A Rookie Mistake and Some Longstanding Consequences

Many, many years ago, when I first began genealogy work on the Mallory Family line, the only sources I had to start with were the things my grandmother, Leona Mallory Poor, told me and some letters from her brother, Houston Lee Mallory.  Neither of them knew much beyond the names of their grandparents and the stories their father, Benjamin Franklin Mallory, told (which were often embellished).  Later, I had the family history written by June Mallory Ferguson, which was an enormous help, and letters from other Mallory researchers in Missouri and elsewhere.  But, prior to that, all I had were a few names and locations.
 
This was before records had been scanned to computers, and everything was in book form or on reels of microfilm.  Records had to be searched by location first, then by name in the source itself.  It was time-consuming and often fruitless. 

I started with the names I knew and checked the U.S. Census for the years before the Civil War.  This is when I came across a family with sons William, John, Henry Clay, and daughters Nancy and Caroline.  It was close to the information I had back then (the names of female children are not always easy to keep track of as they often marry young and move away).  Additionally, I still wasn't sure of a death date for [William] Mallory (John's father, Benj. F's grandfather), and the head of household for this 1850 Bullitt County, Kentucky, family was the (presumed) mother.  Her name was Margaret, but not Margaret Mallory.  Her name was Margaret Uln or Ulin or Ulen.  

To follow this lead, I assumed that [William] Mallory had died and she had remarried (marriage status was not listed in the census) and the children had since taken the name of their stepfather.  The children were all born in Kentucky, as was Margaret.  

Pursuing this lead took months of research.

I found a marriage between a Jesse Mallory and a Margaret Thomas in Virginia, and several early census records for Peggy Mallory in Tennessee.  As I was still uncertain about John's father's name, I could not rule out Jesse by his name alone.  However, I was able to track Jesse's wife through to 1850, and thus able to rule her out as being the woman in Bullitt County, but not rule her out as John's mother.
 
It was not until much later that I could definitively say that Peggy Uln was not William's first wife or John Mallory's mother.  (William was still alive in 1850 and married to his third wife.)  Unfortunately, by this time, I had been using Peggy Uln as a placeholder for so long that the error spread to other genealogists, which spread to others, and so forth.  That's my bad, and I apologize.  Hopefully, this will begin the process of clearing up the mess I caused.

P.S.
Uln or Ulin or Ulen does not stand for Unknown Last Name in this instance.  It is the surname of Margaret's husband and their children.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roger Eastman and the Salem Witch Trials

Image
Letitia Owen--Rhoda S. Eastman--Levi J. Eastman--Abel Eastman--John Eastman--Joseph Eastman--Samuel Eastman--Roger Eastman   The earliest Eastman ancestor that can be reliably traced with solid evidence at this time is Roger Eastman.  He is regarded as the progenitor of the line in the British colonies of America, and for most of those descendants with the Eastman surname in the U.S. today.  He was recorded as arriving in Salisbury, Essex, Massachusetts, in 1638 aboard the Confidence out of Southampton.   Massachusetts Bay Colony was settled by Puritans, who "established a theocratic government with the franchise limited to church members" and "zealously sought to prevent any independence of religious views, and many with differing religious beliefs...were banished" (Britannica.com).   Roger Eastman married Sarah [last name unknown] soon after his arrival, and his first child was born in 1640.  He received land in the first division of Salisbury and was ...
Read more

The Earliest Mallorys, an update

  Previously, the earliest known Mallory was identified as Anschetil, born around 1075.   This information came from Hikaru Kitabayashi in a post written in 2007 .   A blog written in 2011 and 2013 by the same author (a professor of linguistics and author of Post Norman Conquest Mallorys* ) now identifies the first Mallory in England as Geoffrey Mallore (pronounced Mallory, spelled in a variety of ways). Geoffrey, aka Goisfrid Malloret, “seems to have had his origin in Bessin in Normandy” but it is not known if he participated in the Norman conquest of 1066.   According to Kitabayashi’s 2011 post, Geoffrey was listed in the earlier Exeter Doomsday of 1086 “as the lord of Todber in co. Dorset, as tenant of William de Moyon” and possessed “the manor of Steepleton Iwerne (Werne), also of William de Moyon.”   He likely possessed other properties that cannot be identified with certainty because they were recorded only as belonging to “Geoffrey” with no last na...
Read more