BREAKING NEWS: New Year's Eve Breakthrough--maybe, Part II

The Farmer Next Door

In the 1880 census of Hootenville, Upson County, Georgia, the first entry reads:

Birdsong Geo. P. Self M S W 38 GA Farmer

The second entry is that for Matilda Manson and her son Otis. Their neighbor is George Preston Birdsong, born May 25, 1841, died 1905. (The Birdsong Family website is an outstanding work).
He is the eldest son of George Lawrence Forsyth Birdsong and Susan Francis Thweatt Birdsong. Several interesting and unusual facts about George Preston Birdsong can be gleaned from available sources. First, according to information on the Birdsong family site, he was one of twelve children, nine of whom were boys. Apparently, three of the boys did not survive into adulthood. Of the six surviving sons, George and his brother Albert are the only ones for whom there appear to be no record of marriage. As shown above, even as late as age 38, George remained single.

It's Always Darkest Before the Lights Go On . . .

George Preston Birdsong lived with his mother and brothers at least until he was nearly thirty(see 1870 census of Upson County, Georgia) on property his mother had homesteaded in 1868.The Birdsongs were collectively and individually well-off after the Civil War. Mrs. Birdsong's real estate was valued at $3,000, while George's personal property was worth $350--not insignificant sums for the Reconstruction Era. Before the War, the Birdsongs had one of the top-valued farms in the county. George was a veteran of the War, having served with his brother in Company K, 5th Georgia Regiment, which unit surrendered to Federal forces at Greensboro, North Carolina, in April 1865. So in 1880, when he appears to be living alone, George P. Birdsong (a) has survived the deadliest war in American history; (b) is accustomed to family living; (c) seems to be a successful farmer. In other words, he would seem to be a highly desirable marriage prospect and being a man of his time, would seem naturally to gravitate toward marriage and a family of his own. And yet, approaching 40, elderly in relative terms, George Preston Birdsong remained unmarried, without a family of his own, or . . .so . . . it . . . would . . . seem . . . .

Call in the Experts!

What's going on here? Well, let's turn to two noted experts on the sociology, psychology, and genealogy of the South. Lalita Tademy's 2001 work centered on her own Louisiana family iscalled Cane River. Edward P. Jones won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics
Circle Award for The Known World, a study set in Virginia. Both pieces are novels that unflinchingly explore the complexities and subtleties of race in the antebellum and Reconstruction South in ways that explode stereotypes. In Cane River, a book in which all of the characters actually existed and the major events really occurred, Tademy tells the story of a slaveowner who marries a white woman he does not love as cover for his relationship with the black woman he does love. A key character in Jones' book is a slaveowner who essentially maintains two families--one white, one black.

There was no one else in the county who could have gotten away with putting a Negro and her two children in a house on the same block with white people.
. . .
Except for the skin a shade and a half darker and the differences in their age, Dora was the very image of the daughter Robbins had with his white wife.

The Known World, Copyright 2003 by Edward P. Jones

And Now The Breaking News

As has been noted, Matilda Manson and her son Otis left Georgia for Milam County, Texas,sometime between 1880 and 1890. By 1890, Otis had married Bettie Sanford. By 1900, the year of the next available census, Otis and Bettie had three sons and Matilda lived nearby in Rockdale. The question is why did Matilda go to Texas in the first place?

Rockdale, Texas, is about 15 miles from Cameron, the seat of Milam County. During the first week of June, 1900, census enumerator W.G. Gillis was working Cameron's First Precinct, a neighborhood of many German and Bohemian immigrants. On June 5, Gillis visited his 139th household in the precinct, a small abode owned by a 25 year-old Bohemian salesman and his bartender brother. The brothers rented a room to two night watchmen, one from Alabama, the other from Georgia. The Georgian, a man of about 60, identified himself as George P. Birdsong.

BREAKING NEWS: New Year's Eve Breakthrough--maybe

Breaking Down the House

The most frustrating experience for a genealogist (or anyone else, come to think of it) is to run smack head-long into a brick wall. Genealogical brick walls are those mysterious deadends that seem to make one's research goals impossible to attain. They're frustrating because we know somebody must know the key to the riddle--but who? Where? When? And why, for goodness' sake?! Of course, part of the problem is that most genealogists are obsessive-compulsive Type A characters who don't know when to let go. Yes, I'm talking about me (see Resistance is Futile ).
So I've had my share of head-banging in this endeavor (see The Magnificent Blogcession ). The most intriguing, and therefore the most perplexing, problem has been to ferret out the paternity of a key ancestor, Otis Manson, born in Hootenville, Upson County, Georgia, c. 1871.

Duuhh!

Perhaps the only thing more frustrating than hitting a brick wall is the sudden realization that the path through or around it may have been apparent all along had one only paid a little attention to detail. So for months, I'd been staring at the 1880 census of Hootenville, Georgia. Right there on the first page it says:

1 1 BIRDSONG, GEO. P. M W S 38 Farmer

2 2 MANSON, MAT F Mu S 30 Servant, House
- - ---------, OTIS M Mu S 9 At Home
- - McCRARY, ELIZA F B S 18 Farm Laborer

3 3 DAWSON, ELLEN F B S 22 Farm Laborer
- - ---------, JOHNSON M Mu S 5 At Home
- - ---------, HORACE M B S 3 At Home
- - ---------, FANNIE F B S 20 Farm Laborer
- - --------, MAT F B S 3 At Home


To decipher that: At the second household in the neighborhood (2), which was also the second household visited by the enumerator (2), the enumerator recorded that he found "Mat" (Matilda) Manson, a female (F), mulatto (Mu), who was unmarried (S) and thirty years old (30). [Age in the 19th century censuses is often an estimate or a guess. With no government records, limited literacy, and few compelling reasons to know one's exact age, enumerators and citizens sometimes missed the mark by as much as a decade. In this case for example, we know that Matilda was older than thirty in 1880, because she is listed as six years old on the 1850 census of Talbot County]. She was a household servant.

Living with Matilda is her son Otis, age given as nine years [later census records show his birthdate ranging from 1867 to 1876; presumably the 1880 estimate may be closest to correct, having been given by his mother]. Also living with them was 18 year old Eliza McCrary, a black girl who worked on a farm.

"Next door" to Matilda (that is, in the next household in the neighborhood), lived Ellen Dawson, a 22 year old farm worker, and her two sons, Johnson and Horace. Also in that house were Ellen's 20 year old sister, Fannie, and her young daughter, Matilda.

For months, I studied the data about Matilda Manson. Traced back to her native Talbot County, where I learned her mother's name was Jane and her sister's name was Mary. Followed her out to Texas--particularly perplexing because I didn't know why we were going there [see She's Spanish] . Went to Wilkinson County, Georgia, via cyberspace and studied the large Manson family based there. Indeed, I was making plans to travel physically to Georgia, when the genealogical epiphany occurred.

Following a Developing Story . . .

It began like this: if Matilda was a household servant, whose household was she serving? If her teenaged ward Eliza McCrary was a farm laborer, just whose farm was she laboring on? And who were the Dawson sisters working for? Well, it's not as if they were commuting anywhere in 1880 in Hootenville, Georgia. What about the farmer who lived "next door" to Matilda and Otis? Maybe they worked for him . . .hmmmm. . . .

Sanford's Jewish Connection?

So I was saying . . . this Jewish-Caribbean thing could be a new doorway opening up here. One of our family members, Harold V. Manson, has a vague, but certain recollection about a Jewish connection to his black family. He is the grandson of Otis Manson (born c. 1867, Upson County, Georgia) [see She's Spanish]. Harold Manson's recollection is that as a child in Texas he was told that some recent ancestor in Georgia was Jewish. Also, he recalls that his father, Quentin V.H. Manson (b. 1913, Rockdale, Texas; d. 1987, Los Angeles, California), would go to see a Jewish man whenever he was in need of money or otherwise in trouble. The man always responded to the needs, no questions asked. And once a year, Otis and Bettie Manson trundled their brood to the train station in Rockdale and waited for a train from Georgia. When the train arrived, a white man would emerge, hand Otis a packet of cash, and re-embark. Who was this man? Was he Jewish? Was Otis Manson's Georgia family Jewish? Well, next stop: www.jewishgen.org.

Back from the Dead

I can't believe it's been nearly seven weeks since I last posted here! No spectacular excuse--just temporarily brain-dead. Well, I'm back . . . .

Hanuka in the Islands, Mon?

Yesterday (Christmas) I went to dinner at the home of a long-time colleague. She had her daughter visiting from college and a neighbor woman and her son present also. The neighbor woman, I quickly learned, is a naturalized citizen originally from Jamaica. Curiously (to me, anyway), this black Caribbean islander is surnamed "Levy." Apparently, this is a curiousity to a lot of the unwashed masses, she explained. The brief history is this: Ferdinand and Isabella, doing the work of the Inquisition, kicked the Jews out of Spain and Portugal. Jews were banned from Spanish territory in the New World, as well. Fast-forward to 1655: the British seize Jamaica, and other territory from the Spanish. The British begin importing Africans as slaves to operate the sugar plantations and the British, either purposefully or through benign disregard, permit Sephardic Jews to immigrate to Jamaica, starting in about 1663. The Jews made tremendous contributions to the civic and cultural development of Jamaica and remain a strong element of the community to this day. [Our dinner companion remarked on the similarities that she had perceived between Mandeville and Granada]. The African population eventually outnumbered the Europeans and following some considerable violence, the British abolished slavery in about 1820. Meanwhile, many black Jamaicans had adopted or acquired European names. In the case of the apparently Jewish names, how this occurred is not completely clear, but the possibility of some intermarriage cannot be gainsaid. Following the abolition of slavery, black Jamaicans began coming to the United States. The 1850 census shows a 51 year-old black barber, John Levy, a native of the West Indies, living in Palmer, Massachusetts. The same census also shows Ellen Levy, a black 13 year-old, in the household of a white family, headed by Gilbert Creed, Sr., in Jamaica, Queens, New York.

In the next post, what this discovery of Jews in the Caribbean might have to do with the family history of Sanford Gines Bowie III.