Ah-Ha!

Where have I spent most of my time lately?  Here.  Well, with my various ancestors.  Here James Moore Powell (1791-1868) has a marker in Texas.  He had been born in North Carolina, (the state in which I now live, but nowhere near me).

Here's a census report from Louisiana, giving his wife's name and various children.

I noticed the neighbors (all farmers) were a family by the name of Traylor.  Didn't think much of it until I saw 2 Traylor children listed as living with the Powells.  Then as I noticed one of the Powell children grew up (over various census reports) and she married a man named Richard Bass, there were still these one or two Traylor children being part of the household.

Then when they moved to Texas and I again saw Traylors in the neighborhood as well as the household I went Ah Ha!!

The wife must have been a Traylor.  And by looking at the originals of many census reports back and forth, there she was.  Alabama, Louisiana, and finally Texas, she was Nancy Jones Traylor Powell (1804-1881).  I guessed the neighbors to be her brothers, the ones who had all these other children...and one must have lost his wife or maybe some of the children were orphaned, so the Powell and the Bass families took them in.  This was the way families took care of their own in the old South, and many still do.

I also have guessed some other neighbors might have had a sister Traylor marry and raise her family named Hill.  Haven't got anything that connects these famlies for sure yet.  This mystery solving has certainly attracted my attention.

It wasn't until I was telling a friend how I spent yesterday, that I realized the name sounds like trailer, so these days it might have the new-South connotation of trailer-trash.  I wonder how many people might have changed their names because of that.

And Mary Jones Traylor Powell  was listed with a sur-name for her middle name.  Doesn't that make me think her mother might have been a Jones?  I wonder if I'll find a connection and be able to go further back in her family tree.  Even if I can't, NJ Powell was my grandfather's great-grandmother, who he never knew.

While my fingers continue to heal and I do my exercises instead of pottery, (and I've got more pottery than I know what to do with anyway,) the computer has become my pal.  I know these people have been gone for over a hundred years.  But their bones that lie in those graves carry the same DNA as I have, and they have given me the gift of curiousity as well as creativity.  Don't you know that's carried genetically?  Why not? So this is where I'll be for a while.