As I noted in a posting near the start of this year, I now often use the new all-text search feature at FamilySearch, and as I do so, I occasionally find valuable information I had not previously seen, since I had no idea it was cached in some set of documents I had not thought to search before the FamilySearch all-text search tool has unearthed something significant in this cache of documents. This past April in Roots and Branches, the quarterly newsletter of the Tuscaloosa County, Alabama, Genealogical Society, I published an article about techniques I’ve developed to enable this valuable research tool to work for me.[1] The article talks about some of the totally unexpected and valuable finds I’ve made using the all-text search engine. With the kind permission of Tuscaloosa Genealogical Society, I’ve uploaded a copy of this article to this blog.
What I want to talk about now is yet another totally unexpected and really amazing (well, to me, at least) find I’ve just happened on using FamilySearch’s new all-text search tool. In a number of previous postings, I’ve shared quite a bit of information and documentation about an ancestor of mine — she was my 3rd great-grandmother — named Eliza Jane Smith (1790/1800 – 1843). Postings in which I’ve provided information about Eliza Jane include the following:
Ezekiel Samuel Green (1824/5 – 1900/1910) (1)
Samuel Kerr Green (1790-1860) — The Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, Years
Samuel Kerr Green (1790-1860): The Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, Years, 1835-1848 (2)
These postings sum up what I knew about Eliza Jane until a few days ago when FamilySearch’s all-text search tool found for me the new piece of information I’ll share in a moment. The bare outlines of her life (for documentation and further discussion of these bare facts, see the links above):
• Eliza Jane was born between 1790 and 1800, per the 1840 federal census.
• I don’t know where Eliza Jane was born. On the 1880 federal census, her son Ezekiel Samuel Green stated that her birthplace was unknown. On the 1900 federal census, he reported her birthplace as Louisiana.
• It appears that about not long before 1823 and soon after Samuel Kerr Green arrived in New Orleans and Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, she and Samuel met and entered a common-law marriage. Or perhaps Samuel had met Eliza Jane in Arkansas Territory, where he sojourned briefly in the early 1820s after he left Nashville and before he went to south Louisiana…. Most likely, I think, though, Eliza Jane was living in New Orleans when she and Samuel met.
• In a lawsuit Samuel and Eliza’s son Ezekiel filed against his father, which ended up with the Louisiana Supreme Court, one witness stated that Samuel and Eliza Jane had known each other before he came to Louisiana and that they were relatives. At issue in the lawsuit was the question of Ezekiel’s paternity, which Samuel wanted to deny in order to claim enslaved persons Eliza Jane left to their son when she died.
• The Louisiana Supreme Court found that there was abundant evidence that, even if Samuel and Eliza Jane did not marry officially, they regarded themselves as man and wife and were publicly seen that way. Affidavits in the court case and documents in the Louisiana Supreme Court’s case file state that Eliza’s full name was Eliza Jane Smith, and this is how she frequently signed her name even when she was married.
• About 1824 Samuel and Eliza Jane had their son Ezekiel. By 1829, the couple had separated and Ezekiel was raised jointly by Eliza Jane and Samuel. The legal complaint Ezekiel filed against his father Samuel is the source of his birth year: it indicates that he was born in 1824 or 1825. But other documents have him born anywhere from 1818 to 1825.
• Not long after 1830, Eliza Jane married Captain Samuel Ives of New Orleans, who owned a sawmill in Iberville Parish, Louisiana. By 1835-7, this marriage had ended and Eliza Jane lived as a single woman in Iberville Parish, or, as the 1840 federal census tags her, “Wd S. Ives” — that is, the widow of Samuel Ives, who was still living: he was murdered in Iberville Parish on 2 June 1850 by his business partner Alden Piper.
• In 1841, Eliza Jane sold her property in Iberville Parish and went to live with her first husband Samuel Kerr Green, who had now established himself on a plantation close to the Los Adaes settlement near the town of Robeline in Natchitoches Parish.
• On 5 March 1843 at Samuel’s house in Natchitoches Parish, Eliza Jane made a will. On 18 March 1843, the will was filed in Natchitoches Parish, so she died in Natchitoches Parish between 5-18 March 1843.
And now to the surprising document FamilySearch’s all-text search tool has unearthed for me: I have long assumed that Eliza Jane Smith is likely buried near where she died in March 1843, that is, near where Samuel Kerr Green lived, probably on land he owned. I now know that this assumption was correct, after FamilySearch pointed me to the document an image of which is at the head of this posting.
The document at the head of the posting is a cemetery transcription from a collection entitled Louisiana Tombstone Inscriptions produced by Louisiana Society of DAR between 1962-5. As you can see, when the Louisiana DAR undertook this project in Natchitoches Parish, members found a cemetery about two miles east of Robeline and then ¼ mile north.
The DAR transcription collection calls this cemetery Old Ponder cemetery. According to the transcription report, in the early 1960s, this cemetery was overgrown with thorn trees and briars, and though it had several broken tombstones in it, only one was legible. The legible stone stated, insofar as the DAR transcribers could read it, the following:
Eliza Jane Smith, who died
March 5, 1845
Aged 35 years
I can find absolutely no information in any other source about the Old Ponder cemetery in Natchitoches Parish. I suspect it’s now a lost cemetery and that it was already more or less lost when the DAR researchers found it.
This tombstone DAR transcribers found in the Old Ponder cemetery is, I’m quite sure, the tombstone of my ancestor Eliza Jane Smith. The cemetery is right where Samuel Kerr Green lived in the years in which he lived in Natchitoches Parish, and where he was living when Eliza Jane died at his house in March 1843. The description of where the cemetery is located matches where Samuel had land and where he lived.
Note, too, that the 5 March date of death on the tombstone matches the date on Eliza Jane’s will, though she made her will on 5 March 1843, not 5 March 1845.[2] It’s possible, I think, that the digit for the year of her death was misread by the DAR transcribers. It’s entirely possible that by the time the DAR researchers found the stone, it was eroded and not very legible.
If the 1840 federal census provides a correct range of birth for Eliza Jane — 1890-1800 — then she was also not 35 when she died. If her son Ezekiel was born in 1824 and Eliza Jane in 1808, then she’d have been only sixteen years of age when her son was born. This is certainly not out of the range of possibility, but it also has to be noted that by May 1829, Eliza Jane shows up in Plaquemines Parish records purchasing a family of four enslaved persons from slave trader Samuel Woolfolk in New Orleans. If Eliza Jane was twenty-one at this point, then that would have been unusual behavior on the part of a very young and again single woman. I think the 1840 census probably gives a correct birth range for Eliza Jane (her husband Samuel Kerr Green was born in 1790, and her husband Samuel Ives in 1785). I’m not sure how to account for the figure given for her age on the tombstone transcribed by the DAR — and I do wonder if that figure was read correctly.
Despite the discrepancy with dates, there’s no doubt in my mind that this is my Eliza Jane Smith. If this tombstone is correct in stating that she died on 5 March, then she died on the day she made her will — again, in 1843 and not 1845 — and it was entered for record on the 18th. My understanding from communications I’ve had with the Natchitoches parish clerk is that there’s no loose-papers succession file with the original will. I’d very much like to have seen it, and to have seen affidavits proving it, since I think it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Samuel K. Green, who was something of a scoundrel and intent on claiming ownership of a number of enslaved persons Eliza Jane owned at the time of her death, manufactured a will.
I say this because the will leaves Eliza Jane’s enslaved persons to Samuel and not their son Ezekiel, but it’s clear from the lawsuit that Ezekiel filed several years later in Pointe Coupee Parish — this is the lawsuit that went to the Louisiana Supreme Court — that Ezekiel was the legal heir of Eliza Jane’s property included her enslaved persons, since he was her sole survivor.
Now a note about why I’ve been silent here for some time: as I noted in a previous posting, in addition to pursuing my research on my own family lines, I’ve been working in recent months to assist researchers of American Montgomery families who are combining DNA findings with traditional genealogical research to try to figure out the back-in-time origins of some US Montgomery families, and whether some of these families are genetically connected to each other or not.
For some weeks now, I’ve been working on a particular Montgomery line as part of this research venture, and I have to admit, I’m stymied by it, and have been at a standstill as I try to analyze the data I’ve gathered and to match the data to several wildly conflicting accounts of this family line that I find online. And that standstill has spilled over to my work on this blog, since I don’t feel comfortable moving ahead with postings here — on my own family lines — until I’ve resolved the problems I’m confronting with the Montgomery line I’m researching. Give me a research problem, and I turn into the proverbial dog with the proverbial bone: I can’t let it go and other things fall by the wayside as I gnaw the bone.
I hope soon I’ll have this research quandary figured out. Otherwise, I may just throw my hands up and admit defeat and ask those who have produced such divergent accounts of this particular Montgomery family line how they think their accounts square with the abundant actual documents and facts that are out there to be found, which don’t in any way substantiate their accounts of this family.
[1] “A.I. & Genealogical Research: FamilySearch Full Text,” Roots and Branches 50,2 (April 2025), pp. 13-19.
[2] Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, Conveyance Bk. 34, p. 130, no. 3422.
BEGATS AND BEQUEATHALS 
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