Ancestry Magazine

Put on your hip waders and dig up some worms. It’s time to find ancestors.

July was always my favorite month when I was growing up. It was the month when my grandfather and I escaped the scorching heat by going fishing. We’d get the cane poles out, dig up some worms, fill a fruit jar with cold water, pack a lunch, and take off. Then we’d bait our hooks, drop the lines in the water, and sit on the tree-shaded banks of the creek waiting for the fish to bite.

Genealogical research on the Internet is similar to fishing. First, you have to come prepared because the fish aren’t going to jump right into your box, and second, you need to bait some extra lines.

Take an online census record. We can find a great deal of information with a click here and a click there and trace wandering ancestors across the country. But unless we cast other lines, we may never catch that snippet of information that lets us land the big fish.

Two sons of Josiah Vanderpool—Cornelius and Littleberry (how’s that for sweet relief from the plethora of Johns and Williams?)—left North Carolina for southern climes. Cornelius settled near Vicksburg, Mississippi, as early as 1832. By three wives, he had one son and three daughters—tracing all of them through the census was fairly straight forward.

The descendants of Littleberry, however, proved to be a challenge. All of Littleberry’s six children were by his first wife, Nancy Cummins, whom he married in 1836. I learned through the census that Nancy and their two sons died between 1850 and 1860. I also learned the names of Littleberry’s four daughters: Eliza, Mary, Sarah, and Louisiana (“Lou”). As for genealogy, I knew that the sons had been followed but not the daughters. I set out to do some online fishing to see what I could learn about the daughters.

In 1870, Littleberry and his second wife, Francis, with his youngest daughter, Lou, were living in Bell County, Texas. Also with them was twelve-year-old male M. Whitlock, born in Louisiana. The boy probably belonged to one of the older daughters, but nothing turned up in online marriage records. A search in the 1860 Louisiana census disclosed an Eliza Whitlock of the right age and birth place, with husband, James, and two sons, Moses, age five, and James, age two, in the parish where the Vanderpools previously resided. Assuming that M. Whitlock was Moses Whitlock, even though the age didn’t quite match, raised the possibility that daughter Eliza married a Whitlock.

The trail went cold for daughters Mary, Sarah, and Lou, with no clues to whom they married or where or when—except in the household of Littleberry in the 1880 census when a grandson named Elmo Grigg, age five, born in Texas, appears. Whose son was he?

The answer was right under my nose. Backing up to the 1870 census, I found Littleberry’s next door neighbor, Daniel Grigg, with wife, Sarah, age twenty-four and born in Mississippi—exactly what I knew about Sarah Vanderpool.

Daniel Grigg turned out to be my big fish, and my baited line was a post on a message board by a distant cousin of mine regarding Daniel Grigg and his two Vanderpool wives (they were cousins, he said, not sisters). Through this information, I have identified both lines and found the primary evidence I needed to prove my own connections.

And the best part? I didn’t have to use worms.

Myra Vanderpool Gormley, CG is a former Los Angeles Times Syndicate columnist and the editor of RootsWeb Review.