Tonight I got a nice surprise

Tonight I got a nice surprise, an email from someone in Colorado who is a distant cousin. This woman has done a lot of work on our Bowen family. I have been trying to contact her for months. We have been emailing back and forth tonight. Her great grandfather was a half brother of my great grandfather, William Rich Bowen.

Thanksgiving Dinner Guest

In an online group I follow that discusses the Bowen family, someone posed a fun question today:

"if you could have one of your ancestors with this surname join you for
Thanksgiving dinner, which ancestor would you invite? What questions would
you ask him/her?"

This is my reply:

 I would invite William Rich Bowen

He was my great grandfather. I never knew him.

He was apparently born in Huntland, Franklin County, Tennessee on April 15, 1859.

Much of his life was spent in the area around Fayetteville, Lincoln County, TN., and later the separated Moore County.

He married a girl named Queen Anne Smith in 1886. They had six children including my grandfather Rawls Coston Bowen.

Rawls eventually moved to North Carolina, eventually settling in Durham, NC.

William Rich and Queen Anne appear to have moved around living with various of their children, including some years in Durham, where Queen Anne died and is buried.

William Rich moved back to TN and lived for some time with a daughter, and later moved to live with a son in Toledo, Ohio, where he died on October 12, 1931 and is buried.


I would love to ask him if he could confirm the ancestry I have for him, or shed some light on this line of Bowens, and how they came to Tennessee.

Oh my darling, Clementine!

Oh my darling, oh my darling,
Oh my darling, Clementine!
Thou art lost and gone forever
Dreadful sorry, Clementine


The old song says it well. I have a Clementine Bradley in my family tree, and she seems lost forever.

The bulk of five generations have been fairly fast and thanks to ancestry.com, fairly easy to fill out in my tree. But having done that, I am now going back and trying to confirm that I don't have limbs spliced on that don't belong.

The 1860 census of Lincoln County, Tennessee lists a Clemente Boren married to a Daniel Boren. They have several children including a William Boren who is one year old. My family name is Bowen. This appears to be an example of a frequent problem with old census records. The census taker wrote down what he heard when he asked for names. Often, the one providing the information could neither read nor write, therefore the spelling of a name was difficult to verify. This often led to family names being changed for future generations.

I have concluded with some confidence that these people are actually Daniel and Clementine Bowen. I also believe Clementine's maiden name was Bradley. This is based on a marriage record of a Daniel Boren marrying a Clementua Bradley January 9, 1842. The 1860 census lists Clementine's place of birth as "Geo", which I interpret to be Georgia. Her age is given as 41, which would put her birth around 1819-20. Beyond that, I know little else about her.

I had jumped to the conclusion that I had found her parents, a James Bradley and Emelia Horner Bradley. But, there is a problem. This couple appears to have a daughter named Clementine N Bradley, but born in 1833, and marrying an Issac Julian in Missouri, where they seem to have remained.

Much of the information I have was taken from other family trees on ancestry.com. As is often the case much of this information is difficult to confirm and different sources frequently conflict.

So, I am trying to sort out which of the Clementines, if either will remain in my tree.

Spinners and Weavers

Yesterday I received an email from ancestry.com informing me that new hints had been located that might involve folks in my family tree. On the ancestry.com web site these are indicated by small green leaves on the corners of the nameplates in my tree.

As it turned out, some of these new hints were indeed associated with ancestors in my tree. Both involved Smiths. This Smith family was on my Bowen grandfather's mother's side of the family. The hints were military service draft records completed in the early 1900's. I have found that these draft records include a lot of interesting information.

I am amazed at the high quality of the pictures of these old draft records. Many appear as if they had been filled out yesterday. On them I see such things as full name, day of birth, address, age, closest relative, occupation, employer, and even physical information such as hair and eye color, height (tall, medium, short), size (slender, medium, stout), and health problems (none, general poor health, bad leg, etc.).

I found two of these newly associated records interesting. This Smith family was from Bedford County in mid-Tennessee. However by these draft records I could see that two sons had sought their fortunes elsewhere. One, registering in 1917 was 23, single and living in Knoxville, working as a textile worker in the Brookside Cotton Mills and said he had no health or other exemptions. The other was in Winona, Mississippi, was 42, married and working in The Winona Cotton Mill as a mechanic.

It seems that around the mid 1850s the Bowen and Smith families had often turned from farming, to working in cotton mills. Perhaps they saw the regular pay, and regular working hours as a benefit. Some may have been attracted by the relatively new and nice homes available in the mill villages.

Dead Man Walking

A mistake I often made when I first started working on my family tree was to accept information others had already included in theirs. This has turned out to be a big mistake. It also wastes a lot of time removing the bad information.

Here is an example I ran across tonight. I was working on some Smiths in Tennessee in the mid 1800s. Another person had my Mr. Smith in their tree and had included a story about him dying in 1864 in military action as part of the Civil war. Just one problem, the 1880 census shows him and his second wife and children happily living in Lincoln County, TN. The poor guy that was killed in the war just couldn't be our Mr. Smith. 

Other things I have seen are a man dying before wedding day, or prior to his children being born over the next 12 years. I have seen a fellow only 10 years old become a father while married to a woman of age 24. A little common sense could eliminate a lot of the errors.

Is It Him?

It is fantastic that so many records are available on line. Census records, marriages, deaths, deeds, etc. But, just having access to data does not ensure it will be easy to judge its value in building your family tree. It is SO tempting sometimes to accept a nugget of information. But, I have learned that sometimes it is better to earmark a record and continue to look for something else to confirm it before incorporating it into my tree, only to find later that I have to remove it and possibly a large number of entries it lead me to.

Here is an example. I mentioned recently working on an ancestor named Martin VanBuren Smith. I have been unable to find his parents or siblings. However, I have an 1850 census for Greene County, Tennessee that includes a family with a child named Martin V. Smith! Tempting. But Greene County is in the eastern end of Tennessee, while all references to my Martin V. Smith have him in the lower mid-state area in Bedford and Lincoln counties. So, I am reluctant to accept this as the same Martin V. Smith, even though his name and birth year seem a match.

I'll hold onto this record, continuing to see if I can find any other record that connects my Martin V. Smith with any of the names in this Greene County family.

Famous twigs on the tree

If you grow a family tree, eventually you will run into someone who had fame of one sort or another.

In my wife's branch of our tree we have the following for example:

Joseph Melvin Broughton - Governor of North Carolina 1941 - 1945

 and also:

Lu Long Ogburn - Miss North Carolina 1951

Click the names to see more.