BEGATS AND BEQUEATHALS

Before I begin my series focusing on the Lauderdales, I’d like to share with you a teaser regarding that family. The document at the head of this posting, which is a transcription of the original recorded in Anderson County, South Carolina, Deed Book D, pp. 365-6, has been on my mind after I gave an online presentation earlier this week to the Heritage Seekers Genealogy Club of Arkansas. Heritage Seekers had asked me to talk with club members about genealogical blogging. One of the points I made in my presentation is that when we gather together our documents about an ancestor or family and put document together with document, a story often begins to emerge from what had previously been “only” a dry document or two. One of the advantages of genealogical blogging, of organizing and sharing our research about particular family lines and ancestors online, is that the organizing and sharing of our material often help us to spot stories hidden in the material we’ve accumulated about a family.

A case in point is the document transcribed at the head of this posting, which I’ll discuss in more detail in subsequent postings about Sarah Lauderdale Leonard and her father John Lauderdale: on 2 January 1795 in Pendleton (later Anderson) County, South Carolina, my 5-g-grandfather John Lauderdale made a deed of gift to his daughter Sarah, my 4-g-grandmother. Sarah was 10 years old at the time. The deed of gift is the transcribed document above.

This deed of gift contains all sorts of fascinating information, including that Sarah’s grandfather had left her an inheritance of £50 and John had “wasted & run through” it. It’s clear to me that the grandfather in question wasn’t Sarah’s grandfather James Lauderdale, who was still alive in Sumner County, Tennessee, when this deed of gift was made, but her grandfather John Mauldin, who was also still alive and living in Pendleton County along with John Lauderdale and John’s wife Milbury Mauldin when this deed was made. John Mauldin witnessed John Lauderdale’s deed of gift to his granddaught Sarah, and subsequent deeds show him still living into 1796, so the statement that Sarah’s grandfather had left her a legacy does not mean that this grandfather had died..

As I’ve just noted, Milbury’s brother Harris and her father John Mauldin witnessed John Lauderdale’s deed of gift to his daughter Sarah. This suggests to me that the Mauldin family was angry that John Lauderdale had “wasted & run through” his children’s inheritance from their grandfather John Mauldin, and they forced John Lauderdale to deed his land and other property over to his children James and Sarah Lauderdale to make up for the £50 each grandchild had gotten from his/her grandfather Mauldin, and which John had wasted. On the same day that John Lauderdale made his deed of gift to Sarah, he made one almost exactly like it to her brother James.

The story that these deed of gifts seem to tell is given more depth when these deed documents are put together with some court records from shortly before John Lauderdale placed his land and other property in the hands of his children at the behest of his Mauldin in-laws. On 9 August 1790, Pendleton County court minutes show John charged by the state with petty larceny (Pendleton County, South Carolina, Court Minutes 1790-3, p. 23). On 25 June 1792, while he was being held in jail, he was put on trial for this charge and found guilty, and then two days later, he was sentenced to be lashed with 39 lashes on his back at 1 o’clock in the afternoon (ibid., pp. 138-144). Sitting on the jury that convicted John Lauderdale for this crime were his wife Milbury’s brother Joab Mauldin and Thomas Leonard, whose son Thomas Lewis Leonard would marry John and Milbury’s daughter Sarah.

When one puts John’s 1795 deeds of gift to his children James and Sarah, stating that he had wasted and run through a generous monetary inheritance they had received from their grandfather, together with these court records of his conviction for petty larceny, one has to suspect — strongly so — that John Lauderdale was what used to be called a ne’er-do-well. In his book History of the Lauderdales in America, 1714-1850 (Bowie, Maryland: Heritage Books, 1998), Clint Lauderdale concludes that John was given to drinking and gambling (p. 24). That may certainly have been the case, though I haven’t found records mentioning that he drank heavily or gambled. It would not surprise me to find such records, however; many of our 17th- and 18th-century ancestors, particularly in the colonial South, were extraordinarily heavy drinkers, with Ulster Scots families like the Lauderdales noted by historians as having a penchant for enjoying more than a tipple or two on a routine basis.

Stay tuned for more documents and stories as I begin sharing my research about this Lauderdale family line….