Help me puzzle out this family mystery

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So, I have this ancestor named Elijah STAFFORD. Elijah is a slippery sort. We all got an ancestor like that somewhere, I think; one who’s records are so scattershot the only possible explanation is they didn’t want to be found.

So here’s what we know about Elijah:

Elijah pops out of nowhere in the 1850s with his wife, Nancy WRIGHT. He listed his birth place as all sorts of things from census to census: North Carolina, South Carolina, “not known”, etc. On the 1870 census, Elijah states that his father was foreign-born. Him and his wife put down roots in Cherokee co., Alabama in 1860 and raised a brood of children.

Now, tracing his wife Nancy’s family isn’t so hard – she was from Gilmer co., Georgia, and a whole pack of her relatives moved with her and Elijah down to Alabama and lived next door to them. Now, checking the Gilmer co. GA marriage records reveals that Nancy WRIGHT married Elijah **HILL **on September 12, 1844. Curioser and curioser.

On the 1920 census, his eldest daughter stated that Elijah was born in Holland and spoke Dutch. Now, this is an interesting claim in that Elijah STAFFORD or Elijah HILL, whichever was his birth name, is not terribly Dutch. However, it seems like an odd detail to just make up (if she was just trying to make her father’s background more exotic, there’s way more exotic places than Holland, and I’m almost surprised she knew they spoke Dutch in Holland rather than ‘Hollandish’).

Now, in Sumter co. SC, there was a couple named Joshua STAFFORD (d. 1817) and his wife Charity (d. 1839), who had a son named Elijah (born 1807) who was about the right age to be MY Elijah STAFFORD. This son Elijah was something of a ne’er-do-well and skipped town in 1825 “to seek his fortune”, according to a legal record from his mother, Charity. Did this Elijah change his name to HILL, sober up, get married to Nancy in Georgia, and revert back to his birth name?

Now my Elijah STAFFORD could either be from Holland, or be the Sumter co. SC Elijah, but he cannot be both. Or he could be neither. It’s just so bizarre. It’s like having scattered bits of a puzzle that don’t fit right. Right now my options are:

  1. Elijah STAFFORD lit out from Sumter co. SC, went by the name HILL for an indeterminate amount of time, sobered up, married Nancy WRIGHT in Georgia, and moved to Alabama and raised a family.
  2. A Dutch immigrant showed up in Gilmer co. GA, going by the name Elijah HILL, married a local girl, changed his name to STAFFORD for reasons unknown, moved to Alabama and started a family.
  3. Nancy WRIGHT married an Elijah HILL who then obligingly dropped dead so she could remarry another man named Elijah STAFFORD, who was from SC or NC or who knows where. They then moved to Alabama and began a family.
  4. Other ideas?
2

Personally you can’t rely on census records very well, you can never tell who did the talking. You also don’t know what types of transcription errors there might be as they usually made 2-3 copies of each one. So as you’re finding out census records are good for a framework, but not always the best.

There are also other explanations for what you’re finding with different names. Someone misread the marriage index and put down the wrong last name, I’ve done this before and had to go back and look at the marriage record again because everything else pointed to a different name. There could be two two Elijah’s running around, there are two of ‘me’ running around here and I run across his name every so often. I had two people with the same name marry women with the same first name and similar last names. Makes for a real pain to figure stuff out.

I hope that you are citing your sources, otherwise in a few months or a year you’re going to go ‘Where the hell did I get that information from?’ Do it now so you don’t have to worry about that. Don’t believe those trees on Ancestry either, most of them are crap where people just threw them together without thinking about what they were doing. You can use the information, but only as something to go on.

3

Note–to call someone “Dutch” in 19th Century America usually meant “German”.

4

If we’re guessing, I’d guess that Elijah’s father was from Holland, which would back up what he said about having a foreign born father, and in the 1920 census, Elijah’s daughter told the census agent about her grandfather, who either misheard her or just wrote it down wrong.

Record keeping error on the part of the one census guy seems simpler than a shady pack of lies from Elijah and/or his daughter.