The Mystery of the Ancestry of Caroline Taylor Clawson Foreman - Currituck County, North Carolina

Caroline Taylor was my great-great-grandmother.  She was likely born in Currituck County, North Carolina on October 19, 1830, the daughter of Reuben Taylor, and an unknown mother. 

She probably came to Fountain County ca 1835 with a contingent of Currituck County families, a closely related group of the Taylor and Doxey families.  The Currituck to Fountain migration is described is another page of this website, with letters from Currituck to the Midwest posted and indexed.

In Fountain County, Caroline married three times - to David Larue in 1849, to Allen Clawson in 1854, and after Allen died in 1872, to Peter Foreman in 1877.  She had seven children by Allen (one my great-grandmother Allen David Clawson), and she died in 1911 in Warren County.  Tintype photos from the 1860’s - including one of her husband Allen, and one of her children Willard - are posted on the Clawson section of this website.

The mystery of Caroline’s ancestry is what this page is about.  Her 1911 death certificate states that her father was Reuben Taylor - who married a second wife in 1834 in Currituck County, when Caroline was four.  Reuben died ca 1835, and it is unclear where.  A brief probate record of a legacy to his widow is in the items in the adjoining webpage about letters in the North Carolina Archives.  Caroline appears to have had a brother born ca 1828 in Currituck County who came with her to Fountain County and was shown as her brother in the 1880 census.  His 1885 Fountain County death record lists his mother’s maiden name as Doxey.  Yet this brother was also referred in the Currituck-Fountain letters as the son of Cortney Nicholson Taylor, whose mother was NOT a Doxey.

Reuben’s 1834 remarriage indicates that a first wife had died by then.  A series of Currituck County families came to Fountain County, North Carolina in two separate migrations in the early 1830’s, and it is likely Caroline was part of the contingent that arrived in the summer of 1835 - with her uncle Charles Taylor and his wife Cortney Nicholson; her aunt Catherine Taylor and her husband William Doxey; and possibly her father Reuben Taylor along her step-mother Eliza Brumsey Taylor.  Reuben was shown to have died in 1835, but it is not clear where.

Trying to tie down Caroline’s ancestry has been a challenge for a number of reasons:

• Censuses in this period did not list every family member by name, and where Caroline was before 1850 is compounded by this, and she is not evident in the 1850 census.

• When the Currituck contingent came to Fountain County, Indiana is hard to tie down exactly whether her father Reuben was in the 1835 group.  It’s clear that he died ca 1835, but it is unclear whether he died just before or just after the trip.

• Due to an 1842 courthouse fire, there are virtually no marriage records in Currituck County from its settlement in the 1690’s until the time of the fire.

• Probate records are incomplete in Currituck County in this period; and

• Death records were not kept until the latter part of the 1800’s, not leaving a trail of whom a deceased person’s parents might have been.

Therefore, piecing together Caroline Taylor’s ancestry has been very difficult - particularly on her mother’s side.  This page will try to piece together a few known clues to be able to give a picture of her ancestry, and a road map to trying to arrive at more clarity.

When did they arrive? There was a group of Currituck families that came just but two or three years before the Taylors and the Doxeys. Their trip is referenced in the 1881 History of Fountain County, first in the Richland Township section in a biography of a Whitehall:

This excerpt indicates that first group came from Currituck County to Fountain County in 1832, and describes how difficult the trip was. It mentions that the following were included on the trip: Whitehall, Poyner, Woodhouse, Voliva, and Hunnings. A second excerpt in the Fountain County History, also in a Richland Township biography of James Voliva, states that he was the son of William and Margaret Whitehall Voliva, who came to the County in the company of the same families listed in the excerpt above.  James was born on a farm three quarters of a mile west of Newtown, placing the location of the family after coming to Richland Township.  This and other descriptions of the migration are posted on the accompanying web page of the letters send from Currituck County to family members in the “west” from 1835 to 1866.

This period was in concert with a change in the census process.  Prior to 1850, only the head of household, almost always a man, was listed by name in the census.  The 1850 census was the first one that listed everyone by name.  As a result, learning who was in each household was only available by gender and age range.

For over twenty years, I thought that Caroline was the daughter of Charles and Cortney.  In the 1880 census (posted below) she was with Albertus Taylor, shown as born ca 1828 in North Carolina, who was listed as her husband’s brother-in-law – indicating that Albertus and Caroline were brother and sister.  Albertus was named in Cortney’s estate – so I concluded that Albertus and Caroline were brother and sister and children of Charles and Cortney.  The real question is who were the parents of Albertis.

In the mid-1990’s, I could not find a birth certificate for Caroline after writing the Fountain-Warren Health agency that was the repository of such records.   So I continued with the assumption that she was the daughter of Charles and Cortney.

But in the same period, I found a reference to the death record of Albertus in 1885 shown below – which listed his father as a Taylor and his mother as a Doxey.  That was always confounding to me – and it led me to research the Doxey’s in Currituck County to try to find an answer.

Then a few years ago, it turned out that the State of Indiana held death certificates – not the local agency – and I found a death certificate for Caroline (who was Caroline Foreman at the time of her death in 1911), shown below.  It listed her father as Reuben Taylor!  This document is the heading for this page. 

That suggested a different ancestry.  It is quite possible that both Albertus and Caroline were brother and sister, the children of Reuben Taylor and a first wife.  Albertus’ death record suggests that their mother was named Doxey – a family, like the Taylors, that had lived in Currituck County for generations prior to the emigration to Indiana. 

Another sources of information on these early families was a correspondence between Lucy Brumsey, still in Currituck County, and her sister Eliza Brumsey - a correspondence with index that is posted on an accompanying web page on this site. Eliza married Reuben Taylor, the father of Caroline and possibly the father of Albertus. The correspondence begins in the mid-1830’s, and continues as Eliza remarries to James Carson after Reuben’s death - and moves to Livingston County, Illinois. It is chock full of references to Currituck residents, and was placed in the North Carolina state archives - in typescript form - by a granddaughter of Eliza. It appears that this was done in the 1950’s or 1960’s. In addition to the letters were a few probate and marriage references. The page posted below contains a marriage for Eliza Brumsey and Reuben Taylor, and a probate of the share of Reuben Taylor’s probate (quite possibly the father of the Reuben who married Eliza. The portion of the page with that information is posted below:

The information above has two very significant items.  One is that Ruben Taylor was married to Eliza Brumsey on June 19, 1834 in Currituck County.  This marriage is not shown in Indiana records, and the Brumsey materials from the North Carolina archives below show that this marriage happened in Currituck County before they came to Indiana.  Their one child, Charlotte, born in 1835, shown in the 1850 census as born in Virginia. 

The second interesting item above is the Receipt to Eliza Taylor, signed by Charles Taylor, for his share of his brother’s and Eliza’s deceased husband’s estate.  It is dated July 8, 1835.  I have not found any probate or estate record for Reuben Taylor in Indiana or Currituck County.  I had wondered if Reuben Taylor was actually Charles and Catherine’s father, who remarried, came to Indiana, and died ca 1835.  But I, and other researchers, have always believed that this Reuben was a brother of Charles Taylor and Catherine Taylor Doxey.  The first letter in the Brumsey correspondence refers to a letter Charles Taylor sent to a person in Currituck in late 1835, indicating that they were in Indiana by then.

The cover page of the Brumsey letters also has the location - in Currituck County - of the 1834 marriage of Eliza and Reuben.  That section is posted below. 

In summing up these clues, It is possible that William Doxey was a sibling of that first wife of Reuben and that a brother and sister married a brother and sister.  But there is no record of a Doxey woman in that period in Currituck County that fits.  Yet.

I have tested DNA with ancestry.com – and searched for Doxey relatives.  I did find a connection to an early Doxey in one of the tests, but have not been able to find that same connection again.  I will keep looking.

Thus, the mystery.  Who is our Doxey ancestor?  The clues above give a roadmap to try to tie this down further.  The avenues of research are:

• Can any news articles be found that might shed light on this?

• Can any DNA tests make connections that we are not making otherwise?

• Is there a probate record somewhere for Reuben that will help on these connections?

• Can the Doxey records in Currituck County reflect on a possible first wife for Reuben Taylor, and mother of Caroline?

• Can there be a death certificate for one of these family members I haven’t found yet - that gives us a further clue on parentage?

• Some of the names of children connect to previous generations - Caroline Taylor Clawson had a daughter named Julia, which shows up in certain Currituck County Doxey families - a clue worth checking.

• Is there something that someone reading this could help with, that I haven’t thought of yet?

  I will work over time to add pages of Doxey research and try to narrow the question.  As always, I welcome any advice or feedback.

John Laird

Santa Cruz, CA

February, 2024.