Happy Blogiversary to Me

Today is the first anniversary of the day my blog appeared on Geneabloggers. In reality, it's been about a year and two weeks since I started writing Becky's Bridge to the Past. I've written 65 posts and had over 7,000 pageviews. I've been contacted by a couple of cousins and gotten some encouragement from other bloggers. I can say that it's been very helpful to put my genealogical notes in narrative form and has totally been worth the hours I've spent trying to get my words and images just right.

The post that has gotten the most hits is "Genealogy on the Road: Waterloo, Alabama," about the trip my brother and I took to the town our great-grandparents lived in before they came to Oklahoma in 1894. I have a feeling that has more to do with motorcycle riders researching their rally route than with anybody trying to find out about my rather unexciting (but enjoyable) trip to Alabama. I always wonder at someone's reaction when they Google something and get my little blog as a result.

I started the year by listing what I knew about the four branches of my family--my two paternal grandparents and my two maternal grandparents and their ancestors. This is information I have collected in over 25 years of doing genealogy--first by visiting genealogical libraries in Oklahoma and then by using Ancestry.com and the free research tools I could find online. Recently, my posts have been all about using DNA to search for ancestors and some of the new cousins I have found through this medium.

In just the last month I have identified two of my DNA matches--one on each side of my family. The common ancestor of Leo Pentney Gaines and myself is our great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Simmons, which would make us 3rd cousins. Herbert Archie Miller has been my biggest match on FTDNA (aside from my brother) since I first got my results, but I finally got some help in identifying him as a Ming cousin.

We haven't been successful YET, but a number of Huff cousins have been working hard this year trying to untangle the family relationships in Jackson County, Tennessee. My new cousin Barbara and I are still related, although we now know through DNA testing that our great-great-grandmothers Elzina and Ellender Huff were not sisters. I found out that I somehow have a previously undocumented connection to the Pharris family of Jackson County. And to make things more complicated, in the last month we have discovered that we are also related to the Broyles, Wilhoite, and Blankenbaker families of the 1717 Germanna Colony of Virginia. Hopefully, the solution to that puzzle will help us find the parents of our 3rd great-grandmother, Mrs. Susannah Huff.

In the past year I have visited ancestral homelands in Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and Alabama with my brother. We finally found the graves of our Castle great-great grandparents in West Liberty, KY, and saw the town in Virginia named for our ancestor, Jacob Castle.

What are my goals for the coming year? I hope to find more cousins through DNA testing and solve the Huff and Germanna puzzles. DNA has brought us closer in the last year than 20 previous years of chasing the paper trail. In the last week I have been contacted by a Smith cousin who found me through DNA testing from Ancestry.com. I so hope we can collaborate to find out more about the ancestors of our great-grandfather Stephen Albert Smith. This summer my brother and I will visit North Carolina and Virginia. I hope by the time we visit Germanna, I will know how I am connected there.

Genealogy on the Road: Castlewood, Virginia

While my brother and I were this far east, we decided we would visit the town named for our ancestor, Jacob Castle.  Castlewood, Virginia, is located in Russell County in southwestern Virginia.  From West Liberty, Kentucky, where many of Jacob’s descendants migrated, it was about a 3-hour drive.

According to legend, Jacob traded the local Indians a butcher knife and rusty musket (or “a hound dog, a shotgun, and a drink of whiskey”) for forested land that became known as “Castle’s Woods,” while still maintaining his permanent residence in Montgomery County.  While Castle’s life in Montgomery County can be proven by tax and court records, his life in Castle’s Woods has little to document it, except for the name of the area.  In any case, the area was known by this name long before Daniel Boone set forth from the settlement for Kentucky in 1774.

Since no statue of Jacob Castle exists to visit (although there really should be), my brother and I did our best to find some locales associated with our ancestor Jacob.  A nice drive to the country outside of town took us to an area known as Castle Run.  The story is that the area got its name because Jacob was chased there by an Indian upon whose hunting lands he was trespassing. 

  

We had no directions specific enough to find either site that has been proposed as the grave of Jacob Castle.  My cousin Fred Castle had described on a genealogy message board a site on Copper Creek that he felt to be Jacob’s resting place, but no directions were given.  A very nice history of Jacob Castle by a descendant named Ron Hall includes Mr. Hall’s description of a gravesite in a field near the Scott County line, but again, we had no directions specific enough to get us there.  The best we could do was gaze into the woods on either side of the road as we drove, imagining Jacob in his longhunter garb, blazing a trail through the forest.

On the way out of Virginia to our next stop in Tennessee, we stopped near Nickelsville on Highway 71 to read a historical marker entitled “Early Settlers in Russell County.”  It said: “In 1787, Isaiah Salyer (1752-1818), son of Zachariah Salyer (1750-1789) of North Carolina, settled on Copper Creek, two miles southeast of here.  Isaiah’s brothers, John, Benjamin, and Zachariah, and sisters Sarah, wife of Solomon Saylor, and Rebecca, wife of Stephen Kilgore, settled on nearby land.  The Salyer land was officially surveyed in 1790.  The Salyers intermarried with other Virginia pioneer families – Castle, Isaacs, Nickels, Stapleton, Vicars, and Byerley.” 

The marker stood in front of a church and graveyard where we found several Castle graves, undoubtedly from the Virginia branch of the family descended from Jacob Castle.

For more information about Jacob Castle, see my post "Jacob Castle the Longhunter."

Jacob Castle the Longhunter

The parents of Goldman Davidson Castle were William Castle (1799-1859) and Margaret Cox (1799-1880).  Siblings of G.D. Castle were James, John, Sarah, William Henderson, Margaret, Henry, George Harvey, and Patton Robert.  Sometime after the birth of their children, William and Margaret moved to Pulaski County, Kentucky, and then to Morgan County, in a large migration of Castles, Days, Salyers, and others from the Copper Creek area of southwestern Virginia. Goldman Davidson is thought to have been named for men with those surnames that his parents knew in Virginia. William’s parents were Jacob Castle, Jr. (1749-1849—yes, 100 years!) and Mary Shane. 

My cousin Fred Castle, son of my grandmother’s youngest brother Tom, was the Castle historian.  He made several trips to Kentucky and southwest Virginia trying to tie our Castles to the families of Castlewood, Virginia.  I remember when he first had contact with Castle family members that still lived in Castlewood, and how excited he was when he felt he could finally prove our descent, through William Castle, from Jacob Castle, “the Longhunter.”

Jacob Castle Sr. was quite a character, and if Castle family researchers are correct in naming Peter Cassel as his father, he came from quite a family.  Peter Cassel was the son of Johannes Cassel, a Mennonite who came on the ship Jeffries to Philadelphia in 1682 after attending a meeting in Kriesham, Germany, in which William Penn himself spoke to the audience about religious freedom and the land that was available in America.  Johannes became one of the signers of the Germantown, Pennsylvania charter.

Jacob took a different path—he went native.  His first wife was Shawnee; her name Sowege means “gliding swan.”  They married about 1736, and she was the mother of Jacob Jr. and perhaps others.  Jacob may have had several other wives, reputedly all Cherokee, with whom he had other children.  He came to southwest Virginia when it was the frontier, and apparently traded with the natives for land that became known as “Castle’s woods.”  Because his name had been associated with the area long before Daniel Boone set foot there, it has been suggested that old Jacob may have been the one who pointed out the Cumberland Gap to Boone.

Jacob’s Indian name was “White Tassel,” and some have even gone so far as to describe him as an albino.  It is more probable that, with his German heritage, he was very fair-haired compared to his Indian neighbors.  As a longhunter, he would have ranged far from home, killing deer for meat and hides with his long-barreled rifle made by German gunsmiths in Pennsylvania.  He would have lived much as the Indians did.  In my mind, I see him as a blonde Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans.

For this next part I am indebted to Mitchell Farish, a librarian at the University of Virginia, who has a great website with the title “Birth of American Frontier Culture.”  He put historical documents and traditions concerning Jacob Castle into a context that finally made sense to me.

In 1740 Jacob bought land on the New River from Jacob Stover.  When he was home from his travels, he seemed to have conflicts with his neighbors, particularly one named Adam Herman (or Harmon.)  In 1746 Jacob and other settlers were detailed to build a road from Adam Harmon’s to the river; Jacob objected.  In April 1749 Herman’s home was robbed of several deer and elk skins on three consecutive days.  Jacob became a suspect since he hunted with a party of Indians that had been known to steal horses and other livestock in the settlement.  Herman applied for a writ to arrest Jacob Castle and led a posse to Jacob’s hunting camp in Castle’s woods, but Jacob’s Indian friends chased the posse away.  Later in the month Adam and his brother were arrested because they had robbed Jacob.  By May 17 Adam was out of jail, charging Jacob with “threatening to aid and assist the French against his Majesty’s forces.”  Jacob was arrested, tried, and acquitted of the charge of treason.

Others have commented that Jacob probably did feel more loyalty to his Indian friends—and thus the French—than he did to the British.  I would like to think so, since my sympathies have always been with the Indians.  (Wait till you hear about my ancestor on the other side of the family, William Whitley.  He and Jacob Castle are my only claims to famous ancestors, and they couldn’t have been more different.)  In any case, Jacob was thought to have taken part in the Battle of Kings Mountain in the Revolutionary War—with the Americans.

My cousin Fred died several years ago, but I was pleased to recently find this post of his from a genealogy message board about the eventual resting place of Jacob Castle: “What an experience it was to visit the area where the old Jacob Castle was supposedly buried on a hill near a plot of land still called Castle's meadow, uphill from Copper Creek.”  It makes me think of the poem by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.