13 November 1839 account of Jane Brooks Lindsey in loose-papers estate file of Thomas Brooks held by Morgan County Archives
Or, Subtitled: “They were married together February 14, in the year of our Lord 1796“
Sarah Whitlock was, if I have the children of Thomas Whitlock and Hannah Phillips ordered correctly, the couple’s fourth child. Sarah’s my 4th-great-grandmother. I’ve shared all that I know about her life in a number of previous postings. As this previous posting states, Sarah’s name is recorded in a family bible that belonged to her and her husband Thomas Brooks, and which passed from them to their oldest son Charles Brooks.[1] This bible is discussed in another previous posting.
Or, Subtitled: “Defts who first being duly sworn on the Holy Evangalists depose as follows“
Warren County, Tennessee, Years, 1807-1819
As the previous posting indicates, John Hammons Jr. disappears from the Wayne County tax list after 1807, when he moved with his father and brothers Leroy and Woodson to Warren County, Tennessee. On 7 August 1807, John entered 100 acres in White County by virtue of warrant #1686. The land entry states that the land was assigned to John by D. Ross by his attorney J. (or T.?) Hopkins, assignee of Stokely Donelson, assignee of Patrick Hamilton. The entry was location #143 in the 3rd district, and adjoined John’s occupant claim, location #141 and Martin Harpool.[1]
Or, Subtitled: A Cross-Slit and Underkeel in Each Ear — The Value of Earmarks in Genealogy
According to Margaret Austin of Bay Village, Ohio, who researched the Hammons family exhaustively for years and shared her research notes with me in April 1997, Thomas Whitlock’s son-in-law John Hammons appears to have been born about 1770-2. Margaret based this date on the fact that John Hammons Jr. appears on a jury list in Patrick County, Virginia, on 13-14 August 1793 in the cases of Lyne vs. King and Adams vs. Mankin and Keaton.[1] Margaret Austin’s notes also state that John Hammonds Jr. provided a deposition on 8 October 1792 in the Patrick County case of Dickerson vs. Laurance, and was sued on 13 May 1793 for debt in Patrick County in the case of Senter vs. Hammonds Jr. Note the variant spellings of the surname: Hammons and Hammonds (as well as Hammon/Hammond).
Wesley Huffaker’s signature to 2 May 1850 letter to David Dinsmore Lindsey in loose-papers estate file of Thomas Brooks held by Morgan County, Alabama, Archives
Or, Subtitled: The one child of Thomas and Sarah Whitlock Brooks who remained in Wayne County, Kentucky, dying there of childbirth
6. The sixth child of Thomas Brooks (1775-1838) and Sarah Whitlock (1774-1837), Hannah Brooks, who was named for her grandmother Hannah Phillips Whitlock, was born 5 September 1811. This date of birth is recorded on her tombstone in Bethesda cemetery, at Bethesda in Wayne County, Kentucky, and in her obituary in the Louisville and Nashville Christian Advocate on 23 February 1854.[1]As with her brother Alexander Mackey Brooks, the sibling born immediately before her, her birthdate is not recorded in her parents’ family bible. We know she was a daughter of Thomas Brooks, however, since his 8 October 1838 will in Morgan County, Alabama, names Hannah Huffaker as his daughter.[2] As documents cited in the posting I have just linked state, Thomas’s estate documents show that Hannah’s husband was Wesley Huffaker.
History of Randolph and Macon Counties, Missouri (St. Louis: National Historical Co., 1884), pp. 541-3
Or, Subtitled: “He entered land and devoted his time to improving his place and farming”
4. Thomas Whitlock Brooks, the fourth child of Thomas Brooks (1775-1838) and Sarah Whitlock (1774-1837), was born 22 December 1805. This date is recorded in his father’s family bible (and see also here). As the postings I’ve just linked state, I have not seen or found information about the bible’s provenance — except we know that the bible originally belonged to Thomas Brooks and was bought by Thomas’s son Charles at his father’s estate sale in April 1839 — and haven’t seen the original bible register. I’m relying for information on a transcript of the register (by an unidentified person) published in 1988.[1] The transcriber of the bible read the name of this son of Thomas and Sarah Whitlock Brooks as Thomas R. Brooks. A biography of George H. Cottingham, who married Thomas Whitlock Brooks’s daughter Sarah Margaret, in History of Randolph and Macon Counties,Missouri, gives Thomas Whitlock Brooks’s middle initial as B., and a biography of Thomas’s son William C. Brooks in the same work shows it as N.[2]
Bond of Charles Brooks and John Stewart, 24 January 1823, for Charles’s marriage to Deniah Cornelius, see Lawrence County, Alabama, Marriage Bonds and Licenses 1820, available digitally at FamilySearch
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.
Original will (holographic, page 1) of Thomas Brooks of Morgan County, Alabama,, 2 October 1838, in loose-papers estate file of Thomas Brooks held by Morgan County Archives
Or, Subtitled: The Mystery of an Estate Selling Land to Which the Decedent Does Not Have Title
With this posting, I’ll provide information about the final phase of the lives of Thomas Brooks and wife Sarah Whitlock, after they moved in November 1836 from Wayne County, Kentucky, to Morgan County, Alabama, to join their adult children who had settled in adjoining Lawrence County, where Thomas’s brother James had died in 1835, and Wayne County neighbors including Rev. Elliott Jones.As I state at the end of the previous posting, because both Thomas and Sarah died not very long after they made their final move to Alabama, and doctors’ receipts in Thomas’s estate file indicate that medications like laudanum and morphine were prescribed for what appear to have been painful illnesses, I suspect that both were already sick at the time of their move, perhaps both with a lingering, debilitating illness such as cancer.
Thomas Brooks’s affidavit, 10 March 1804, Wayne County, Kentucky, in Whitlock v. Whitlock, Commonwealth of Virginia Chancery District Court, Staunton, box 10, file 38
Or, Subtitled: “A Rough Hardy Race of Men, Very Large & Stout, & Altogether an Excellent Population, for a New Country”
Thomas and Sarah Brooks Establish Their Young Family in Kentucky (1798-9)
In the previous posting about Thomas Brooks (1775-1838), I track him up to 1798, when he moved with wife Sarah Whitlock and infant daughter Jane from Wythe County, Virginia, to Pulaski (soon to be Wayne) County, Kentucky. As that posting notes, when the Brooks family made that move, Thomas and Sarah were a young couple, he 23 and she 24. You may have noticed that the previous postings discussing the Virginia beginnings of this Brooks family cited no records for Thomas in Wythe County other than tax records — with the exception of the record in his family bible stating that Thomas and Sarah married 14 February 1796.
Pen-and-ink drawing of Mark Jefferson Lindsey from “an old family bible,” reproduced in Henry C. Lindsey, The Mark Lindsey Heritage (Brownwood, Texas, 1982), p. 3
Or, Subtitled: Migration of Alabama Families to Northwest Louisiana, Late 1840s and Early 1850s
Establishing Mark’s Birthdate
In the bible of his sister Frances Rebecca Kellogg, Mark Jefferson Lindsey recorded his birthdate, stating that he was born “in the year 1820 Oct the 9,” son of D. and Jane Lindsey. Above the diary entry, Mark has written the date on which he made this record: “December the 4 1853.” We’re able to know that Mark himself wrote this entry since his handwriting matches that of other documents he wrote. In the signatures of Mark below, note the stylized J, for instance, with the loop running back through the top of it, and the stylized capital M. The first is from a 15 September 1838 deed of trust between Jacob H. Huffaker and John M. Davis in Oakville, Lawrence County, Alabama, for a debt Huffaker owed Davis, with Mark signing as trustee.[1] The second is Mark’s signature as he gave bond on 19 October 1839 for his marriage to Mary Ann Harrison in Lawrence County.[2] The birth record for Mark in his sister Frances Rebecca’s bible is, it’s easy to ascertain, written in the same hand — by Mark himself.
S.W. Barbee, “Old Lawrence Reminiscent,” Moulton Advertiser (22 December 1908), p. 1, col. 5-6 (1)
Or, Subtitled: Irish Linen, Thirst for Red Liquor, and a Loyalist Grandfather
Now to the last of the children of Mark Lindsey and Mary Jane Dinsmore, their son David Dinsmore Lindsey (after which I’ll turn to Dennis, their oldest son): Mark and Mary Jane’s last child was named for Mary Jane’s father and, like his brothers Burke and Wesley, was called by his middle name. As we found when I did a series of postings about David Dinsmore previously, David was an Ulster Scots immigrant who arrived with wife Margaret in Charleston, South Carolina, on 10 December 1767. The couple sailed from Belfast aboard The Earl of Donegal, and immediately after their arrival in South Carolina, claimed land under the Bounty Act in what was then Craven County (and by 1769, Ninety-Six District) and would later become Spartanburg County. The Earl of Donegal’s passenger list states that David was aged 17 in 1767. (I’ve provided links to the six postings in my series about David Dinsmore at the end of this posting.) Continue reading “The Children of Mark Lindsey (1774-1848) and Mary Jane Dinsmore: David Dinsmore Lindsey (1815 – 1873)”→
Begats and Bequeathals 