Unearthing a Scandal and Consequences

It starts with a death.

Cirrhosis of the liver. So he was an alcoholic. I suppose that's not unusual in 1913, the year of his death, in Kentucky, home of moonshine and copper stills hidden away in the woods. I'm already unhappy for being related to this guy because he was clearly an alcoholic.

He had a wife and a large family of 9 children. One of those children was my great-grandfather, who was responsible for me growing up not in Kentucky, but in Oklahoma. I'm not completely sure that that was an improvement.

Surely any alcoholic was abusive. They usually are, right? His wife, Sarah, was probably relieved at his passing.

Yet, here's a photo of Sarah, her hand on her husband's gravestone. There is a photo of him embedded at the top of the column. She's looking away, clearly distraught. Her sorrow is palpable through the grainy photograph. It was clear she missed him. It was clear that she loved him dearly, despite his faults. After all, she married him, stuck with him, and had 9 children together.

Why?

What motivated her to do that? What gave her that loyalty to her partner and husband, despite any faults and failings that he might have had?

We can't ask her, as Sarah passed away in 1935. I have no writings from her. Can we deduce anything from mute records of the time?

A Small Issue of a Birth Date

Sarah Jane Brown was born on 18 January 1856, in Pike County, Kentucky.

Oh, no, her birth date isn't the issue. It's that of her first child, her daughter, Lenora or "Nora". See, there's a conflict in the data.

Lenora's grave marker shows her with a birth year of 1874. Her death record showed that she died on 17 December 1942, and that her age at death was 70 years, 6 months, and 1 day. Doing some back calculation gives her birth date as 16 June 1872.

What do we make of this conflict? Which year is correct?

She was the eldest of 9 children. Let's go back and take a look at when her parents were married. She was not born out of wedlock, so it was likely after her parents were married.

Sarah Brown married James H. Weddington (Jr.) on 1 January 1873 in Carroll County, Missouri. Both were from Kentucky. 

James H. Weddington & Sarah Brown marriage record,
Carroll County, Missouri, 1 January 1873. Middle of the page.

There we have it! Lenora was born in 1874, not in 1872.

Or was she?

Sarah and James' second child, Leonidas "Lee", was born on 10 February 1875. Let's do some "baby math". If Nora was born on 16 June 1874, then Lee would have been born 8 months after Nora. But a woman is not likely to get immediately pregnant after birth. At the very least, it could take a couple of months. It's also doubtful that a premature baby, of say about 6 months, would have lived back in 1875. So this makes it less likely that Nora's birth year was 1874.

But what about 1873? 16 June 1873 is a good candidate. It's after her parents get married. It leaves enough time for Lee to be born later in 1875. But is that arbitrary? And why would her grave marker still show 1874 as her birth year?

Hey, what was it about Sarah and James' marriage that was so odd?

That's right. They got married in Carroll County, Missouri. But they were from Pike County, Kentucky.

Carroll County, Missouri

Pike County, Kentucky

They lived in Pike County, Kentucky after getting married and lived there their whole lives. They never lived in Missouri. That seems to be a long haul in 1873 to go get married... Unless, they were hiding something. Time for more "baby math".

Sarah and James were married on 1 January 1873. If Nora was born on 16 June 1873, that means... that Sarah was about 4 months pregnant when she married James. As we have established, Sarah was born on 18 January 1856. Ok, time for some more math. Which means that she was 16 years old when she married (just days away from turning 17), and therefore 16 years old when she got pregnant.

Now we begin to understand why she ran away with James to go get married in Missouri. Nobody local would marry them without their parents' consent.

There's an interesting source that I possess, a privately printed typewritten manuscript called, Weddington History, U. S. A., put together by Wallace M. Weddington and printed in the 1980s. Some time ago, he had written to many members of the Weddington family descended from the Virginia / Kentucky Weddingtons, and asked them to send him family information and any stories. He collected them and privately printed them in this manuscript. My grandfather got a hold of a copy, who passed it down to a niece, which has since gotten to me.

That manuscript states that Sarah Brown's family was against the marriage to James Weddington. Well that would make sense. What parents would not be against a marriage where their 16-year old daughter got pregnant by a 28 year old man, back in 1870s, and then ran away to another state far away to elope?!

But now this situation is even stranger. Why did Sarah stick with James? They made a successful marriage and raised a large family despite daunting odds. There was a 12 year age difference. Yet, she seemed to be incredibly loyal. Why?

Forensic Psychology

Much in psychology teaches us that many things that motivates us as adults stems from our experiences as a child. This is true whether we're talking about people of today, or people within history. If I want to understand what motivated Sarah, I have to take a look at how she grew up, and see if there were any experiences that might have shaped her thinking. This is forensic psychology. All we have are genealogical records to recreate what happened.

Sarah Jane Brown was born 18 January 1856, in Pike County, Kentucky, to Jeremiah "Jerry" Brown and Mary "Mollie" (Blackburn) Brown. She was the second of four children by Jerry and Mary, had all brothers, and an additional older half-brother (son of her father and his first wife who had died). It must have been challenging for her, having all brothers and no sisters. Just her and her mother as the women of the house.

As history haves it, the Civil War breaks out on 12 April 1861. Sarah is 5 years old living in Pike County, Kentucky. Kentucky is technically a "border state" in the war. There are many in Kentucky who sympathize with either side. Some were Unionists and some were Rebels, and there were no clear lines running through the state. Your very neighbors could be on the opposite side from you.

Scandal!

Now to the juicy stuff. But we have to follow the bouncing ball to keep everyone straight.

See, now Jerry Brown had joined the Union Army, on 18 November 1862, in the 39th Regiment Kentucky Infantry, in Company D, as a Corporal.

As it so happens, Jerry's wife, Mollie Brown, had a sister, Malinda (Blackburn) Thacker. Malinda's husband, John Thacker, had a brother named, Greenville Thacker. So that's Mollie's sister's brother-in-law. (Whew!)

This Greenville Thacker enlisted in the Confederate Army 1 August 1862, for a service period of 3 years.

But Greenville didn't make it. Sometime during his service he skipped out, went AWOL, and went back home to Pike County, Kentucky.

Meanwhile, Jerry Brown was wounded in the Civil War, likely in July 1863. He received a gunshot wound, in the line of duty, to his right elbow joint, fracturing the joint and causing paralysis in his right forearm. He couldn't fight anymore and was demoted to a Private. But he still continued to help in the hospitals until he was mustered out on 15 September 1865.

Poor injured Jerry came home to find his wife, Mollie, with a days-old baby boy, born on 10 September 1865. Apparently Greenville Thacker came home from the Confederate Army and sometime in early December 1864, had an affair with his brother's sister-in-law, Mollie Brown, and their son, Greenville Harmon Thacker, was the result. Sarah Brown was 9-10 years old when she witnessed this scandal being played out in her family.

We don't know what kind of scene this caused, or what was said to one another. But we know the fallout that happened. We know that this resulted in Jerry divorcing Mollie. Jerry later remarried in 1869, and then later moved to West Virginia. Mollie married her "baby daddy", Greenville Thacker, but oddly much later on 12 Apr 1877 in Pike County, Kentucky.

It was discovered that in 1870, Jerry Brown was living with his new wife, his sons, and a stepson, in Pike County, Kentucky. Sarah is nowhere to be found in Kentucky. She was found living with her paternal uncle, Alfred Brown in Tazewell County, Virginia across the border. She was going by her nickname, Sallie, and she was 14 years old. Was she sent there by her father earlier? It was clear that she wasn't living with her mother. Did Sarah choose to not be around her mother and the scandal that she caused at home?

Imagine being Sarah during all this, at an impressionable age. She sees her mother have an affair, resulting in a baby. Her father coming home, injured in a horrible war, to discover the affair. The anger and resentment. The split up of Sarah's family. Sarah not having another female to relate to. Likely shipped off to her uncle's family across the border, likely so she is supported. Her father remarrying by the time that she is 14 years old. Her mother now in another man's house, with another man's baby, likely in shame for having the affair. Can you now see how Sarah decides to do something different?

She likely decides that she will find a man, willing to help take care of her, that she can love and be loyal to. Because she saw, with her own eyes, how her mother was disloyal to her father, and the fallout that came of it.

Oh, and Sarah didn't want the shame of showing to the world that she was pregnant before getting married and at such a young age. So her daughter, Nora, carried out the deception that she was 1 year younger than she actually was, throughout her life, such that Nora's own grave marker showed the wrong birth year. A minor discrepancy in the birth year of one person hides the potential shame of three generations.

Now there is greater understanding of why Sarah valued loyalty to her family and her husband, James Weddington Jr.. She wanted to create a different world than the one she grew up in. She wanted a stability that she didn't have. That's not a bad thing to do.

And she missed her husband that she dearly loved.