Degrees of Connection: What the Neighbors Meant to Your Ancestors

My mid-nineteenth-century small-town ancestors would be utterly baffled at how little I know about my neighbors. Neighbors were their family, in-laws, society, colleagues, entertainment, education, support system, and source of marriage partners, gossip, trade, and annoyance. They were the cast and crew of our ancestors’ life dramas.

Elizabeth Shown Mills encourages us to solve tough genealogical problems about our ancestors by “cluster research,” seeking clues from their friends, acquaintances, and neighbors (i.e., FAN Club). [1] Genohistorically, we embrace that and want to go even further. We seek more than lineage data about our ancestors as we examine their neighbors. In the details we discover about nearby households, we will find our ancestors’ world filling out, becoming much more real.

Sarah Gayle’s Boarder

I first became truly conscious of how small the world was for earlier generations while reading a proof for a book we were publishing at the University of Alabama Press in 2013. I was completely intrigued by The Journal of Sarah Haynsworth Gayle, a rare peek into the deeply personal thoughts of a woman in Greensboro and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, between 1827 and 1833. Her lawyer husband, future Alabama Governor John Gayle, traveled for months at a time on business. In her loneliness and isolation, she made a confidante of her journal. In it, one entry was particularly foreign to my twenty-first-century worldview.

In June of 1829, Sarah described the scene as a young woman who had boarded with her family that spring prepared to go home. She wrote of a tearful departure, with “scarcely an eye that did not gush.” At dinner, when the boarder’s name was mentioned, Sarah’s son Matt “sobb’d convulsively,” went to look around the now-empty guest room and said, “Mah I feel right lonesome.”[2]

I cannot imagine a similar scene today. A visitor from outside their small, small world was a mind-expanding entertainment. It was an education. It was a burst of energy in a world much in need of it. All things centered on the newcomer. And when the guest departed, they were truly out of touch, except for a treasured letter now and then. Life deflated back to smallness.

How Far Was Far?

Today, I can drive from my house in Tuscaloosa to Sarah Gayle’s, which still stands in Greensboro, in less than 45 minutes in any weather. For Sarah to visit Tuscaloosa, which she did now and then, it could be an all-day ordeal. Once, in early May after the spring rains, she described such a “hasty trip” with her husband, which “would have been extremely pleasant but for the swollen water courses.” The many creeks between the two towns were so deep, she had to get out of the gig to cross each one. “The gig sank,” she wrote, “and my trunk fill’d with water—the horse seem’d near drowning and Mr. Gayle stood in water waist-deep, to extricate him.” [3]

I am horrified just to think of having to pack a trunk for a “hasty trip” of 39.5 miles.

Unless you were a postal carrier, lawyer, judge, circuit-riding preacher, or peddler, a trip of 39.5 miles was something you rarely did. In good weather on the rare level road with a horse and a lightly loaded wagon, you might be able to travel that far in around seven or eight hours. Every stream along the way would add time and trouble. Roads could be impassible for days after a good storm. Most days, then, your physical world extended as far as you could walk, or a little further if you could divert a horse from its field work.

Sarah Gayle’s journal set the stage in a small way for what I was going to discover by doing “cluster research” in another small world. Centreville—my ancestral town—was also about a day’s journey from Tuscaloosa when the creeks were high.

Sixteen Households in 1850 Centreville, Alabama

I decided some months ago to study my ancestor’s neighbors, to get a bigger sense of his world. My 3^rd great-grandfather, Jacob Newell Mayberry, ran a hotel and tavern beside the bridge across the Cahaba River, coming into downtown Centreville, Alabama. He also owned the bridge, charging tolls to all who crossed it, based on their load. His house still stands there, and a scar on the landscape on both sides of the river—visible on Google Earth—shows me the likely spot where the bridge was.

I was particularly interested in their slaveholding practices, but not altogether sure of what else I wanted to know about the neighbors. I just dug in and let my curiosity determine what I captured. The 1850 census created a nice little sample for me. The census taker apparently started in the heart of downtown Centreville, a few blocks east of the river, and worked his way down Market Street to Jacob’s bridge. There were sixteen households before he began working the larger population on the west side of the river.

Sixteen households was manageable. I could do that.

I started with household #1, where Dr. Wilson of North Carolina and his family resided. I created a “sandbox” family tree in Ancestry to begin to build the family structures of every inhabitant. I quickly went backward and forward in time to get a sense of each family’s story. The interconnectedness of the houses began to appear almost immediately, when I realized that Dr. Wilson’s wife had the maiden name “Carson.” Head of household #2 was Rachel Carson, who I quickly connected to at least two other households in just a few hours of research.

Here’s an idea of just how interconnected most of the households were or would eventually be by marriage. This is just what I could deduce in a very quick pass. More connections would undoubtedly show up with more attention to the details.

As these households intermarried, couples had children who tied in-laws together with vested interests for life. And that was only one layer of connection.

Connected by Occupations

Similar, cooperative, and competing occupations also tied this small group of people together. The occupations listed in the census make it clear that these were townhouses, mostly. Most houses included boarders — maybe related, maybe not — and only three houses identified the head of household as a farmer. I happen to know one of these “farmers,” George Howard, was also the architect who designed most of the grand houses still standing in Centreville. And “tavern keeper” Jacob Mayberry was also a cotton planter, in addition to running the bridge and hotel. For many, the census-declared occupation was only a part of their story of making a living.

In the sixteen houses, there were four physicians, five merchants, five clerks, four peddlers, three lawyers, two tavern keepers, two tailors, and two saddlers. And there was a teacher, a laborer, a “P painter,” a carpenter, and, in the local jail, enumerated as household #7, was a man named Riley. No last name. Occupation: slave. (See more about Riley here.) Between these households, they owned 222 enslaved persons, some of whom would have been in these townhouses and others living on plantations outside of town. Add to these the women, all “housekeepers,” and children.

Connected by Proximity

Given that these sixteen households were in town, they were also closer together than rural houses would have been, making it possible for a fit person to visit every house in an easy walk. Remember our last episode’s rough map of Centreville? There are changes since then—the beauty of making your own master map. Here is their stretch of road:

We can get a pretty good idea of the census taker’s path because of the buildings that are still standing and a few written documents or old photos that place a few of them. Some of the houses were likely on Centreville’s town square, surrounding the courthouse (#5). The courthouse was the county’s second and stood on the site where today’s courthouse (the 4th) now stands. [4] The jail likely stood near the northwest corner of the square. S. W. Davidson’s house (#2) still stands. And #1 is Jacob Mayberry’s place. #4 marks the spot where I believe the census taker crossed the bridge to enumerate the residents on the west side.

From the top of the town square to the bridge was less than a mile. And in that mile they knew each other. Their futures and fortunes were tied together. I have a much richer sense of Jacob’s world because I took a few hours to peek into the lives of his neighbors.

Study Your Ancestor’s Neighbors

What about your ancestors? Are you ready to see the connections? You might be interested in different things than I was, so your system needs to be your own. But just in case it helps, here’s a glimpse at what I did. First, I gathered basic data from the sixteen households—the factors that interested me. I wanted to know about their occupations and boarders. I was especially interested in which were slaveholders, how many enslaved persons they owned, and whether the census taker’s enumeration order on the regular census matched the slave schedule. I gathered details in Ancestry.com, and kept notes of things that intrigued or puzzled me. Here is what my spreadsheet looks like:

If you are using Zotero for some of your research, you can use its capability of relating records together. Look at the end of this post for details. As you begin to build this community in your mind, remember to go past the goal of filling in blanks in your ancestor’s story. The neighbors are worth knowing for their own sake. Without them, you have a very sterile and inaccurate picture of your ancestor’s world.

And now I ask a favor

I am thrilled with the response this blog has had so far, and I want to keep it growing. Nothing is more powerful than your recommendation. If you have friends or associates in your genealogy organizations who might appreciate this blog, please share this with them.

And, as always, I ask you to comment on your own experiences or with your questions. Has a neighbor ever solved a genealogical problem for you? I’d love to hear more!

Related Records in Zotero

Zotero allows you to create interconnections between records that are related in some way. If you are in a citation record, go to the tab labeled “Related” in your Details pane and click “Add.” You may then search or browse your library for the item you wish to relate to this one. If you want to connect freestanding notes, click on one of them, then look below the note. Beside “Related,” click “[click here]” and you will be able to connect records in the same way. If you are relating a freestanding attachment to another record, it works much the same way, but the “Related” link is above the notes.

There are other ways to group things together in Zotero, including collection folders and tags, and features of the Zutilo add-on, which we will talk about at a later date.

See you again in a few weeks!

  [1] Elizabeth Shown Mills,  “Applying the Preponderance-of-the-Evidence Principle to a Southern Frontier Problem: William Medders of Alabama,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 82 (March 1994): 32–49; PDF download at Elizabeth Shown Mills, Historic Pathways (https://www.historicpathways.com : 1 Jun 2020). Mills’s FAN club term is much-acknowledged in the genealogy community, though I am not certain when the term first came into use. I find her using the “cluster” expression as early as this article in 1994.

[2] Sarah Haynsworth Gayle, The Journal of Sarah Haynsworth Gayle: A Substitute for Social Intercourse (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2013), 230.

[3] Gayle, 233.

[4] “Bibb County Courthouses and Jails,” The Centreville Press, June 18, 1936, 4.

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