Or, Subtitled: A Southeastern Kentucky Family Migrates to West Central Illinois, Late 1820s
The third child of Thomas Brooks and wife Sarah Whitlock of Wythe County, Virginia, Wayne County, Kentucky, and Morgan County, Alabama, was
Or, Subtitled: Migration of a Brooks Family from Lawrence County, Alabama, to Itawamba County, Mississippi, and West to Texas
The following posting provides an outline sketch of basic information about the children of Charles Brooks (1800/1 – 1861) and wife Deniah Cornelius of Lawrence County, Alabama, and Itawamba County, Mississippi. As the postings I’ve just linked note, Charles Brooks, who administered the estate of his father Thomas Brooks in Morgan County, Alabama, purchased his father’s bible at Thomas Brooks’s estate sale in Morgan County. Charles and Deniah then recorded the names and dates of birth of their children in the register of the bible of Thomas Brooks.
In a recent posting, I provided a digital image of the sale bill (also called an account) from the sale of the personal property of Charles Brooks of Itawamba County, Mississippi. The sale was conducted by Charles’s son James M. Brooks, who administered his father’s estate. As the posting I’ve just linked tells you, the sale account is filed in the loose-papers estate file of Charles Brooks in Itawamba County, Mississippi (Itawamba County, Mississippi, Loose-Papers Estate Packets #281). Since accounts of estate sales were usually written by the person administering an estate, I assume that James M. Brooks wrote this sale account, though it’s not signed. As the previous posting also indicates, the sale account is not dated, but the sale seems to have taken place between 23 December 1861 and 27 January 1862.
After I shared that sale bill, it has nagged at me that I did not offer readers a guide to misspelled words in it. The sale account contains quite a few phonetic spellings, and as a result, many readers may not be able to make out words in the sale bill. Here’s my guide to some misspellings I spot:
Sithe & cradol = scythe and cradle
Lot of cotin = lot of cotton
Par Sadolbags = pair [of] saddlebags
Muly bull = muley bull
Trasher = thresher
Shep = sheep
Shots = shoats
Coalt = colt
Pare stilyards = pair [of] steelyards
I hope this guide to misspelled words in the sale bill will help readers trying to make out what it says.
This is a note to readers who may have read the previous posting here, about Charles Brooks (1800/1 – 1861), son of Thomas Brooks and Sarah Whitlock, and his years in Itawamba County, Mississippi, from 1840 to 1861.
I have now added substantial new material to that posting, and wanted to let you know this. Bob Franks, publications editor and librarian for the Itawamba Historical Society, has kindly sent me land records filling in gaps in my research about Charles, and copies of documents from Charles’s estate file. I have worked that new material into the posting, and am happy that it now offers a more complete picture of Charles Brooks’s life in Itawamba County. I am deeply grateful to Bob Franks for his generosity in finding new documents and sending them to me — and want to put a word in for the Itawamba Historical Society and its outstanding website chock full of valuable information about the history this Mississippi county
Or, Subtitled: Migration of Families from Lawrence-Morgan Counties, Alabama, to Itawamba County, Mississippi, Following Depression of 1837
This posting is a continuation of a previous posting discussing the life of Charles Brooks (1800/1-1861), son of Thomas Brooks (1775-1838) and wife Sarah Whitlock. The previous posting tracks Charles in Lawrence County, Alabama, where he married Deniah Cornelius, daughter of Rowland Cornelius and Eleanor Watkins, on 27 January 1823, and where Charles and Deniah and their children lived until 1840, when the family moved to Itawamba County, Mississippi. As the posting I just linked also indicates, Charles appears in the estate records of his father Thomas Brooks, who died in Morgan County, Alabama, on 25 October 1838 with a will naming Charles, his oldest son, as his executor.
Or, Subtitled: Wherein I Confess That I’ve Made a Whopper of a Mistake, about Which I Need to Tell Readers of This Blog
I need to start this posting with a confession. I make mistakes. I know that will shock you profoundly[!]. In working on this posting, I discovered I have made a colossal one, one that reverberates through previous postings about my Brooks family. Finding that I have gone wrong about one key piece of information will now require me to backtrack through previous postings and correct multiple erroneous statements based on one big wrong turn.
Begats and Bequeathals 