Whatever happened to Rhoda Craig, Part 2

Spade actually wrote this article. Attribution of authorship to R. Willis by WordPress is a bug I can’t figure out how to fix. Spade also wrote Part I. Please also note that accessing the links in some of the footnotes requires a free and worthwhile membership at FamilySearch.org.

And now, on to Spade.

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I took another swig of Cutty. I’d been hired to dig up the dirt on Rhoda Craig, wife of the Jeremiah Rankin who died in an “accident” at his mill in 1760. Following clues left in a letter written by her grandson, John Mason Rankin, I’d learned that she’d married a man named Andrew English and ended up in Greene County, Tennessee. Her daughter Rhoda English had married a man named John Kincaid, and her daughter Elizabeth had married a Joseph Walker. After Elizabeth died, Joseph Walker had married the widow of Andrew English Jr, also named Elizabeth. They’d all lived in Bath County, Kentucky, the next county east from Fayette County where Rhoda and Jeremiah’s sons Adam and Jeremiah were living; William and Thomas lived in Woodford, the next county over.

But there were still some missing pieces. John Mason Rankin had said that one of Rhoda’s daughters had married a Faris, so who was he? And how did Rhoda and Andrew English end up in Tennessee?

The phone rang. “Spade here… Yeah, I’ve been looking into Andrew English. What’s it to you?… Well, I guess news travels fast…  Is that so?… Caswell County, North Carolina? That doesn’t make much sense… DNA?… Faris too, eh?… It doesn’t surprise me… Well, thanks for the tip!” I put down the receiver.

It was a guy named Jacob Walker, a descendant of Joseph Walker.[i] He’d been trying to trace his family history using DNA and had found a slew of matches to descendants of Andrew English. He said the only way that could happen would be if Joseph Walker’s wife was an English. The matches were too strong to be from anywhere further up the family tree. He said he also had matches to descendants of a pair of brothers named Faris: Alexander and Isaac.

So here was Alexander Faris again, the man who was surety for Joseph Walker when he married the widow of Andrew English Jr.[ii] I started looking for his will and found it in Maury County, Tennessee, dated 1820 and proved in 1824.[iii] He had a long list of children, some with telling names: Thomas C Faris, whose middle name turned out to be Craig, Mary Ann Faris “now Walker”, Adam Faris, whose middle initial turned out to be “R” for Rankin, no doubt… But the kicker was the baby of the family: Rody E Faris — and if that “E” didn’t stand for “English”, I swore I’d eat my fedora. The only hitch was that Alexander Faris’s will said that his wife’s name was Elizabeth. She couldn’t be Elizabeth English because that woman had married Joseph Walker. I had to figure her for a second wife. Whatever the name of his first wife, she must have been a daughter of Andrew English and Rhoda Craig. I decided to name her “Sarah” just for convenience… It takes way too long to say “daughter of Andrew English whose name remains unknown”.[iv]

And how about Isaac Faris, the other Faris brother that Jacob Walker had DNA matches to? A grandson of Isaac’s named Cecil Whiteside left a nice little story about how Isaac went to Maury County, Tennessee, getting there a few years before Alexander moved down from Bath County, Kentucky:

On March 19, 1806, Isaac R Feris and his family arrived at Bell Bend on Duck River across from where Cathey’s Creek flows into the river. His wife died that night. At this place there is a shoal of solid rock making an excellent crossing. As the river was at flood stage, they floated the body across in a wagon bed and buried her on the high bank of Cathey’s Creek on land that was to be part of his farm. Her name is unknown. But this unfortunate event gives us a date when the settlers from North Carolina arrived in the area. Their children were Elizabeth, Cynthia, Rebecca, Isaac Jr., Rhoda and Ann (twins), Alexander and Mary.[v]

Here was another Rhoda. That name was like a fingerprint. Outside of Rhoda Craig, I’d barely encountered it, but it was clearly a favorite for her descendants.

Cecil Whiteside said the Faris family came from North Carolina, but a quick check of the 1850 census for children of Alexander and Isaac showed that they had all been born in South Carolina with the exception of Alexander’s youngest daughter who was born in Kentucky. Alexander and Isaac Faris both showed up in census records for York County, SC,[vi] and there was a 1784 marriage record from there naming Isaac’s wife as “Jane”, no surname, but dollars to donuts it was “Jane English”.[vii] Jane’s first kid came in October 1784, so she might have had a bun in the oven. “Sarah” had her first in 1787, so must have married not long after Jane. The girls wouldn’t have gone to South Carolina on their own, so the rest of the English family, including mother Rhoda Craig, was probably there with them.

But now came another twist in the story:  Rhoda’s oldest daughter, Mary English had married a guy named Thomas Robertson in Caswell County, North Carolina, according to Thomas’s Revolutionary War pension application.[viii] As it turned out, Jacob Walker had traced his ancestor Joseph to Caswell County as well, and it’s possible he and Elizabeth English were also married there. Mary’s and Elizabeth’s first children were both born about 1783, so it made sense if they would have been married in the same place about the same time, probably around 1782.

I tried to pin down when Andrew English had arrived in Greene County, Tennessee from land records. He’d obtained a warrant for a tract land on Lick Creek in 1783, but hadn’t entered it until 1787.[ix] There were a lot of earlier records for “Andrew English” too. The problem was that there were too damned many men named Andrew English living there. Andrew had two brothers, John and James, who had moved to Greene County, as early as 1779 when it was still part of Washington County,[x] and they each had a son named Andrew. It was impossible to sort what record went with which Andrew.

But all those Andrews gave me a clue: Andrew’s daddy must have been named Andrew too! Sure enough, I found a Pennsylvania will naming sons John, James and Andrew that started “In the name of God Amen the sixteen day of March in the year of our Lord God 1749 I Andrew English of New London in the County of Chester…”[xi] I stopped right there.

New London is the first township north of New Munster, a tract of land on the Pennsylvania-Maryland border where Jeremiah Rankin was probably born. His mother, Mary Steele, had it from her first husband James “The Carpenter” Alexander,[xii] and the family continued to live there after she married Adam Rankin, Jeremiah’s father.  There was also a Craig family in New London, though there are Craigs pretty much everywhere, and I couldn’t find a connection to Rhoda.

The word from Faris researchers was that Alexander and Isaac’s father, John Faries, had moved down to South Carolina in about 1763 from Delaware with several of his brothers. The progenitor was a fellow named Alexander Faries “the elder” because he lived to nearly 90. I dug out his 1783 will and read “In the name of God Amen I Alexander Faries of Pencader Hundred and County of New Castle…”.[xiii] I stopped again.

Pencader Township was right on the border with Marland and Pennsylvania. That’s barely a mile east of New Munster.  So there it was: The Rankins, Englishes and Farises all lived within a one-mile radius, two at the most. There was no way they could not have known each other. Hell, they probably all congregated at the same Presbyterian meetinghouse. I could picture Adam Rankin, Andrew English the elder and Alexander Faries the elder hunkering down after church smoking their pipes and talking land deals while their kids Jeremiah Rankin, Andrew English and John Faries wrestled in the dirt with little Rhoda Craig looking on and sticking out her tongue at them.

All the pieces fit neatly together now. After Jeremiah Rankin’s demise, Rhoda Craig probably took her four boys and went home to mommy and daddy in New London, where she married Andrew English. She was still in Pennsylvania as late as 1776, now with seven more kids by her second husband. I already knew that her sons Adam and William Rankin were in Augusta County, Virginia, during the Revolutionary War, but whether mom and the English kids went with them, I couldn’t tell.

Adam was ordained and married in Augusta County in 1782,[xiv] but by that time the rest of the family was already in Caswell County, North Carolina, where Rhoda married off daughter Mary English to Thomas Robertson and Elizabeth English to Joseph Walker. By 1783, Andrew English was making plans to join his brothers in Greene County, Tennessee, and Joseph Walker and wife were already on their way there.

For some reason the English family took a detour to York County, South Carolina where their old friends the Faris family were living.  Next thing you know, Jane English gets married to Isaac Faris, possibly with her daddy standing by with a shotgun, and “Sarah” gets hitched to Isaac’s brother Alexander. Once the dust had settled around 1787, Rhoda, her husband Andrew and the littlest English kids packed up, left Jane and “Sarah” behind with their Faris husbands, and headed to Tennessee.

Rhoda shuffled off the mortal coil in 1798, but by that time, most of the English kids had already joined their half-siblings the Rankins in Kentucky.

I emptied the bottle of Cutty and sat back in my chair. I’d earned my fee, but there were still some nagging holes. Why wouldn’t John Mason Rankin have remembered that one of his half-aunts had married a Kincaid if they were living right next to his Rankin cousins in Indiana? Why wouldn’t he remember that not one but two English daughters had married Faris boys, especially if they were living near him in Maury County, Tennessee? Why couldn’t I find any record of Andrew English in any of the places I figured the family ought to have been living before they got to Tennessee? Why wouldn’t he have mentioned his Faris daughters in his will?

I drained my glass. In this business, you have to take what you can get, and some mysteries just stay mysteries.

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[i] Much of the evidence presented in this article and the preceding was collected by Jacob Walker. Spade’s creator is himself an extremely lazy researcher, whose primary methodology consists in stealing the work of others. I am much indebted to Jacob’s meticulous research skills.

[ii] Bath County, Kentucky, Marriage Bonds 1786-1965.

[iii] Maury County, Tennessee, Wills, 1807-1899.

[iv] I know, I know… It’s not good to make up names. If we ever do find out what her name really was, I’m sure I’ll regret it… unless of course it turns out to be “Sarah”. (RRW note: if her actual name isn’t Sarah, then someone can write several emails, comments, and articles explaining that there was no such person).

[v] “Family History” manuscript by Cecil Whiteside, p. 3.

[vi] United States Census, 1800, York County, SC, pp. 5, 7.

[vii]  “Hunting for Bears,” South Carolina Marriage Index, 1641-1965.

[viii] I have been unable to locate the original pension application, but it is referred to in English-Robertson Families in America, by Arthur Leslie Keith, p. 2.

[ix] Land Warrants, Greene County, Tennessee, no. 488-747, No. 506.

[x] English-Robertson Families in America, by Arthur Leslie Keith,  p. 1.

[xi] Chester County, Pennsylvania, Will Book B, p. 119.

[xii] New Castle County, Delaware, Will Book C, p. 103.   Mary Steele Alexander Rankin’s tract was bisected when the Mason-Dixon line was drawn, and about 1 mile west of the border with Delaware.

[xiii] New Castle County, Delaware, Will Book M, p. 145.

[xiv] John Mason Rankin letter to Henry Newton Rankin dated 13 Sep 1854. https://www.familysearch.org/en/tree/person/memories/LDQ5-C3P