If Samuel and Dessie Anderson are your grandparents or great grandparents, Nancy (McGee) and Washington Ratliff are your ancestors too.
George Washington Ratliff (~1831-1889) (who was generally called Washington) is my second great grandfather, maternal grandfather of my grandpa Sam Anderson. There are a series of sad stories on this side of the family involving early parental deaths leaving the children without parents. George Washington’s father John Ratliff died in 1847 and apparently his mother was already dead because the children were put into guardianship of first William Bowlin, then after he died, his wife Elizabeth Bowlin. We have no knowledge of the connection of the Bowlin family and the Ratliff family.
So we find him and his siblings for some years in census records as living with the Bowlin family. Then he grows up and marries and has his own household. But who did he marry? All we know, again from census records, is her name was Nancy1. I had been unable to find out any more until recently. All we know about Washington Ratliff’s wife is the name Nancy and an approximate birth date, both obtained from census records.
One day I noticed that someone had named her Nancy McGee in their tree. So I started digging around to find out who this Nancy McGee might be. Looking at the census records I noticed that a Nancy McGee lived next door to Washington when he was growing up in the Bowlin family, and she was born the same year (again from census records) as Washington’s wife Nancy. Washington was living with Elizabeth Bowlin (widow of William) and Nancy McGee was living next door with her mother Elizabeth McGee, daughter of Delaney Bowlin. Living next door and being appropriate ages often led to marriage in those days.
Three of the households on that census page are 1) Delaney Bowlin, 2) his daughter Elizabeth and husband David McGee (with daughter Nancy McGee), and 3) Elizabeth Bowlin, widow of William Bowlin (son of Delaney Bowlin) and the children of John Ratliff. Also, in 1852, Washington Ratliff was a witness to the will of Nancy McGee’s grandfather Delaney Bowlin. He was probably already married to Nancy at that time because they had their first child, my ancestor Marthenia, in January 1852. I believe this is enough to be pretty confident about Nancy Ratliff’s parentage.
That breakthrough added around 50 new ancestors to the tree (that count does not include the spouses and other children that I generally add for ancestors). These people are mostly Scotch-Irish and some of the families are very well documented. These are almost our first Scotch-Irish ancestors. I believe most of my ancestors on the Anderson/Kimsey side were of English or Welsh origin before this discovery.
The name Scotch-Irish may need to be explained. The Scotch-Irish (or Scots-Irish) Americans are descendants of Ulster Protestants who emigrated from Ulster in northern Ireland to America during the 18th and 19th centuries, whose ancestors had originally migrated to Ireland mainly from the Scottish Lowlands and Northern England in the 17th century. 2.
An interesting book about most of the Anderson/Kimsey ancestors is Albion’s Seed3. It describes the waves of migration of English-speaking people to America and their influence on the country. They describe four waves. The first was an exodus of Puritans from the east of England to Massachusetts (1629-1640). The second was the movement of a Royalist elite and indentured servants from the south of England to Virginia (ca. 1649-75). The third was the “Friends’ migration,”–the Quakers–from the North Midlands and Wales to the Delaware Valley (ca. 1675-1725). The fourth was a great flight from the borderlands of North Britain and northern Ireland to the American backcountry (ca. 1717-75).
Descendants of Samuel Anderson and Dessie Kimsey have ancestors in three of those four waves. We have, as far as I know, no Puritan ancestors. Mostly I had been working with wave two and three, but now we have found our Scotch-Irish. They were mostly Presbyterians and came for religious freedom (a common thread in our ancestors). If the ancestors I had worked on before loved the frontier, these people loved it even more!
Like our other ancestors, they moved very early into what is now Kentucky from Virginia and then to central Missouri before moving to the Platte Purchase when it opened. They were some of the first in Missouri, very soon after Daniel Boone.
David McGee, Nancy (McGee) Ratliff’s father, was born about 1798 in Mercer County, Kentucky. The McGees had come to Kentucky very early, and there are stories to tell of that some other time. But today I’ll tell one story about David McGee in the wilds of central Missouri.
The story quoted below is from History of Howard and Cooper Counties, Missouri published in 1883:5. I want to make several comments. Remember when this was written (1883) and that it obviously was written from the point of view of the settlers living on what had previously been Indian land, and it had been during the War of 1812. The United States declared war against the United Kingdom and its indigenous allies in 18126. You might also be interested in this article about “The War of 1812 and Indian Troubles” in Cooper County published by Missouri Genealogy Trails.7.
Also, these people had recently come from Kentucky where for many years they also were battling the Indians over the right to the land and had also built such forts there. We will come back to some stories about pioneer life in Kentucky on another day.
“This life of ease and rest was suddenly disturbed by the inauguration of a bloody and harrassing war, a war in which the Indian was to take the most prominent part, as the unrelenting and merciless foe of the pioneer, who had settled along the banks of the river. Great Britain, our quondam, cruel mother, had declared war (1812), against the United States. The settlers, who were then residing on each side of the river, soon became convinced that the savages were preparing to take sides with Great Britian, and being thus forewarned, they began the immediate erection of forts.
…
“On the 14th day of December, 1814, a man named Samuel McMahan, living in what is now Lamine township of Cooper county, was killed near Boonville, not far from the present residence of Scott Benedict, under the following circumstances: He had been down to the settlement at Boonville to bring his cattle, as he intended to move down the river, and as he was returning home he came upon a band of Indians who were lying in ambush for some men who were cutting down a bee tree not far away. The savages fired upon him, wounding him and killing his horse. He jumped up after his horse fell, and although severely wounded, ran down the ravine leading to the river. The Indians started in pursuit of him, and as he was weak from the loss of blood, they soon overtook him and killed him, sticking three spears into his back. They afterwards cut off his head and scattered his entrails over the ground. The Indians, knowing that the vengeance of the settlers would be sudden and terrible, then scattered, and made their way out of the country the best way they could.
“The next day, for the settlers, not knowing the number of the Indians, waited for reinforcements from the opposite side of the river, a party of men went out to get the body of McMahan. James Cole, the brother of Samuel Cole, carried the body before him on his horse, and David McGee brought the head wrapped in a sheep skin. The settlers buried McMahan under the linn tree, which formerly stood in the centre ring at the old fair grounds. A child of David Burress, which was burned to death, was also buried under this tree.
“The next day after the killing of McMahan, all the settlers living near the present site of Boonville, speedily repaired to the house of Hannah Cole, which stood on the bluff”, in what is now “East Boonville,” as this place was the most suitable of any near to defend against an attack of the Indians. All of these men came with their teams, cut down trees, dragged logs to build a fort at that place. They completed the building of the fort in about one week, although all of the men could not work at one time, as it was necessary to station a guard on every side to watch for the approach of the enemy, whom they expected every hour.
“The fort was built on the edge of the bluff, and as the bluff was very steep at that point, it was well defended on that side from the Indians. Another reason for building it in that place, was, because the inmates of the fort could obtain a constant supply of good water from the river. They had a long log running out over the edge of thee bluff, and a windlass and rope attached to it, so that it was an easy matter to draw up water, even during an attack of the Indians.
“As soon as the fort at Hannah Cole’s was completed, the old fort at Stephen Cole’s, situated on the bluff near the river, one mile below the new fort, was abandoned, and all the families gathered into the new fort, so as to be a protection to each other.
“But this precaution proved to be unnecessary, as the killing of McMahan was virtually the end of the war in this part of the country, and the settlers had no more open fights with the Indians, although small bands of savages occasionally roamed through the country, running off stock, and committing other depredations. The Indians had found out that the men who had pierced the wilderness and brought their families with them, were ready to lay down their lives in defence of them and their homes, and the savages deserted their hunting grounds and moved farther west.”
- There is more confusion… We do have records from an Anderson Bible that says her name is Lucrecia, but I believe that is confusing the wife of his brother James who was Lucrecia McDaniel.
- Scotch-Irish in Wikipedia
- Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer
- The barn on the top is not an original building of the fort
- History of Howard and Cooper Counties, Missouri published by the National Historical Company, St. Louis, in 1883. pages 621-624
- The War of 1812 in Wikipedia
- The War of 1812 and Indian Troubles in Cooper County published by Missouri Genealogy Trails