A Search for … Carl Julian Moore

Every genealogist has a nemesis.  That one ancestor who stubbornly refuses to be found.  The one who, more than any other, gnaws at you because you know, you know, that they are out there if you could just figure out the right documents to look at.  Mine was Carl Julian Moore, my mother’s father’s father.  And this is the tale of how my sister and I finally found him.

I began my search for Carl Julian Moore in the winter of 1998.  I had just opened an account at FamilyTreeMaker.com and was excited to get on the computer and show my mother just how much easier it would be to do her family research online.  We sat down and I took notes as she told me what she remembered so I could begin my search.  Mom had Carl’s death certificate on hand.  So from the information on that, we knew the following:

• Born: April 25, 1879 in Warsaw, Kentucky (his headstone says 1878, so the certificate is probably a typo)

• Died: April 22, 1937 in Oak Park, Illinois 

• Father: Charles Moore, birthplace unknown

• Mother: Mary Wynne, birthplace unknown

Death Certificate and Headstone for Carl Julian Moore

Mom had a few other tidbits.  She thought the birthplace might be Frankfort, Kentucky instead of Warsaw.  She knew that Carl had apparently run away from home as a boy and taken part in the Oklahoma Land Rush, riding with an uncle.  His father had also supposedly run away from home at some point.  Mom knew there was family in Antlers, Oklahoma – a family named Welsh or Welch with some Indian connections (apparently Grandpa liked to joke about his supposed Indian-blood though Mom was pretty sure that was just embellishment).  Carl served at some point in the Spanish-American War and she had his medal.  He married a nice Baltimore-Irish girl, Mary Agnes McCarthy, and they began the production of the Moore descendants in Baltimore, Maryland.  He sold mattresses for a living, traveling around.  Since he died when mom wasn’t yet two, everything she knew about him was from stories. 

Carl Julian Moore

So armed with this slew of information, I went down to my computer, blithely confident that by morning I’d have copies of census records to show mom for all of Carl’s life … ah, the naivete of my former self … Six hours after I began searching for a 1- or 2-year-old Carl Julian Moore in the 1880 Federal Census in Kentucky, I started to realize that maybe this wasn’t going to be so easy after all …

Over the years, I managed to locate Carl Moore and his family in the 1910, 1920, and 1930 censuses.  As I went along I learned a lot about transcription errors (Carl transcribed as Earl or Eorl or Cal; Moore written as Mor or Moore or O’Moore), not taking written documents as complete fact, and using common sense to make logical leaps.  But try hard as I might – and I tried very hard indeed - I could never find Carl in the 1880 or 1900 censuses (the 1890 one was destroyed by a fire and almost all records were lost). 

After my mom passed, my sister joined me in my research and we decided to go all out in tracking down the family tree.  More records were put online and I got a little further.  I turned up Carl’s enlistment record.  He joined the cavalry on October 20, 1900 in St. Louis, Missouri, served for a year as a Private in Troop K, Second Regiment Cavalry.  He collected a military pension of $20/month for his service, starting in May of 1931.  But Carl Julian Moore just didn’t exist before October 20, 1900 – not in a census, not in a birth record, nowhere.  And believe me, I searched – checking every single 1- and 2-year-old Carl, Charles, Earl (in case of typos), Julian; checking every couple named Charles and Mary; checking every single variation of Moore I could think of.  He was not anywhere to be found in the Kentucky 1880 census or those of the neighboring states.

 

1900 Register of Enlistments (left side)
#1248. Moore, Carl J.
Enlisted: 20 October, St. Louis, MO by Capt. Davis
Born: Warsaw, KY; Age: 22; Occupation: Painter
Eyes: Brown; Hair: Dk. Brown; Complexion: Fair; Height: 5' 9 3/4"

1900 Register of Enlistments (right side)
Regiment: 2nd Cavalry; Company: K
Discharged Sept. 7, 1901, Ft. Columbus 6 S.O. 192. HG6
August 17 '01. Private. "Excellent"

Having hit such a solid brick, I turned to other things, gritting my teeth and tabling the search for Carl Julian Moore.  But as people do meander when they talk (which is wonderfully useful), I did collect some more tidbits from the relatives as I went along and a larger picture of Carl grew: 

• “One of four Irish brothers who came over from Wales and all but one went West” (N.) 

• “Worked for Simmons Mattress Company – travelling salesman” (G. & P.)

• “Had family out west, maybe not cousins, more distant – someone had Indian blood” (G.) 

• “You don’t want to know where you came from” (G. quoting Grandpa) 

• “They’re all horse thieves and liars” (G. quoting Grandpa) 

• “We’re part Indian” (P., K., and N. quoting Grandpa)

• “Welch or Welsh” (G., D., P., N., T., K., MH.)

• “Antlers or Moore, Oklahoma” (G., D., P., N., T., K., M., MH.) 

• “Someone served in the Civil War; Dad used to talk about it” (A.)

Then one day, while collecting information from N., I suddenly got two clues I hadn’t had before.  First, she remembered Grandpa talking about visiting the relatives out in Oklahoma sometime in the 1960’s – Welches or Welshes; so they were real.  Second,  she remembered that there was a scandal about justices in the Oklahoma Supreme Court and that Grandpa had said that one of them was a relative of ours.  D. and my sister later confirmed hearing the same story.

Curious, I dug into the scandal.  In 1965, three justices of the Oklahoma Supreme Court were charged with bribery and tax evasion:  Chief Justice Nelson Corn, Justice Napoleon Johnson, and Justice Earl Welch.  Justice Welch was a longstanding member of both the Oklahoma legal and Native American communities (being partially of Chickasaw descent) who began his career in his hometown of Antlers, Oklahoma.  Welch – Antlers – Indian descent – Supreme Court Justice … this had to be the relative Grandpa was speaking about!  But how was he related?  “Cousins” in our family is a really generic term.  Unlike most people, we actually know and talk with our second and third and lord-knows-how-many-removed cousins, so not a really helpful designation.  Trying to figure this out, I came up with my best idea yet – stop researching Carl Julian Moore and start researching Earl Welch.  I reasoned that if I went up his tree, sooner or later I’d find a Moore to follow down to our branch!  So off I went. 

By this point in time, FamilyTreeMaker.com had turned into Ancestry.com and it was full of family trees.  I found two made by the descendants of Justice Earl Welch.  Earl Welch (1898-1969) was the child of Charles Welch (1871-1927) and Mary Adelia Morton (1870-1930).  I looked at his pedigree chart – the branches for Charles Welch’s ancestors were well-documented and went back a few too many generations to be close enough for Grandpa to have called cousins.  His mother’s side, though, only went back one – to Charles Morton (1846-1897) and Mary Gilliam Wynne (1842-1899).  Wynne, aha!  I figured this must be the connection – their Wynne to ours.  There was an old pedigree chart scanned into the online tree. It showed Mary Gilliam Wynne as having been born in Dyersburg, Tennessee (very useful).  So off I went looking for her history, reasoning that there could easily be more than one Mary Wynne in the same family (Mary Kate, Mary Helen, Mary Pat – it’s a trend in our family) and perhaps a sister was our Mary Something Wynne. 

Mary Gilliam Wynne had 5 sisters – there was a Matilda and a Martha, but no other Mary’s, or at least none listed as such.  She also had a number of brothers and one caught my eye – Julian Frazier Wynne.  Carl “Julian” Moore – “Julian” Frazier Wynne – again, another similarity.  I traced all of her sisters through the censuses through Carl Moore’s birth year (1878) and ended up getting frustrated once again.  All of them were accounted for and none married a Moore.  I then looked again at the pedigree chart and registered something I hadn’t at first look … Charles Morton was born in Warsaw, Kentucky.

Pedigree Chart from Welch Family Tree

So, here we had a Charles Morton … grandfather of Earl Welch, the Supreme Court Justice from Antlers, Oklahoma … born in Warsaw, Kentucky just like Carl Julian Moore was … married to a Mary Wynne, just like Charles Moore, Carl Moore’s father … and let’s not forget Mary Wynne Morton had a brother named Julian, which was not a common name … that was a lot of coincidental similarities.  Mary Adelia Morton was born in 1870; Carl Moore was born in 1878.  What if Carl Moore was really Carl Morton, brother of Mary Adelia Morton?  I decided this was definitely worth further research, so I went looking for the 1880 census in Oklahoma. 

Well, apparently, I hadn’t been paying enough attention in my history classes.  In 1880, Oklahoma wasn’t a state, it was Indian Territory – a poorly documented location.  If you saw the latest version of the movie “True Grit”, the land they rode through was a good representation of what Oklahoma Territory life was like at that time.  I found Charles Morton and Mary Wynne in Dardanelle, Arkansas in 1870 but their daughter wasn’t born yet.  Neither Arkansas nor Oklahoma had birth certificates available from that time period.  I found nothing in the very messy 1890 territorial census and by 1900 both Charles Morton and Mary Gilliam Wynne were dead.  As was that trail.

Now, my sister was convinced we were on the right track – and I agreed the coincidences were huge but they weren’t proof.  She went off researching the families of Mary Wynne and Charles Morton while I moved onto the McCarthy’s, convinced that we’d get nowhere with that trail for the time being and cursing my nemesis once again.

And then Ancestry.com came out with a shiny new toy for all of us genealogists to play with – the Ancestry Autosomal DNA test. 

This test is mainly advertised as giving people their ancestral ethnicity – 34% Irish, 23% Dutch, etc. – basing their results on comparisons to DNA tests of people who have proven ancestors in a region going back 5 or more generations.  But its real use is providing genetic proof that the paper trails of relationships we’ve dug up are indeed correct (or in other words, that Great-grandma did not have close relations with the milkman).  Using a comparison of over 700,000 locations on the DNA samples, the labs isolate patterns in the DNA.  The more patterns you have in common with another testee, the closer you are related to them.

We jumped on this testing bandwagon and went a little overboard – testing thirteen family members across four generations.  The resulting ethnic percentages were a lot of fun and proved some interesting points (that we’ll discuss in another post).  But the most intriguing result was one match that popped up in every single Moore descendant’s results – we’ll call her LU.  Now, you need to understand, through the random lottery of genetics sometimes a relationship will pop up in the results that doesn’t seem logical.  In this case, my brother turned up as a closer genetic match – 2^nd cousin – to LU than any of the others.  LU was a match for everyone else on the Moore branch, some as 3^rd cousin, some as 4^th.  What the “2^nd cousin” label really means is that LU and my brother had a very large number of DNA patterns that were similar to each other; enough to indicate a 2^nd or 3^rd cousin relationship.

DNA Results

LU had kindly provided her family tree on Ancestry.com, which was linked through her results.  Only one last name stood out as familiar – Morton.  Her great-grandfather was Samuel Sidney Morton.  My sister, who is a bulldog, had been going not just all over Ancestry.com trying to trace the Morton’s and Wynne’s, but also the Internet.  In her searches, she found an earlier tree posted online by LU that listed a sibling of Samuel Sidney Morton – Charles Morton, who married a Mary Winn.  That was an “aha!” moment.  So, we contacted LU to find out the source of her information.  Unfortunately, it turned out to be a deceased cousin and LU hadn’t found any confirmation of the existence of the alleged sibling, Charles Morton who had married a Mary Winn.

So where did that leave us?  We knew that we were genetically very closely related to LU; clearly on the Moore side.  We knew there was a strong possibility that the deceased cousin had things right.  But we had no proof.  After all, Great-grandma might have dallied with the milkman … we needed a paper trail.

Now, my sister was deep in her research of Mary Wynne’s ancestors – the Frazier family.  She wanted copies of the Daughter of the American Revolution records for a Samuel Frazier.  To get into the DAR, you have to fill out an application and supplement it with a paper trail proving your relationship to a Revolutionary War soldier (birth and death certificates, Bible records, etc.).  The applications can be seen online but the supplemental records have to be ordered by mail.  While looking at the list of applications that had been submitted by potential members claiming Samuel Frazier as a revolutionary ancestor, she spotted a name that she knew – Alta Claryne Allen Lee.  Alta was a direct descendant of Charles Morton and Mary Wynne through their daughter, Matilda.  Wanting to look at the records Alta had submitted, we ordered copies and sat back and waited.

Finally, they came. 

The family Bible page included in the application listed a son of Charles F. Morton and Mary Gillian Wynne Morton:  Charles Julian Morton, born April 25, 1878 and died on April 22, 1937.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are Morton’s, not Moore’s.

DAR Application: FRAZIER, SAMUEL #A042031 by Alta Claryne Allen Lee, p. 8.

There is no doubt that Grandpa knew his father had changed his name.  We know this from three things.  First, he visited the family out west in Antlers – clearly they were Morton’s, not a Moore among them.  Second, someone told the Oklahoma Morton’s of Carl Moore’s death in 1937 or it wouldn’t have been in their Bible.  And last, and most obviously, the Supreme Court Justice he was talking about … that was his first cousin. 

I can only speculate as to why Grandpa kept his father’s history secret.  From what we’ve discovered about Charles Morton’s life so far, there were scandals and allegations enough to make an honorable man like Grandpa cringe (probably the source of the “horse thieves and liars” comments).  But what I really think is that he just was respecting his father’s desire to cut himself off from that family, whatever Carl’s reasons were for doing so.

Now, before you cut up your Moore ancestral emblem throws, coasters, or posters, wait a bit.  I have a new nemesis in Carl Julian Moore (Morton’s) father.  Charles F. Morton doesn’t exist on paper before the 1870 census – even his Civil War records don’t seem to exist – and he apparently had a rather shady past.  And both LU’s and our family trees are stuck at the Charles Morton / Samuel Sidney Morton generation.  No proof yet exists to the names of their parents.  So, we probably are Morton’s, we could be Moore’s, or we could be something else altogether.

We’re working on it. We’ll try not to take another 15 years to figure it out.


© Tree Quest: The Truth Is Out There 2013 All Rights Reserved