Kentucky Ancestors, Volume 46, Number 3 - Kentucky Historical ...
Kentucky Ancestors, Volume 46, Number 3 - Kentucky Historical ...
Kentucky Ancestors, Volume 46, Number 3 - Kentucky Historical ...
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Emily, Charles, and Joe:<br />
The Graham/Jones/Davis Surname Mystery<br />
by Mary Clay<br />
This is the story about a surname puzzle. A<br />
similar story could be told by many other African<br />
Americans who are trying to find their ancestors.<br />
The search for the surnames the ancestors took<br />
after they were freed from enslavement can be a<br />
true test of one’s research abilities. This task would<br />
be made much easier if the ancestors had taken the<br />
surnames of their most current owner, but many<br />
of them did not. In fact, the surname may have<br />
belonged to a prior slaveholder–the first, the favorite,<br />
or the longest–or the slaveholder of a parent or<br />
grandparent. 1 Members of my family were found<br />
in censuses taken after they were freed with three<br />
different surnames – Graham, Jones, and Davis. This<br />
is a recounting of my attempts to find the origin of<br />
these names.<br />
Charles Jones was my maternal grandfather. My<br />
mother, Catherine, was one of the younger of his<br />
ten children. Charles died before I was born, but I<br />
was told that he had a great sense of humor and had<br />
a way with telling a funny story. One of the stories<br />
told about Charles (Papa) was that he had no formal<br />
education, but he was blessed with a lot of common<br />
sense. When one of the neighbors had a problem to<br />
be solved, they called on “Professor Jones.” Family<br />
stories that I could remember were scarce so I relied<br />
heavily on the memory of my cousin, who is about<br />
twenty years older. From those family stories, this is<br />
how my family search started:<br />
• Charles was born on 11 April 1857.<br />
• His mother’s name was Emily.<br />
• His father’s name was Garrett.<br />
• He had a brother named Joe and a sister named<br />
Sarah.<br />
116 | <strong>Kentucky</strong> <strong>Ancestors</strong><br />
• They were all born as slaves, but Charles was very<br />
young when his freedom came.<br />
• Charles died in a house fire in 1943.<br />
• The family had always lived in Franklin County,<br />
<strong>Kentucky</strong>.<br />
Fortunately for my genealogical research, 1857<br />
was one of the few years, prior to 1911, when birth<br />
records were mandated by law in <strong>Kentucky</strong>. A search<br />
of the birth records at the <strong>Kentucky</strong> Department for<br />
Libraries and Archives (KDLA) showed that four<br />
children were born on 11 April 1857 in Franklin<br />
County and one was a black boy named Charles. 2<br />
The record shows that Charles’s mother was a slave<br />
and his owner was William B. Onan, who lived in the<br />
Bald Knob precinct of Franklin County, <strong>Kentucky</strong><br />
(see last line in image of Franklin County, Ky. birth<br />
register). We had never heard the Onan surname or<br />
the Bald Knob area in relation to our family, so this<br />
was new information.<br />
With the knowledge of the Onan family name,<br />
my search of the online message boards found a post<br />
by a woman who was researching the Onan name.<br />
When I contacted her by email, she responded and<br />
I was referred to a book in the <strong>Kentucky</strong> <strong>Historical</strong><br />
Society research library called The O’Nan Family<br />
Record. 3 On page twelve of this book, I struck gold!<br />
A listing from a page of the William Brewer Onan<br />
family Bible showed the names of his slaves and their<br />
dates of birth. There I found Emily, Charles, Sarah,<br />
and other potential relatives. This solidified my link<br />
to the former slave owners.