Tretower Genealogy Research

I’m very fortunate to have access to Ancestry.com’s wonderful databases.  As I have had my hours at work cut back some, I have used this additional time to check the Ancestry databases for Vaughans and Bentons.  I have been trying to locate Fereby Benton’s family, or more accurately, prove that she is a descendant of Epaphroditus Benton, who lived in eastern Virginia and then in northeastern North Carolina.  There were several Vaughans that lived near Epa. Benton in NC and I have wondered if one of these Vaughans could have been William and John Vaughan’s father or grandfather.  I also have looked closely at the Pugh family which descends from Francis Pugh and his wife Pheribee Savage.  Obviously, the name Pheribee is the attraction, and it is only deepened by the appearance of Lazarus Benton, a grandson of Epaphroditus Benton, who appears in the will of Francis, as one who either owed him money or was owed by the late Pugh.  As Lazarus, I feel was either Fereby Benton’s father or grandfather, (probably grandfather) this family, as well as families related to the Pughs by marriage, such as the Parkers, are very interesting to me.

I was able to find a large volume of material at Ancestry — 3 volumes of NC records, fully indexed, and as I type this, I have probably 30 pages from these volumes copied to my computer, awaiting me to study their contents.  I have always felt like there was a connection out there, somewhere, lost in volumes of dusty county records and state documents, that, if they were all put together, would point squarely at Fereby’s family, as well as possibly William Vaughan’s line.

My thoughts this month are over the possiblity that William Vaughan was not born in Virginia like I had thought, but was born in North Carolina.  Or else he was born in VA and his family moved to NC while he was still a child.  I’ve spent many hours looking at VA records, and there were many Vaughan families in Colonial Virginia, but I haven’t really looked deeply at the possibility that William (and John) could have been from North Carolina.

Maybe it was the abundance of Vaughans in VA that led me to this conclusion.  Or maybe it was because the first records we have of William were in VA.  But Fereby’s entry on the 1850 Madison County, Arkansas Death Schedule lists her place of birth as North Carolina, and I believe this is indeed correct.  It could be that she was born in eastern Tennessee when it was considered part of NC, but either way, she was from NC.  If William met her sometime around 1770, it is very likely that he met her in NC.  So maybe he was living there.  I’m afraid, however, that finding proof of this might be impossible.  The northern part of NC and the mid-south and southwestern parts of VA were very thinly populated in colonial times, and both Fereby’s suspected family and William himself, were “Wilderness people”.  Not city dwellers, they roamed around.

Lazarus Benton, for example, jumped back and forth from VA to NC, over the course of his life.  The moves were not far — back and forth over the state lines– but this, plus the frontier-like setting of the areas where they lived seems to ensure that there will not be much out there to find.

At any rate, I’m going to try to find clues.

Eddie Davis