The Methodists, the Wellses, and a Bad Census

A “family tree” can be a lovely thing. For my part, though, I prefer it upside down.

Read the words in this beautiful little free clipart which say, “…our roots keep us all together.” And those words are at the bottom. It’s just my personal "thing," though, to want at the top all those ancestors who predated me. I LIKE realizing that they’re all “above,” sort of hanging over my shoulder. 

But, either way, you got the tree, and you’re gonna be in the branches. 

So today’s branch is the Wellses. And this will be a long post. If you're not in the mood for some lengthy reading about censuses and so on, just take a glance at the pictures and you might get a fair idea of the story.

[WARNING: FREE UNSOLICITED LESSON HERE! As an English and Spanish teacher, for years I’ve battled kids who don’t understand about making family names plural. I mean, you write, “the dogs,” so you would also write, “the Browns,” “the “Smiths,” “the “Alawines.”

And when you have a noun with an “s” on it—“class”, for instance—it becomes “classes,” with “-es.” So for more than one “Wells” person, you have “Wellses.” So don’t be put off by my title. It’s right. –Not trying to sound like your most-hated grammar teacher from high school…]

OK. Sermon over. Now TO the Wellses and a different kind of sermon: In the “Comments” section after the post “The Mercer Connection,” I mentioned to Suzanne Smith Benson that the Wells branch of the family was known for having an early Mississippi circuit-riding Methodist minister. I refer you to the family tree:

If you trace backwards from Lucretia Wells Alawine, you’ll see her lineage to her (probable) grandfather Isaac Wells, who is named in the following document. (This is found in Passports Issued by the Governor of Georgia 1785-1820, by __ Bryan.) 

A few of my remarks in this post will be quoting Alton Alawine, because his maternal grandmother was Texas Anna Wells, also a descendant of Isaac Wells, and Alton took a keen interest—as has been noted before in a different post—in finding as much as he could on that side of his family tree. I’m snipping bits from a letter from him, in which he more or less “talks to himself” about his problems associated with tracing that branch. 

Alton guessed (probably correctly) that Henry and Isaac were brothers. It would appear that Isaac had already made a trip to the Mississippi Territory in 1810, because he is listed in the book Early Inhabitants of the Natchez District (by N.E. Gillis in 1963) as living there, over the age of 21, but without a family. Maybe he was checking out possible places for his family to live before returning to Georgia and obtaining a passport in 1812 to move, with all the household.

In 1820 Isaac was apparently living in Franklin County (the Natchez area) again, this time with a family of 8 children, three born before 1810 and five born between 1810 and 1820. If one of those shown in the 1812 passport document was born, say, around 1810, that would account for the correct number of children both on the census and the passport.

Alton could be a pretty good storyteller, so I’m going to let his words explain his theory at this point:

Alton went on to theorize that the families were delayed in Tennessee, possibly because of the War of 1812, possibly because of hostilities with the Choctaw tribe. But it’s likely that Samuel Wells was born while they were in that state. 

It appears that Isaac’s brother Henry didn’t care for the Natchez area, or, who knows?—maybe he had heard enough about the Mississippi coastal area by then so that he decided to go there instead. But in the 1820 census he and his family were shown to be living in Jackson County—possibly in Biloxi. [Correction, thanks to Sandra Alawine: possibly "Old Biloxi." See Comments, below.]

In 1820 there were five other Wells families living near Isaac: Absalom, Polly, Samuel, Samuel W., and Daniel. 

For those who aren’t familiar with census records: Before 1850, families were only listed by head of family. Age brackets identified children—so you have one male between age 1 and 5, one female between 20 and 30, for instance—but no names were given. So it could be that Absalom was Isaac’s father (or his uncle), or Polly was his mother (or his aunt). Samuel was possibly Isaac’s brother; Samuel W. was likely his cousin; and Daniel may have been either his brother or his cousin. 

There’s where the frustration with census records hits you. You can’t really know. Unless you have wills, court records, church documents, first-hand narratives, other things like that, you can’t definitively identify your ancestors. You can only take educated guesses. 

Alton added this note on the side of his letter:

More on that, further down. 

By 1830 Isaac and Samuel (the one who was probably Isaac’s brother) were living in Madison County. Henry and a younger Isaac (probably his son) were still on the coast, in Jackson County. 

In 1840 Isaac Wells shows up on the Leake County census. His age is approximately correct, as is the age of a female listed in his household (probably his wife Nancy Ann Robbins). And he has a male between the ages of 20 and 30 living with him. This is almost certainly our ancestor Isaac. 

1840 Leake County

I copied this snip of a family tree chart from FamilySearch.com.

It’s a user-created document, and it’s where I found the name “Nancy Robbins.” I assume it may be correct; I can’t vouch for that branch. But someone who’s a descendant of Nancy Robbins has traced back HER lineage and has posted the tree on the website.

By the way, FamilySearch.com is a Mormon-sponsored website which has an abundance of documents. I’ve seen several mistakes there—as I do on other websites; alas, it’s usually the census-taker’s handwriting that causes the trouble—but the documents are there. You just have to do your own work and sort it out yourself. 

By 1850 Isaac Wells (the father) was living in Attala County, and next door to him was (undoubtedly) his son Isaac, whose age is correct in comparison with previous censuses.

1850 Attala County

And if you look at the second Isaac’s children, there is Lucretia—my great-grandmother who married Andrew Jackson Alawine. 

A couple of interesting things: The older Isaac and his wife appear to be rearing a pair of “orphans” in their household. It’s possible they were children of one of Isaac and Nancy’s
own offspring, and if anyone wants to pursue this, you could, by trying to find any descendants of either John Waddell or Nancy I. Waddell. 

The other thing is the older Isaac’s occupation: “Minister of Gospel.” This is apparently true, based on family lore and confirms some paragraphs in the book A Complete History of Methodism in Connection with the Mississippi Conference, by Rev. John G. Jones.

Another personal commentary here: When Alton was trying to research the Wells line, he had to locate this book the hard way—through a card catalog, the type you thumb through yourself. It took me all of about 10 seconds to Google and download it from archives. 

 

You see that, in the book, our ancestor is called Isaac “Wills.” However, this should have been “Wells.” Perhaps it was another transcription problem, or perhaps people spoke the name with a slight Scottish accent! 

Reverend Jones states clearly that he's including “verbal conversations and narrations that have never been committed to writing.” Maybe THAT’S how the name changed to “Wills” in the book: he mainly used verbal history.

Up above, when I added Alton’s handwritten note indicating he was trying to figure out who the older Isaac’s father was, I say, “More on that, further down.” Well, this is the “further down”: Alton, so far as I know, wasn’t ever able to definitely identify that ancestor. In this chart he only goes so far back as “Isaac Wells, Methodist minister from Georgia.”

Another family tree he wrote out, which I have in my documents, shows this, with many question marks between Benjamin and Isaac Wells:

In the handwritten note, he wonders if Isaac and the older Henry’s father was ANOTHER Henry, if you read the note carefully. And that guess was also a good one. 

The family tree from FamilySearch.com, however, way above, shows the older Isaac’s father also named Isaac, and HIS father as John, married to Amanda Deckard. I have no idea about all this, myself. I’m putting out the information for anyone who’d like to chase it down. 

Another last, curious thing… I own a copy of a self-published book, The First Hundred Years of the Pine Springs Community of Lauderdale County, Mississippi. It was written by Mary Ellen New White (who died in 2016) and was printed in Meridian, Mississippi, in 1992. It’s not my job to criticize or judge other people’s work; goodness knows, in doing this blog I’m putting myself out there for criticism. However, in the book, there’s a strange story relating to Andrew Jackson Alawine which I can’t imagine anyone alive today being able to confirm. 

In writing her book, I think that Mrs. White assembled as many firsthand stories as she could find. There’s an element of truth in this particular narrative, because Lucretia Wells (as I’ve shown above) was descended from a line of Methodist ministers. It’s likely that Andrew WAS Methodist. And it’s also true that, later on, his son Samuel T. and HIS wife Maggie Skinner founded Alawine Springs Church, loosely associated with the Church of God—more of a “Holiness”-type church, I suppose, whatever that meant at the time. 

But Mrs. White says Andrew was buried at “Mt. Zion Methodist Church” (which is NOT true, unless Antioch Baptist Church—where he and Lucretia are interred—was originally a different denomination); and, “his funeral was held outside in the churchyard” therefore is also not accurate. I’m not sure which “Alawine descendants” were interviewed for this particular detail, but I personally never heard it. –Which isn’t to say it’s totally false—just that some key parts are demonstrably not correct. 

However, intriguingly, the part about Calvert’s Store in Rio is, of course, true. And it’s also true that the Alawines’ farm was located very near Calvert’s Store and was about 100 acres originally, as shown by the plat coordinates Mrs. White indicated. [You see the space after the words “Apparently Calvert wanted,” where something was edited out and not corrected. You could probably use the words “the land” there.] 

And Will Alawine’s son WAS named “Samuel Bozeman Alawine.” 

But just as a final warning about relying too much on censuses: The 1900 one for Pine Springs (which Mrs. White used extensively) is riddled with mistakes. And you have to know “the rest of the story,” as Paul Harvey used to say, to be able to judge where to stop believing the material.

1900 Lauderdale County

For instance, the census shows Kate and Samuel living with their father Andrew Jackson Alawine. But both of them were married and had children in 1900 and, presumably, were living with their spouses in other places. A woman named “Mattie” was identified as Andrew’s daughter, but she was Will’s wife Mattie Thaggard, and she was, therefore, Andrew’s daughter-in-law. She’s listed as being 15, but having been married for 9 years! Several children of Will and Mattie’s are also said to be in the household as Andrew’s children; but, again, they were not. 

I have two theories about all this. The first: The family wasn’t actually at home, and the busy census taker just asked neighbors for information about Andrew Jackson Alawine’s kin. Maybe the neighbors told him they knew there were sons and a daughter, and they knew some of the grandchildren’s names, and by this means the information was contaminated in perpetuity. (Again, unless—like us—you know “the rest of the story.” But, still, the actual government data is inaccurate.) 

Or, maybe, the census taker did talk to either Andrew or Lucretia but didn’t make clear what he wanted. So they gave him information about the WHOLE FAMILY, which he wrote down…again, for posterity to puzzle over. 

Mrs. White was confused by this (as are we all!), but she attempted to explain it in another way. 

 

Mrs. White discussed a business transaction or two, and then, moving bravely on, continued: 

…And, except for the names, almost nothing here is accurate. Andrew and Crecie's children were ALL married in 1900 and had children of their own: In the same census James Tilden Alawine is, in fact, shown living in Neshoba County with his first wife Bessie; Samuel and Maggie Alawine had at least two and maybe three children by then; Kate was married to Will Thaggard, and her son Andrew had already been born. 

I apologize for the length of this particular post. I started to break it into two parts but changed my mind. I wanted to show how some sources are accurate—but have to be read in context, like the Methodism book—and some have to be looked at very skeptically, even if their source would seem to be irrefutable. I’ve run into too many badly transcribed or just completely wrong things in census records to trust them completely. 

How do you know for sure? I guess you may not. Sometimes the first-hand person is the best reference…if you still have one available.

Ælfwine