Thinking about Granny's warmth towards her half-sister Gaynelle, as I wrote about a couple of days ago, again triggered my musings about Granny's mysterious heritage. I've mentioned the rumors of adoption, my rebuttal regarding her dimpled chin looking like her dad's own dimpled chin, and the adopted Greeleyville man who looks like her son, my Uncle Donald. Of course Granny has always said she was not adopted, but I felt unsure when I saw in the census record that Jessie, her mom, had no children for ten years before the two girls, and I've always wondered. What I just realized is that, after Jessie had been married to Charles Gamble for ten years, her step-daughters were now teenage girls! In that day especially, it would have been common for the grandparents to raise any illegitimate children. Charles himself had been raised by his own grandparents, largely, and he probably knew the shame associated with the open knowledge of an illegitimate birth. In fact, his mother Amarintha lived with him at least some of the time that my Granny was a young girl. Amarintha never married, and he may have wanted to protect his daughters from the same fate.
So, my new idea is that Jessie and Charlie may have raised their granddaughters as their own children to provide stability for them and to allow Gaynelle and/or Gurleen to be able to marry well and respectfully.
With this in mind, and suspecting Gaynelle as the most likely candidate, given her close long-term relationship with Granny (who even took me to visit Aunt Gaynelle when I was a child), I plugged in a search on-line for Aunt Gaynelle. I didn't expect much, but I also thought her name unusual enough to be helpful in the search process (unlike the zillion Johns and Elizabeths!). I was elated to find that just in 2007 a book of memoirs had been published with recollections dating back over a hundred years of a woman in Kingstree! Many of her pages had been scanned in, and one told of the 'exceptionally pretty' Caroline Cox joining her family for Christmas dinner. According to the memoir, Carrie had naturally curly blonde hair and had later named her baby Gaynelle after a character in a Victorian novel. Sadly, Carrie died when Gaynelle was only 7 months old. Of course I've ordered the book, as that is where the scanned-in page left off, and the next pages were not included! Oh, the book did mention 'Mrs. Gaynelle Gamble Hammet', so it was certainly my Aunt Gaynelle.
Anyhow, it would be fantastic to find out that the romantic and tragic Caroline Cox is actually my great-great grandmother. I have so many loads of illiterate farm folks making up my family tree that I would just LOVE to have somebody a bit more refined in there!
I know I'm likely wrong, but it does pull together everything...if Gaynelle is actually Granny's mother, then it explains Granny's closeness to her, Jessie's strange 'birth pattern', the adoption rumor, Granny's dimpled chin would be from her grandfather, and...drum roll, please...her very curly blonde hair from her grandmother Carrie! Additionally, the father could be the Salters man who fathered the Donald-look-alike adopted man (who would then be Granny's half-brother) that I met in Greeleyville, explaining why Uncle Donald looks like the man!
I'm over the moon about this whole explanation and how well it all fits, but the fact is that I've mistakenly pieced together 'perfect fits' before. When I realized my mistakes, I was so disheartened I just stopped working on genealogy for some time. When I'd find a family with similar names and ages living in a different location, I'd begin to think I'd found the correct family and become very excited, but I'd later realize that it looked as though it had been a wild goose chase. I know thorough documentation is the accepted standard in genealogy, but it's all so much more complex than that.
I have a great-aunt on my mother's side who was born two years after her 'father' passed away. The family knew who the ne'er-do-well real blood father was, but, out of family loyalty, they list her with the other children in the family genealogy. How incredibly frustrating for her future descendants to have to sift through...and with no record of her paternal ancestry to go on. When the point is our genetic heritage, these things do matter--we can prefer whomever we like, such as those who adopted children, but we are still not genetically related to them. I do think the adoptive parents should have a place of mention to be recorded in the genealogy, but it's pointless to then track their own genetic heritage, right? These well-intentioned families have made it impossible in many cases to uncover who the real blood parents are, and sometimes we don't even know that it's going on.
I spoke with my Dad about my ideas, at which he thoroughly laughed. He repeated the rhetorical information, "No, dear...Gaynelle was Granny's half-sister" and, upon, listening to my explanations, he finally just said, "well, there's absolutely no way to know". I suppose I'll just hope that more old memoirs are published revealing the truths!
I doubt there's any personal account of Carrie Cox in existence, besides the one in the recently-published old memoir. I'm so delighted to have found it, and I hope to discover more within the whole book. It's amazing that the whole 'dust-to-dust' concept really does seem to apply to most folks!
If the family tree is correct, I do have that link with British royalty through the Packs, but those are, honestly, more 'notorious' in my mind than anything. I likely have a Native American link, as well, which has its own kind of romance, but Carrie sounds like a truly romantic character--closer to my own reality than Native Americans or British Royalty or even hard-working illiterate farm folk...so, yes, I hope she is my ancestress, and I'll be tickled if it turns out to be so!
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1 comment:
UNLESS...you are really just a butterfly DREAMING that you are a person with a complicated family tree...
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