New Images Posted in the Kennedy & Talbert Photo Collection

Now that I've recently been connected with other researchers of the the Kennedy and Talbert families of southwest Virginia, I have been able to add significantly to the collection of family photos on Flickr. There was quite a bit of intermarriage between the Horne, Talbert and Kennedy families so many of the photos in the album will be of interest to more than one surname's researchers.

I'm trying to grow the album with "oldies-but-goodies," so I welcome your Kennedy, Talbert or Horne family photos that date prior to 1925 (or no later than 1950). Please email me if you have images that you would like to contribute.

Click here to view the Kennedy & Talbert Family Photo Album

Descendants of Edward Corder, "The Boys of Greenway Court" is Now Available as a Free Download

I've just stumbled across a happy little gift from the internet. The Boys of Greenway Court, a 19th-century morality tale by Hezekiah Butterworth, is out of copyright and available online. You can read the text version, or download the 16MB facsimile which contains beautiful illustrations.

I have to caution you that the story is florid and ponderous in the way of most late Victorian writers, but for those interested in reading it from the perspective of historian or genealogist, it can be fun in a novel (ahem) kind of way. I have several hard copies which I have purchased whenever they have become available on eBay, but original early editions can be scarce and pricey, so I'm glad to see that all interested parties may have a free digital copy.

A "Swindled" Inheritance, and Other Kennedy Family Legends Examined

Through a happy coincidence, my last blog article on the Conway-Kennedy murder has brought me into contact with descendants of Forrest T. Kennedy (s/o John & Mary Horne Kennedy), who have long been involved with researching our extended Kennedy family.

My own connection to the family is at once distant and immediate. As a child, my grandmother would tell me endless stories of her childhood visits with "Grandma Brooks," a character who still looms large in Brooks family lore. Grandma Brooks was Ibbie Kennedy, daughter of Wiley F. Kennedy and Mary Elizabeth Talbert Kennedy of Russell and Wise Counties in southwest Virginia. Ibbie married my great-great-grandfather, Warren D. Brooks Jr. of Del Rio, TN, when he came to Wise County working on the railroads in the last quarter of the 19th century.

Sadly, Grandma Ibbie's father, Wiley F. Kennedy, died of epilepsy seven months before Grandma was born, and Mary Elizabeth Talbert Kennedy took Wiley's three small daughters to live with her parents, Thomas and Rebecca Gobble Talbert.

Mary Elizabeth later remarried to Squire Osborn, the girls' hated step-father (who Grandma referred to contemptuously as "Ol' Sqwar Ozburn"). I cannot tell how much contact the children had with their Kennedy relatives, but they must have had some. Grandma Brooks talked about her Kennedy cousins and I can remember my own grandmother speaking of an "Ackey Bud" (Ichabod) Kennedy, so there must have been some contact with her father's family, but no particular stories specific to the Kennedy family were among those passed down to my own grandmother. With one exception. And was it ever a doozie.

For a reason I could never quite understand, Grandma Brooks was under the impression that one of her cousins had traveled to Ireland and "swindled her out of her inheritance." (She didn't hesitate to name the cousin, but I do, as her accusations seem to be completely without foundation.) As a child, I accepted this story without question, obligingly imagining pots of gold covertly stashed, and castles sold away from the family by a scheming (and very distant) relation. In my teens when I started researching the Kennedy family, I quickly realized that while our ancestors of that name were not precisely poor, they were unlikely to have come from a family in Ireland of any particular prestige or wealth. I pressed my grandmother for more details, but she knew no more than she'd been told.

Years would pass, and life would happen, and I would lay my work aside. In the mean time, the internet went from a novel concept to the most powerful communication tool in the history of mankind. So here we all are, able to view thousands of obscure records and writings at the stroke of a few keys, which is how I happened across Wade Powers Kennedy's 1941 book, The Name and Family of Kennedy and Powers, which is viewable online and downloadable as a PDF.

The book is "Dedicated to Future Generations who, it is hoped, will expand and extend this record and beautify it by good deeds that shine like diamond dewdrops in a meadow of the finest kind of living."

I could tell right away that our author was an optimist. He did nothing to disabuse me of this impression as he launched immediately into a florid passage about the "worthy deeds of the marching generations giving [the surname] dignity and splendor." (Oh dear, such high expectations of us all.) After a short discussion of the history of surnames, Mr. Kennedy (my 1st cousin 4x removed) gets right to the point, asserting that Kennedy "is one of the very ancient names," possibly meaning "head or chief of the clan." Perhaps so, but our line? Optimist, optimist, optimist.

After a brief mention of  a "Kenneth" associated with King Duncan of Scotland, he states that "It is probable however that the greater part of the family traces its descent from the EARLS of CARRICK" (his emphasis), a southern district of Ayrshire, Scotland, which lies south of the river, Deen. He goes on to mention Sir James Kennedy who married Mary Stewart, daughter of King Robert III of Scotland. Ohhhh, boy. Now I'm beginning to understand. Did someone show Grandma Brooks a copy of this book?

Mr. Kennedy is on a roll now. He posits a connection between this noble line of Kennedys and the ancestor of what I call the "adore" Kennedys: Theodore, Elmadore, Macadore, Shenadore, etc. In Section III (pg. 13) he moves to our own ancestor's line, David Kennedy "father of the Kennedy family scattered throughout the western part of Virginia and into other states."

He states that there are substantial reasons for believing that our ancestor, the David Kennedy who settled in Russell County, VA in the 1790's, "belonged to the Scotch line" of Kennedys coming down from Sir David Kennedy, the first Earl of Cassilis. In support of this he gives evidence such as "family resemblance, personal characteristics, accent in speech" (although how he became familiar enough to compare our family's qualities of speech with those of the long-dead Sir David, he does not explain).

Now, I'm not going to sport with your intelligence by entertaining a connection between the Kennedys of Russell County, VA and the purported ancient nobles of southwest of Scotland. I believe W.P. Kennedy did indeed have reason to believe there was a connection between our ancestor and a Scottish Kennedy line, and I will examine that later on in another blog entry. I do not believe he intentionally misled us about the origins of our family, but ever the optimist, he may have seen what he wanted to see, and made the connections that seemed most agreeable to someone of his obviously idealistic disposition. Time will tell, as research progresses. The old fellow might surprise me and turn out to be right. But don't hold your breath. If he is, I will write a blog entry titled "An Ode to Optimism," in which I give him his full due for very lucky guesses.

However, back to Grandma Ibbie's puzzling accusations. As of 1941, the story of the Kennedy family's glorious origins had just gone to print. I'm not sure how long prior to this, W.P. Kennedy's research into the family origins and resultant theories had been in circulation amongst the relatives. His family appeared prosperous by comparison to that of my Grandma Brooks (whose husband died when they were in early middle age, leaving my young great-grandfather to support her and his younger siblings). Wade P. Kennedy was obviously a scholarly author. His brother was a self-taught and successful local lawyer. Another brother started a franchise of Piggly-Wiggly stores in Wise County. I can just imagine Grandma's speculation about the source of their means and success. (Surely it could not simply have been the result of hard work? Much easier to believe it was the result of a stolen pot of gold...) 

I cannot be sure -- truly I cannot -- but I believe that Grandma Brooks made some sort of connection in her own mind between the grandiose origin tales and the success of her Kennedy relatives and posited a covert trip to Ireland on the part of one of them, wherein the cousin in question had somehow located the exact origin of wealthy Kennedy relatives in the old country and had managed to secure and dispose of family property without the knowledge of a multitude of other state-side cousins. What alternative explanation could there be for her own circumstances to be so reduced when her ancestors had been Kings and landed gentry, and her own cousins so comparatively wealthy?

Not being one to stand on ceremony, I instantly questioned my new Kennedy relatives about whether or not any Kennedys had been to Ireland or had located our family's origins there. They were utterly bewildered to hear of such a trip and replied that as far as they knew, no one ever had.

My feeling is that had that trip actually been undertaken (probably in the early 20th century), it would have been much discussed within the family, especially within the line of the family that went to great pains to collect the family's history, and such a trip would have been nearly impossible to hide from the other cousins and their descendants. I can think of no other plausible explanation for Grandma's tale, other than she having leaped to conclusions based on Wade P. Kennedy's (very likely incorrect) assertions of connections to Irish and/or Scottish nobility. But what a bizarre conclusion to leap to! 

If you are a descendant of John & Mary Horne Kennedy of Russell County VA and you can shed any light on my great-great-grandmother's fanciful tales of "swindled" (her word) Irish inheritances, or what might have given her such an idea, I hope you will add your comments below. I'm open to anything, but at the moment, this seems like the most plausible explanation I can contrive. I have long wondered what caused her to "tell such a tale" (to use the words of Prissy in Gone With the Wind), so any enlightenment would be welcome.

In the coming months I am going to examine other family stories from the W.P. Kennedy book and see how they hold up against new information that becomes available online and through the wonderful magic of DNA testing) The purpose of these examinations is not to detract from Wade Kennedy's priceless, wonderful preservation of our family's history, but to clarify and --to use his own words-- "to expand and extend [his] record" -- and if need be, to correct it based on new information that comes to light.

Elizabeth Conway Kennedy Shot Clean Off Her Horse. That'll Teach Her to Free-Range Her Cattle, I Reckon.

Recently a young cousin asked me for some information on her ancestry for a presentation she had been assigned in her honors civics class. Poor kid. She was deluged by pages of family history, charts and anecdotes, all straight from the Too Much Information Desk (a desk from which any avid genealogist writes at every possible opportunity).

One of the stories I related to her was the tragic tale of how our ancestor John Kennedy and his sister Mary Elizabeth Kennedy came to be orphaned in the year 1800. I didn't know very much about it myself, having only been told that one or both of the children's parents had been murdered, and having been unsuccessful in tracking down additional details.

Since new information comes online every day, I decided to have another look and this time I hit pay dirt. Allow me to relate to you the story of the tragic demise of David Kennedy and his wife Elizabeth Conway Kennedy, of Castlewood in Russell County, Virginia.

First, a word about the actors in our drama. It is believed that David Kennedy came from Ireland since, on the 1880 census, son John Kennedy gives his father's place of birth thus. David may have been widowed prior to his union with Elizabeth Conway. He had an older son, Samuel, who died in a tragic accident at Burton's Ford when a neighbor woman mistook him for a swan and shot him early one foggy morning as he was washing his face in the nearby river. I'm not making that up. Apparently the Burton family who lived across the river had been planning to shoot a wild swan that frequented the river bank, and when Samuel went down to wash (dressed in a white shirt in preparation for an impending trip to town), the trigger-happy Mrs. Burton fired away. (The Name and Family of Kennedy and Powers, W. P. Kennedy, 1941, p. 14-15)

Now, back to our story.

David and Elizabeth (called "Nancy" by son John) lived near the present-day town of Castlewood, close to the aforementioned Burton's Ford. Elizabeth Kennedy is generally believed to have been a daughter of Thomas Conway, whose property cornered with that of Henry and Elizabeth Kiser Hurst. According to the traditions of both families, a disagreement developed between the families when the Kennedys allowed their cattle to range free, resulting in damage to the Hurst crops. Elizabeth Hurst and Elizabeth Kennedy "engaged in bitter quarrels on more than one occasion" on account of the trespass.

Elizabeth Kennedy was a keen horsewoman and often rode out surveying her stock, or on errands. On the 10th of June of 1800, she rode into the local community and on her way back to her farm she encountered Elizabeth Hurst doing laundry in the creek just downstream from Bickley's Mill. Mrs. Hurst's infant son, Samuel, was laying on a quilt near his mother, and another son, Andrew, had just returned from hunting. The boy leaned his rifle against a large poplar tree and was trying to quiet his fussing brother when Elizabeth Kennedy rode into view on the road above the creek. As usual, the two women began to argue. One Hurst researcher says she has been told that Mrs. Kennedy "clubbed" Mrs. Hurst, which would imply that the two women were on equal footing, but most accounts agree that Mrs. Hurst snatched up her son's hunting rifle and shot Elizabeth Kennedy off her horse, which made it more likely that the victim was still on the road above the creek, and Mrs. Hurst was on lower ground within reach of the tree by the creek.

Mrs. Hurst was duly arrested for murder.

"The prisoner being arraigned at the bar, it was demanded of her whether she was guilty or not guilty. She answered she was not guilty. Whereupon divers [sic] witnesses being sworn and examined against her, and she being heard in her own defense: on consideration whereof it is the opinion of the court that the said Elizabeth Hursk [sic] for the offense ought to be tried at the next District Court to be held at Washington Court house on the 2nd day of October next, and thereupon she was remanded to jail." (Russell County VA Law and Order Book No. 3, Page 59, year 1800)

In case you're wondering how things went, she was acquitted, but her defense nearly bankrupted Henry, who had to sell part of his property to pay her way out of trouble.

Sadly, in the late winter or early spring of 1800, Mrs. Kennedy's husband, David, had gone south on his lucrative annual round of horse-trading through the Carolinas, never to return. According to his granddaughter Elizabeth Kennedy, as David was awaiting payment from the planters who had purchased his horses, he suddenly fell ill and died. There was no convenient way to return him to Virginia so he lies buried in an unknown location "somewhere in the Carolinas."  (Kennedy, p. 17) Perhaps the stress of her husband's recent death added to Elizabeth's decision to engage in the fatal quarrel with her neighbor, although more likely, from the sound of it, it was force of habit.

Thomas Conway Sr. and Richard Price administered the estate of the unfortunate Mrs. Kennedy. The orphaned children, John (about 3) and his sister Mary Elizabeth (about 5) were probably initially taken in by the Conway family, although a grandson of John insists that David's old friend from his militia days, John Smith, took the boy when his mother died.

In December of 1800 and again in October of 1804 the court ordered that the "Overseers of the poor bind Mary Kennedy, an infant orphan of Elizabeth Kennedy, deceased, to John Holbrook, according to law." The children were by no means paupers since their parents were moderately prosperous farmers, but the Overseer of the Poor was the legal authority charged with settlement of guardianship and payment from the estate for an orphaned child's upkeep.

Young John was most likley raised into his teens by his Conway relatives (possibly by the widowed Mary Conway Fletcher, his mother's sister). A friend of the family remembers that the Conway farm abutted her father's farm, and "Johnnie Kennedy" frequently cut across her father's land on his way to the public road. (Kennedy, p. 24) In 1814 John Kennedy left home to enlist in the Federal Army and served in Company A of the Virginia Militia during the war of 1812.

According to Wade Powers Kennedy, the family records were passed to granddaughter Ann Fraley Murphy (who was raised in the household of John and Mary Horne Kennedy) and were subsequently lost. However, there was no shortage of grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the unfortunate couple who had not heard every detail of their tragic story from the time they were knee-high to a grasshopper. I suspect the only reason I had not heard it myself from my own grandmother was because her "Grandma Brooks" (Ibbie Kennedy Brooks, granddaughter of John and Mary Horne Kennedy) had been raised in her mother's family, the Talberts (after her father Wiley F. Kennedy died during her infancy 1867).

The Kennedys, I can assure you, have long...long...memories. If Grandma Ibbie Kennedy Brooks had known the story, I haven't the slightest doubt that I'd have heard it with my own ears from the time I could understand the words "shot off her horse."

Disposition of Branson Family Land in Frederick County, VA

As I was cleaning up the hard drive on my computer this morning, sorting through a folder of genealogical documents I had photocopied, I came across two records of a land transaction for the Branson family of Frederick County, Virginia. John Branson (b. 1704 either in Berkshire, England or in New Jersey) and his brother Thomas Branson Jr. are mentioned as joint heirs to the 690a parcel of land their father Thomas L. Branson Sr. owned on the Shenandoah River in Frederick (formerly Orange) County.

Thomas Sr. had purchased this tract of land (and others) from Jost Hite, a head right settler who brought a number of (mostly German) immigrants into the lower Shenandoah Valley. Under the head right system, Hite received acreage for each settler he brought to the area. Unfortunately a portion of the land the Hite group settled actually legally belonged to Thomas, Sixth Lord Fairfax, Lord Proprietor of Virginia. When Fairfax arrived from England in the 1730's and discovered the encroaching German settlers, a lawsuit ensued that would outlast both combatants. On an interesting side note, Fairfax would be the only English peer to make his permanent home in the colonies when he settled on the Manor of Greenway Court (a residence that would have been considered a modest farmhouse in England) in the 1740's.

Thomas Branson's land adjoined Hite's and his grant of 850a was situated at the head of the "south branch of the Opeckon (creek), nigh a cattail meadow." Later he would secure a patent for 1370a on both sides of Crooked run, near his brother Jacob. Thomas Sr. must have lived in the valley at some point in the 1730's for in 1734 one John Dyer was deposed (apparently in regard to the dispute between Fairfax and Hite) and related that Fairfax had come over the mountains to visit his proprietorship and stayed at the home of Thomas Branson. Branson dared to broach the topic of land ownership west of the Blue Ridge and Fairfax reassured him that he "would not have any poor man quit the place for want of land" and that no one was to worry, it would simply mean a change of landlord (paying quitrents to him instead of to the the crown treasurer). According to Dyer's deposition, "[Fairfax] was desirous of having the Land settled."

In this, the old Baron was true to his word and his tenants held him in high regard. Had he lived to see the end of the war (he died in 1781) there is speculation that his tenants would have been reluctant to strip him of his hereditary land ownership.

Thomas Branson Sr.'s will was proved 21st November 1744 in Springfield Township, Burlington County NJ. I'm not sure why he returned to New Jersey and did not permanently settle his tracts of land in Northern Virginia. He was survived by his wife, Elizabeth. His will named sons David, Joseph, Jonathan, Lionel, William, "Day," Thomas, and John, and daughter Sarah Owen. He also mentioned the children of Zachariah and Mary Robins, and William and Elizabeth Rogers and called those children his grandchildren. To grandson Thomas Branson (son of John), he left the 200a tract of land on the Shenandoah which he had laid out for Thomas Alexander about a decade earlier.

Two years later, sons Thomas Jr. and John appeared in court in Frederick County, VA to finalize the division of the 690a left to them by their father. They agreed to evenly divide the land on 26th of February 1746/7 and a few days later, Thomas Jr. sold his 340a parcel to Samuel Earle, who took "peaceable possession" of it before witnesses John Branson, James Remy and Thomas Satcher on the 5th day of March, 1747.

Documents attached.

This information is relevant to the Brooks family members who descend from the union of Elizabeth Branson and John Corder through their daughter Mary Elinor "Nellie" Corder who married John Huff in Botetourt County VA, 6 October 1782.