Finding a Family for Elizabeth: Part I, Martha Jane Adkins Horton

Background

My grandfather was from Knoxville, and his mother was born in nearby Anderson County. Early on in my genealogy journey, I could provide a paper trail establishing that William and Elizabeth Adkins were my 3rd-great-grandparents. But I soon learned that researching East Tennessee prior to 1850 can be an exercise in futility, especially for beginners who may be relying solely on census, probate, and vital record groups to establish identity. I was certainly guilty of that. Even as my research skills grew, every time I would re-visit the Adkins family, I would get frustrated with the lack of information outside of census records, and give up on them again.

Research Goal and Plan

Recently I decided to research this family again, this time with a specific goal in mind: Identify the parents of Elizabeth Adkins. I started by reviewing the documents I already had before establishing a research plan.

Martha Jane Adkins

One of the first documents I re-examined was the death certificate for Martha Jane Adkins Horton. It had been several years since I looked at it, and I wanted to reassure myself that I had placed Martha Jane - my direct ancestor -  in the correct Adkins family.

Martha Jane died in Knoxville on 26 May 1926, and a digital copy of her death certificate is now available at Ancestry.¹ A partial transcription and the full image follows:

1. Place of Death:
    County: Knox
    City: Knoxville
2. Full Name: Martha Jane Horton (Mrs.)
3. Sex: Female
4. Color or race: White
5. Widowed
6. Date of birth: March 24, 1853
7. Age: 73 years, 2 months, 1 day
8. Occupation: at home
9. Birthplace: Tennessee
10. Name of Father: William Atkins
11. Birthplace of father: Tennessee
12. Maiden name of mother: Betsy Jane Disney
13. Birthplace of mother: Tennessee
....
16. Death of death: May 26, 1926
....
19. Place of burial or removal: New Gray Cemetery
      Date of burial: May 28, 1926
...

Death certificate of Martha Jane Horton, Knoxville, Tennessee, 1926

Next up: Nancy Horton

References

1. Knox County, Tennessee, death certificate no. 808 (1926), Martha Jane Horton; digital image,  "Tennessee Death Records, 1908-1958," Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 20 Dec 2015).

Nuggets in a Delayed Birth Certificate

Tip of the Week:

Online databases for delayed birth certificates rarely index every name on the certificate. Always examine the evidence provided at the time of application - it might just have information you need to answer your research question!

This weekend I decided to spend time doing focused research on my Adkins family. My earliest couple in this line is William Adkins and Elizabeth Jane "Betsy" Disney, my 3rd-great grandparents. They were born in the 1820's, and were married before 1850, so they are not enumerated with their parents on any census records. They lived in Anderson County, Tennessee in 1850 and 1860, and in Campbell County in 1870. In 1880 and 1900 Elizabeth is a widow, living in Campbell County. Finding information about either of them, especially their lives before 1850, has been pretty much a fruitless effort to this point. Of their eight children, I had information about 3 of them, but had not been able to find a trace of the others after they left home, and so it is that these other five siblings (James, Sarah, John, Minerva, and Joseph) were the focus of my research last weekend.


Near the beginning of my search, I found an application for a Tennessee delayed birth certificate for Condy Huston Dabney, filed from Saline County, Illinois in 1942.¹ Among the items listed as proof for his date of birth was an affidavit from Samuel Disney. Fortunately, this affidavit was on the back of the document. Samuel gave sworn testimony that he was 73 years old, that he had known the parents of Condy (German B. & Sarah Adkins) his entire life, and that he was a cousin and neighbor to the family. This affidavit proved to be the key in unraveling the family of Elizabeth Jane Disney, which I'll share more about in a later post.

Affidavit of Samuel Disney, 1942

References

1. Tennessee State Registrar of Vital Statistics, delayed birth certificate 161658 (issued 1942), Condy Huston Dabney; digital image, "Tennessee, Delayed Birth Records, 1869-1909,"  Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 3 Apr 2016); citing Tennessee Delayed Birth Records, 1869-1909. Nashville, Tennessee: Tennessee State Library and Archives.