jgrussell – my world

Where is Michael J. Robertson, son of Ray Chester and Mary Buie Robertson? I can’t find him, and I want to!

When my cousins Paula and Bobbi and I got started with this genealogical research some months ago, we went onto the message boards on both Ancestry.com and Genealogy.com to look for information and to ask for help in our research. And on one of the boards we found a message posted in April 2001 from Michael Robertson looking for information about his father’s family.

I’d love to be able to help him, and to share information with him, because Michael’s father Ray was my grandmother’s brother. But when we tried to email him, it turned out he had one of those @home addresses that disappeared when the @Home network did. We tried the attbi replacement many @home customers had but that didn’t work.

So where are you, cousin Michael? I sure wish you’d get in touch…

My great great grandparents were Gustavus and Isabella Robertson. We know at least a little about Gustavus’s forebears: his father, William M. Robertson, lived with them from before 1850 to after 1860. Question: who were Isabella’s
parents?

Her youngest son, my great grandfather Jasper Robertson, told his family his mother’s maiden name was Gentry. Another son, George, said the same thing when he provided information to the State of Oklahoma for Jasper’s death certificate in 1912. The family of a daughter, Mary Isabella Robertson Hendrix, reported Isabella’s maiden name as Isabella Gentry for Mary Isabella’s death certificate in Colorado in 1950. So let us search for Isabella’s family among the
Gentrys of the day.

She first appears of record in the 1850 Winston Co MS census at age 18 married to Gustavus B. Robertson (spelled “Robinson”), age 22, with sons William, age 3, and Elijah, age five months. Since she gave her first son her husband’s father’s name, perhaps she gave her second son her own father’s name. So let us search for an Elijah Gentry.

Her census records uniformly give her father’s place of birth as Georgia. So let us search for an Elijah Gentry born in Georgia.

She was born in Mississippi in 1832. So let us search for an Elijah Gentry born in Georgia whose children would have been born in Mississippi by the early 1830s.

She was living in Winston County MS in 1850, so let us search for an Elijah Gentry born in Georgia whose children would have been born in Mississippi by the early 1830s and who would have some connection to the Winston County
MS area by 1850.

And there was such a man. A Methodist preacher and early surveyor, Elijah Gentry matches the search criteria in every particular. The evidence, albeit circumstantial, is compelling:

– Elijah Gentry was born in Georgia in 1797.

– The Gentry family lived in Winston County at the time of the 1840 census and moved to next-door Neshoba County by the 1850 census.

– All known children of Elijah and Wilmoth Gentry were born in Mississippi, and the known birth years range from as early as 1817-18 to as late as 1836-37.

– On the 1840 census, there were two female children living at home, one between five and 10 years old and one between 10 and 15 years old. Neither girl is shown on the 1850 census. There are two other known Gentry daughters. Martha Ann was married to George W. Thomason in 1836 and thus cannot be either of the daughters of the 1840
census. Nancy was married to Amos T. Humphries in 1845, had a reported year of birth of 1829 according to the Gentry Family Genealogy magazine (and confirmed by the 1850 census, which lists her as 21) and thus was most likely to be the female child aged 10-15 years in 1840. Isabella was eight years old in 1840 and would perfectly fit the missing
5-to-10-year-old on the 1840 census.

– There is no other known Gentry child born between 1829 and 1834 (Isabella was born in 1832).

– There is no other Gentry family in Mississippi in 1840 with a female child born in Mississippi between 1830 and 1835.

That’s not all:

– Betty McAndrews (whose husband Wayne descends from Isabella’s son Bird Alexander through his daughter Allie) indicates that her mother-in-law had been told that Isabella was associated somehow with the name Rankin. The
Gentry family was in Rankin County between 1823 and 1833 (and thus it would have been Rankin County where Isabella was born in 1832).

– Michael Robertson (grandson of Jasper through son Ray Robertson) said his family Bible indicates that Isabella had brothers named Bill and Lije. Two of Elijah Gentry’s sons were named William and Elijah.

– Every single child of Isabella’s shown on the 1860 census (in Attala County MS) had a name parallel to that of a Gentry child: William, Elijah, Bird or Byrd (Ira Gentry’s middle name was Bird or Byrd), Martha, Nancy and George.

– Mary Ann Thurmond (granddaughter of Isabella’s daughter Mary Isabella) has a letter from G.B. Robertson to Mary Isabella in which he signs their names “GB R and IR Robertson.” An article entitled “Gentry” written for the
Rankin County MS Historical Society by two great great grandchildren of Elijah Gentry (Helen Maxine Wilson Smith and Clarence E. Wilson are children of Willow Isabelle Gentry Wilson, daughter of Jacob Elijah, son of John Wesley, son of Elijah) identifies the children of Elijah and Wilmoth Gentry as: (1) Martha Ann; (2) Elijah K.; (3) Ira Byrd; (4) John Wesley; (5) “G.B. (daughter) married I.R. Robertson”; (6) Nancy A.; (7) William Jefferson; and (8) George Washington.

Given this circumstantial information, my working hypothesis is that the information “G.B. (daughter) married I.R. Robertson” is a mere transposition of names, and that, in fact, it was Elijah and Wilmoth’s daughter I.R. (Isabella R.) who married G.B. Robertson. But boy would I love some documentation…

In an old cemetery in the Wichita County, Texas town of Iowa Park, there is a family plot with one marker on it and at least five burials in our six grave spaces. There are three children buried there in Highland Cemetery and two, perhaps three, adults. I’m pretty sure I know who five of those buried there are, and it hurts my heart to think of all but one of the graves being unmarked. That’s something I am determined to change.

The marked grave is that of Sammie Cottrell. This little boy was born on May 5, 1887, and died on April 11, 1892. He was not yet five years old. Had he lived, he would have been an older brother to my grandfather, Clay Rex Cottrell, who was born in Iowa Park in 1898. Their parents were Martin Gilbert Cottrell (1855-1946) and Mattie H. Johnson Cottrell (1858-1912).

Another grave I am sure of is that of Ruth Marie Cottrell. This little girl was born on August 12, 1917, and died on February 22, 1918. She was the firstborn child of Clay Rex Cottrell (1898-1970) and Opal Robertson
Cottrell (1898-1995). Had she lived, she would have been the oldest sister to my mother, Hazel (“Totsy”) Cottrell Geissler (1926-1999).

The third child, I believe, is yet another firstborn. Clay’s sister Nettie and her husband H. Dixon Holley are on the 1910 Wichita County census with their daughter Myrtle, then aged one. Among the questions asked on that census is how long the couple had been married (four years) and how many children a mother had and how many were still living. Nettie answered that she had had two babies; only one was still alive. So there is yet another Cottrell family firstborn gone. And there is a death record on file in Iowa Park for “Mary Holly” who died in November of 1907.

And still another firstborn accounts for one of the adult burials there in that plot. There were five girls born to Martin Gilbert and Mattie Cottrell who lived to adulthood: Effalie, Nettie, Addie, Theo and Maude. Effalie was born on November 6, 1875, and there is a marriage record for Effalie and Hinton Snoddy in Wichita County on May 5, 1898. And then on June 21-22, 1900, there was a census taken in Wichita County, as elsewhere around the United States. Hinton Snoddy is then a 30-year-old widower, living with his mother and siblings. The family story is that Effie died of typhoid as a young bride. Our family records show Effie was buried in the family plot.

And a likely candidate for another adult grave is Louisa Baker Cottrell, born in May 1833. She married G.W. Cottrell, and gave birth to six children — including Martin Gilbert Cottrell and his sister Mary E. Cottrell, who
married John H. Green. Louisa is last seen in the census records in 1910, living with the Greens in Wichita County.

My cousin Mary… my aunt Ruth… my great uncle Sammie… my great aunt Effie… my great great grandmother Louisa. My roots.

None of them will lie in unmarked graves for long. That much, I promise.

And we’ve found another Judy in the Cottrell family! I’m so excited! I had a long telephone call this morning from my second cousin, Judy Pilcher, daughter of Ruby Hodges Straughn and granddaughter of Theo Cottrell Hodges. (And I apologize in advance if I have her father’s name wrong!) Theo (called Aunt Tedd) and my grandfather Clay Rex Cottrell were sister and brother. Judy has much of the family history from her mother and
grandmother and has already started to send photos and other information along. Since my grandfather Clay was the youngest, he didn’t have the same exposure to the history as his older sisters did, and finding Judy and her information is like finding treasure. And she was so surprised and delighted to find she had so many cousins! All the other Cottrell children had one child or two, three at the most. And then along come my
grandparents with their 12 children, raising 10 to adulthood.

We’re so glad to have found you, Judy. Welcome “back”!

We’ve found my mother’s cousin Fred Gottlieb! She always spoke so warmly and lovingly of this tall handsome man who cut short his own honeymoon so he could walk her down the aisle. But we’d lost touch over the years and when I started doing the family tree research, I had no idea where he was. I’d posted a bunch of messages on genealogy.com and ancestry.com looking for info on the family but, until this week, hadn’t gotten any response.

But on Monday I got a response to a message asking about my great grandfather M.G. Cottrell from a woman asking if I knew anything about a Totsy Cottrell who was a member of that family. Do I!!! Totsy was my mother’s nickname! I shot back an immediate reply and asked the woman what her connection was with the family. Her reply was to ask if my mother had been married in Golden, Colorado, in the chapel of the Colorado School of Mines. (My father was an assistant professor there at the time.) By this point I was burning with curiosity and my cousin Paula and I went trolling for info. Turns out the woman — Karen Perce — had posted in the Gottlieb family forums, and I figured she had to be connected to cousin Fred. I was right! She’s a friend and Fred had asked her to see if she could find anything about the family.

We’re all delighted to have made the contact. Paula and I are printing out photos and info for Fred and exchanging info with Karen. And to show him just what he meant to my mother, I will be able to give him copies of the telegrams she kept for more than 50 years — his telegrams to her saying he would walk her down the aisle and to please make him a hotel reservation in Denver. Thanks, Karen…