Pro process, we analyze our Sources. So in gathering all of the Sources that the Johnsons had found, I created a timeline and I checked the dates. Then I analyzed the information. So there was an 1860 census and there was an 1880 census. I was able to analyze the family names, the birth locations, and I was able to show that within reason, this was a family that logically fit together.

3 (15m 2s):
You know, names checked out, locations checked out, it flowed in just comparing those three Sources in

Diana (15m 10s):
The blog post, you put an image of the table you created with the family in 18 60, 18 70, and 1880. and I think that is a wonderful way of comparing family groups to, to make sure that you’ve got the same family and looks like consistently. You’ve got Robert Alfred head of household and then Sie as the wife. And then you’ve got all these different children and on that span, you know, you have the older children in 1860, but then you’ve got younger children that have been added in later years and you just have people that drop off because either they moved out or they got married. So it’s so great to see that table and I think that probably really helped you in putting together all the pieces of the puzzle

3 (15m 54s):
It did. And something that was fun. So because of that July birthday, Patrick was not able to be included in the 1860 census. And it was interesting because as I looked at a neighbor, his brother George, who’s there in 1860, was actually in another family, but his name was there, his birth was there. and I, you know, without going in and, and knowing who the family was, they had to have been somehow traveling together or it could have been a sibling where he was in that household. But we were able to piece together and which makes sense, I mean for those of us who’ve had children, how nice to have a younger sibling, a toddler have a buddy to play with.

3 (16m 39s):
And in that household, there was a, a young child that George could have played with, but I thought it was interesting that they

Diana (16m 46s):
I agree

3 (16m 46s):
Named him in there.

Diana (16m 47s):
Well, and it makes you wonder cuz there were the two children looking at this table. There was a six-year-old, a four-year-old, and then George was three. And maybe for a time Elsie was ill, you know, and maybe she just couldn’t take care of two young toddlers. And so he went to live with, who knows, maybe it was her sister or Yeah, you just, you don’t know. I mean that wasn’t obviously your objective to research that, but I think that’s a Really good lesson for all of us to always look at the neighbors and see who we are all connected to here because the neighborhoods often are very, very connected. So that was really great that you realized that and put that together.

3 (17m 27s):
That was the fun part of going through the migration. You see the family move together and the Johnsons did a really great job in their book of piecing these families together, following them in the census, following them through the Civil War. And so by reading certain chapters I was able to really get a good sense of, of who this family was and their closeness and their events and, and how they, they traveled together. So,

Diana (17m 53s):
So you not only had records that the Johnsons gave you, but you also had the book that they had written that you could use to go through, which is kind of unusual having all an entire book.

3 (18m 3s):
Yeah. Though, in addition to the reports they had written, that took a good bulk of that step of analyzing Sources. So Right,

Diana (18m 11s):
Right.

3 (18m 11s):
There was lots to draw from.

Diana (18m 14s):
And for our listeners, the title of that book is PORs A Gunfight And The Law, A Historical Account of Our Alfords in Texas. And that is on Amazon. If you’re interested after hearing these blog posts and wanna check that out, that is there.

Nicole (18m 29s):
So as you were reading this book and kind of seeing the next part of Patrick’s family’s life, what did you notice about kind of their migration patterns and, and where they were going over time? So

3 (18m 40s):
By tracking the patterns of migration through the births of the children, I was able to see a tie to Tennessee where the parents were born in Tennessee. Studying the migration patterns helped familiarize myself with Patrick’s extended family. and I noticed that those migration patterns correlated with the census information of the Alfred family in, in the table. So they covered multiple locations over several states. and I also learned from the book that they migrated in stages over time. So the older married siblings would go establish themselves and then as the younger siblings married, they would come.

3 (19m 25s):
And then eventually the parents came with the, the younger group. And it was interesting to, to learn about that. So Patrick’s parents and maternal grandparents originated from Tennessee. So his father was the youngest Alfred sibling and his mother Elsie was the oldest of her Evans siblings. So, so knowing who the siblings were really helped as they migrated, cuz Robert and Elsie passed along the names of their siblings to their children, So, I felt like these were important details to diagram, particularly that Elsie had a father and a brother named Patrick.

3 (20m 7s):
So knowing who their siblings were, knowing where they migrated, you can start to see patterns in names and that’s a common thing in families that provides the indirect evidence of relationships. I also found that Tennessee origins became a really important clue that connected Patrick to James cuz it, it will come full circle as we cover these different areas. So once I had an understanding of who Patrick was, I shifted my focus to then discovering and identifying exactly who James Johnson was. So, it was just a rinse and repeat process.

Nicole (20m 49s):
Oh, wonderful. And that makes perfect sense for your strategy to fully identify Patrick his family and I love that you really worked on the, the other relatives like the extended family and the siblings of Patrick’s parents because like you said, that’s so key for providing indirect evidence of relationship, especially if they migrated together. So we have a little foreshadowing there that you mentioned something might be coming in the Texas area that’s gonna help us with that. So it’s cool to see the clues kind of coming together as you switch over from Patrick Alfred to seeing if any of those clues carry over to the identity of James Johnson.

3 (21m 27s):
Right. So I followed the same strategy for James that I did for Patrick by naming his parents, his spouses and children so that I could distinguish one James from another. So we know that James married three spouses and had 11 children. So James’ paper trail began after 1880. So in 1885 he married his first wife, Sarah Jane Anderson in Illinois and they had four children and all of their children were born in De Queen Arkansas. So they had Charles Parker, Murray, California, Ida Pearl, and Elsie Jane.

3 (22m 14s):
And then in 1898 Sarah Jane died in childbirth with Elsie Jane. And we all know that that period of research between 1880 and 1900 requires lots of creativity and substitute census records. So with no census records available in 1890 to search for the Johnson couple and Sarah Jane’s death before 1900 cemetery gravestones can serve as evidence. So Sarah Jane’s gravestone directly stated her relationship as the wife of James Johnson’s and those details lined up with the the 1885 marriage record.

3 (23m 5s):
So James buried Sarah next to their daughter Ida Pearl, who died the year before in 1897. And Sarah’s burial next to Ida Pearl, as well as the details on Ida Pearl’s stone provide evidence of that parent-child relationship. Then in the 1900 census in Queen James was listed with his two sons, Charles and Murray, but there was no Elsie Jane and she would’ve been old enough to be included. So this was negative evidence that was useful to validate the family story that Elsie Jane was wetters by a woman named Becky.

3 (23m 52s):
This was a story that the Johnsons had heard repeated several times during the interviews and so that kind of got them onto this Becky mc faded. And so to take the family lore and to compare it to details in the records, I thought this was a really cool way that this lined up.

Diana (24m 9s):
So I. Just have one question. So he was married to Sarah in Illinois. Was there a marriage record for them or was that just taken from other records?

3 (24m 18s):
There was a marriage record for them and it said right on the record they were married in her brother’s backyard.

Diana (24m 27s):
So was it under the name of Patrick Alfred or James Johnson? Oh no, it

3 (24m 31s):
Was, it did say James Johnson. And so that was the interesting thing about following Patrick and James is that before 1880, James Johnson was not mentioned and after 1880 there was no Patrick mentioned. So that was, and we’ll talk about that later on in the process, but just in establishing the two identities I wanted to say, okay, here’s what we know about Patrick, here’s what we know about James, and then we’ll we’ll go in and compare and analyze

Diana (25m 8s):
So. it really, there’s a lot of negative evidence. No James Johnson before 1880, no Patrick Alfred after 1880, you know, just the complete absence of records or any records before. That’s a Really good example of bringing it all together and having negative evidence to prove that identity change. So that’s great. You know, one thing that we haven’t talked about and I just wanted to make sure that you mentioned is how you did your spreadsheet because I thought that was such a great way to do it. Oh yes. And you write about that in the blog post and we share a link to that. So just briefly tell us, you know, the strategy of tracking all these people.

3 (25m 50s):
Right. So I took a class, it was Sleep Virtual Academy in the fall of 2019 and Melissa Henningfield taught us, she had us go through and as we researched a particular family and looked at a record, we would add the people named in the record to this spreadsheet. So the way I set up my fan club spreadsheet, I just did a Google sheet, but the thing that’s so helpful is you take each record and it becomes the title of the column. And when those records are placed in chronological order, it becomes a timeline, which is what I did.

3 (26m 32s):
I took all these records that the Johnsons had found and began putting them in this spreadsheet. The beauty of this format comes in how the names are then placed. So one name gets one row on the spreadsheet and So I took, for example, the 1870 census that had Patrick and I put, you know, all the family’s names. Then I added a row before and did the 1860 census and then 1870 and on as I found records for James. And that’s what helped me see how these names just lined up in the part one of the blog.

3 (27m 17s):
I covered Patrick’s information and then James’ information and then in part two I’ll go and add siblings. And that’s where it really became interesting. So I added a link to that fan chart in the blog so that you can go see, copy and paste it and use it however makes sense to your brain. You often teach that Diana, which I love. And, and so Melissa did that and I just went and added color as as the chart group cuz it, it did get pretty big. But it’s a tool that you can use right now for your brick wall ancestor. Just open up a sheet, get that first record in there and you can start today with that, with that step.

Diana (28m 3s):
Well I love that and as you were talking and I, I opened it up and I’m looking at it, I could see so many applications, you know, if you’re trying to track a man and you’ve got several candidates for him in another location, just people of the same name, something like this would help you to start making the connections and seeing how things add up or don’t add up. So I, I love that. so thanks for sharing that example and teaching us that little trick in this blog post.

3 (28m 32s):
And Melinda told us you can make this as simple or as complicated. She wanted us to keep it simple. So I chose to do that in this particular project, but you can add as much or as little as you want. But the idea is really to, to keep it simple so you can just make the connections.

Nicole (28m 50s):
That’s so wonderful. I once made a, a table like that in a report where I wanted to show just put X’s for different fan club members in the columns but on the records that they appeared in and it just kind of showed a pattern of these same guys always appearing near the research subject. So it. It’s a great way to do it. I’ll

3 (29m 8s):
Bet there’s a cool thing that you could put an Airtable for this Nicole, right?

Nicole (29m 13s):
I know, I have to think about that. How could we do this in Airtable the

3 (29m 17s):
Next

Nicole (29m 17s):
So I question.

3 (29m 20s):
Well, even the fan club I haven’t quite worked with in Airtable, but this just, I’m sure there’s some way that that that this could be implemented. So we’ll have to

Nicole (29m 29s):
I a look at that I agree. Well let’s take a minute and hear from our sponsors 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. Their easy to use search feature lets you filter your results by date, location, a specific paper and more.

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Diana (30m 37s):
Michelle that 1900 census that you were just discussing, where James and his first wife Sarah had four children, she had died by 1900, Sarah had died. And you knew that from the gravestone because that listed her death date as 1898, but only James, Charles and Murray were listed. Is that right? Just the dad and the two boys on the census. But but tell us more about that census in the family. What was going on in 1900 with the family?

3 (31m 11s):
Right. So back in 1900 bottles were not available for babies. And so a common thing that mothers and fathers would do is give the infant to a mother who already had an infant who was nursing. And so she would take on the feeding responsibilities for both children and the body’s so amazing how it can accommodate two children like that. But with Janie missing from that household in 1900, the Johnsons went looking for her. And with that Becky McFadden name coming up, they found her in the McFadden household listed as a niece to the head of household.

3 (32m 0s):
Lee had a wife, Becky and one year old Janie Alfred was listed in that household. So I analyzed the information about Janie in 1900 with points of comparison found in other records. So for example, her birth month and year in the 1900 census lined up with Sarah Jane’s death on her gravestone and that supported the circumstances that might have placed Janie in Texas with the McFaddens Janie’s father’s birth place. Also lined up with Patrick’s Illinois birth shown in the 1870s census.

3 (32m 44s):
So by comparing points of information in the 1900 census with with other records, they correlate and they combine to prove these points. Other clues about Becky McFadden also lined up with known information about Rachel. Rebecca Alfred, she was Patrick’s younger sister by two years, her April birth in 1962, Illinois lined up with the, again, the 1870 census and she had been married for 21 years. This was, this was consistent with records found for Becky that she lived in a household with Lee McFadden in 1880, but she was missing from the Alfred household in 1880.

3 (33m 32s):
So when we looked at the census table with all the siblings, there were two s, I think it was Patrick and Rachel, they were the two that were missing in 1860 and 1880 and So, it all corresponded, it’s that negative evidence we talk about that It is just so useful. All these things came together to support the family story. Right.

Diana (33m 55s):
So the Johnsons discovered this through their interviews, this connection to Becky, you know, she was Rachel Rebecca, but she went by Becky. So that was the clue that sent him to looking at the censuses and finding Janie in this household where she was being wet nursed by her aunt. So that was a great connection. and I love how in the census she is named Janie Alfred and she’s here with Lee and and Becky McFadden.

3 (34m 20s):
It just makes sense that Lee McFadden married Becky when she was in Alfred and this is Becky’s brother that’s bringing this child. And so things just, you know, when you start to use logic and reason in what people were thinking when they gave information again at this time there was no reason to misreport information. So I think he just kind of slipped and thought, oh yeah, it’s an Alfred. And again, no internet to fact check. Right,

Diana (34m 54s):
Right.

3 (34m 54s):
So that’s

Nicole (34m 55s):
A great connection between the two identities. So tell us what happened with the second wife.

3 (35m 3s):
Seriously, Nicole, this was such a fun story to read because James, he got Janie off to Becky and then he had these two young boys and the equivalent of a marriage proposal in Arkansas was just going up to your neighbor’s door and asking if, you know, I, I need a wife for these two children, can I marry your daughter? My dad was not in favor, but the daughter was listening. Dempsey Dempsey was right inside the house and she heard the conversation and she came right out and said, yep, I wanna marry him. And what a darling girl. I mean I just love the picture of her that will be in this part two of the series.

3 (35m 46s):
But the picture of her with those children and and how she stepped in and took those two boys. And so James and Dempsey married in 1899 and they had six children before Dempsey died in a wagon accident. She was taking lunch to James and the wagon hit a tree stump and she passed away from her injuries. And so just a lot of sad things going on. So in the 1910 census, all the children were listed except for Poy, which is an unusual name and one that was easy to follow.

3 (36m 27s):
They all lived with James and Dempsey. And then those details lined up with previously known information. For example, the second marriage for James, the first marriage for Dempsey. And in there Elsie Jane was listed as Janie Johnson. So she was back in the household as James’ daughter and So I noticed the likeness in the name and the age between Janie Johnson in this 1910 census and Janie Alfred in the 1900 Mick Fadden household, her birth state, you know, all those little details just just add up.

3 (37m 7s):
Another interesting piece was the mother’s birthplace for Charlie Murray. And Janie was different than the younger Johnson children. So this showed consistency with having a different biological mother. You know, that the mothers were born in different states. And so this supported Sarah Jane’s death and a second marriage for James. And the local newspaper reported Dempsey’s death, which supported her absence then in the 1920 Johnson household, cuz there were not a lot of records at this time. And so substitute records such as newspapers and cemeteries were, were helpful. And then in that 1920 census, POY was listed as the youngest Johnson family member.

3 (37m 53s):
So I think by that time the older children were capable of helping James with farm work and taking care of the children. And so James didn’t marry right away.

Nicole (38m 5s):
Well it’s sad that she died from a wagon accident, but yeah, I can imagine having older children to help out. He probably wasn’t in need of a new wife as urgently.

Diana (38m 17s):
One of the things I think so interesting in looking at the little snippet of the 1910 census is that the older children from his first wife are listed after all the children that he had with Dempsey, which is super interesting.

3 (38m 33s):
That was interesting too

Diana (38m 34s):
Because sometimes you’ll see that when they’re borders or they’re maybe the wife’s children, but he’s the head of household, so they’re all named, you know, daughter, son, daughter, son. There’s no difference there. But the those three are grouped at the end.

3 (38m 47s):
Huh? and I hypothesized that maybe Dempsey was giving the information. I, I don’t know. I don’t,

Diana (38m 54s):
She could’ve done Interesting. Yeah and she gives his birthplace as Tennessee all the way through. So there’s a Tennessee connection there too.

3 (39m 4s):
Yes. And that will come into play because that’s one of the bits of conflicting information between Patrick and James as their birth state. But I think with the whole identity changed, even though he didn’t change his birthday, he did claim to have been born in Tennessee. So, oh, whether he forgot I, I don’t know,

Nicole (39m 27s):
Maybe it was not as bad to be born in Tennessee if you’re living in the south because if you’re born in Illinois you’re pretty much a Northerner. But if you’re born in the South, then maybe other southerners will accept you as one of them better.

3 (39m 39s):
And that is so true Nicole. That is one of the things that when we go into locality research and learning about that time that they were in Texas, oh boy, that was a huge differentiator between the people in the north and the people in the south. And so yeah, I think you’re exactly right. It was more acceptable to be from a southern state in Tennessee than a northern state such as Illinois. Cuz those tensions just continued. They didn’t go away

Diana (40m 10s):
All the way to 1910. Interesting. Well let’s finish up this episode of talking about the third wife because James does have a third wife.

3 (40m 19s):
He did. So one thing I thought was interesting, this Rosa Ayers, he did marry her and they had one child, Rosa was actually, she would come in and and help with the children. Sh they were not married, Rosa was married at the time. She would come in and help probably take the younger kids during the day while the older children went to school. Because remember Pompy was just a couple years old. She would just bring her children and help out and, and then eventually her husband ended up divorcing her because she was always with this other family and, but you can see there was quite a bit of time that had passed between those, the death of Dempsey and the marriage of Rosa So I.

3 (41m 6s):
Think that just kind of came later. But it’s just interesting how all these things came together. They were not married very long, just under 10 years. So that helped give me clear understanding of who James Johnson was. He had been identified by his three spouses, his 11 children, his birth month and year, his locations in Illinois and Arkansas and his birth in Tennessee. So the second part of my strategy remember is I had to determine that the person named Patrick Alfred who was born on the 20th of July, 1860 in Palmyra, Mike Cope County, Illinois, was the same person as James William Johnson who said he was born July 20th, 1816 Tennessee and then died in 1934 in Westline Fair County Arkansas.

3 (41m 60s):
So with this information I can now compare the details in other records of another individual to determine whether they pertained to James William Johnson. So with Patrick I had one piece of evidence with James. I had several pieces of evidence that contained some conflicting information we’ve kind of touched on throughout the podcast. But even with James, these were all original Sources primary information. They included both direct and indirect evidence that answered the question of relationship. So for example, James’s death record said he was born in Tennessee, which matched the the census.

3 (42m 42s):
But Patrick was born in Illinois. So I had to prove how could this be the same individual? So conflicting information has to be addressed and resolved to satisfy the Genealogical proof standard, which is why I was writing this paper, So I determined that the difference between the records made for Patrick before 1880 and those made for James after 1880 had to do with timing and intent in reporting those details. So before 1880, no one had reason to misreport the details and after 1880 everyone had good reason to misreport.

3 (43m 25s):
They were protecting their brother, they were protecting their husband, their son, and So I wasn’t sure if Rosa when she gave the details in the death certificate if she knew about James’s story. I assume she did, but we just don’t know cuz she did report James’ father as Robert Johnson. His name was Robert, but it was Alfred So. you did James take this secret to the Grave. We don’t know, but that’s what we’ll find out in the next podcast. We’ll have

Diana (43m 56s):
A little leap with a little bit of a teaser then

Nicole (43m 58s):
Well Thank you so much Michelle for walking us through the two identities that we’re trying to prove are one man, it’s really great to really dive into the records and to talk about the types of evidence that we have and the conflicts and and the gps, the Genealogical proof standards. So there’s a lot involved in writing this up. So this is such a good preview to how it unfolded in the paper that you wrote.

3 (44m 24s):
Well, Thank you for having me, it’s been a a pleasure to talk about this fun project and go through the different ways that it could be tackled. So Thank you for having me.

Nicole (44m 35s):
All right. Thanks everybody for listening and we will talk to you again next week. Bye-bye.

3 (44m 41s):
Bye. Bye-Bye.

Nicole (44m 42s):
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