Shelton sign
So I wanted to get at something of the history of my
grandfather, who almost undoubtedly had untreated PTSD, who could not make
himself whole again and had no one whom he trusted to talk to except a quiet
grandson. I wanted to do this as part of working with my father to put his
family history together for what is perhaps the first time.
My grandmother Shelton’s family tree, the Keese and Summers
line, is huge. They married young and often, had lots of children, intermarried
distant and not-so-distant cousins, and in general would keep a professional
genealogist busy for a long time. (Six Hardeman boys married six Keese girls
over the years. And some of their kids married some other of their kids. It
looks less like a tree than like kudzu.)
My grandfather Shelton’s line hit a brick wall very early
on. I could take it back two generations, no more. We went from Ralph Sr. to
Robert Thomas Shelton to Thomas W. Shelton, then the rest was silence. Thomas
W. was born in Virginia and died in Plano, Texas. There are lots and lots of
Sheltons in Virginia, and the men have a limited set of first names: they tend
to be Thomas, William, Ralph, Robert, and Richard. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The ur-Sheltons are English and in some instances come from Shelton, Norfolk,
UK. They connect to the Boleyns, to Patrick Henry, to Meriwether Lewis. Not all
of them were nice, or even sane, but they have an interesting history.
Which Thomas W. could not be connected to in any of the
information I was collecting.
I’ve told several people that, in my amateur experience with
it, online genealogy ranges from pinpoint accuracy to speculative fiction.
People write down the wrong information. Boys lie about their ages to get into
the military. Parentage is misrepresented to descendants. Some people want
desperately to be descended from Charlemagne rather than from Charlie Smith.
Look at the consternation over the acceptance of the descendants of Thomas
Jefferson and Sallie Hemings.
Still, I wanted to know if my small Shelton line connected
to the bigger one, so I collected data on all of them I could find, especially
the ones in Virginia. Oddly enough, I was related to them through other lines
(those Hintons are everywhere!), just not directly.
Until I checked the 1870 census for Thomas W.
And there, in addition to his wife and children, were two
older people in his household, both in their late 60s: Elizabeth and Theophilus
Shelton.
I had a Theophilus in the Shelton lines. There was only one.
The dates matched. If, as I assume, this was Thomas W.’s father, the lines
connected.
That ticking noise you hear was the sound of a row of
hundreds of dominoes falling over and landing in place.
Theophilus Quincy Shelton, meet your descendants. Hopefully. If I did this right.
Next: Ralph.
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