The Lost Uncle

It’s fitting on this Memorial Day that I just happened to find yearbook pictures of my uncle Daniel James.

Daniel and I started corresponding after I took a DNA test and his results came up as my first hit. Early on in our exchanges, he asked me not to tell anyone that we were in contact. I never asked why, but considering he and my father hadn’t talked in 35 years at that point and I didn’t know anyone else on that side of the family, it wasn’t really an issue.

Later I found out that he was estranged from pretty much everyone in his family. I did eventually tell my dad that we were in contact.

Last month I received an email from his account after a couple years of not hearing from him.

Nathan, this is D_______, Daniel’s wife.

I wanted to let you know he is in the hospital (not covid). He had a sore on his ankle and it turned gangrenous and they had to amputate his leg above the knee. The infection also turned septic which has affected his thinking and speech along with his internal organs. At this point the doctor is skeptical he will ever return home because the medical care he will need I cannot do at home. It is all up to Daniel now to pull through. I am not sure he has the strength to do that right now. Please send out a prayer he recovers.

Sorry to have had to tell you this, but I thought you might like to know. D________

On April 7, she wrote me that he had passed the day before.

Dean James, 1961 Hill-McCloy High School Rambler, Montrose, MI;
accessed on Ancestry.com 30 May 2022

I’ve been looking for an obituary since. I asked his wife if one was printed but she never wrote back. And even though I never met and know very little about him, I wanted to write down some of what I learned from years of infrequent emails about our shared family history and the little documentation I’ve found on him.

Dean James, 1962 Hill-McCloy High School Rambler, Montrose, MI;
accessed on Ancestry.com 30 May 2022

Daniel, known as Dean when he was young, was born April 16, 1945, to Ralph James and Mary Lou Romine. He grew up in foster care until he graduated and then enlisted in the army. He rose to First Sergeant in the Korean War and married a woman he met while stationed in Germany. They soon divorced. He married again and lived in Flint for a while before moving to California. From public records, I know he lived in Los Gatos and Campbell, CA, and Laughlin, NV. He married D________ sometime after 1990 in California. He died on April 6, 2022, probably in Laughlin, Nevada.

May First Sergeant Daniel Dean James rest in peace.

Korea, 1972. Daniel is on the right. Photo from Daniel himself.

Posting a few emails I received from him over the years:

Hi Nate,

First, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Save this, you are the only person I have ever written a holiday greeting too. Bad brother, uncle, etc.

Second, thank you for sending all the neat goodies! I really appreciate the thought and the information. I have spent at least 3,650 hours reading, researching, and revising what I thought I knew about myself and the family, based on the records you sent me last year.

I have to apologize, there are a number of incidents that occurred in 1971-1972, that greatly affected my ability to remember much of anything. After five decades, I still don’t have it right! I will keep trying as long as I can….

Unfortunately, I did not recall being the best man at your dad and mom’s wedding. That was a real kick in the butt. I have gone back to grid square 00 and started over. I am now trying to get it all in writing and that will take sometime due to my numerous issues.

Again, have a great new year and God bless. Daniel

24 Dec, 2017, personal email

Hi Nate,

We are doing well, hope you are too.

The articles are great! They answer some of the questions I had for a long time. I never heard About this before, but I’m not surprised. My dad was a alcoholic for many years. He worked for Goodwill and attended AA around the 1960’s. My mom, sister and I had the same problem! The last time I saw them they were still drinking real heavy (1972). The drinking was part of the reason he “resigned” and the divorces, I’ll bet on it.

The last divorce raises several questions. Were my parents ever married? Was my dad a bigamist? Why did they get married in Rock Port, Atchison, Missouri, which is about 100 miles South of Council Bluffs? So many questions and no answers, yet.

By the way, my old computer died and I got a new one. Windows 10, Office 2016 and Outlook are driving me nuts! I think the learning curve will be much longer than usual, older age, I guess. If you have questions let me know, I’m not embarrassed to call it as I see it.

Daniel

7 Feb 2016, personal email

Post-script: If you are reading this and would like to share more about Daniel, please contact me or leave a comment here.

The Merry Inn Bar

My father told me his Aunt Eva James Burns and her husband Ralph Burns had their hands in many businesses. Ralph was invited to drive in the opening parade of the Mackinaw Bridge, the bridge that connects the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan, because his company supplied concrete materials that were used to build it.

Ralph Burns’s obituary* states that he retired from Catsman, which was a conglomerate “of real estate, coal, fuel oil and concrete companies” owned by millionaire Samuel Catsman. I would assume this is the company that supplied concrete to build the Mackinaw Bridge but I have not verified.

The Burnses had a small conglomeration of their own, investing in a market, restaurants, and bars around the Flint area. Here is Aunt Eva at the MerryInn Bar that had been on Franklin Street. It became a gay bar with the same name in the early 2000s.

*Obituary of Robert Burns, Flint Journal (Flint, MI), 26 Nov 1987, personal records.

Olivia or Lavinia?

My 2nd great-grandmother’s name is different in almost every record in which she appears.

“Four Pioneer Residents Dead,” The Nonpareil (Council Bluffs, IA), 7 Feb 1917, p.5, col. 5. Accessed on genealogybank.com.

1913 Council Bluffs, Iowa, City Directory. Accessed on Ancestry.com

Iowa, U.S. Marriage Records, 1880-1945, for Lena James and Samuel Hurd, Year 1893, Vol 370 (Keokuk-Ringgold). Accessed on Ancestry.com

Lavina, Lavinia, Lovina, Levina, Lena, Olivina, Olla, Olive, Olivar, and the inscrutable “M”. I eventually found a newspaper article that may account for the inconsistent names.

“Mrs. Louis Clayton James,” The Daily Nonpareil (Council Bluffs, Iowa), 6 May 1890. Accessed on genealogybank.com.

Though the reporter gives some color to my great-grandmother’s words for dramatic effect here, it’s probably safe to assume she didn’t talk like the Queen of England. Based off this description, the assorted clerks and census takers writing down her name had a hard time figuring out what she said.

I got a clearer idea of her name when I received her death certificate.

State of Iowa Certification of Vital Record ordered through the Pottawattamie County Department of Health. Personal records.

I know it’s hard to make out, but according to her daughter, Mamie Greer, her name was Olivia. Viewing mentions of her in newspapers and city directories throughout the years, she was either Olivia L or some spelling variation of Lavina O.

In the Soup

“Janitor James’s Wild Desire for Divorce,” Daily Nonpareil, Council Bluffs, Iowa, 8 May 1890, Accessed on genealogybank.com

Louis Clayton James is my great-granduncle who went on to marry at least three other women after his first two wives, Elizabeth Casebolt and Ella Kissell.

Catherine and the Doubtful DNA

In a previous post, I said I was pretty sure my 3rd great-grandmother’s parents were John James and Julia Callaghan. DNA matches, weddings of their children occurring in the same frontier county around the time of Catherine’s wedding to Elliot Bellamy, and a discovery of one of John and Julia’s grandchildren, Jacob Butcher, living very near Catherine in Harrison County, Missouri in 1860 led me to that conclusion.

But since discovering the neighbor cousin, I’ve been trying to gather evidence for their connection. And I can’t.

I searched all of my shared matches with descendants of John and Julia and found inconsistencies. First, most of the descendants of John and Julia James I share DNA with don’t share DNA with each other.

Second, some of the John and Julia descendants share DNA with the Bellamys, Catherine’s children from her first marriage, but they also share DNA with descendants of Jacob and Daniel James, Catherine’s second husband and her brother-in-law, both of whom are my third great-grandfathers. (The Jameses were fond of intermarriage.)

Third, I found that while I had many DNA hits with John James’s parents, I had none with Julia Callaghan’s. Looking at the Thrulines tree, it was just a one-way track from her parents down to me with no branches shooting off. That’s never a good sign when you’re talking about a woman who lived 250 years ago and had many siblings. Now, it’s possible that none of the descendants of Julia’s brothers and sisters have taken DNA tests, but it’s unlikely. The further back a couple lived, the higher the number of descendants there are to match, and Julia was born in the mid-1700s.

This one-sided DNA trail means that I’m likely not a descendant of the couple. Since I share DNA with both of John’s parents though, I am likely a descendant of one of his siblings.

The fact that descendants of Catherine, and Jacob and Daniel James all share DNA with descendants of John James makes me think that the three of them were related. (Yet, another case of the Jameses keeping it in the family.)

I also noticed while looking at DNA matches to descendants of the Bellamy children the abundance of matches to an Obediah Basham, whose father was named Bartlett Angel Basham. Could Catherine’s youngest son, Bartlett Bellamy, be Bartlett Angel Basham’s namesake? Looking through the History of Gallia County book online, I noticed that Angels were founding settlers of Gallia County. They, along with the Bashams, came from Bedford County, Virginia, same as Catherine. So I can place the Jameses, Bellamys, Bashams, and Angels there and prove they traveled together to Gallia County at the same time.

History of Gallia County, H. H. Hardesty, Chicago and Toledo, 1882, page XX; Accessed on Hathi Trust 11 Oct 2020. Click image for link.

Kitty and the Suspicious Neighbor

So I have this theory. My third great grandmother, Kitty James, pops up in records in 1817 when she marries a guy named Elliott Bellamy in Gallia County, Ohio. So I look around Gallia County for Jameses in 1820. I find a few old men who fit the bill: a guy named John and a guy named Bartlett. Both are old enough to have a daughter Kitty’s age. My theory is one of these men is Kitty’s father.

I plug both John and Bartlett James into my family tree to get DNA hits from my dad’s and my tests. No hits come up for Bartlett, which is surprising because Kitty named one of her children Bartlett. For John, I get 13 DNA matches from three of his children. My theory tightens to John James is Kitty’s father.

Next I research John’s family top-down, meaning I start with John and his wife and then research his children and grandchildren, recording who they are and where they settled. I’ve been digging into this family for few months now.

Okay, you’re caught up, but if you’re a family member or a curious reader who wants to know more, read this.

I was looking into the family of the sister of John James, one of the two men living in Gallia County in 1820 with the last name James. This sister happens to have the same exact name as my third great grandmother. For the sake of clarity, I’ll call her Catherine, and I’ll stick to calling my third great grandmother Kitty.

Catherine married Adam Butcher and lived for most of her life in Pike County, Ohio. As part of my research process, I plug their names in Google and find this old page from a forum on genealogy.com.

Now this is a long list of Butcher family members. As I scrolled down the page, I saw many listings for Harrison County, Missouri. That piqued my interest because Catherine and her family settled in Harrison County in the 1860s or so.

I conducted searches in Ancestry for Butchers living in Harrison County, Missouri, and found a large number of them living in Cypress Township on the southern border of the county. Kitty and my family lived in Clay Township along the northern border.

I looked into Kitty’s census records next. Look who I found on the NEXT PAGE after Kitty’s family’s listing:

Jacob Butcher is the son of Adam Butcher Jr, who is the son—you guessed it—of Catherine James Butcher, John James’s sister! So Jacob Butcher is the son of Kitty’s suspected first cousin.

Looking at the 1876 Plat map of the county, I can see how close the Jameses and the Butchers lived. The red circles are the houses. The yellow is just highlighting their names.

They lived really close to each other. Right?

How much of a coincidence could it be that a member of the family I suspect to be Kitty’s happens to live across the creek from them in 1876 in a different county in a different state that where they originated?

This is an exciting discovery. I think I’m on the right track.

Now I am researching Kitty’s other neighbors.

I know. My last blog post was about how I’m resisting starting a HYOOJ project to distract me from my troubles.

I’m only researching the neighbors listed 2 pages before and 2 pages after Kitty and her family. I’m hoping to find more connections.

Kitty and Her First Husband’s Will

This is another installment in a series of posts about my ancestor Catherine James Bellamy James. You can read from the beginning here: Kitty James & Child Marriage.

Lately, I’ve been working with a John Jacobi James researcher named Mary, who also happens to work in the Gallia County Genealogy office. Woo hoo! She reviewed Elliott Bellamy’s probate records and had some interesting observations.

Transcription:
Elliott Bellomy’s Estate
Gallia County SS Be it Remembered that on the twentieth day of March in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and thirty five the appraisers heretofore appointed to appraise the goods and chattels belonging to the estate of Elliott Bellomy, deceased filed in the Clerks office of our court of Common Pleas Gallia County in the State of Ohio the following inventory to wit “Agreeably to the command of an order of the court of Common Pleas of Gallia County at their march from 1834 the undersigned have [illegible] and appraised certain articles the property of Elliot Bellomy decd late of the County ass[esse]d viz: 1 Bed and Bedding 20.01 1 Pewter Bason 1.06 1/4 $21.071/4
Respectfully submitted 24th March 1834 Wm F Gooldin, Philip Cubbage, Joseph Hazlett, appraisers.

We also certify that there is in the hands of Wm L Bellomy in notes and accounts for which the said William L Bellomy lord the chattel property of said Elliott Bellomy the sum of one hundred and forty nine dollars and thirty two cents $149.32
Wm Golding, Joseph Hazlett, Philip Cubbage

State of Ohio Gallia County SS I do hereby certify that the within named Wm F Gooldin Philip Cubbage and Joseph Hazlett appeared before me one of the acting justices of the peace of the County aforesaid on the 24 March 1834 and was sworn to faithfully & impartially appraise the goods & chattels which are of Elliott Bellomy late of Ohio Township dec[ease]d [illegible] Nehemiah Davis JP seal
End transcription

First off, there’s a date inconsistency there. Based on the other probate records involving Elliott’s estate, I assume this all took place between March 18 and March 24 of 1834 and the mention of “thirty five” is a typo.

Did anything strike you reading that record?

Three dudes appraised Elliott’s belongings and came up with a bed, sheets, a washbowl and $149.32. Why did it take three men to appraise three things?

Where is Elliott’s wife, Catherine? Why wasn’t she or their sons and daughter named at all? If she had refused to be executor it most likely would have been recorded here. Instead, Elliott’s father William is named executor, which isn’t unheard of but how could people assess the belongings of a man without mentioning the family members who use them every day. Why were they all handed to his father?

Curious.

These observations of Mary’s add doubt to my belief that Catherine James was still married to or living with Elliott when he died. But I still don’t think she was married to multiple men as the census records and the birth years of her children might suggest.

It also raised the possibility that the Elliott Bellamy who married Levina Cogshill in Greenup County, Kentucky, in 1827 might be the man who died in Gallia County in 1832. But on further inspection, I notice that “Ellet” Bellamy and Levina Cogshell had a double wedding with Andrew Bellamy and Lenna Cogshell. For both marriages, the women’s father gave consent. I find it hard to believe that a 31-year-old man with four kids would marry a set of (twin?) sisters with a family member. I think this might be the older Elliott’s nephews, sons of his brother Matthew, who lived in this county at the time.

Sources:

1. Ohio Wills and Probate Records, 1786-1998, Probate Place: Gallia County, Ohio, Ancestry.com, Image 105, page 179. Accessed 12 Jul 2020.

2. Greenup County Kentucky Marriages, 1804-1850, Index (original record could not be found). FamilySearch.org. Accessed 12 Jul 2020.

Kitty and Her Place of Birth

This is post #5 in my exploration of my 3x great-grandmother, who may or may not be Catherine James Bellamy James. You can start at the beginning of this thread here.

This post discusses the results of my research to answer the question: Where was Kitty born?

All but one of Kitty’s census records indicate that she was native to Virginia, but Virginia happens to be a big place with a long history. How do I narrow her birthplace down to a county or a region of Virginia?

My answer: I have been researching her FAN club, her Friends/Family, Associates, and Neighbors, to narrow things down.

I started with her husbands.

Elliot Bellamy’s researchers agree that he was also born in Virginia. His parents, William Lee and Eleanor Molen Bellamy were married in 1794 in Henry County, Virginia, near Martinsville. That’s along the border with North Carolina, south of Roanoke. Elliot was definitely in Gallia County, Ohio, by 1816 to marry Kitty, so the Bellamys migrated between 1794 and 1816, probably via the Kanawha Trail, a path through the land that would become West Virginia. Probably all of the families I discuss in this post traveled the trail to get to Gallipolis and Portsmouth, Ohio.

Kitty’s second husband, and my forefather, Jacob James’s birthplace is also exclusively listed as Virginia. The people I believe to be his parents, Josiah James and Mary Brock McCann, were probably married in 1800 in Bedford County, Virginia.

These marriage locations are pointing me to a clear region of Virginia in which to research.

To support this hypothesis, the people I believe to be Kitty’s family, John Jacobi and Julia Ann James, also have ties to this area. Please read my previous posts to learn why I think they are Catherine’s people. Their younger children, including all four of the brothers and sisters who married in Gallia County about the same time as Kitty and Elliot, were born in Bedford County between 1784 and 1802, according to their family researchers. One of their daughters (Catherine’s sister if I have the relationships right) Christina, married Lewis Settle there in 1803. John’s sister, Eva, married Samuel Hibbs in Bedford County in 1791.

I realize it’s risky to base my search on people I’m not sure are Jacob and Catherine’s parents, but I have to start somewhere, and I can’t ignore the confluence of so many surnames that the James Family researchers have discovered in our shared DNA matches, such as Basham, Angel, and Brock, in addition to the Bellamy family members living in the county at this time.

Kitty and the Double Life

Honestly, the more I research my third great-grandmother, Catherine James Bellamy James, the more I don’t think she’s my third great-grandmother. You can read why I think that at the beginning of this series of posts.

There are just some details in her records that don’t make any sense. Like, how was she running two households and two families 50 miles apart in the 1820s?

Here’s what I mean. Take a look at these two census records from 1830.

I know that the census records above contain the right men because they were in the exact same place with the same neighbors in other censuses: Elliot in 1820 and Josiah in the 1840 and 1850 censuses.

The top census record is from Scioto County, Ohio. It says Jacob James is in his 20s, is living with a woman the same age, and has 2 boys under the age of 5, one of whom I assume is Josiah.

The bottom census record is from Gallia County, Ohio, from the same year. It says Elliot Bellamy is in his 30s, is living with a woman in her 20s, and has 4 children under the age of 15.

Some back story: The children of Elliot and Catherine Bellamy were William, Nancy, Joshua and Bartlett. They were all born between 1817 and 1826-ish. My ancestor, Josiah James, is consistently described as being born in 1828 in Kentucky. All of the data of the children in these records checks out.

To give an idea of the geography between these two places, here’s a map of very southeastern Ohio. Kentucky is at the bottom across the river. West Virginia is the far bottom right across the river.

Accounting for all the little turns in the highlighted road and the fact that it takes an hour and a half to drive 58 miles, I’m guessing the land in between these cities is pretty hilly terrain. Granted, in 1830, folks would likely be traveling by boat, so the trip from Gallipolis to Portsmouth would be faster than going back upriver.

Some research of the James/Bellamy family suggests that Catherine was mother to both of these families at the same time, a sort of reverse polygamist situation. I just don’t think it can be true. First off, that’s a ways in 1830 for Catherine to be traveling to raise both families. And it would be very expensive for the wife of two farmers with 6 children to feed. Women did not have the kind of power back then to be able to move freely between households and keep their secret excursions under wraps.

Another reason I don’t think Catherine is the woman in both of these censuses is because I know that Elliot passed away in 1832 or 1833. I found his will on Ancestry on which his son William is executor.

So, in order for Josiah to have been born in Kentucky in 1828 to Catherine, not only would she have been married to another man and raising at least four other children, she would have been on an excursion in Kentucky while pregnant for some reason.

Divorce was uncommon in this place at this time for social and religious reasons. Evidence exists that the James children and the Bellamy children were close when they grew older. Josiah James and Bartlett Bellamy had a double wedding in May 1848. Josiah brought his father and Catherine out to Muscatine County, Iowa, to join William and Bartlett Bellamy in 1854. These facts suggest to me that there was no scandal between them.

So I don’t think Catherine was living with Jacob James in 1830. I do think Jacob had a wife before Catherine. To complicate things, though, I match genetically to descendants of all four of the Bellamy children.

If Catherine wasn’t Josiah’s mother, how could I be genetically linked to her Bellamy children?

Well, I’ve been researching that question.

What if Josiah’s mother was Catherine’s sister?

Like, after Elliot Bellamy and Josiah’s mother passed away, Jacob married his wife’s sister. It wasn’t an uncommon practice. It would explain the genetic ties. It would explain why the James siblings were tight with the Bellamys: they were brother-cousins. And it would make the descendants of Catherine Bellamy my 4th cousins instead of my half 3rd cousins once removed. For you DNA buffs out there, the shared centimorgans between those two relationships is virtually the same.

What do you think?

Sources are located in the links throughout the post. I found all of the censuses mentioned, as well as Elliot and Catherine’s wedding record, on Ancestry. The fact that she married Jacob James as her second husband can be found in censuses and in Joshua Bellamy’s biography on page 518 here.

Kitty and the Two Johns

This is the third entry in an on-going series of pretty much me writing out all of the weird stuff I’m finding about my third great-grandmother, Kitty James Bellamy James. To start this link, click here.

This post continues to discuss the research question: What were the names of Kitty’s parents?

So I narrowed Kitty’s father down to four men in my last post. After researching them further, I only found verifiable facts about two of them: John Jacobi James and his son, John Samuel James. I plugged John Senior and his wife into my Ancestry family tree to see if any DNA matches came up.

After seeing that I matched 13 of John James Senior’s descendants, I took a step further and plugged in John Senior’s parents’ names. I had 7 matches to 5 of John Senior’s siblings.

And I went back another generation and found that I matched to 8 descendants of John Senior’s grandparents. GRANDPARENTS!

We’re talking about people born in a section of the Holy Roman Empire known as Germania in 1714. There is no doubt in my mind that if John Jacobi James isn’t Catherine’s father then he must be her grandfather or uncle.

To read more findings, click here.

Sources:

1. Personal records from DNA test.