LITTLE ROCK — Think for a minute: Does the name Sylvander Dewberry Martin mean anything to you?
I’m not really expecting it to ring any bells. It’s just that of all the names in my genealogical logbook, his is my favorite. It’s distinctive, you know? Or rather, it would be if we could ever decide just exactly what the name was.
Sylvander has been difficult to get a handle on not only because he was a humble farmer a ways back (born about 1838), but because no two sources spell his first name the same way. His middle name is even worse. My favorite is Dewsenberry.
Mark my words, someday I’m going to come across one of those sloppily thrown-together family trees (of which there are thousands online) that refers to him as Silver Doozie. That’ll drive the next generation of researchers bonkers.
Sylvander is only my second greatgranduncle by marriage, but upon first encountering him, I figured tracing his path would be a cinch because of the unusual name. It hasn’t worked out that way. For one brief moment, hope flickered. Turns out he had a grandson named S.D. Martin, born of the son of Sylvander’s second marriage.
Unfortunately, that’s as much as I’ve found out after several years of research. So far there’s been no evidence that the younger S.D. ever elaborated on his name in the official records of Alabama or anywhere else. Maybe he wasn’t sure what it was, either.
It wouldn’t matter too much if I were to drop this line of inquiry altogether. A family researcher can go only so far with collateral lines and theirin-laws before the relevance runs out. The only reason I keep following this one is that my ancestor, Sylvander’s first wife, appears in only one census with him; by the next census, she was dead and he had remarried and sired more children.
The year that Juliann Hyde Martin died is unknown, so I’m still trying to determine whether she and Sylvander had three daughters together or only one. Such are the joys of genealogy.
No kidding. The hunt, the time spent sifting for clues and then following them as far as they will go, may be the biggest part of family research’s appeal - provided one’s sleuthing leads to the occasional “Eureka!” moment, of course.
Family researchers are not unlike chickens in a barnyard. No inch, no millimeter of ground will go unpecked, and we’ll keep going over that ground long after a reasonable animal would give up. Trust me, there’s always another nugget.
Not that giving a patch of ground a rest doesn’t have its advantages. A few years ago a cousin sent to me photocopies of marriage, birth and death pages from an old family Bible. Photocopies of photocopies, actually, so they took a bit of work to read. I got so engrossed in trying to read the faded handwriting from more than a century ago that a photocopy of anold postcard sent to my Great-Aunt Belle that had been included with the bundle went ignored for the longest time. For one thing, the signature on the card, E.F. Ward, meant nothing to me-the Missouri postmark didn’t, either-whereas the Bible pages were a font of information, even if they took some time to decipher.
Which I did bit by bit over the course of several years, eventually putting the names and dates included there in context with names and dates gathered elsewhere. That task all but done, I turned at last to the postcard, giving it my full attention. Of course, by that time I had the benefit of all the research into the Bible records that had gone before.
Eureka! It finally dawned on me why some distant cousin years ago had included a photocopy of the postcard with those of the Bible pages, why it was relevant. More than relevant, vital.
E.F. Ward wasn’t a man. She was Ella Frances Oakley Kinsworthy Ward, my great-grandfather’s sister. She hadn’t died young at all, as I had assumed, but had, of all things, divorced, remarried and moved to Missouri.
Of course, I knew there was such a thing as divorce in the 19th century, and even before that. It just happened so infrequently that I hadn’t considered the possibility. A word to the wise: Always consider the possibilities.
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———Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page. Today’s column was based on one from May 14, 2008.
Editorial, Pages 75 on 02/20/2011