A Comforting Thought and Some Follow Up on Carles

First some follow up on Carles Thompson.

It turns out that Carles Thompson and Susannah from Butler County PA (see last post Hollingsworths next door) are actually Charles Thompson and Susannah Colby from Butler County PA. I was able to find some family history on them. Charles is born in Massachusetts and his daughters marry Washington Perry Smith (ironically born in Indiana). Charles' son Warren dies in the area before his son Michael. No Levis are mentioned in the material I found.

Charles has some interesting connections to Allisons from the History of Butler County:

 Mr. SMITH has been an active worker in the Republican party
since its organization, has held the office of school director for
sixteen years, and has always manifested a laudable interest in the
progress of the public schools. He was married in 1848, to Harriet, a
daughter of Charles THOMPSON, of Massachusetts. She died in 1850,
leaving one child, who died in early youth. His second wife was
Emeline THOMPSON, a sister of his first wife, to whom have been born
five children, as [p. 1073] follows: Harriet N., wife of John N.
ALLISON;

JAMES ALLISON, a native of Ireland, first settled in Maryland, and
came to Centre township, Butler county, Pennsylvania, in 1802. He
purchased 300 acres of land, and cleared a farm, a portion of which is
now in possession of his grandson, John ALLISON, the old homestead
being owned by O. D. THOMPSON. Mr. ALLISON married a Miss THOMPSON,
and his family were as follows: Frank; William; Robert; Margaret, who
married James PHILLIPS, and Ellen, who married Henry THOMAS


Now for the comforting thought.

John B. Hollingsworth and family from my last post make their way to Indiana between 1850 and 1860, without any decade of layover in Ohio. That means to me that my searches in Ohio may be fruitless. It's comforting though because it means that people really did just leave Butler PA and move to Madison Indiana. The family of Howell D. Thompson seems to make a similar trip from York PA to Randolf, Grant and Madison county Indiana so it's not uncommon at all.

What is uncommon to me is how I can track all these other families back to Pennsylvania, but not Levi. I've tracked multiple Thompson families in the Madison area and I can't get any of them back to Butler County PA. What makes me feel a lot better about this lack of data is that I CAN get John B. Hollingsworth, neighbor in 1860, back to Butler.

If Levi is on the up and up and he really is just misrepresented in the census records or in the index of those records (as he has been in every one I've found) then at least I have circumstantial evidence of other Butler-ites in the same town..one house away in Madison Indiana.

If Levi is not on the up and up and possibly doesn't even know his origins, but borrowed a background to make life easier when he joined the Army. Then I have a person he would have associated with who influenced him enough to give him some kind of past and a profession he would fall back on when times became hard.

Either way, he didn't just appear in Madison Indiana like a magic rabbit and that, to me anyway, is comforting.

Now I should check into the family that John B. Hollingsworth is living with because there is another stone cutter there and I need to look at the three Thompson children living with the Bayer/Boyers in North Butler.

Then of course there is the matter of John Thompson and Jane Stevenson's children. John dies in the 1840s, that doesn't count him out as a father of Levi but it's cutting it close. His other sons would be a decade or more older in that scenario. I have a few sons listed for John and Jane with no ages assigned. Any of them could be parents of Levi too.

The trail though really seems to stop at John. He is from Lancaster or Chartier's creek, and is one of the many faces of John Thompson in Butler. He may be the one with 11 children...or he may not.

Hollingsworths Next Door

With our paternity in question and just more confusion in the world of DNA, I decided to go back and look at the people around Levi again. I'm sure I've noted in the past that the person living next door to Levi in Van Buren Indiana in 1860 is a Stonemason and wondered openly if that is where Levi got his start in that trade. This time I looked more closely at the people involved. There are actually two stone masons living next door to Levi and interestingly enough, one of them is a Hollingsworth from Pennsylvania.

That name always gets my attention so I decided to follow up on him. He is around the same age as Levi, living in the same area, also with a seemingly unrelated family (Levi is living with the Brodericks) and he's from Pennsylvania. Worth looking into.

It turns out he is not alone. The rest of his family is in Fairmount, Grant, Indiana. Just a few miles away from the Alexandria area. In 1870 John B. Hollingsworth ends up living in Grant with his parents (nice) and just like Levi he seems to forget where he was born. Close families often travel together, so I thought I would look through Grant Indiana for some Thompsons.

There are two families of Thompsons I've found so far. One is the family of a James Thompson who lives there in 1850 as well and is from Virginia. The other is the family of Samuel R. Thompson who is a brother of Howell D. Thompson who is well remembered in the history of Madison County Indiana. Howell D. Thompson's father John L. Thompson lives in Randolph Indiana and is from York Pennsylvania. (He is also a suspect. His wife dies in 1839. I haven't gotten a good 1850 record for him, Howell D is living separately in Pendelton Indiana in 1850.)

Neither Samuel R. or James from VA shows a Levi or even a male child of a similar age, so...darn. Of course I've already been through Grant County in the past and didn't find Levi there, but it's worth a try.

Next I stepped back in time to 1850 to see where the Hollingsworths were and who lived around them. With John B. Hollingsworth's whole family for reference, he was actually pretty easy to find. In North Butler, Butler County, Pennsylvania.

Hold the phone! Things I know about Levi Thompson, he's born in Butler County Pennsylvania and moves to Madison Indiana sometime before 1855. He is a farmer but after the war becomes a stonemason or Tombstone manufacturer.

Things I now know about John B. Hollingsworth, he's born in Butler County Pennsylvania and moves to Madison Indiana sometime before 1860. He's a stonemason. Now that is a bit weird.

I started to wonder about a lot of things, like why are these guys so similar? How is it that I can find John B. Hollingsworth, practically a clone of Levi Thompson (or maybe the other way around) but I can't find Levi? What kind of ninja is Levi Thompson?

Well, then my next step was to go through the 1850 census in North Butler, Butler Pennsylvania and look for  Thompsons..which I would expect to find because Butler PA is awful with Thompsons. I find three families of Thompsons.

One family consists of several Thompson children living with a Bayer or Boyer family. No Levi Thompsons. The second is a family of Thompsons who is lead by a man listed as Carles (there is no H) and his wife. Carles is from Massachusetts his wife is from Vermont. Again, No Levi Thompsons. The other Thompson family is one I've seen before. It's Jane (Stephenson/Stevenson) Thompson and her son David and Nathaniel Stevenson Thompson. Their father John Thompson is dead. He is sometimes linked with John, James and Matthew threesome of brothers who settle in Center and Franklin, Butler PA. No Levi Thompsons.

Again here, I've already been through the Butler censuses for 1850 and didn't see Levi Thompson then either so no big surprise there. Given our DNA results, I thought maybe I should do a search for males who were not Thompsons but were about the right age and came up with a laundry list of 15 year olds in North Butler.

Of course the Hollingsworths were there, but also scattered around the Stephenson Thompsons were just plain old Stephensons. The Stephenson Thompsons are living in a cluster of Stephensons in 1850. Nathaniel Stevenson Thompson is named after Jane Thompson's father Nathaniel Stevenson who is a pioneer from Scotland I believe. Jane and her sons must have been living around what I imagine is her sibling's family. Among these Stephenson's there was one record that was interesting. A male child listed as (something) N. Stephenson at the end of a list of Stephensons. I believe he is not a direct descendant of the head of household because he is listed after the entire family down to a 2 year old (which is what I see often with unrelated children). Although I'm sure I'm imagining it, the first letter looked a lot like an L to me.

I was at the point that I was convincing myself it was an L I was seeing and that the census taker had mislabeled that last boy as a Stephenson when he obviously was L. N. Thompson. Then I conjectured that Levi Thompson was obviously this L. N. Thompson the son of John Thompson and Jane Stephenson and that he left Pennsylvania with a friend named John B. Hollingsworth and moved to Madison Indiana with him. That was when I realized that it is way too easy to assign too much meaning to these coincidences.

Still, even without that last bit of fever dream, there are an awful lot of similarities with these two men John B.  Hollingsworth and Levi Thompson with their proximity in 1860 and the same birthplace and later the same occupation. I think it will be worth further investigation.

Stinsons

Last year while working with two different genetic matches at 23 and me, I noticed that they shared the same Stinson and Bailey family. In particular they shared James Bailey and Margaret Stinson. Because these two people matched me on different chromosomes, I put it off as an interesting coincidence among people with roots in Virginia. Since I also have roots in VA, it's possible our match is there somewhere.

Here is a link to a family tree containing the Baileys: http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/b/l/a/Norman-R-Blankenship-VA/WEBSITE-0001/UHP-0237.html

This year working with two more matches, this time they do share a match on the same chromosome, I found that one of them has a Stinson family and that the match is most likely on the branch of their family tree with the Stinson in it married to a Burkett. Their Stinsons go to the Carolinas. They also overlap with a person who has Stinsons, Barbers and Boulwares from South Carolina:
http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=marciamcclure&id=I5678

It turns out the Stinsons are Stephensons from Scotland. So I independently have four matches with Stinson/Stephenson connections.

There is a yest another person in this research mix who has no Stinsons (call her J) that I have seen so far, but does have a lot of Scots who move into Canada. On my grandmother's side, I also have Scots who move into Canada, but no Stinsons.

On the list of names from the memorial linked above, I do see some I recognize like the Strouds that appear to be linked to so many of my genetic matches and the Johnstons from  J's family tree. I also see Baileys from my matches last year (along with Stinsons of course). So this group from South Carolina may have  more meaning for me than I can fully realize now. Should I be looking for Stinsons and Stephensons in Indiana. Could these be a clue to Henry Williamson's wife or mother? Are they connected to my Finks or McQueen family? Is there more for me in Canada than I have seen so far?