Platting Orientation Using the Census and a Timeline

My progress with creating John Washington Womble’s neighborhood has been slow of late.  This weekend I took a break from visiting my local family history center to research so that I could spend more time on this project.

Earlier in the week I came up with the idea of creating a timeline of events that happened in the Civil District where John Washington Womble lived.  My idea was that perhaps the various land sales would develop into a better grasp of where the various plats were supposed to be. 

A few months ago, I’d listened to a webinar about neighborhood recreation. The lecturer mentioned that one will never completely be able to locate every single tract of land and be able to place it with 100% accuracy in a particular area.  This bit of information was a wonderful boost and needed realism for me.

In creating my timeline I learned a few things, Ellen Womble Bowling and her husband sold their land within a few of her father, John Washington Womble.  Also Womble’s neighbor, Samuel Faught sold his land the exact same day.  Of further interest, John J Womble, nephew to John Washington bought a presumed neighboring tract two years later.  I had always thought mistakenly that at least for a short time the men had been neighbors.  But not so, according to my timeline.

Unfortunately, listing out the various land transactions became less numerous or easy for me.  I’d platted a number of tracts in DeedMapper and began trying to arrange them in a logical manner according to their Census enumeration.  This is slow work because the trying to follow the plats and their placement in the Census doesn’t always seem to follow a logical sequence.

Perhaps something to keep in mind is that the enumerator was likely on horseback and likely wasn’t walking.  The Census for the 12^th Civil District of Hardeman County isn’t too helpful because it only provides the month on some of the pages as an indication as to when the enumeration was done.  So I have no idea if it took the enumerator the entire month to complete where he spent a couple of hours each day traveling around in that Civil District, or if he was able to complete his task within a day.

From prior research I know that there is a bridge that goes across the Hatchie River that was owned by a man named Simpson.  A road known back in that time as the Bolivar Simpson road likely ran from the Hatchie River to Bolivar.  My thought is that likely the enumerator may have traveled along that road and then made his way in a circuitous route off the road and onto whatever lanes, paths, or pastures may have existed to reach the various people living in that Civil District.

Review of Progress Made in Implementing My 2016 Systems

My list of 2016 systems for myself included the usual ideas, such as eating better and exercising more frequently.  Among those ideas were some serious commitments that I needed to make towards taking control of my genealogical research by documenting the sources I find and have found in the past.  Stopping the process of finding documents and not bothering to examine and analyze them until much later or ever.  Also, becoming more diligent about filing away the information I’ve collected after examining and analyzing it.

In looking back at 2016 and these systems that I created for myself to follow, some of these ideas did bear some small fruit and others just simply didn’t pan out for a myriad of reasons.  The documenting my sources did work out because I made a conscious effort to create citations or at least note down pertinent information about a particular source while I had in front of me and spent time over a period of months creating citations for items I’d found in the past.  After completing my research at a repository I wrote citations for the items viewed while still on site or immediately after leaving having that information still fresh in my mind.  Instead of writing these source citations sometimes weeks, months, or years later when I was trying to analyze the source later and write about.

In order to document, examine, and analyze these newly found bits of information, I came up with the process of after returning from a repository of entering the item into my research log which included the source citation, then entering the source into Evidentia and using that program to examine and analyze the source.

I tried using Evernote when researching online as a way to help me get into the habit of creating source citations when I found a piece of information or didn’t.  What I found was that it was easier for me to just not use Evernote when downloading a digital image of a document found online and instead save the image file to the pertinent research folder on my computer and record the search and findings along with a source citation in my research log.