Family legends. We all have them. Like the Spaniard whose sister married an Englishman, so he boarded a ship to go visit her. The ship sank on the way to England and all the survivors were picked up by a passing ship from the United States and brought to America.
Another family “legend” involves my great-great-great grandfather, Lewis D. Whitford. Lewis David Whitford and his sister, Martha, have been stated to be the children of John Martin Whitford and his wife Mary Outlaw. John Martin was from Craven County, and there is a marriage record in Craven for him marrying Sarah Heath in 1830 [Craven County Marriage Bond for John M. Whitford and Sarah Heath, March 3, 1830 available from FamilySearch.org].
Mary Outlaw was from Duplin County, custom [and law] at the time required the marriage take place in the county of the bride. The problem is, there is no marriage bond for John and Mary in Duplin County…or Craven County.
Then there is the problem of how did they meet? While researching the Reel family, I ran across an affidavit given by David Whitford, John Martin’s dad, in a North Carolina Supreme Court Case, Reel v. Reel.
In 1813 or 1814, [James] Reel had a dangerous illness & from that time he was like one deranged. His nerves were affected & shaking. [Whitford] had been afflicted with Rheumatism & was recommended to visit some Springs–he mentioned this to [James] Reel and talked to him also about a negro Doctor in Wayne [County]. [North Carolina Supreme Court Case File 798, Reel, et al. v. Reel, 1818, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, North Carolina].
The Springs mentioned were probably Seven Springs in southern Wayne County, near Duplin County, and only about 7 miles from Outlaw’s Bridge, the area where many of the Outlaw family lived. It doesn’t take much to imagine that John Martin accompanied his father to the Springs one day and met and fell in love with Mary.
But again, as the aphorism goes “genealogy without documentation is mythology.” We have no documented evidence of John Martin Whitford marrying Mary Outlaw, outside of the Whitford book compiled in the early 1970s by Vera Whitford, and the Outlaw Genealogy compiled about the same time by Albert T. Outlaw and Abner H. Outlaw. When I mentioned this conundrum to Dallas Herring, a Duplin County genealogist, in the late 1990s, he stated if Albert Outlaw (the compiler of the Outlaw book) had it he found evidence somewhere. The State Archives has Mr. Outlaw’s papers on microfilm, and I have viewed some of it trying to locate the actual date recorded in the Outlaw book for the marriage of John Martin Whitford to Mary Outlaw on December 19, 1842.
Then comes DNA. I have tested with two companies, FamilyTree DNA [both the Y-DNA and the Family Finder tests] and Ancestry DNA. Just recently on my Ancestry DNA home page, I was delighted to see in my DNA Circles the “Lewis Outlaw DNA Circle” with 33 matches. Many of the names I recognized as Whitford cousins who have also tested with Ancestry, but there were many more I didn’t recognize. Luckily, most of those had family trees connected and appear to be descended from siblings of Mary Outlaw. More research will have to be done to verify all of these new links, but at least DNA seems to corroborate our family legend.
[Updated 26 Nov 2017 to correct a grammatical error, add a link to Martha Whitford, and explain who Dallas Herring was.]