RLP 387: Revisiting the Father of Cynthia (Dillard) Royston – Part 1 Objective

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 387: Revisiting the Father of Cynthia (Dillard) Royston – Part 1 Objective.

Nicole (42s):
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. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hello everybody, welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (49s):
Hi Nicole. How are you today?

Nicole (51s):
I’m doing well. And you, what are you working on?

Diana (54s):
Well, I’m getting all of my slides ready for my presentation for a Research Like a Pro webinar on Henderson Weatherford. So it’s always fun to build a new presentation and go back over the research and decide what will really help everyone who’s watching understand the case and learn from it. So I enjoy doing that part and I enjoy presenting about the research I’ve done as well.

Nicole (1m 18s):
Yeah, it is always fun to do that. So if you’re not aware, this month’s Research Like a Pro webinar is Tuesday, December 16th at 11:00 AM Mountain Time, and Diana will be presenting Challenging Accepted Ancestry, a New Look at Henderson Weatherford’s Family Origins. And she’s going to examine how careful analysis of historical records can overturn commonly accepted family connections based on surname and geographic proximity. So this is such a great case study because it demonstrates how you can question family relationships that are found in online trees and evaluate original sources like tax records, census, land, probate, and then use that indirect and negative evidence found in those sources to build a case for new family connections that make more sense than the ones people assumed.

Nicole (2m 9s):
So she’ll also talk about the role of DNA in confirming or rejecting hypotheses derived from documentary research. And the localities involved include Texas and Arkansas. So it will be a really great presentation and if you’re not a member of our Research Like a Pro Webinar Series, you can still join and you’ll have access to all the previously recorded lectures for the year as well as Diana’s. If you’re joining us for our next study group, this will be in February through May of 2026. It’s going to be Research Like a Pro with DNA study group, and registration begins December 5th, 2025. And you can apply to be a peer group leader on our website if you’d like to help us out in that way and get free registration.

Nicole (2m 54s):
And then be sure to join our newsletter. This comes out every Monday with new content, blog, post videos, podcasts, And it has our upcoming lectures and sometimes coupon codes for different things that we’re offering. Upcoming conferences we’re looking forward to RootsTech March 5th through 7th, and that will be in Salt Lake City and we’ll be having a booth there. And then of course our Research Like a Pro Institute that we have just organized, our first course will be Merging and Separating Identities with Jan Joyce, who’s an accredited and certified genealogist. And she’s taught this once before with GROP and now we get to host it this time we’re really excited.

Nicole (3m 36s):
It will be held every Thursday from April 30th through June 11th from 9:00 AM to 2:30 Mountain Time. And so it will be like once a week you’ll meet and have classes on Thursdays, and then you’ll have the week in between to work on the assignment and to let it sink in and try to apply what you’ve learned. And so that’ll be seven Thursdays, so seven weeks. And you can view the complete schedule at FamilyLocket.com with all the instructors and which topics they’ll be teaching, and I get to be part of that. And I’m teaching about spreadsheets and Airtable and doing a workshop with hands-on work using the spreadsheets.

Diana (4m 15s):
Well, that sounds so fun and I’m excited to be part of that and learn from Jan. I love learning new ways to tackle tough problems. For our episode today, we are going to talk all about Cynthia Dillard Royston and the latest phase that I am working on trying to find her father. And I’ve kind of taken a break from this for a while and been working on other ancestors, but I decided it was time to come back. And so for the Research Like a Pro 11 study group, I tackled the Dillards again, I’d found some new things that gave me a new location to study and that was exciting. So I have a fun series of blog posts and so we’re going to use those as the basis for our podcast episodes.

Diana (5m 2s):
And we are going to just follow my, follow my research. Well, the first thing that you have to do is figure out your objective. And so I needed to go back and really review what I’d done in the past. So we’re just gonna go through it first, what I’ve already worked on and things that I have eliminated or candidates I’ve eliminated. So the very first project I did, phase one was titled is George W Dillard, the father of Cynthia Dillard Royston. So she, Cynthia, and Thomas, her husband, had settled in Chambers County, Alabama by 1842. And George W Dillard was pretty prominent in that area, had a lot of land records and such, and I thought that he could be her father.

Diana (5m 51s):
So my objective was determine if this George W Dillard, and he was born 1781 in Virginia and died in 1854 in Lee County, Alabama, which really at the time was Russell County just right below Chambers, and so my objective was just to test that hypothesis. So my conclusion was, I’ll just read you my conclusion after I had done that whole project, “this research project sought to establish connections between George W Dillard and Cynthia Dillard Royston without a marriage record for Thomas B Royston and Cynthia, Cynthia’s maiden name of Dillard appears only in three of her children’s death certificates.

Diana (6m 34s):
The census records from 1850 to 1880 provide evidence of her birth in about 1815 in Georgia. Because of the proximity of George to Cynthia in Chambers County, Alabama, his life was studied as a candidate for her father. The 1820 and 1830 census households for George show a female of appropriate age to be Cynthia. His presence in Muskogee County, Georgia from 1828 to 1840 is well-documented in newspaper articles. And a land record puts Thomas in Lee County, Georgia near Muskogee at 1831, making a meeting between him and Cynthia possible. A courthouse fire in 1838 could explain the lack of a marriage record for Cynthia and Thomas.

Diana (7m 18s):
The move of both George and Thomas and Cynthia into Alabama by 1840 also points to a possible connection with families often migrating together. George patented land in three different Alabama counties, including Chambers County, where Thomas and Cynthia settled by 1850. But studying the land transactions of Thomas revealed no connections to the land George patented. The presence of a “Leonidas” in both the Dillard and Royston households also points to a possible connection. Future research could examine the descendants of George for other similar naming patterns. Although evidence continues to point to George as a possible father, further research should be done to eliminate other candidates.”

Nicole (8m 5s):
So you had a kind of conclusion where you didn’t really find a lot of connection but couldn’t eliminate him yet.

Diana (8m 11s):
Exactly. There was just nothing. I was so hoping that Thomas Royston had purchased land from George, you know, those land records lined up, and no they didn’t. And it looked like George was a land speculator ’cause he had patents all over the place. So that was what I was starting with and I just didn’t find anything that could really connect them.

Nicole (8m 35s):
Well, you didn’t give up and you went on to phase two. So I will go ahead and summarize phase two, which focused on identifying alternate Dillard candidates, because there was no direct evidence or any, there wasn’t really that much evidence at all connecting Cynthia to George W Dillard, even indirect evidence, except for like the possibility that she could have been that child in his household. Well, the next step was just looking for other Dillard men who could be her father in Georgia using the censuses of 1820 and 1830 looking for a female of Cynthia’s age. So the objective for this project was to identify and eliminate candidates for the father of Cynthia Dillard Royston.

Nicole (9m 15s):
Cynthia was born 1815 in Georgia and died August 2nd, 1882 in Collin County, Texas. Cynthia married Thomas Beverly Royston about 1833 in Georgia or Alabama. And her father was born before 1795, likely in Virginia. And then after that project, the conclusion was that it was a successful project in “identifying and researching 10 Dillard individuals who were candidates for the parent of Cynthia”. And Cynthia and her husband Thomas B Royston had been researched extensively and clues to her parentage came in the records of her later life. Born in Georgia about 1815 maiden name of Dillard a previous research had focused on George w Dillard of Muskogee County, Georgia, and Russell County, Alabama.

Nicole (10m 3s):
But without direct evidence, eliminating other possible candidates could strengthen that hypothesis. So the conclusion continues, “a candidate for the parent of Cynthia had to meet the criteria of having a female of appropriate age to be Cynthia in the 1820 and 1830 census prior to her marriage in 1834.” And then there’s a great table listing all of the candidates. So the table has a column for the name of the candidate. So there’s Arthur Dillard, Edmond Dillard, John, Nathan, Owen, Philip, Sampson, there’s a Susan Dillard, Thomas Dillard and Theophillus Dillard. And then that has their residence in 1820, which are Georgia locations, residence in 1830, also in Georgia, different counties in Georgia.

Nicole (10m 49s):
And then it has the person’s estimated birth year, kind of based on the research that Diana did. And some of it’s from online trees, some of it’s from probate records, some of it’s just based on census years. And the conclusion column mentions if they could be eliminated or not as a candidate for Cynthia. And so for example, Philip Dillard was eliminated based on his will, which names each of his children, and none of them were Cynthia, and Thomas Dillard was eliminated based on the marriage records of Jones County, she would’ve probably been listed as getting married there. So just kinda some like preliminary conclusions of who could likely be eliminated.

Nicole (11m 34s):
So the only one that couldn’t be eliminated was Susan Dillard of Muskogee County, Georgia. And George W Dillard also of Muskogee County remained the strongest possibility for the father of Cynthia. And so after phase two, further research could explore all of the Dillards of Muskogee County from its creation in about 1826 to 1850, looking for any connections. And then after writing all about this research, a descendant of George W Dillard contacted Diana with the news that she had the family Bible pages for George W Dillard’s family.

Nicole (12m 15s):
And the female from the censuses who we had hypothesized could be Cynthia, was actually Mariah Dillard, who married James Kivlin, and so this seemed to be strong evidence that eliminated George W Dillard as a candidate for Cynthia’s father. So now kind of with this information that Cynthia was not the daughter in this Dillard family we’re really only left with one candidate, Susan Dillard. So let’s have a word from our Sponsor. The air is getting crisp, and for many of us that means a little extra time to dive into our family history.

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Diana (13m 58s):
So as you can imagine, I took a little break from the Dillard research. I was a little discouraged when I found out that positively George was not the father, but you know, then it’s also good because you can just get rid of that hypothesis and try something else. One day I was looking at ThruLines and I saw that a new possible father for Cynthia had appeared, and so I decided to do that for my next full project on this. So my objective was, “Test the ThruLine hypothesis that Hobson Milner was the father of Cynthia. Hobson Milner was born about 1794 in Virginia and died in October, 1872 in Harris County, Georgia.

Diana (14m 41s):
He married Nancy Meadows on September 30th, 1812 in Jasper County, Georgia.” Well, my Cynthia was born as we said, 1815 in Georgia, Georgia, and died 1882 out in Texas, and she married Thomas 1833 in Georgia or Alabama. So you’ll notice that this wasn’t even the same surname. Milner is not the same as Dillard. So how did Hobson Milner ever get added to Ancestry as a possible father for her with ThruLines ? So I did all the research on it, and here’s my conclusion, “This research project successfully tested the hypothesis that Hobson Milner was the father of Cynthia and found it to be false.

Diana (15m 23s):
The ancestry, DNA ThruLines that suggested this relationship for three of Cynthia’s descendants were analyzed and it was found that the majority of DNA connections were only for Cynthia, not connecting her to Hobson Milner. Documentary research identified as Cynthia Milner, who married a William Milner in Harris County, Georgia in 1833 as the probable source of the confusion. A researcher likely discovered Cynthia married to Thomas B Royston on the 1850 census and assumed this was a second marriage for Cynthia Milner. No marriage record has been found for the Dillard-Royston marriage, and” as we’ve talked about, “the evidence for that maiden name for Cynthia comes from her children’s death certificates.

Diana (16m 5s):
If the maiden name of Dillard was unknown to researchers, attaching Cynthia Milner to Thomas B. Royston could have seemed reasonable. Research in the census, however, revealed that Cynthia and William Milner resided in Tallapoosa County, Alabama in 1850 and 1860. During the same time, Cynthia and Thomas B Royston resided in neighboring Chambers County. Cynthia Milner and Cynthia (Dillard) Royston were two separate individuals, both residing in the households of their respective husbands in 1850 and 1860.” With Hobson Milner disproved as the father of Cynthia research can now continue to explore both DNA and documents in hopes of discovering her father.

Nicole (16m 47s):
That’s an interesting one because it shows how sometimes people incorrectly merge identities of people and you can easily separate them by what you did, which is the timeline of this Cynthia Milner continued at the same time as Cynthia Dillard Royston timeline continued and so they couldn’t be living in two places at once.

Diana (17m 7s):
Right, and if you just see the first name of a woman and you don’t know her maiden name, sometimes we can make an assumption and jump to the wrong conclusion, which is probably what happened in this case,

Nicole (17m 23s):
Right, I think, wasn’t there like a marriage of a Cynthia Royston or something to a Milner? I don’t know, it seems like there was something that people had found and incorrectly attached.

Diana (17m 34s):
Yeah, it was a Cynthia Milner married William Milner, and it was just kind of an interesting case about finding the records that just prove it to be wrong. So sometimes we have to do a project to disprove something like that.

Nicole (17m 52s):
Right. Well, And it is disconcerting to see a Thruline hypothesis like that because it kind of makes you think, oh, there’s like DNA evidence here. So it definitely needed a project to kind of look at that DNA evidence and be able to say, oh yeah, these are not the right matches that you would need for this cluster, as well as the documentary evidence is wrong.

Diana (18m 16s):
Exactly.

Nicole (18m 18s):
Well, the next phase was adding DNA to the research. And since you’d already disproven the Thrulines hypothesis that had popped up, it was time to really look at the actual clusters of DNA matches that were relevant to this side of the family and see if any of them had Dillard’s that were interesting. So using a DNA network graph, Diana discovered a cluster of matches where the most recent common ancestor was Elijah Dillard. So the objective became to “test the hypothesized biological sibling connection between Elijah Dillard and Cynthia Dillard Royston.

Nicole (18m 58s):
Elijah Dillard was born about 1816 in Georgia and died on September 6th in 1886 in Coffee County, Alabama. Cynthia was born 1816 in Georgia and died in 1882 in Collin County, Texas.” So these two were just reportedly born in the same year, 1816. Cynthia had married Thomas Beverly Royston in 1833 in Georgia or Alabama. After doing this research project the conclusion said, “With documentary research not providing clues to the origins of Cynthia (Dillard) Royston, DNA analysis discovered a possible brother candidate in Elijah Dillard. Victor Parker, a great grandson of Cynthia Dillard Royston, tested his DNA at Ancestry and shared DNA with more than 63,000 people.

Nicole (19m 43s):
Some of those matches would have also received a portion of DNA from Cynthia that could reveal clues to her parents. A Gephi network graph clustered Victor’s matches into groups, and analysis revealed a cluster that seemed to originate with Elijah Dillard. If he were Cynthia’s brother, the shared DNA would come from Elijah and Cynthia’s unknown parents. Documentary research explored Macon County, Alabama Court probate and land records for Dillards. Elijah Dillard was the subject of three deeds, and other Dillards mentioned in the records were sons of George W Dillard. Although previous research discounted George W Dillard as Cynthia’s father, the Macon County research suggests that Elijah and Cynthia Dillard may be connected to the George W Dillard family in some way–perhaps he was an uncle or cousin.

Nicole (20m 30s):
Searching Pike County Alabama records resulted in the death register entry for Elijah Dillard. No parents were named, but the record did name a specific death date place in burial for Elijah. Returning to explore Victor Parker’s DNA matches in the network graph’s peach cluster, found a new match descending from a different son of Elijah Dillard: James Monroe Dillard. This has an independent line and further evidence that Elijah Dillard is the MRCA of the cluster and that he could be a brother to Cynthia Dillard Royston. James Monroe Dillard lived in Escambia County, Florida on the southern Alabama border in the 1930s.

Nicole (21m 10s):
Perhaps he kept in touch with his probable first cousin, Mariah (Royston) Lovelady, and her reporting of Florida as Cynthia’s birthplace stemmed from this connection. Further research in both documentary records and DNA is needed to continue exploring the connection between Cynthia and Elijah.”

Diana (21m 28s):
So it was exciting to have found that cluster and Elijah Dillard. Finally, some other thing to research with Cynthia. And then after I found him and had done the research, I took a break for the next couple of years and went to work on Clemsy Cline and Henderson Weatherford. So I decided that it was time to come back to the Dillards because FamilySearch had launched Full Text Search and I had found a new migration path for Thomas B Royston, Cynthia’s husband. So previously I had thought he went down to Muskogee County and then over into Chambers County, but the new path discovered him residing in Cass County, which has became Bartow soon after.

Diana (22m 15s):
And so this is an, this was up further north and it was just across the border from DeKalb County, Alabama. And this is where the couple resided in 1837. So this gave me a whole new group of Dillard families to research, and it again, could be a plausible reason for the lack of a marriage record because we have another burnt courthouse and there are no marriages from 1833-1834, where the Dillard Royston marriage would’ve taken place. So I needed to come up with a new objective. And so I wrote “Discover a candidate for Cynthia (Dillard) Royston’s father residing in Cass County, Georgia, during the 1830s.

Diana (23m 1s):
Cynthia was born about 1815 in Georgia and died on August 22nd, 1882 in Collin County, Texas. Cynthia married Thomas about 1833 or 1834, possibly in Cass County, Georgia.” So this was my new objective and it was exciting to have a new place to research and a new group of Dillards. So after reviewing everything, that’s what I decided to focus my research on and you’ll have to just keep listening to the next episodes to see what I discovered.

Nicole (23m 37s):
Right. This is kind of tantalizing because we’re just introducing past research phases and what your new objective was for this phase, but we’re not gonna tell you anything yet that was found.

Diana (23m 49s):
No clues.

Nicole (23m 50s):
I mean, you’ve done a lot of research so far on this objective, so it’s interesting to see all the different avenues, kinda the winding path that has taken you to kind of getting rid of the favorite theory and opening different doors through DNA, and just finding new things. And it, it really highlights the amazing ability of autosomal DNA evidence to guide us to theories that we would not have found on our own.

Diana (24m 18s):
Exactly. I would never have picked out Elijah Dillard out of all the Dillards in Alabama to be a connection to Cynthia. It’s a pretty common name, and there, there are Dillards everywhere. So you have to hang on to some little fact, you know, like locality or proximity or something that connects people, or just start eliminating the one by one, which I’ve done some of that as well. But having the DNA and that really nice cluster, that was super helpful. So yeah, Elijah, he’s gotta be a brother or could be a close cousin, I guess, I don’t know. We never can say for sure for sure with DNA in this far back, but seems likely he is a brother with their ages.

Diana (25m 1s):
And I’ve noticed as we’ve been going through all these objectives that I go back and forth with Cynthia’s birth year, I think in one objective I said 1816, and in this one I wrote 1815, and that’s because I really don’t know her specific birthday. I just have censuses that Cynthia is one that gets younger every 10 years. She was born every, every time the census came out, she was first born in 1815 and then 1816 and then 1817 and then 1818. So I kind of waffle I guess between what would be her real birthdate.

Nicole (25m 36s):
That’s funny.

Diana (25m 37s):
Yeah. Yes. But I do have her death date because she was, when Thomas died in Alabama, she was the executrix of his probate. And the family, she goes off with several of the children to Texas, but there was still some land back in Alabama, and so they had to appoint someone else to take care of that final cell of the land, and they record in the probate records there that she died out in Texas. So otherwise I didn’t have any record of her death at all because Texas, it was just not a time when they were recording anything much beyond the land and taxes, so.

Nicole (26m 20s):
Right.

Diana (26m 20s):
That was very helpful to have go through all of the probate and find her death date mixed into it.

Nicole (26m 26s):
It’s so interesting how some records just have these surprising details that you wouldn’t expect to find, the widow’s death information in her husband’s probate packet, but it just shows how important it’s to do reasonably exhaustive research and look at all the sources that are out there because you just never know, know where that detail will be located.

Diana (26m 46s):
Oh, absolutely. I was so excited when I got that whole probate packet and went through and did the transcription, and this was back when you read every single word and transcribed it yourself, no AI to help you. And I believe there’s something like 50 pages. It was a lot, but I discovered a lot of really interesting things doing that, full transcription.

Nicole (27m 11s):
Alright, well this has been fun to think about the previous objectives that you have on Cynthia Dillard and the one that we’re going to be going forward with to find a new candidate in Cass County, Georgia. So this will be exciting.

Diana (27m 24s):
Absolutely.

Nicole (27m 25s):
All right, thanks everyone for listening. Have a great week and we will talk to you again next week. Bye-bye.

Diana (27m 30s):
Bye-bye.

Nicole (28m 9s):
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.