RLP 365: Thomas B. Royston’s Land and Headstone in Chambers County, Alabama

Nicole (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 365, Thomas B Royston’s Land in Headstone in Chambers County, Alabama. 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 (40s):
Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. How are you doing? And Hi Mom, how are you?

Diana (47s):
Hi Nicole. I’m doing well. How about yourself?

Nicole (51s):
I’m doing great. I’ve just been playing with Claude AI Deep Research, which is a new feature as of last month. When this comes out it’s July and this came out in June of 2025. But we’ve always been waiting for Claude to come out with the deep research feature similar to ChatGPT and Gemini and Perplexity. So it’s finally here, it’s just called Research. So it’s not called Deep Research like the others, but you have to have the web searching feature toggled on and then you can ask for the AI tool to go and search the web and write a report on a certain topic.

Nicole (1m 36s):
So the one that I tested it out with was Women’s Legal Status in Colonial South Carolina, because we were just talking about the book that you’re reading about that, what’s it called again?

Diana (1m 48s):
Women and the Law of Property in Early America by Marilyn Salmon. And she does use South Carolina as one of her examples.

Nicole (1m 58s):
Yeah, it’d be interesting to kind of review the section in the book about South Carolina and then review this deep research report and see like any similarities and anything missing. But it seems like it did a great job. It worked for well, the prompt I gave it was, “Research how the law affected women in South Carolina in the 1700s to early 1800s.” And it thought for six seconds and created like a research plan, and then it said “it will dive into some comprehensive research on how the law affected women in South Carolina. This is a fascinating period of legal and social history that will require examining various aspects of women’s legal status, rights and treatment under the colonial and early state law.” So then it researched for 13 minutes and examined 456 sources.

Nicole (2m 41s):
And when it says 456, I think it counts, each paragraph in a webpage is a separate source, I’m not sure, that’s how one of the other deep research tools does, it might be Perplexity, but when looking through the report, it is very good. It uses a lot from the South Carolina Encyclopedia Online, which is called South Carolina Encyclopedia, and it’s from the University of South Carolina. So it has a bunch of articles about the history of South Carolina. So that’s obviously a great source. It uses Wikipedia, it uses a bunch of other sources like New York History’s article on the Coverture and it has some, the Slave Code of South Carolina on another website that it’s been published from the early laws.

Nicole (3m 29s):
So it has some interesting sources, a lot of articles online. The University of Wisconsin has this American legal history to the 1860s where it has the South Carolina slave code from 1740 that it cites over and over. So it found that, and then it just has a bunch of different websites that it found. This is like an education website called Zen Education Project Teaching People’s History. So it was a really great research report done by Claude. It’s exciting that we have that now.

Diana (3m 58s):
Well, I’m excited to try that and I think this is a really good use. You know, I wanna really verify first that everything is coming out correctly from this deep research. But you know, digging into the laws is one of the more challenging parts of our family history. And so I’m really excited to try this out. Well let’s do some announcements. Our Research Like a Pro Webinar Series for 2025 will be held again on July 19th. That’s a Saturday at 11:00 AM Mountain Time. The title is Untangling Family Networks using Documentary Research and DNA Analysis to Search for Glenn Hopper’s Father. And our presenter is Yvonne Fenster.

Diana (4m 40s):
And this investigation uses Y-DNA and autosomal DNA evidence combined with documentary research to explore Glen Hugh Hopper’s paternal origins in early 20th-century Tennessee.

Diana (5m 22s):
Y-DNA established the Daniel surname for Glen’s father, sons could be Glen’s father? What documentary evidence, from census records to Civil War pension files, could provide the geographic and chronological context needed to evaluate each Daniel brother as a potential father candidate? How could BanyanDNA analysis help navigate the complex genetic relationships between the Daniel brothers when their families were so heavily intermarried? So this is going to be such a great case study. It will dive into early 20th century Tennessee research, unknown parentage, genetic genealogy, Banyan DNA, multiple relationships, pedigree collapse, YDNA analysis, indirect evidence, censuses records, land records, tax records, civil war pension file, and social security application. So just a little bit about Yvonne. She’s a professional genealogist accredited through ICAPGen in the upper south region of the US and she brings expertise in DNA analysis, particular in cases involving cousin marriages and YDNA research for breaking through genealogical brick walls.

Diana (6m 7s):
So we’re so happy to hear from Yvonne and if you haven’t yet signed up, we invite you to join us. Well, our next study group begins August 27th, 2025. Registration has begun and you have until August 21st to decide if you will join us to tackle one of your brick walls or just to learn how to use the Research Like a Pro process with a peer group and assignments. And if you’d like to be a peer group leader, please apply on our website and we would love to review your application and see if you would be a good fit for us. Of course, join our newsletter that comes out every Monday with new posts, upcoming lectures, coupon codes and more.

Diana (6m 51s):
Well, today we are going to talk about the final segment of my trip to Alabama where I was able to do some onsite research and visit the land. And so in this episode we’re going to talk about my visit to Chambers County where Thomas Beverly Royston and Cynthia Dillard settled in the mid 1800s. I was able to go to the cemetery where he was buried and see his headstone and then see the land that he owned. And I have written about him and we’ve discussed him in the last few episodes when I was researching him at the Alabama Department of History and Archives and also at the Chambers County Courthouse.

Diana (7m 35s):
So this is the final bit, and I’ll use the research that I found there to tell a little bit more about their story in this podcast. We will, we’ll kind of wrap it all up.

Nicole (7m 48s):
Okay. Well, remind us what you found in your visit to the archives.

Diana (7m 52s):
I found the tax record for Thomas, which revealed he was in Chambers County as early as 1842. And so that was really significant because the first record I had for him before that was the 1850 censuses. So the 1840 censuses had him in DeKalb County and that showed an FB Royston and it showed a family structure of three young children, probably two extended family members or hired hands because there were three males aged 30 to 40 and then there were nine enslaved people. And so I hypothesized that the males of two of them under five were Ulysses and Charles Baldwin and then Thomas and the two unknown males could, maybe they were family members, you know, we don’t know ’cause they’re just tick marks.

Diana (8m 45s):
And then a female who would be Mary Elizabeth between five and 10, and then Cynthia who was between 20 and 30. And then there were the enslaved people and there were two zero to one, three ages 10 to 24 for the males and for females there were two ages zero to 10 and two ages 10 to 24. And so this gave me a good foundation for who his enslaved people were. And I had mentioned previously in past podcasts that I would like to track them and try to discover their names and follow them down, but to date, I have not yet found any deeds or records that actually name his enslaved people.

Diana (9m 32s):
So I’m hoping someday to maybe find that.

Nicole (9m 35s):
Yeah, that would be great if you can.

Diana (9m 37s):
Right. So the censuses that I found long ago had several questions for me. I just wasn’t really sure at first. Is this really Thomas? Because clearly on the censuses it says shows an F.B. And of course I was curious about the additional males and where Thomas maybe acquired his enslaved people. But the first question I had about if FB is really Thomas B, I, was answered when I received his land application file from the National Archives. So he had made this application for land that had been ceded by the Cherokee Nation through the Treaty of New Echota.

Diana (10m 20s):
And this county DeKalb County was created on January 9th, 1836. And when it was opened up, it brought in many settlers. So like so many of those settlers that many of them came from Georgia, Thomas benefited from the sad removal of the Native Americans who had lived in that land for years. So in the blog post that I wrote about this, I have a map that’s titled The New Map of Alabama, and it was drawn in 1836 and it shows a really large chunk of land there on the border of Georgia ranging from the top of Alabama almost to the bottom.

Diana (10m 60s):
And this was the Cherokee and Creek lands and those were the lands that were opened up. So Thomas applied for the land patent based on preemption and that allowed for squatters who had settled on the land owned by the federal government to pay a $1.25 per acre to purchase their claim up to 160 acres. So that was possibly Thomas’s impetus for beginning the process. And he had to prove that he had really lived on the land for a minimum of 14 months. So he provided an affidavit that were, was signed by two men who knew him. And the final land patent states John Graves, a signee of Thomas B Royston.

Diana (11m 45s):
So that means that Thomas either transferred or sold his rights to the land to John Graves before the final patent was issued. So that let me know that that FB Royston was really Thomas B Royston because that was clearly his name on the land grant application and it talked about him being of DeKalb County. So it was good to put to rest that question and to really show that he was indeed there for just a few years it looks like. Well, we talked a little bit already about that 1842 tax assessment and I had not realized that he had moved that soon to Chambers County.

Diana (12m 29s):
So now I had a better idea that perhaps he could have moved anytime between that censuses in May of 1840 and 1842. So why move to Chambers County? It was a few counties south and you know, we never know specifically, or sometimes we do, but in this case, I still haven’t discovered exactly why he moved, but maybe the land was better or maybe he had an associate who recommended the location. Chambers County is on the border of Alabama and Georgia and it was fun because when we were there we drove across the river and went to Georgia. It’s the Chattahoochee River is the dividing line, the border.

Diana (13m 13s):
And that river was very broad and the settlers would use that to move their goods down river. So you know, they’d plant their cotton or whatever on the plantation and then they would take it over to the river and ship it out and it would’ve been very close and easy for Thomas to do that. Well Chambers County opened for settlement in 1832 and this was based on the Treaty of Cusseta. And this was a cession by the Creek Nation that was ceding its lands east of the Mississippi River. And by the time Thomas B Royston moved there, the land had likely been claimed because it was several years after it opened up.

Diana (13m 56s):
So he didn’t have any land patents in Chambers County. Instead he purchased it from several individuals and there are a lot of deeds for him purchasing and selling land there in Chambers County. But in 1850 censuses he reported his real estate was worth $1,800. So he had accumulated quite a bit of land and because it was so confusing, I had to take some graph paper and graph out all of his land. And now I could probably do that digitally with Deed Mapper, one of the great tools online. But at the time I did this several years ago, I just used plain old paper to figure it out and it was really fun to see kind of the two sections of land that he purchased

Nicole (14m 41s):
That is fun and that’s great that you used graph paper. We have a mathematician in our household who really likes to do math on his graph paper. He’s young, he’s about nine years old and maybe I should have him map out some deeds on the graph paper. He would like that.

Diana (14m 58s):
Oh he probably would because it’s really fun, you know, you just have to figure out the east half of section, you know, whatever it is, the section and the township. He probably would love learning the whole federal land system and then be able to figure out where the land was.

Nicole (15m 17s):
Yeah, that’s fun. Well a word from our Sponsor. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com.

Nicole (16m 0s):
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Nicole (16m 44s):
So we have Thomas B and Cynthia Royston, interesting spelling of Cynthia with a S-Y-N-T-H-A. So Synthia and the children are Mary, Ulysses, Baldwin, Adeline, Sarah, Joseph, Benjamin, Robert, and Thomas B, so Thomas B Junior. So going from ages 15 with Mary all the way down to Thomas B Junior zero. And then the 1850 slave schedule shows 13 enslaved people as part of the Royston plantation and an additional four people were listed. But despite searching the deeds in court records, we haven’t been able to find any transactions that identify the names of these enslaved individuals. There were ages though. And so we can see male 37, male 31 female age 30, a male age 36, all the way down to the the three in the teenage years, two females 16 and 12, and a male age 13, and then three children, which were all female age six, four and two.

Nicole (17m 28s):
So there were quite a bit there. Then in the 1860s censuses the household had again increased with four additional children born to Cynthia and two of the older children had married and moved out and resided in their own households. So we have Thomas B and Cynthia living who had been born in Georgia Age 54 and 44. And then the oldest now was Charles B. Royston age 21, born in Alabama, Adeline, Sarah, Joseph, Benjamin, Robert C, Thomas B and then the four new were Margaret, age eight, Richard Leonidas and infant female age eight months. Then the 1860 slave schedule shows the following 16 enslaved people as part of the Royston plantation.

Nicole (18m 13s):
I could list all of them, but basically there’s one third of them are over 20 and then over half or under 20. So that’s interesting to see the breakdown. There were three additional slaves more than last time. And despite searching in court records and deeds, there still hasn’t been any record of their names found so far. But it is good to know the number of enslaved individuals and hopefully someday we’ll find out who they were.

Diana (18m 44s):
Right. It looks to me like some of these were the same people because they aged appropriately, but it’s, you know, it’s so impossible to tell. But I would like to do some comparison about ages from year to year since we have 40, 1840 1850, 1860. Well, in 1861 the Civil War broke out and as would be expected, five of the Royston sons enlisted for the Confederacy. And only two survive the war, joseph and Robert C Royston, who was our ancestor. When Thomas wrote his will in 1867, he left his land to his widow, Cynthia, the surviving older sons, Joseph and Robert, his daughter Sarah and a grandson.

Diana (19m 30s):
And he clearly states in his will that the rest of the estate was to be divided between his children and he calls them now unmarried and minors, once they were all no longer minors or married. So the estate was not even finalized until 1882 or 1883 because the youngest child at his death was pretty young. She would’ve just been about six or seven. So it took a while for her to grow up, they could finally finalize that estate. Well he died a year after writing his will and his probate file reveals the date of death as September 21st, 1868.

Diana (20m 9s):
And his family buried him in the Bethel Baptist Cemetery. So that cemetery marker still stands and I was able to view it, but it is sadly, almost entirely illegible due to erosion and so much lichen or moss growth on it. I wished I had known to take something to clean it off because there are some products out there now you can use to safely remove that, but I didn’t. So another trip perhaps, but previous researchers when they could still read it said it stated in memory of Thomas B Royston being about 62 years of age, departed this life September 2nd, 1868.

Diana (20m 54s):
So I know that it would’ve been the 21st that he died, not the second because that’s in the court papers and it makes more sense when looking at the court file, you know, the probate file. So I’m just wondering if maybe the one was eroded and because I can’t read it, I can’t really tell right now. But an interesting thing about this is that there are some symbols on it and there’s also a square that looks like something is missing. And so the Find A Grave Memorial also stated that a small square marble insert with Royal Arch Mason written on it is now missing from the obelisk.

Diana (21m 34s):
And it also states that grandson Emory Johnson is buried next to him on the left. So that was really interesting because I wondered what, what was, used to be in that hole there. So his headstone is pretty distinctive. It was a small cemetery and because I had pictures, it was really easy to find it this really tall, very thin obelisk rising up. And so I was able to to see that. And another fun point was that we did visit on a Sunday and the Baptist congregation pulled up in their cars while we were looking in the cemetery and we joined them for their meeting and they let me play the piano and we sang some hymns.

Diana (22m 16s):
It was really fun. So we learned it was the oldest church in the county, so it was probably there when the Royston family was, perhaps that was their church and that’s why they chose that cemetery to bury Thomas.

Nicole (22m 32s):
That’s so neat. I love that. And probably some of you out there listening have seen on Instagram, the people who go clean headstones and gravestones. And one product that they all seem to recommend is the D2 biological solution, which is a cleaner that you can use for headstones that’s considered non-toxic and safer surrounding plants and wildlife, but is effective at cleaning off moss growth and things on headstones. So I’ll put a link in the show notes, but apparently D2 is the best choice for cleaning.

Diana (23m 7s):
I would love to go try it. I wish I lived closer because it would be so fun to actually see what could be underneath all of that moss,

Nicole (23m 16s):
Right? I mean maybe we just need to hire somebody to go do that. So if you live in Chambers County, let’s know,

Diana (23m 24s):
There you go.

Nicole (23m 27s):
Let’s talk about that marble insert with Royal Arch Mason on the obelisk and to find out what that is. You asked Claude, right?

Diana (23m 42s):
Yes, I did.

Nicole (23m 44s):
So that’s such a great thing to use AI for is to just get started on research projects on an unfamiliar term or phrase that we find in in our historical research. I’ve done this a lot, so it’s great. Just put that in AI and say what is this? And it’ll give you some ideas to get started and then you can continue to research, you know, and find sources and things. But what Claude told us about Royal Arch Masons is that Royal Arch Masonry is a significant branch of Freemasonry that forms part of what’s called the York Rite. It’s considered one of the most prestigious divisions within Masonic organizations. The Royal Arch degree is sometimes described as the completion of the Master Mason’s degree, the third degree in standard Freemasonry.

Nicole (24m 26s):
Members who join this order often have the designation marked on their gravestones as a symbol of their dedication and achievement within Freemasonry, the small square marble insert you mentioned. So you must have mentioned that in your prompt.

Diana (24m 38s):
Yeah, I think in the prompt I put in what it said, and I think I did a picture too.

Nicole (24m 46s):
Oh nice. So the small square marble insert that is now missing from the obelisk would’ve displayed the Royal Arch Mason emblem or text, which typically features a triple tau symbol, a symbol resembling three T’s joined together, sometimes an arch with keystone, often includes colors of red and purple. So that’s neat. And this type of Masonic marker on graves was common in the 19th and early 20th centuries as Freemasonry was a significant social and fraternal organization. The presence of this symbol indicates that the deceased was a dedicated Mason who had advanced to the Royal Arch degree. And the fact that this was on an obelisk was also significant because an obelisk grave marker was popular during the Victorian era and often used for prominent community members.

Nicole (25m 33s):
The combination suggests this person held some status within both the community and the Masonic order.

Diana (25m 39s):
Right. And I’m really glad that when I was there I took a very up close photo of the top part of the obelisk because when I blow that up and look at it, I can see evidence of the suggested symbols. So it’s really neat to read about it and see other pictures and then to realize that’s what it was all about. Well, I wanted to learn a little bit more about this whole idea of Royal Arch Masonry, especially about 1860s Alabama. And again, I queried AI through Claude and it said the Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons in Alabama was well established by the 1860s, having been founded decades earlier. There are preserved records of their formal meetings, including the annual convocation held in Montgomery in December, 1860, just before the Civil War began.

Diana (26m 28s):
This indicates the organization was functioning formally with regular meetings during this period. So that would be neat to have do some future research and see if I can actually find that and if it really has been preserved. And then Claude went on to say, during the Civil War, Alabama Masonic organizations continued operating despite the challenges of war. Alabama seceded from the Union in 1861 and joined the Confederate States of America with Montgomery serving as the first Confederate capital Throughout the conflict, approximately 35,000 of the 122,000 Alabamians who served in the war died. The war significantly disrupted normal activities and fraternal organizations throughout the state.

Diana (27m 8s):
So that was interesting. This was a whole nother layer of Thomas B Royston knowing that he was a Mason. And when I was thinking about that, his son Robert, who went out to Texas, was also a Mason and his widow submitted an application for a pension and she talks about how the son Robert was a Mason. So that must have been a big deal in the family that both father and son were part of that organization. It makes me kinda want to research the other sons and see if they continued that tradition as well and learn more about their involvement in the Masons. So you know, just when you think there’s nothing else to find out about your ancestor, you find out all something new, which is so fun.

Diana (27m 53s):
So it was great. My trip to Alabama gave me new records, new insights, but then I also came way with a lot of new questions about the family. So even though I researched ’em for many years, there’s still a lot to do.

Nicole (28m 6s):
Wow, that’s so great. I love that you dove in a little bit more to learning about the Masons and and now you have a little research project in your future on it, so that’ll be great.

Diana (28m 16s):
Yeah, you know, it’s just a call out to cemetery research really looking at those symbols on the gravestones because if people are going to the expense and the bother to put something on the stone, it was important to their family or to something about them. And I think sometimes we just look at the dates and the names and maybe don’t pay as much attention to those symbols. So it’s good to pay attention and learn about those.

Nicole (28m 44s):
Alright, well thanks everyone for listening and we hope you have a great week. We will talk to you again next week. Bye-bye.

Diana (28m 50s):
Bye-bye.

Nicole (29m 28s):
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.