Pride Goeth before a Fall

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 42

#52ancestors
Prompt: Proud

One of my Mother’s reminders was “Pride goeth before a fall.”  I ruefully remembered that awhile back when doing research on my Daves line.

I tried for many years trying to find the parents of Sarah Daves, who married Isaiah Herndon.  I knew her brother was Goodman Daves as she lived with him near the Herndon family when she was 14. I knew that she also had a brother named James who lived with her and Isaiah in 1860. I found Goodman’s marriage record in Henderson County, Kentucky so I knew they came from there before moving to Missouri.  The family was even mentioned in the Turnbo Manuscripts giving many details about the relationships among the Herndon, Daves, and Lawrence families.

Using a spreadsheet and the 1840 Henderson County, KY census, I narrowed their likely father down to two men who both had sons and a daughter the right ages. However, that was as far as I was able to get without going to Kentucky to search the court records that had not been published yet.  One of the men who was a candidate for their father was William Davis.

Then one day as many do, I was searching Ancestry trees and found that someone had found their parents.  I was so excited as I followed their tree back and discovered one of their ancestors was William Richardson Davie.  William R Davie is credited with being one of the framers of the Constitution of the United States, founder of The University of North Carolina, a Revolutionary War Officer, and was the Grand Master of Masons in North Carolina.  He was certainly an ancestor to be proud of and I created a post on Facebook to announce my finding and let my relatives know that a mystery had been solved.  

There were multiple trees on Ancestry that gave this lineage and it seemed solid.  Then came the COVID-19 shut down and I started working from home which gave me more time free from commuting.  I turned to gathering the proofs for this lineage.

I guessed that perhaps the Frederick William Davie who was listed as Goodman, Sarah, and James father went by the name of William tying him into one of the men I suspected in Henderson County. I couldn’t find any information about Frederick William Davie, William Richardson Davie’s son, so I decided to start at the top and work down to them. Not the way you should do genealogical research, but it sometimes works.  As I worked my way down, I ran into a slight problem.  All of Frederick W Davie’s biographies said he had no children.  I did not want to give up this ancestor. However, his will named no children and left his estate to his wife, brother, a niece, and nephews.  A lawsuit in the Supreme Court, Bedon v Davie et al states in section 7 that Frederick William Davie died in April 1850 with no issue [children].   

I went back to those family trees on Ancestry.  Starting with the first one I found, I started tracking all their proofs. Most of them had no real proofs but would list the family tree that they incorporated into their tree.  After tracking it back through multiple trees, I found that the original tree shows a completely different Sarah Daves and with her father, Frederick Daves but not the son of William Richardson Davie.  This Sarah’s birth year and place was wildly different than my Sarah Daves and her father’s information did not match up to the Frederick William Daves that so many trees had listed.

I reluctantly gave up this ancestor and remembered again, “Pride goeth before a fall.”