Myrtle's Mother is a Mystery

Brief Recap:

My mother's father's mother is Myrtle.  Myrtle's mother (I call her Tina) is a mystery.

Below is part of my 21 Nov 2015 Post about Tina.  Pay special attention to the highlighted part.

Myrtle's mother has been a bit more difficult to track down.  Even her name is complicated. I have seen her listed on documents or referenced by family members as Tina, Tinia, Tinnie, Tunie, and Tiny.  One of her grandchildren thought her maiden name was Hartley but there has, to my knowledge, never been anything else to confirm that.
She was born according to one census in October of 1860.  She has been listed as being born in both Louisiana and Mississippi.  It is also not know when she died.  Presumably sometime after 5 Jun 1900 which is the last time she shows up on a census in Hunt County, Texas with her second husband Jess W. Abrams.
Ironically I know the date of Jacob's marriage to Leannah Dyer and the date of Tina's marriage to Jess Abrams, but I cannot find marriage records for Jacob and Tina's marriage.  Probably sometime between 1875 and 1879 based on when children were born.
Speaking of children, here are Jacob and Tina's children:
Jacob and Leanna:Richard P. born 1860Mary C. "Mollie" born 1870Jacob M. born 1873Cully C. born 1875
Jacob and Tina:LaHanna "Annie" born 1879William Douglas born 1882Myrtle Victoria born 1886Jesse Jewel born 1889
Tina and Jess:J.C. Abrams born 1898

My mom had her DNA tested through Ancestry a couple of years ago and I've been working through the results ever since.  A couple of months ago I started noticing a familiar name in some of her results - Hartley.  Could this be the connection I've been looking for?!?!

My mom's closest Hartley match has a pretty good tree - yay!!  The person who stands out to me in the tree is Samuel Tillman Hartley.  Here's why...

This is what I know about Tina:

• Probably born around October 1860 in either Mississippi or Louisiana
• Probably married Jacob Pinkney Briggs in the 1870's because their first child was born in 1879
• The Briggs family seemed to live in and around Choctaw lands as they moved about the country
• The Briggs moved to Oklahoma in the late 1880's
• Tina married J.W. Abrams in 1894 in Texas (her youngest daughter lived in Texas which is probably why she moved there)

Here's some info about Samuel T. Hartley and things that I find interesting:

• He was born in 1825 in Choctaw County, Mississippi
• He also lived in Texas and Oklahoma
• His family applied to be included in the Five Civilized Tribes (Dawes Rolls) as Choctaw - they were denied
• There are some similar names between Samuel's family and Tina's family (not conclusive evidence but interesting) 

The more research I do on Samuel, his children and relatives I keep finding "coincidences" between the Briggs and the Hartleys.  But I just can not find the connection. It's very frustrating. I think the main problem is the lack of information I have on Tina.  If I had anything else - anything at all - I think I could make the connection.

Beorham, Bereham, Berham, Barham

I had been compiling some research on my Barham ancestors when I came across a homemade book in my local genealogy library titled Fifteen Generations of Barhams. Dorothy Jean Goynes Chapel had done the work for me in 1974!  Bless that woman.

It appears that she's done meticulous work. Everything I was coming across in my research she seems to have already found. Dorothy offers a nice introduction where she acknowledges that in so many generations of names there is bound to be the occasional error, and that due to the relatively new idea of uniform spelling rules, the actual spelling of some names may be impossible to determine. As someone who is fascinated by history I was especially struck by this statement, "The past is much more mean[ing]ful and history becomes more interesting if one has an ancestor who took part in a historical battle, helped establish a settlement, or cut a new trail to a new land."

I'm going to share the first three pages of her book here where she lays out the background on the Barham family.  But then for the sanity of those who aren't interested in genealogy to the extent that I am, I will shorten up the lineage part of her book.  But know that while I'm only listing her names and dates, she is a treasure trove of information on the family members.  And she notes in what documents she found this information.  This book was such a lucky find!

I'm not sure why Dorothy skips from Warine de Berham to Thomas Berham, but she does.

Thomas Bereham* = Isabella

*last mention of Thomas is in court documents in 1448

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Richard Bereham* = Anna Busse

*Died around 1480

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Nicholas Barham* = unknown

*his will was mentioned in court documents in 1546

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Nicholas had three sons, Richard, William and John. Those three sons had many descendants, but it was John's who appear to have brought the Barham family to America.  However, here's an interesting bit of information about both Richard's and William's descendants.

Richard Barham's son conducted the prosecution of Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, for conspiring with Mary, Queen of Scots against Queen Elizabeth I.

William Barham's descendants (possibly more than one) married into the Gybbons/Gibbons family of Rolvenden. The Gibbons family became the owners of an estate called Hole Park sometime in the early 16th century.  By the early 18th century the house passed to another allied family (genealogy term for families who intermarry) of the Gibbons, the Moneypennys. Unfortunately,the estate bankrupted them forcing them to sell outside the family to a man named James Morrison.  Morrison's son sold the estate to Colonel Arthur Barham in 1911 bringing it "back to the family" so to speak.  It remains in the Barham family to this day.

Here is the website of Hole Park and here's a video narrated by the current owner, Edward Barham.

Many of the Barhams mentioned above and their descendants are buried in a nearby church called St. Mary the Virgin which can be seen in this video below. (Note the narrator mentions the Gibbon Family.)

Back to the American Barhams. John Berham, son of Nicholas, married Thomasyne and died in 1555. He had six children, but it's third son Thomas we are interested in. Now let's go back to our lineage:

John Berham = Thomasyne

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Thomas Barham = Mildred Franlyn-Roberts

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Robert Barham = Susanna Sare

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Robert Barham = Katherine Filmer

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Captain Charles Barham = Elizabeth Ridley

You may remember Captain Charles from the first Barham post. He is my 10th great-grandfather.

Fun but Rather Meaningless Genealogy

I think when someone new to genealogy envisions tracing their family's roots, they imagine discovering a famous cousin who will become their entrance into the world of the rich and famous or a royal ancestor making them 7th in line to the British throne - or something like that. Unfortunately, like with most things, that's not quite how it usually works.

If you are familiar with the concept of six degrees of seperation, this won't come as much of a surprise to you.  Odds are likely that you are in some way related to someone famous. However, it may not be a person you particularly want to be related to, or the distance of relationship will most likely be so great that it's basically meaningless, or some other fantasy-crushing reality. I'm the forty-eleventh cousin of President Obama and my 3rd cousin 2x removed is married to Reba McEntire's brother, Pake. True story. At a family reunion I told my relatives they were related to the former president and they asked me to stop doing genealogy.

Ready for another blow to your ego?  There's a really good possibility you might be genealogically related to royalty but not genetically, and you certainly aren't alone.  Most people, if they search long enough and go back far enough in all of their various lines, can eventually find some ancestor who was descended from some royal (most likely Charlemagne).

Confused? Here's a great blog post explaining how if you go just 40 generations back, you have over two trillion ancestors!  You may have noticed a problem. The problem being that there haven't been two trillion people alive in the history of the world.  As the blog states, you do not have two trillion unique ancestors - there's repetition. The blog also explains how using autosomal DNA is really only significant up to 5 generations back.  By seven generations back, you share less than one percent of DNA with a particular ancestor. Thus how you can be not genetically related to your ancestors.

All that being said, it's still fun knowing that King Edward I is my 25 x great-grandfather.  I'm a princess! How did I figure this out? There is a searchable book on Ancestry called The Royal Descents of 600 Immigrants by Gary Boyd Roberts.  I discovered one of my ancestors in it - Captain Charles Barham of Virginia. Here's the lineage:

Me

My mom

My grandma

John Gates (born 1887)

Mollie Justice (1861)

Sarah Robinson (1844)

John B. Robinson (1810)

Sarah "Sally" Barham (1786)

James Barham Jr. (1764)

James Barham Sr. (1730)

Charles Barham (1706)

Robert Barham (1678)

Captain Charles Barham (1626)

Here's how Captain Charles connects to King Edward...

What's really great is that this book gives sources.  So the lineage can be verified.  Although I have to say, it seems most of the time these Brits are pretty good about genealogy when it comes to royalty and aristocracy. They don't usually make mistakes.

Another interesting thing here is that if you stumble upon a book about the Magna Carta and the signers of it (called sureties) and their descendants, you would recognize some names. De Clare, Despencer, FitzAlan, Sergeaux.  This further illustrates why you don't have as many ancestors as you should - intermarriage.  I've identified no less than 8 signers of the Magna Carta that I'm descended from because of all the intermarriage. (It's not that rare. There's even a few lineage societies of people descended from the Barons who signed it. BOMC and National Society of Magna Carta Dames and Barons to name a couple.)

Plus, turns out the daughter of my 26 x great-grandmother, Isabel de Clare (sister to my 25 x great-grandfather, Richard de Clare) married Robert V de Brus and became the grandmother to Robert the Bruce! So there you go, now I'm a cousin *cough*sort of*cough* to the Scottish throne.

My next post is going to be about the illustrious Barhams from as far back as the earliest written records in England.

William Douglas Briggs

Uncle Doug... The man who helped me discover my Briggs family. Well, his picture did.

This picture to be exact. And the information I got off the back of it.

Doug was born on the 29th of January 1882 in Helena, Phillips County, Arkansas according to the World War II Draft Cards (4th Registration) for the State of Oklahoma (shown below). He was the second child of Jacob and Tina/Tiny/Tinia Briggs.

The earliest documentation I have found on Doug is the 1900 census in Hunt County, Texas (of course, it would have been the 1890 census if not for that pesky fire). He is 17 living with his mother and step-father, Jess Abrams, as well as his half-brother, J.C., and full-sisters, Myrtle and Jessie.

It's possible that this is one of those cases where the family was not at home when the enumerator came by and a neighbor supplied the family's information. However, if that's the case, the neighbor sure knew alot about the family: birth month, year, and place; how many living children Tinia had as well as non-living children. It's also possible that the enumerator just got some information confused, but the fact that the youngest Briggs child is listed as a male when she was most certainly a 9-year old girl is a pretty big fact to get confused.

The census shows the Briggs children's father as being born in Arkansas, but he has claimed Tennessee as his birthplace on two other censuses. Tinia's oldest Briggs child is not with the family because she married William Ivey in 1893 in Lamar County, Texas (an adjacent county to Hunt).

Doug married Allie McDonald on July 1, 1909 in Pushmataha County, Oklahoma presumably where he moved after the death of his mother. Doug and Allie had 6 children together:

• Elmer Junior Briggs (1911-1997)
• William Doyle "Nub" Briggs (1917-1994)
• Martha Gladys Briggs-Owens (1920-2011)
• Pearl Allene Briggs-Pate (1922-2005)
• Mary Jane Briggs-Shea (1926-2005)
• Holland Ray Briggs (1914-1915)

Doug passed away in 1943 and is buried in Kosoma Cemetery in Pushmataha County, Oklahoma.

Doug Brigg's Gravestone

Cousin Cathy was lucky enough to meet and talk to Doug's daughter Martha Gladys (who went by Gladys) before she passed away. Cathy was kind enough to pass on some of the information Gladys shared with her about Doug. Gladys said that her father, Doug, told her that his father, Jacob, was the "meanest creature that ever lived." Gladys goes on to say:

Doug left home when he was 13 years old, and he did not see his sisters, Anna and Jessie, for years and years, and never seemed to know much about his family. Doug worked on a boat on the Mississippi River when he was a kid, after he left home. 

Gladys didn't really know much else about her father's life or his family.  Aunt Jessie (Briggs-Moss) and husband were the only ones of the family she knows of being in Texas.  Cathy did hear from other members of the family that Doug wasn't the sweetest guy himself. He must have gotten that from his dad.

Annie Briggs

Jacob and Leanna Briggs had a fourth child, Cully, who was born in Mississippi in 1875. But after that it's a mystery.  He lived until at least age 5 because he shows up on the 1880 census with his family, but so far no other record of him has been found.

So Jacob's next child is with his second wife, Tina.  Jacob and Tina's oldest child is LaHanna "Annie" Briggs born 5 Jan 1879 in Mississippi.  Annie married William Edward Ivey in 1893 in Lamar, Texas.  (Note: William had two children from a previous marriage, Belle and William. Remember that for later.)  I'm not sure what brought Annie to Texas - several of the Briggs family members show up in this part of Texas around this time. Anyway, Annie and William had three children:

• Ed George Ivey (1894-1973)

• Laura Ruth Ivey-Mathews (1895-1928)

• Oma Ivey-McCay (1901-1962)

I'm not sure whether William died or he and Annie divorced, but Annie married James Monroe Jackson on 8 Apr 1907 in Woodland, TX. (This, incidentally, is around the time and place her mother, Tiny, died.) Annie and James had five children:

• Mack Delton Jackson (1908-1976)

• James Otis Jackson (1910-1955)

• Mary Belle Jackson-Killian-Kinnamon (1912-1988)

• Hilda Farie Lee Jackson (1917-1918)

• J.P. "Jack" Jackson (1920-1972)

Mack Delton Jackson is the father of Cousin Cathy.  She is the one who has given me most of my information on the Briggs family.  In fact, if I hadn't stumbled onto a picture she posted online I would never have found out anything about my Briggs line (because my great-grandma Myrtle's death certificate was leading me on a wild goose chase).  So I am immensely grateful to her!

Annie passed away 26 December 1933 in Kosoma, Oklahoma.  This is a family story that Cousin Cathy shared with me about her grandma's death: 

She and my grandfather were living in a little house they had built on Doug Briggs property.  She had helped Doug kill hogs during the day, came home and put food in the oven to warm up, and went out to milk her cow.  Her oldest son, Ed Ivey, was in the house.  When she didn’t come back he went out to look at her and she had just leaned back against the wall on her stool and was dead.  The milk wasn’t even spilled.  My mother said Annie had complained to her of a pain in her side the last time she saw her.

Remember when I mentioned that William Ivey had two children when he and Annie got married?  Well, William's daughter, Belle, married James Monroe Jackson's brother, Dode Jackson.  Since James Monroe Jackson was Annie's second husband, there's no actual familial relationship, but interesting nonetheless.

Mamie Briggs

Jacob Mamie or Mamie Jacob Briggs was born September 15th of either 1871, '73, '75, or '76 (can't seem to make up his mind) in Sunflower Co., Mississippi .  Mamie was the son of Jacob Pinkney Briggs and Leannah Dyer, making him a half-brother of my great-grandmother, Myrtle Carroll.

He was married 20 Jul 1899 in Howe, Le Flore, OK to Mollie N. Merchant. And they had 3 children: Marvin, Tommie (girl), and Willie (girl).  Willie died when she was only ten years old. But the other two children grew to adulthood, got married and had children of their own.

He died sometime in 1946 in McAlester, Oklahoma and was buried in Red Oak Cemetery there.

Mamie's WWI Draft Registration

Doug and Allie Briggs & Mamie and Mollie Briggs

Mary C. "Mollie" Briggs

The next few posts I'm going to go through some of the children of Jacob and Tina Briggs.

It appears Jacob may have had an oldest son named Richard P. (born 1860 in Mississippi), but I have no other information about him at this time and I don't know of anyone else who does either.

Next in line was Jacob and Leanna's daughter Mary C. "Mollie" who was born 10 Jan 1870 in Mississippi. Mollie married Thomas Andrew Wilson on 29 May 1886 in Choctaw Nation, Oklahoma. Mollie was Thomas's third wife (but not his last). Mollie and Thomas had 5 (possibly 6) known children: Katie(?), Effie Edna, Eunice Claudie, Ida May/Mae, Thomas Lee (died in infancy), and Dewey/Duey Fontain.

Left to right
Eunice Claudie Wilson
Thomas Wilson holding Ida May Wilson
Mary C. "Molly" Briggs holding Dewey F. Wilson
Effie Wilson

Above is a picture of the family I found on the OK Gen Web site.  The identification is also from that site.

Effie Edna was born 3 May 1887 in Indian Territory, OK.

Eunice Claudie was born 3 Jun 1889 in Butler (Indian Territory), OK.

Ida May/Mae was born 6 Mar 1893 also in Butler.

Dewey/Duey Fontain was born in December 1897 in Dunbar (Indian Territory), OK.

Cousin Cathy told me a family story that was related to her that Mollie was pregnant at the time of her death. She tragically fell out of a window which killed her and the baby.  This was on 1 Jan 1901 in Pushmataha County, OK.