Dear Edna,
I have received your
Alexander file and have been busy studying it. It was a huge amount of
work to compile all that data and I want to thank you for your enormous
effort. I have been struggling now for the better part of a year to try
and acccomplish far, far less than what you have done, so I understand the scope
and value of what you have sent. I am honored and privileged that you will share
it with me.
During my own research into
my Alexander ancestors I ran across many blind alleys and conflicting pieces of
data. Now that I have your records, I see what appears to me to be some
conflicting information, and I want to discuss that with you here. You may
feel that I am somewhat presumptuous to question your data, but I do so with all
humility and a sincere interest to ensure that we have the correct
facts
My interest and questions
only relate to the First and Second Generations, which are those that relate to
my own great grandfather Allen. By the way, you asked about the name
Albert Allen, which I used to refer to him.
This comes from a very large piece of
geneological work published in 1988, called "A Stonyford
Pedigree". This is a 776 page tome that gives the pedigrees of all of the
early settlers of Stonyford CA in Glenn and Colusa counties. It is
compiled from the usual sources, census, cemetary, marriage , death
and birth records, and family records. In there they list his name as
Albert Allen, born in Brown Co., Ill. 27 Nov. 1833. I have a copy of
his death certificate from March 1, 1921, on which the name Allen Alexander
is given. The data was supplied by my grandfather Charles Alexander
and he may not have been sensitive to the niceties, like second names.
Also I note on the death certificate that he lists the birthplace of Allen's
widow, Annie Huffman, as Illinois, whereas we know it was Kentucky. My
grandfather was not a stickler for details.
Now, getting back to your
Alexander family records: my own data agrees (almost) with yours
in respect to the children in the second generation. These are the ones
you list as Nos. 4,5,6,7,8,9,10, and 11. However, my data suggests there
was another son, named Elihu, born 23 October 1826, died 4 March 1901, and
married Lucinda Logsdon (b.Ky 1819) on 8
Nov. 1846. (One of Elihu's descendants, Priscilla Alexander of Carmel Valley CA,
has a family bible with inscriptions supporting all these three dates, but her
records do not indicate the name of Elihu's father.)
As I said above, I have the death
certificate for my ggfather Allen and the name of his father does not appear
there either. (How could my grandpaw not have known that name? Like I
said he was not a stickler for details.) Finally, I also have a copy of
the death certificate for John Houston Alexander, the third son of Allen Sr.,
and it does not give his parents names either!! Yet the info was
supplied by his daughter Elizabeth Huffman, who should have known. Women
always seem more sensitive to those things, but his parents names are not
given. By the way, the name given on the death certificate by Elizabeth
was John Houston Alexander, not Hustead.
But I have some other info
that convinces me that Allen is indeed the father of the three men above.
If you go to the web site www.macomb.com/~ilschuyl/ and find the document "Combined History of Schuyler and
Brown Cos., Illinois, 1882" and browse through there you will find a couple of
references to Allen Alexander.
I quote here one of the pieces:
"the first school in
Woodstock Township was taught by John Taylor in 1827. The first school in
the northern part of the township was taught by Charles Hatfield, in 1833, in a
house built that fall of elm poles in an elm grove near Joshua Griffith's.
The pupils and teacher mixed the mud on the floor of the schol house, after
school began, with which they daubed the house at recesses and noon.
Pupils in attendance were William T. and Isaac Black, children of Richard Black;
Sarah and Rebecca, children of Jacob Fowler; Houston and Elihu, children of
Allen Alexander; James and Thomas, children of Isaaac Sanders; Anderson,
Isaac S. and Pressly, children of Mrs. Amelia S. Riley. The day before
Christmas, Anderson and Pressly Riley took the teacher out and wallowed him in
snow and left him tied, because he would not treat to whiskey. The teacher
treated to two gallons of whiskey on New Year's." (emphasis above is
mine)
Houston and Elihu were nine
and seven years old, respectively, and Allen was just born. Considering
their age, those kids were pretty good drinkers weren't they? So,
this history quotation establishes to my satisfaction that Allen was the father
of both Houston and Elihu, and by connection, Allen as well. Now let's
look at that connection next.
Turning to the 1840 U.S.
Census records for Brown Co. I will try to connect the information there
about the Allen Alexander household to that for the subsequent1850 census for
the same family.
Allen Alexander was listed as the head of a
household having the following members: (Though the data at the left was given
in the census info, the three columns on the right side are the names and ages
that I have filled in as my best guess.)
Probable *assumes census done in July, so
age given reflects that
No.
Sex
Age
Name
Age*
D.O.B.
1
M 15/20 John
H. 16
11/1824
1
M 10/15
Elihu 13
10/1826
1
M 5/10
Allen
6
11/1833
1
M 40/50
Allen,
Sr. 40/50
/1790-/1800
1
M 60/70
father?
60/70 /1770-/1780
3
F under
5
Mary under
1 1840
Lucy
1
1839
Martha
3 1837
1
F 5/10
Nancy 5 1835
1
F
10/15
Margenia
10 1829
1
F
30/40
wife
30/40
/1800-/1810
Octavia does not appear in this group because
she was not yet born in 1840.
The above family group can be
coordinated with the 1850 census, which
shows John H. Alexander as head of the household, having the following members: (all given info is from the
census data)
Sex
Age
Name
P.O.B.
M
26
John H.
Tenn
M
16
Allen
Ill.
F 15
Nancy C.
Ill.
F
13
Martha
E.
Ill.
F
11
Lucy
Ill.
F 10 Mary
Ill.
F 8
Octavia
Ill.
Allen Sr. is missing
because he died in 1841, as your data
shows
wife is missing because she
died in 1847, as your data shows
Margenia is missing because
she was probably married, but I don't know
Elihu is missing because he
was married in 1846 & had set up his own household
All the ages given differ
by ten years from the 1840 numbers I included. The ages selected by
me for 1840 were consistent with the birthdate information from your records,
except for Lucy, whose birthdate you gave in your data as Jan. 1841. In
1850 she would have been 9 years old, but the 1850 census data lists her as
11. Do you have any thoughts about this discrepancy?
There are two other
discrepancies that I want to point out. In your Second Generation
description of James H. Alexander you say that he died on 4 Dec. 1835. If
so, he could not have been the father of the four girls Martha, Mary, Lucy and
Octoavia, because they were all born after he died. Furthermore, if he was
born in 1780, he would have been 44 years old when his first child John H. was
born. This does not seeem likely to me because in those days most people
married and had their families early in their life. For these reasons, I
think we have to conclude that he was of an earlier generation, the First,
actually the same generation as Allen Sr.
Maybe James was a brother of Allen's. Do
you have incontrovertible records that show James was Allen's son?
I believe that what I have shown above leads
to the conclusion that Allen Sr. was the father of the nine children, and not
James. In fact, curiously, in your description of Allen in the First
Generation, you say "He had 6 daughters and three sons" I think we know
who they are.
One more small piece of
information that adds a little bit to the conclusion above are the land records.
We know from the 1850 census that the Alexander home was located in
Cooperstown Township. It was in this township where Allen Sr. bought 40
acres of land in March 1836 in section 6 and an adjacent 40 acres to the north
in July 1836. Section 6 is where Cooperstown Twp. is located. This
transaction can be found at the "Illinois Public Domain Land Tract Sales Data
Base"
at the following web
site: http://www2.sos.state.il.us/cgi-bin/land
and at this site enter Brown Co. and name Alexander. At this same site you
can also find that in 1835 Matthew Alexander purchased 80 acres in section 26 in
Brown Co. and John Alexander purchased 40 acres in Schuyler Co., section
35.
It appears to me that the land above purchased
by Allen is the same land in Cooperstown where the Alexander family lived when
the 1840 and 1850 censuses were taken.
If anything I have
presented above seems to be wrong I sure would like to hear from you why it is,
because I am no skilled geneologist like you clearly are, so I may have
been led astray.
Wally
McGahan