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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.

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