Children of Thomas Brooks (1775 – 1838) and Wife Sarah Whitlock: Thomas Whitlock Brooks (1805-1879) of Wayne County, Kentucky, and Randolph County, Missouri

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]

Children of James Brooks (1772-1835) and Wife Nancy Isbell: Clarissa E. Brooks (1818-1895), Alpha Caroline Brooks (1821-1890), and Samuel F. Brooks (1821-1846)

S.W. Barbee, “Old Lawrence Reminscent,” Moulton Advertiser (13 October 1908), p. 1, col. 4-5.

Or, Subtitled: “He draws near the crater of a volcano who lays violent hands on the Golden Rule”

With this posting, I’m resuming my chronicle of the children of James Brooks (1772-1835) and Nancy Isbell of Wayne County, Kentucky, Warren County, Tennessee, and Lawrence County, Alabama. In previous postings, I’ve chronicled the lives of their first two children, Godfrey Isbell and Thomas R. Brooks, then of their children Hannah Isbell, Margaret C., and James Irwin Brooks, and most recently of their son Johnson H. Brooks (and here). This now brings us to James and Nancy’s seventh child, their daughter Clarissa E. Brooks.  

Children of Thomas Brooks (abt. 1747 – 1805) and Wife Margaret: James Brooks (1772 – 1835) and Wife Nancy Isbell (1)

Wayne County, Kentucky, Marriage Bonds 1801-1813, p. 66

Or, Subtitled: From Virginia to Alabama by Way of Kentucky and Tennessee

We’ve met the second child of Thomas and Margaret Brooks, their son James Brooks, in previous postings. As we’ve seen, James’s year of birth, 1772, is recorded in the register of a bible belonging to James and his wife Nancy Isbell. A transcript of this bible register was published in November 1952 by Memory Aldridge Lester in the Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine, with a note that the bible belonged at that time to Nettie Raymond Brooks Young of Moulton, Alabama, and Lester had transcribed the bible at Mrs. Young’s house in June 1951.[1] Lester published the same transcript again in 1974 in a book entitled Old Southern Bible Records.[2] The posting linked above provides digital images of both transcripts.

Thomas Brooks (1775-1838) and Wife Sarah Whitlock (1774-1837): Kentucky Years, 1798-1836

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.