Skeletons in the Closet
In Memory of Henrietta Smith
By William Smith
Every family will have the proverbial skeleton or skeletons in their closet if they are determined to come up with an honest three-dimensional review of their ancestor’s past. Not only does it flesh out their family past, but it also helps to sometimes explain the motivations behind certain twists and
turns in otherwise inexplicable actions.
And with the Smiths of Cuerdly, (Cuerdly is a small village to the immediate east of Liverpool on the Mersey), their descendants were to produce skeletons aplenty.
I was to initially stumble onto a family closet where a skeleton resided in this
particular Smith line in the early days of my interest in genealogy. Verbal tradition in the Smith family had it that the first Smiths to America settled in the area of Hubbard Springs in what is now Lee County, Virginia.
The story went that David Smith married Sallie Romans (spelled Romains, Romans, etc.) in Rome (Roam) Ireland and came to this beautiful comer of Virginia about 1813, where David rented land owned by Arthur Blankenship.
This information seems to have been related to Elizabeth Smith Jennings by the daughter of Noble and Mary Morgan Smith, Mary Smith Carter) back in the 1920's. For years, the trail went cold because before the days of ancestry.com, there were too many Smiths by the name of David in western Virginia during early settlement days to pinpoint which one was our David.
Then, in the latter 1900s, Elizabeth's sister, Henrietta Smith of Rose Hill, Virginia, was researching in the courthouse files at Abingdon, Virginia. She came across a marriage certificate, which was to throw the David and Sallie Romains marrying in Ireland into confusion.
One of the earliest marriage certificates on record was that of David Smith and Sallie Romains' marriage on December 10, 1801. The marriage was performed by a Baptist minister, probably at the home of Sallie's father, Jacob Romains, near Marion (Royal Oaks), Virginia.
The second hint came during a conversation Henrietta and I had with a cousin from Knoxville while we attended the funeral of Dennis Smith in Middleborough. We were discussing the lost location of
David and Sallie's burial site when he chuckled and said, "You know we have a little Melungeon in us, don't you?
He offered no further information, but the Knoxville Smiths had done extensive
research on the family. Then, another version of David and Sallie's background came up with the publication of the book Generations, which chronicled the migration of the Ledfords from North Carolina to Cranks Creek, Kentucky, during the latter part of the 1700s.
Verbal tradition among Ledford's had it that David was the son of Henry and his wife, Elizabeth Ledford Smith. Elizabeth was the sister of Aley Ledford. Aley was to play a major role in the history of this particular Smith clan.
Although Generations is an accurate telling of the Ledford family, their version of David began to fall apart after more research became available. It is now generally agreed that Henry and Elizabeth Ledford married about 1792.
Keep in mind that the marriage certificate in Abingdon courthouse proved David and Sallie married nine years later in 1801.
The final nail in the coffin for the Smith and Ledford stories of the Smith entry into the
Cumberland Range came when a cousin, Wix Unthank, invited me over to a ceremony at a cemetery near Cumberland, Kentucky.
The ceremony was honoring a Revolutionary War veteran by the name of Jonathan Smith with a national marker.
The genealogical researcher who had located the grave site was Ronald
Collier, who was connected with Southeastern College at Cumberland.
When explaining the connection with David and Sallie Smith, Collier remarked that Jonathan Smith, the first European to settle in Poor Fork, was David's father.
After following this avenue of discovery, it turned out Jonathan's father was Hugh Smith, an Anglo-Irish Quaker who left Pennsylvania, in the mid-1700s and taking the Great Wagon Road, ended up near the present-day Hillsboro, North Carolina.
There, Hugh Smith met a beautiful olive skin girl by the name of Jane Bunch and united in marriage according to her Saponi Indian heritage.
The Bunch family was a racial mix of native Indian and some say Portuguese descent. If the Portuguese is involved, it would represent a healthy racial mix of people who bordered the Mediterranean for thousands of years. They later became known as Melungeon.
This union got Hugh kicked out of the Society of Friends. After they moved west to the banks of New River, near the
present-day Jefferson, North Carolina, the Smiths prospered, holding large tracks of land in the area.
Now getting back to David Smith, grandson of Hugh Smith, it turns out that the family had him leave the Poor Fork Settlement, probably because he was an alcoholic.
Thus, David and Sallie ended up back across the Cumberland, in Hubbard Springs. As a young man, his son, Noble Smith, decided, with no promise for a future under the family circumstances, to cross
over into Cranks Creek, where his sister, Minerva, had married Isaac Burkhart. A local landowner.
Aley (Alexander) Ledford. met and liked the boy. He had a daughter, Nancy, about Noble's age and soon arranged their marriage. At this point in the telling of the Smith line, Aley came up with a land grab idea, which was to make three people, his son John Ledford and his sons-in-law, Noble Smith and Henry Skidmore, very wealthy landowners.
His sister's son, Jim Farmer, had become the official county surveyor. Together with the chosen three, Jim surveyed the Cumberland rim from Cranks Creek to Cumberland Gap and then made a generous circle to the north and came back to Cranks Creek. All unclaimed land within this survey, some 86,000 acres, was entered in a land grant and signed by Governor William Owsley of Kentucky, making the three men very wealthy.
However there was one big problem. In 1834, the Melungeons who had settled in the Clinch Valley in Tennessee shortly after the Revolutionary War and kinsmen of Noble were declared free people of color by the Tennessee legislature. This status gave them no legal rights with European settlers.
Therefore, they were forced to give up their fertile river bottoms and move up on Newman Ridge, which was less desirable for agriculture. This occurred only a few years before the aforementioned land grab. Aley would have known of Noble's Melungeon heritage. His neighbor, Isaac Burkhart, had married Noble's sister and would have known about his wife's background. Edward Pennington was making himself known across the gap from Cranks Creek and was a nephew of Jemima Pennington Smith.
Aley was not about to risk 86,000 acres over the Kentucky legislature following Tennessee's lead. He conveniently had a brother-in-law by the name of Henry Smith, rewrite Noble's family history, and made Henry his father. Trouble was Noble's side of the family didn't check Aley's creation and created the legend that David and Sallie had come directly from Ireland.
It took Henrietta Smith digging around in the courthouse basement in Abingdon to begin unraveling the stories of Aley Ledford and Noble Smith's family.
Information below by Patrick Nichols
Being a descendant of nearly everyone mentioned in this article, it has been a particular source of interest to me for a number of years.
I have often wondered who Jane Bunch was, and this past year, I found a document that might explain her Bunch ancestry.
In 1780, in newly formed Wilkes County NC, Colonel Benjamin Cleveland purchased 640 acres of land. Cleveland factors much more heavily in the history of the Melungeon community than most people know.
Between 1780 and 1781, Cleveland hanged my father's ancestor, William Nichols, a son in law of Moses Riddle, William Riddle, a son of Moses, and Old Ned Sizemore, the progenitor of the Sizemore family. Forever scattering entire lines of our families.
Our ancestors fought for the British, as many mixed race native people did during this tumultuous time in American history. Most likely, their treatment by European settlers and double taxation figured predominantly in their loyalties. Whether the crown of England would have fulfilled any of their promises to them can only be speculation at this point in time. However, those men gambled their lives on those promises and paid the ultimate price.
When Cleveland purchased this land in 1780, there were two people living on it making improvements, Micajah Bunch and Jonathan Smith, the son of Hugh Smith and Jane Bunch.
This brings us to the subject of Micajah Bunch, who some say was some form of elder or leader among the Melungeon families and that may very well be true.
Today, Micajah is almost sort of a mythological character in our history. However, at one point in time, he was like anyone else, a person with a past, and there are a few records of his existence.
Most dates you will come across for Micajah are the birth year 1733 and a death date of 1804. What most people don't realize is that the dates are based on when he began to enter the historical picture and when he seemed to have exited the historical picture.
He is listed on the early Lunenburg County VA tax lists with Gideon Bunch around 1748 to 1750, and thus the year 1733 became the accepted version of when he was born, due to the fact he would have had to be sixteen years of age to be on those lists. This would be where some people began to believe Micajah was the son of Gideon Bunch.
Dates for Gideon Bunch range anywhere from a birth year of 1705 to 1715. These dates come about from the estimated birth year of Micajah.
However, the two may have been brothers.
Enter Paul Bunch, who died in 1771 in Johnston County, NC. When Paul died, he named his brother Micajah Bunch, an executor of his estate. Records have clearly established Paul was born in the early 1720's, and that's most likely the time frame Micajah was born in himself and not far behind those dates, the birth year of Gideon Bunch.
If you look at the section of our website called The Reliquary, there you will find the land document of Benjamin Cleveland that mentions Micajah Bunch and Jonathan Smith.
No one can say for sure what the relationship was between Micajah Bunch and Jane Bunch Smith. However, wherever Micajah went, Hugh Smith and family seemed to have followed. Hugh is listed along with Micajah and the Collins family after they left Orange County NC in places like Botetourt County VA, and he lived alongside them on the Indian Lands in Fincastle County VA in the early 1770's. There are more than a few records of the Smith family providing securities for Micajah.
My ancestor Jonathan Smith was no more than ten to fifteen years old at this point in time. I can only imagine the things he saw and witnessed, not only from a historical standpoint, but he most likely knew or came into contact with many of the earliest Melungeon families during his childhood.
Hugh Smith and Jane Bunch, possibly the daughter of Micajah, were my ancestors via their son Jonathan Smith on my mother's side.
Jane Bunch
Jonathan Smith
David Smith
Minerva Smith m. Isaac Burkhart
Catherine Burkhart m. William Ledford
Sarah Katherine Ledford m. William Asbury Brooks
Orlando Brooks Sr. m. Virginia Castle
Carmen Brooks - My Maternal Grandfather
Patrick Nichols
Atlanta GA
Note - William Smith's story Skeletons in the Closet first appeared in the Lee County VA Historical Society, in July of 2014