Passing on the stories?

Two members of the same family hit major milestones in their lives, both on the 30th of September 1885 and both in Clay County.

But the two could not have been more different.

September 30, 1885, was a Wednesday.¹

And in Clay County, Texas, Martin Gilbert Cottrell — called M.G. by his family — celebrated his 30th birthday.² He’d been married for 11 years, to Martha “Mattie” Johnson,³ and they’d had four children by then, with a fifth well on the way.⁴

One thousand miles to the east, in Clay County, North Carolina, M.G.’s great aunt, Dorothy Baker Davenport, closed her eyes for the last time.⁵ She was 86 years old, had been a widow for eight years — she had been married to her cousin David Davenport for roughly 60 years when he died in 1877⁶ — and was survived by only seven of her 14 children.⁷

And the great unanswered question The Legal Genealogist has today is this: did these two, great aunt and great nephew, know anything about each other? Did either of them know the stories of the other?

That question hit me as I reviewed the juxtaposition of these events in my family history. I had the great good fortune to know every one of my aunts and uncles, even though — in some cases — we lived many miles apart. But — though I heard about many of them — I didn’t know my great aunts and uncles — any of them. And I don’t know what they might have known about me.

Was it any different for M.G. and Dorothy, I wonder?

Dorothy was my third great grand-aunt, the younger sister of my third great grandfather (and M.G.’s grandfather) Martin Baker. Both were the children of David Baker (whose mother was a Davenport) and his second wife Dorothy Wiseman (another Davenport descendant). They weren’t even two years apart in age — Martin was born on 9 December 1797 and Dorothy on 11 August 1799.⁸

They would have played together, worked together, grown to adulthood together. They were both married around the same time, around 1817 or 1818, and each would have known the other’s spouse well. Martin married the girl next door, Elizabeth Buchanan;⁹ Dorothy married their cousin David Davenport.¹⁰

Both families moved away from their childhood homes in Burke County around the same time, to what was then Macon County, North Carolina — appearing one after the other on the same page in the 1840 census of the newly formed Cherokee County.¹¹

But that’s where their paths together ended. Martin continued to be on the move, to Pulaski County, Kentucky, by 1850,¹² to Louisa County, Iowa, by 1852,¹³ to Parker County, Texas, by 1854. That’s where his youngest daughter Louisa met George Washington Cottrell. They were married late in 1854,¹⁴ and M.G. was their first-born child, born there in Parker County on 30 September 1855.

Dorothy and her growing family stayed in North Carolina and set down roots, deep into the soil of the westernmost part of that state. They were there in 1850¹⁵ and 1860¹⁶ and 1870,¹⁷ after their area of Cherokee County became Clay County.¹⁸ Dorothy was still there as a widow in 1880¹⁹ and that’s where she died in 1885.

So… with all those years when Martin and Dorothy traveled the same path… did they stay in touch after their roads diverged? Did Martin send a letter back east when his grandson was born, telling his sister of the child that bore his name? When Dorothy’s sons were lost, one after the other, in the Civil War, did she put pen to paper to tell her brother of her loss?

When Martin himself died in 1868, did anyone let Dorothy know? One of her sons, Phillip, did make the trip west himself; he was in Texas by 1880.²⁰ Did he ever visit his cousins? Did he tell his mother about them? Was he the one to tell her that her brother had died?

Was Dorothy’s memory a presence in M.G.’s life? Did he ever hear any of the stories about this sister of his grandfather?

And did he love those stories the way I loved — and love — the stories of my own great aunts and great uncles?

I wish I knew…

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