RLP 60 – Who Was Anne Carter? Interview with Kimball Carter CG

Nicole (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro, Episode 60: Who Was Anne Carter, Case Study and Interview with Kimball Carter, CG. 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 creators of the Amazon bestselling book, Research Like a Pro a Genealogists Guide. I’m Nicole co-host of the podcast join Diana and me as we discuss how to stay organized, make progress in our research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (42s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone, welcome to the show today. I’m Nicole Dyer co-host of The Research Like a Pro Genealogy Podcast. I’m here with accredited genealogist, Diana Elder. Hi Diana, how are you today?

Diana (58s):
I’m doing well.

Nicole (60s):
What have you been working on?

Diana (1m 2s):
Well we are working hard on getting ready for the Research Like a Pro DNA with study group that is starting very soon and we are recording this podcast a couple weeks early. So we still have spots available as of today. But when everyone listening hears this, it may be closed, but you can still go on and check on the website and if you’d like to have a discount, the coupon code to put in is simply podcast, which should be easy to remember. So we’d love to have you join us if you are interested and you can go on FamilyLocket to learn more about that.

Nicole (1m 37s):
Yeah, and that starts on September 10th and we’re really excited for our 10 week study group about DNA. So thanks for everyone who’s already signed up. Well today we are talking with Kimball Carter who is a Certified Genealogist that we met at the BYU conference and he will be sharing a case study about his ancestor, Ann Carter. So we’re really glad to have him here. Hi Kimball.

Kimball Carter (2m 1s):
Hi. Thank you for inviting me.

Nicole (2m 4s):
First before we talk about Kimball’s case study, we’re gonna do our listener spotlight really quick.

Diana (2m 10s):
Okay. So this is from a listener named Work Hard Play Hard on Stitcher. This was a review about the episode, Three tips for Connecting with your DNA Cousins, and they say “DNA is the latest genealogy tool to prove relationships. Thank you for giving tips on how to contact DNA cousins.” So Thank you so much, Work Hard Play Hard for leaving that review. We love giving tips from our personal experience on things that work well and DNA is super fun to be working with. Now we’d love to hear from you, so if everybody listening want to go on and leave us a review, we’ll read it here and spotlight you sometime.

Nicole (2m 54s):
Alright, well let’s talk more about Kimball. Hi Kimball. Tell us about yourself and how you decided to pursue becoming a certified Genealogist.

Kimball Carter (3m 5s):
I’ve been researching for over 40 years and I’ve always had my Carter line, my father’s side of the family, had never been researched when I began in about 1976. It’s been a difficult line for over 40 years. I’ve searched that line, it’s been the shortest branch of my tree. And finally with DNA, I was able to connect to my third great-grandparents. Anne Carter was my third great-grandfather’s mother. Everybody knows that relationship because of her will, which has been pretty available. Once I had made this breakthrough on this child of hers, I wanted to of course push my tree back further.

Kimball Carter (3m 48s):
So I started looking at Anne. The only thing that ever seems to be cited about Anne is her will, but the will itself doesn’t seem to be cited it, it’s cited in the contents of the book. It’s a pretty famous book in the Carter world called the Descendants of Captain Thomas Carter of Darford, Lancaster County, Virginia, who was one of the early Carters to come to the United States. And as I read that, which is where everybody is, you know, citing Ann’s information, I realized that if the book was right then I was a descendant of Captain Thomas Carter, also. So I, I began and started looking at the book.

Kimball Carter (4m 29s):
But as I read it and looked at the information about the family that I come from, her son Richard, a bunch of red flags went off because the phrases that were being used in the book by the author were “It Is Thought,” or “Probably,” or “if I’m right in Thinking” and there were no sources cited other than Anne’s will. And that wasn’t actually cited with a citation it simply referenced the will. That’s how I started. I found the court copy of the will and after reading it, it was clear that that the author of book really wasn’t thorough.

Kimball Carter (5m 13s):
Because of that I started to question anything that was written in the book about the family. And then I had had my YDNA done a number of years ago and at first glance I’d always thought that I might be a descendant of Captain Thomas Carter, but after really looking at that more carefully and and consulting with other people, I found out that I was not a descendant of Captain Thomas Carter. So all of that said, we’ve got a problem with Anne and her identity because the information in that book is suspect.

Diana (5m 45s):
That’s so interesting because we tend to look at things, you know, before we’re trained as genealogists, that are written in books and say, oh that’s accurate. But I’m just curious, when was the book written? Do you remember a rough date?

Kimball Carter (6m 1s):
Between 1910 and 1920. So it’s, it was a long time ago.

Diana (6m 5s):
Yeah. And so access to records obviously was not as good as it is now. And also I’ve noticed that people that are doing Descendancy sometimes they don’t want to spend as much time on certain lines as others. I think that’s probably where some of those terms, if I’m right in thinking or probably or it’s thought kind of crept in because obviously the author hadn’t really worked on this line. But I would imagine that that has created quite a few problems with this being spread online everywhere.

Kimball Carter (6m 39s):
Yeah, there are a lot of trees on Ancestry, you know, FamilySearch, everywhere that connect this family back to Captain Thomas Carter, and it’s just not correct. Anne was not married to the man that everybody thought she was. And that became obvious after some more research. And there’s a large family, Anne had 12 children and 10 of the 12 lived to have children themselves, some with some large families. So there’s lots of descendants out there and lots of trees that are incorrect.

Diana (7m 13s):
Oh my goodness. I think if we research long enough we’re all going to run into this kind of a scenario, especially with this name Carter. I would imagine that that is very common. Is that common in, you know, Virginia where you’re researching?

Kimball Carter (7m 26s):
Yes, there are four prominent Carter lines that started in Virginia and in addition there are lines that people have not found that are Carter’s also. But in the area that we were researching Anne’s life, there are a lot of Carter’s and a lot with the same given names: John, George, James, Robert, Charles, William. They seem to name them over and over the same things. So multiple families and some families with that name twice within the same family and then multi-generational issues. So it’s a very confusing area for the Carter name similar to a Smith or a Jones. Just a lot of them.

Diana (8m 8s):
Yeah, you just kind of wonder why they couldn’t be a little bit more creative and in cases like this, aren’t you so excited when somebody does name somebody unusual?

Kimball Carter (8m 16s):
Yes.

Diana (8m 16s):
You know, a different name like Ezekiel or something kind of off the wall, then you can finally make some more connections. So yes, I totally feel your pain. I’ve done a lot of those Colonial Virginia work and those similar names just drive you crazy, especially when there’s like an original settler and then everybody names a child after the original settler and you just have such a mess. Well let’s talk a little bit about the time period because this is pre-1800 Virginia, and Virginia went through key battleground for civil war and we have a lot of things that are missing there. So what are the kind of records that you had to use to break this open?

Kimball Carter (8m 58s):
Pretty much in Virginia you’re, you’re looking at probate is a huge record for you. Land and property records, tax lists and court records. Those are my four go-tos that are pretty consistent that between those in those four records you’re going to find something about your ancestor. It may not be a lot, but you will find something somewhere in in those four records if they, if they lived in the area you’re researching. I tended to go to court records, which I know are not as widely used and specifically to court orders because court orders are well kept, they aren’t indexed, at least not with, you know, databases.

Kimball Carter (9m 44s):
They usually have an internal index. And I’ve had some really good breakthroughs with court orders, probably just because of the fact that in in that time period, if your people didn’t have a lot of land, or if you’re looking for a guardianship and they didn’t have guardianship records, a lot of times the, the way they kept records that I’ve learned over time in my research is that every county just did what they felt like and the names of the record books will vary from county to county. The types of records that they would put in one book versus another just varies by county. So you really have to get familiar with how they did it in that county. And the best way to do it is to open those books up, you know, with now digitally online and, and look and see what was in them and how they were organized.

Kimball Carter (10m 35s):
’cause there was actually some organization, it just doesn’t look like it. So court orders were huge. Anne died in 1789 in Westmoreland County, Virginia. So I knew that there would be other records about her life in that county somewhere. So court orders were one of the places I, I went and I found a court order from 1783. So six years prior to her will, stating that she was named Guardian to five of her children, those five children’s names were also in her will. So I knew it was the right person because of the fact that the, the will named the same five children as the court order.

Kimball Carter (11m 17s):
And it also said that they were orphans of John Carter, deceased. Now this was huge breakthrough because in the, the book that we talked about that was written about Anne and her family, it said that she was the wife of Thomas Carter. I have never found any documents about Thomas Carter in that county other than some very early ones back in the early 1700s. And I’ve never found a document with the name Thomas Carter associated with Anne in any way. That was a major breakthrough because here we have a man who dies, who his orphans are, she’s being made the guardian to, and the five children named are five children in her will and it states in her will that they are her children.

Kimball Carter (12m 7s):
So that was my big breakthrough on finding what had happened here with the identity of Anne and her husband.

Diana (12m 15s):
That is so interesting and isn’t it so exciting when you discover that document that is the breakthrough?

Kimball Carter (12m 21s):
Yeah.

Diana (12m 21s):
There’s nothing like that when you, you finally see it on your screen or in print, so great. Well you know, for everybody listening, if they haven’t worked in these kind of records, they might be kind of confused why the children were named orphans when they had a living mother. So this has to do with the law and the terminology. Do you wanna just kinda walk us through that?

Kimball Carter (12m 43s):
Yeah, basically it was a man’s world at that time period and if a man died and had any kind of estate, whether it was personal property or real estate, then the estate had to be looked after and the wife was not considered to be the person to naturally do that. Even though in our world that’s how it would be thought. So if there was any kind of estate, they had to have a guardian appointed who would look after their interest in that estate, whether they would get land or whether they would get personal property, whatever. So in this case, Anne was named the Guardian, which is a little unusual. It’s, it’s not totally unusual. I’ve seen it lots of different ways. Sometimes the widow is named the Guardian, oftentimes it’s another man who is named the Guardian.

Kimball Carter (13m 28s):
In this case I was fortunate that it was Anne, the wife that was named the Guardian ’cause it helped me link these two together.

Diana (13m 35s):
Right. So if you see Orphan in a record, just know that it doesn’t mean the mother’s deceased as well, that it is generally just the father. That actually can be very helpful in knowing that. Kind of a little example of knowing that the law, the history of the times, how things were written up in the records. One of the things that I thought was so interesting in this case study was the problem with the FamilySearch catalog and how this was incorrectly categorized. So how did you figure this out? Because we kind of expect that everything you know will be correct in there, but of course there’s human error that enters in. So tell us a little bit about that discovery.

Kimball Carter (14m 18s):
Well, I’ll be honest, that was the thing that really made this difficult for me at first because I didn’t realize that the catalog had named the volume incorrectly. I was looking for a volume that would’ve contained the probate records, particularly the estate settlement distribution of the estate, the inventory. I was looking for those documents because those are typically created when someone dies, especially if they had a a, estate that needed to be divided. But I couldn’t find anything. And when I looked in the, the catalog on FamilySearch, they did not have a volume for the time period of what they called records and inventories, which is where these documents were kept in that county.

Kimball Carter (15m 3s):
Well they actually did have a volume. The problem was it was mislabeled deeds and wills. So if you went to the microfilm or the digital online images, look at those first few pages on the film to check the title to make sure it matches the title that FamilySearch, or whoever’s cataloging it, Ancestry, whatever, that it matches what they’re saying it is. So what happened was they just mislabeled it. They labeled it with deeds and wills when it was records and inventories, deeds and wills would contain deeds to property and wills.

Kimball Carter (15m 43s):
But John Carter didn’t leave a will. So there was no will to be found there. And that was the first problem. When I realized and looked at the title of the book, then I went, oh there are records possibly in this book now that pertain to the family. So that was the first challenge. But the second challenge was in these volumes, usually they have an internal index, so an index that was handwritten by the, the person that kept the books in the county. Well the problem was when I went to the index page, the letter C was like a big blank page with one entry. I was like, well wait a second, can there really only be one person, one family in this book that has the letter C is their first letter of their last name.

Kimball Carter (16m 30s):
And so what I decided was, well I’m gonna have to just turn every single page in the book and see if I can find them because I think they’ve been overlooked in the index. I’ve encountered that problem before in other records where there’s an index that you think is gonna be complete. And I’ve learned that if I go page by page, I find records that the person that recorded it just didn’t put ’em in. I don’t know why but I did find multiple records of the family after I searched page by page.

Diana (17m 2s):
Those kind of searches are what we kind of do when we’re at our wits end, right? That’s when we’ve done everything else that’s easier and then we have to do the really hard stuff. How long did that take you to page through that?

Kimball Carter (17m 12s):
Well it really isn’t that long. One of the things that, because I’ve been researching a long time, when I first started researching, I did that a lot because I learned that indexes weren’t complete. And if I found somebody that I thought should be in a book, I thought they’ve gotta be in here. So I, I’ve done that quite a bit. Every time I do it I think, okay, how much time is it really gonna take me to go through 600 pages? And I figured, you know, four or five hours maybe, but four or five hours when you’re trying to find somebody that you’re related to is not that much time.

Diana (17m 43s):
Yeah. And when you think that easily you can sit down and waste four hours just kind of surfing the internet, looking at different websites without being very focused, then that really puts it into perspective, right? Just may seem kind of tedious but as long as you’re keeping track, you know, in your research log and you know that you’re searching and you’ve gone through each page, then you feel like you’re making progress. Even if you don’t find anything, you know, you’ve done the search. So just to kind of recap here some of the things that you learned that not to believe the printed compiled genealogy and to look for red flags. If you’re seeing things that kind of let you know that the author maybe wasn’t as thorough in their research, same people with the same names, you know that same surname of Carter, you’ve got to be careful with that.

Diana (18m 32s):
Key records were the tax list, probate, land, and court records. And then if you’re just not finding the records you think should be there, look at that microfilm, don’t believe the title in the catalog. I think that is so interesting. And then doing the page by page search. So I can totally see how this has elluded other researchers because it took a real focused approach to breaking through this one.

Nicole (18m 60s):
When I did some research in Colonial Virginia, I encountered a similar problem with the way the record books in the county were named or labeled in the FamilySearch catalog. So it’s not just applicable to this one question, I think it’s something that the catalogers maybe didn’t know the best way to title it or these could have been done a long time ago. I’m not sure why there’s these errors, but it is difficult. But knowing that it could happen helps us realize we do need to go in and check the title page on the actual film. Like Kimball was saying, the one that I had issues with is I was doing the same thing. I had a book that was written about the Johnson family in 1965 with all the descendants of William Johnson and the citation for the individual I was trying to find more about was to a book called The Great Book of Isle of White County.

Nicole (19m 56s):
And I thought, what is a Great Book? And there was no Great Book in the FamilySearch catalog, but when I finally found the right record book, it was just a, a record of deeds. It was just interesting how they were labeled differently in 1965 versus now in the FamilySearch catalog. So I think another thing to consider is that over time things are called different things and the researchers in 1965 were just going to the county and looking at ’em there. And maybe that was the nickname for the book that the county clerk was using, who knows.

Kimball Carter (20m 28s):
I think these names are confusing it when you’re first researching also because if you don’t know the words records used in this county, it was called records and inventories. Well inventories you kind of understand what that is, but records could be anything and they are lots of different kinds of things. They just didn’t have an incredibly sophisticated organizational system.

Nicole (20m 52s):
And the other interesting thing I thought you said was that they only had one person under the C line. And I’ve often seen that in the internal index as well where it seems incomplete. And I think a good mindset for a genealogist is to ask those kind of questions about the source. Was this record keeper careful? Did he add every surname to the internal index or was the clerk just getting lazy and did it feel like indexing?

Kimball Carter (21m 21s):
Right. And we don’t know who did it, we don’t know if they did it when they wrote the record, if they put it in the index or if somebody came back through later and did it.

Nicole (21m 31s):
Yeah. And one benefit from paging through an entire book like that is that you do get familiar with the record keeper, whoever the clerk was that was copying this down or writing it and you kind of understand the source a whole lot better than when you just go to that one image that contains information about your subject.

Kimball Carter (21m 50s):
Yes. And and one of the things that I discovered by paging through, I found many records that had to do with this family and collateral families that I was researching that I hadn’t initially gone in there looking for, but I found a number of records that were very helpful.

Diana (22m 10s):
So I have to ask the question, did you record each of those? Did you put each of those in a research log as you were going?

Kimball Carter (22m 19s):
Yes. Yeah, I recorded all of them.

Diana (22m 21s):
Because you wouldn’t wanna have to go back.

Kimball Carter (22m 24s):
Exactly. And especially with a book that’s not indexed correctly. So I recorded every single one of them. I can’t remember how many there were. There were upwards of 20 records that had to do with this family and other families that I’m, I was researching in the county at the time period. So it was very, a very fruitful exercise to go through the whole book.

Nicole (22m 45s):
I like that you had a timeframe of four hours. We can all relate that, you know, we’ve spent four hours doing research on a brick wall and come up with nothing. But at least if you’re going through a book you can say you went through that whole record book and either didn’t find anything or you learned about how the records were kept or you did find something. So you make much more progress with doing that than just searching databases over and over. So have we covered all of the challenges now that accompany this project?

Kimball Carter (23m 16s):
I think John Carter is a challenge in and of himself. As I researched, there were four men living in the same area with the name John Carter and two of them were within that same extended family. One was the nephew of the John Carter that we ended up finding. And that was confusing at first because the county line was shifting. This was a time of growth. The county was being divided and happened twice in the lifespan of this John Carter. So I had these four John Carters that I had to figure out who they were and were they different, how were they different?

Diana (23m 53s):
So I have a question about that. What was your research process or your, maybe your organizational process, in separating out those John Carters, because this is such a common problem in our research, you know, how did you keep track of them? Did you put ’em all in separate sheets? Did you use a big whiteboard? How do you work through a problem like that?

Kimball Carter (24m 16s):
I create separate files on my computer. I have, I keep different folders for each of the men and every document that I find I place within those folders and then I go through and transcribe all the documents and then abstract them and then usually put those into a table of comparison. That’s how I end up eventually sorting them out. I was fortunate with these John Carters because two of them were fairly wealthy and left wills, although one of the John Carters lived in King George County, actually four of them lived in King George County at the time. But one of them was clearly from another county outside of King George from Spotsylvania County because it was written in a marriage record that he was from Spotsylvania County.

Kimball Carter (25m 4s):
I went and researched him further in Spotsylvania County, found more information about him, his will, and that really separated him because they named his wife and was able to figure out that he was not the John Carter that had married, married to Anne. Another John Carter that was in the same county in the same parish. He was also from a wealthy family and left a will and his wife was named and he died before this John Carter. So I could separate him. The third John Carter was more difficult because he was the nephew of the John Carter that became our John Carter. And quite honestly, I don’t think I can be a hundred percent certain of what happened to him and that I can be positive it was his nephew.

Kimball Carter (25m 52s):
But everything I found looks like that he definitely was not the John Carter we’re looking for. Actually in a court order again, I found a court order where his orphans and he died right within a year of this John Carter, his orphans received guardians and his wife had died. So it made it clear that he was a different person. There were a lot of reasons why I believe he was the nephew, but that wasn’t as critical. It was critical to separate these men and know they were four different men and which one was married to Anne.

Diana (26m 24s):
Right. And you mentioned that you collected all of these records and that you’d put ’em into folders and then you maybe would have to put those into a different folder ’cause you’d think look at a record and say, oh this is John of Spotsylvania, not John of King George. I may sound really organized, but I do the same thing. I use a giant whiteboard and I have papers all over the place trying to sort these people out because you really do have to just dive in and look at everything and try to make sense of it. It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle and you’re just taking to these pieces and putting it together. For our listeners, we’re going to share Kimball’s report or his proof argument in the show notes so that you can go read this and and look at his great table titled Comparison of the for John Carters ’cause it will give you an idea of how you could use the table to separate out men of the same name.

Diana (27m 17s):
I, I think it’s always so good to see how other people make sense. So these kind of things. So thank you so much for sharing that with us. I’m loving what I’m seeing here.

Kimball Carter (27m 26s):
Thank you.

Nicole (27m 26s):
Why don’t we talk some more about Anne and discovering her parents. So let me recap where my understanding of what we know about Anne is. First of all, she was listed in this descendants of Thomas Carter book, and just to clarify, Thomas Carter that the book was about was like a 1600s man in early Virginia. So then the chapter about Anne is several generations later and she was incorrectly linked to another Thomas Carter.

Kimball Carter (27m 57s):
Right. Yeah. And that’s part of the challenge. And I don’t know if we mentioned this earlier, but one of the key problems we had with Anne’s will is the way that the author in the book cited it. He stated that the first named child of her will was Thomas Carter, which would kind of add credence to the idea that she was somehow related to a Thomas, but the court recorded will does not have a man named Thomas in it. So the author had inadvertently, or I don’t know why it was written, that she had a son named Thomas. She didn’t have a son named Thomas. She had a son named Samuel who wasn’t listed in the book but is listed in the will. So there there was a really big disconnect.

Kimball Carter (28m 38s):
But Anne had been identified in multiple trees by different surnames as her maiden name Claytor, C-L-A-Y-T-O-R was one of one of the names Neil was another one and Hunter. As I researched, I noticed a Claytor family living near the Carters. So I started researching the Claytor family because I thought okay, this family looks like it’s a possible link, but there nobody had cited any sources for why they gave her the name Claytor in there in a tree. So that didn’t give me any clues.

Kimball Carter (29m 19s):
So what I did was I looked for the Claytor family. There was a family by a man named Thomas Claytor who lived very near where the Carters lived from property records. So I started researching him, he left a will, I believe his will was in about 1745. I’m not looking at anything, it’s somewhere in that area. And in his will he left a, a small legacy to his daughter, Anne. He didn’t name give her surname in his will, but he did give us the surname of his other daughter as Claytor still. So he didn’t name her surname. But then at the end of the will there was a witness, and I looked at the witnesses and one of them was John Carter.

Kimball Carter (30m 0s):
That to me was a strong clue. I thought, okay, John Carter’s witnessing the will of Thomas Claytor and he’s got a daughter named Anne that seems like it’s suggesting something. So I started then researching Thomas’s children and Anne’s sister, Elizabeth Claytor, had left her will, which I found. That was gold because in the will she named her brother-in-law as John Carter and her sister as Anne Carter and that she was leaving most all of her estate and she also had legacies for three of Anne’s children that are named in Anne’s will, that are named in Elizabeth’s will as being children of Anne.

Kimball Carter (30m 47s):
So that really cemented everything and connected them. Another lesson about geography, the Claytor family lived in Westmoreland County, but when Elizabeth died, she must have moved to King George County, which is basically across the street because her will was in King George County. She’s the only Claytor that was her will, well the only one at that time period that was in King George County with her will. So if I had looked in Westmoreland County, which is where she had been living and everything I knew about her was there, I would’ve missed her will if I had not looked in King George County for her will. So I always wanna look at neighboring counties because you, these county lines, they just were invisible lines that people would go across all the time.

Kimball Carter (31m 35s):
That pretty much sealed the deal on Anne. And then later I found a will of Elizabeth and Anne’s brother, William Claytor, who died actually just about time John Carter had died. And in his will, two of the witnesses were his niece and nephew through Anne. They were children of John and Anne that were witnesses to his will. And then, or one of them married and it was her husband that was also a witness. So that really connected the family.

Nicole (32m 4s):
Those are just goldmines of information, those wills. And I’m so glad you were able to find Elizabeth’s will in that neighboring county because we don’t always search every county surrounding the one. But you’re right that it’s just an invisible line that was kind of drawn down the street where these people lived and they lived right on the border. So Elizabeth Claytor, it sounds like she didn’t marry and that’s why she retained her maiden name her whole life. And when she died, she left her estate to her nieces and nephews.

Kimball Carter (32m 35s):
Everything we can tell she did not marry, her surname never changed. And she died, I can’t remember the, it was like 1767, I think she probably would’ve been in her forties I think. Although there are no birth records for these families. So we don’t know their exact ages.

Diana (32m 52s):
And I’m guessing you didn’t have a marriage record either or else you would’ve had the maiden name of Anne.

Kimball Carter (32m 58s):
No. Marriage records are few and far between in that time period for most of the people I’ve researched, once in a while you’re lucky. I research in neighboring Richmond County, which is where a lot of my Carter ancestors lived later. And they had some church records that survived back into the 17 and 1600s. And once in a while you find something in there, but they usually don’t even mention any relatives. They just say the the man and the woman. They don’t give you parents or anything. On the, four John Carters that we talked about, I found a marriage record for one of them and the reason that that it was found is because there was property involved because they were wealthy. Other than that, usually I don’t find any marriage records.

Nicole (33m 40s):
What about church records? Were you able to ever use any parish records for these areas?

Kimball Carter (33m 46s):
No, they don’t have any. You know, it was Church of England. Most what I’ve found with Virginia is that the Church of England records sometimes have survived for some parishes and they’re particularly good from about, you know, the late 1600s into the mid 1700s. But once everything started moving towards the Revolution, the Church of England basically got thrown in the trash and people quit going and the records start to fall off. They just start disappearing because of the fact that it was from the, from England. Unfortunately, Baptists that became prominent churches there did not keep records at least that have, have survived, have never found any church records in these two counties, Westmoreland and King George that have helped me in any way.

Kimball Carter (34m 37s):
There just isn’t much there.

Diana (34m 39s):
So it sounds like Kimball that you have become a real expert on this specific locality in Virginia because you’ve done so much research there. Is that true?

Kimball Carter (34m 51s):
Yeah, I’ve been researching these counties now for yeah, 40 something years. But there’s still these like, like the name of a record book being wrong, the looking when there’s no index that’s right. I’m still surprised that I find things because for instance, another thing I’ve found in, in this in Westmoreland County is that I found some wills where there are three different books that the same will appears in. I don’t know when they created those books what was going on, but there are duplicates of a number of records and I’ve even compared some of the wills and found like I found one where it named a child that wasn’t named in the other two copies.

Kimball Carter (35m 33s):
So you, you just have to be thorough and check everything and realize that, that when these people kept these records they weren’t thinking about us. They were just writing what was happening at the time in the way that they felt like they needed to. And I think you have to keep that in mind whenever you’re researching.

Nicole (35m 51s):
What resources did you use to help you understand the geography and the shifting boundaries in those counties?

Kimball Carter (35m 59s):
Well the Newbury Atlas has always been a really helpful piece. It shows the borders. I, I don’t know if they’re a hundred percent accurate, but I think they’re close. One thing I discovered in the process of this, I, I talked to the county clerk a couple of times and unfortunately the history of a county border is not something a county clerk spends a lot of time dealing with, especially when it occurred in the 1600s or 1700s. And it, it was interesting in talking to them because I had looked at the Newbury Atlas and it showed where the border they thought had been between King George and, and Westmoreland County.

Kimball Carter (36m 40s):
That was from 1721 to 1787. And I told them where it said it was and they said, oh I didn’t know that we have a border that was over there. So you can’t expect that the people that are working there today are gonna know about that. It’s not something that they have to know. I also found a, a book called the Atlas of Westmoreland County that’s on FamilySearch and I was able to go to that and they had maps of land patents in the county. That was really helpful because it showed where this portion of the county that had changed hands from county to county is started in Hanock County, then was made part of Richmond County then King George and then Westmoreland.

Kimball Carter (37m 22s):
And it even said that on the map where it showed the patent and that’s exactly where these people lived is in that part of the county that had been rotated through these four different counties. That was really helpful. And then I kind of used those two different sources to put together a, a map that would show about where these people had lived because on the patent map there was a patent that was taken, I think it was in 1667. It’s in that timeframe and that patent is listed in one of the deeds that I found, one of the early deeds that shows a location basically of, of where this property had to be because if it was listed in the county that it was supposed to be in King George, and in the patent map you could take those and overlap them and it would show you what part of the county of west of King George the property had to have been in because if it was part of that patent it had to be within that and within the county and they overlapped us in a way that showed you where it was.

Diana (38m 28s):
Well I have to say, I’m looking at your map that you compiled and it is so neat everyone listening, go check out the actual paper that Kimball wrote and just take a look at his map. I love how you put this together. Can I just ask what software you use to put that together so I can copy it?

Kimball Carter (38m 48s):
I’m a graphic artist. I was a professional graphic artist for my entire career for 40, 43 years and I just retired and so I used Adobe Illustrator, it’s a great program but it’s a little technical and it’s also expensive. So I, I kind of have a, a little bit of unfair advantage because of my background in that space for a lot of people. I think that doing that would be pretty tough, honestly even for me with my experience, you know, that that’s pretty meticulous work to get those kinds of things right. But Adobe Illustrator, it’s a fantastic program, it’s incredibly deep and very rich and it can do a zillion things but it also has a pretty steep learning curve to do things like that.

Diana (39m 30s):
So maybe I should just hire you to do this for me because you could do it a lot faster than I could.

Kimball Carter (39m 38s):
Yeah, unfortunately that’s probably true. It it’s just reality.

Diana (39m 41s):
Good. Well I’m just gonna remember that, that if I need a really great map, I know who to come to because I love this and I like to do that in all of my client reports because I feel like, you know, as researchers we get to know the area so well but someone who hasn’t been researching there, it’s so helpful to have a visual to see how everything works. I’m very, very visual and I think the one visual counts for about five pages of text, so I love that. Well,

Kimball Carter (40m 11s):
Thank you.

Diana (40m 11s):
We are getting to the end of this episode. So let’s kind of wrap up and let’s talk about some of those other records that you’ve used. And I love how you used the property records and how you used the records of the enslaved people and tax records. So just kind of walk us through some of the neat discoveries and how you use those records to kind of pull all this together.

Kimball Carter (40m 39s):
Maybe I’ll start with the easier ones. Actually, one of the easier ones was the enslaved persons. There was a theory I had about who John Carter’s parents were. A man named Giles Carter who named a John Carter in his will. But connecting Giles and John and being certain they were father and son, the one, the John that we were looking at was the hard part. In Giles Carter’s estate there was an inventory and it listed his slaves. He also left one of his enslaved persons to his son John. Then Giles’ wife, Mary, deeded John, her son, all of her property and named a slave by name in that property record.

Kimball Carter (41m 32s):
When John Carter died in his estate distribution, it named each of his enslaved persons by name. Well the first person named in his list was a man named Dick, and Mary Carter the person I thought was his mother, deeded a boy named Dick to him in 1750. I, I believe that Dick was the same person. And then also his father, Giles, had willed him, enslaved girl named Bess. And there was a Bess as a woman shown in John Carter’s inventory. And then one other enslaved child that showed up in Giles Carter’s estate inventory was Nan.

Kimball Carter (42m 17s):
And there was a Nan that appeared also as an adult in John Carter’s inventory. So that to me was pretty strong evidence that these were the same person that this John Carter, the son of Giles and Mary was also the John, the same John Carter that was married to Ann Claytor and and had those three enslaved persons in his estate. So that was kind of the, one of the easier records. Not easy to sort through the details, but it was like you can compare these two and look at ’em. Tax records, property tax records started in 1782 in Virginia. They’re not super simple to learn from.

Kimball Carter (42m 58s):
You basically have to pull a lot of ’em and compare what you see. Well, in 1782, the first year was fortunate that John Carter appears with 19 slaves in Westmoreland County, Virginia. If John Carter had been living in King George, ’cause that’s where his father Giles had been, that’s where the property records had been, if he were in King George still then he should appear in the King George property tax list. But he’s not there. There’s no John Carter listed. But there is a John Carter listed in Westmoreland with 19 slaves. And then the next year, John Carter is listed as his estate.

Kimball Carter (43m 39s):
He doesn’t, doesn’t list him, it just says John Carter’s estate in 1783. And then the year after that, Anne Carter is listed, listed in the property tax records and no John, so that makes it clear that the John Carter that died in Westmoreland County was probably the same one that was living in King George because 1778 is when the county line changed. And so John, who had been living his whole life in King George County, all of a sudden was now in Westmoreland County because it swallowed up pretty much most of that part of King George County. That was the southern part. It was now part of Westmoreland County and John never moved, but his property all of a sudden appeared there.

Kimball Carter (44m 25s):
So those tax records helped. The deeds were probably the biggest amount of work. There were lots of them. I tracked all of the property that I could find that was associated with John Carter or with Giles Carter, who was, I believe was his father and was able to, to find records where Giles died. He left most of his property to John and then some of his property to his son, Giles, to make it confusing. And that Giles moved out of the area and went up to Prince William County. And I later tracked the property that that Giles had inherited ’cause he then willed the property he’d gotten from his father to his son William in 1785.

Kimball Carter (45m 13s):
And the nice thing is that he actually said in the will to his son, William, he said, the land that I got from my father who bought it from a man named John Gohan, which is on the deed from 1742. So that helped to track where that land came from. And so what I did was looked at, okay if, if John Carter received part of the property of Giles and his son Giles, John’s brother, received part of the property, then I had to figure out how much land was there. So I took Giles Carter’s deeds and figured out that he owned total of about 180 acres land.

Kimball Carter (45m 55s):
And then the land that he gave to Giles, his son was about 80 acres. Although you don’t know that from reading the deed, you have to follow forward when when it’s sold and it says it’s 80 acres, which was not until 1799, that meant that John had received about a hundred acres from his father and then he bought 70 acres himself in 1755, which gave him a total of 170 acres. The reason that was important to me was, you don’t have 19 slaves, and if you look at his estate inventory, it talks about all the things that he owned.

Kimball Carter (46m 35s):
And one of the things that stands out is he had like 1000 pounds of pork and he had beef, so he obviously was raising cattle. He had to have land in order to have all this stuff. And then to have 19 slaves to work land, you don’t work 19 slaves on 25 acres, you have to have some property. So it was critical to find out if John had property and where it came from. And that’s how I connected him back to his father Giles, was through the property records and the enslaved persons.

Diana (47m 12s):
I love that because I work in this time period and these same very challenging areas of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, all the time, and it is often the land and the tax records, those two things that pull it all together. So I love that that’s how you use that. And so now I’m just assuming that this wonderful graphic you did of how all the land was distributed, you also made with your neat program.

Kimball Carter (47m 41s):
Yeah, I did. Although you could make that in lots of different kinds of applications. You could do it in PowerPoint.

Diana (47m 48s):
We’ve been using Lucidchart for DNA and I’m, I’m looking at this and thinking, oh, I think I could do something like this with Lucidchart because again, you know, you’ve listed the land, you know, you have little dotted lines that go to who purchased it, who sold it, where it all went. So it’s so neat. I really, really love your graphic there. Well, I am just very impressed with this entire research process that it’s been so fun to have you go through it with us and I think everyone listening, if they are doing any kind of this hard research, have they picked up just a ton of tips about how to better, you know, dive in and really do this hard research?

Kimball Carter (48m 28s):
Well, I hope it helps.

Diana (48m 29s):
Yeah, absolutely.

Kimball Carter (48m 30s):
There’s one other thing I should mention. Just really fast in the property records, one of the key things is looking for who the neighbors were. And that was a big part of proving that John Carter was related to Giles because the neighbors that were in the property records of Giles Carter also end up appearing in the records of John Carter as his neighbors. Unfortunately, the records did not include metes and bounds in almost all the deeds. They just said that the land is bordered by these people. But that became really, really critical in determining that, that John was the same John that was Giles’s son.

Nicole (49m 8s):
That was really key in my Johnson project, the neighbors, because the same thing happened, I don’t know if it was just early in Virginia, they didn’t list the metes and bounds as much, but they had the neighbors listed a lot. So you can follow those and I really like how you did that in your case study. It’s a lot of extra work to follow all those neighbors, but then it really helps you weave together the exact location of where these people lived and all of their associates and really help you prove your case. I think it’s important. This was so enlightening. Thank you so much for coming today and talking about your case study on our podcast, Kimball.

Kimball Carter (49m 48s):
Well I appreciate it. Thank you for having me and I hope that it helps somebody.

Nicole (49m 53s):
We will put your article on the show notes so everybody who wants to go and read Kimball’s article, you can click there and read all about it. Alright everyone, thanks for listening and we hope that you have a great week. We’ll talk to you again next week.

Diana (50m 8s):
Alright, bye-bye everyone.

Nicole (50m 7s):
Thank you for listening to Research Like a Pro with Diana Elder, accredited genealogy professional and Nicole Dyer. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your own genealogy research. If you like what you heard, please leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher or visit our website, FamilyLocket.com to contact us. You can find our book Research Like a Pro a Genealogist’s Guide on Amazon.com and other booksellers. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.