Give Me the Evidence! Is Mary Jewell the Daughter of Dorsey Hoagland?
Researching My Ancestors
“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world.” —Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
How do I compete with over 300 public family trees on Ancestry? I stand on my soapbox and shout my message, over and over again, with a tiny megaphone, until I’m blue in the face. Maybe someday, someone will hear my cries and stand with me against the sea of lemmings, and stop clicking the shaky leaves to propagate the lie. All I ask is for one piece of concrete evidence, or even a solid argument, to show that Mary (Hoagland) Jewell of Greene County, Indiana, was the daughter of Dorsey Hoagland and his wife Mary Lydia Kurtz of Nelson County, Kentucky. Not a single tree provides the proof.
In the beginning, I fell for the trees and added the information to my own. But then I sifted through the rotted leaves gathered at the base of the tree, and uncovered the gnarled roots. I unearthed a whopping piece of conflicting evidence. And still, people fall for the trees, even while sharing the same document. I am reminded of the line from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe:
“Logic!” said the Professor, half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?”
Parents don’t give their children the same name, unless the elder one is deceased, in a vast majority of cases. George Foreman remains an outlier in this scenario.
I have spent many fruitless hours falling down rabbit holes, combing through land records, probate files and county histories, examining tax records, and digging up whatever I could find. Mary (Hoagland) Jewell tops my father’s direct mitochondrial line and remains the last link in the chain, belonging to haplogroup h1g1. We descend through the line of her daughter Sarah. I have not found a shred of evidence that links Dorsey Hoagland of Nelson County, Kentucky, and the Mary Hoagland who married John P. Jewell, in neighboring Bullitt County, Kentucky, on October 18, 1820/1, except a shared surname and a geographical proximity. It appears that no one has taken the time to evaluate what the remaining documents show. Except me.
Dorsey Hoagland lived in Nelson County, Kentucky, where he died intestate in May 1836. Dorsey’s widow, Mary Hoagland, along with James Hoagland and Elijah Gates, filed guardian bonds for Dorsey’s five youngest children—Mary, Elizabeth, Sophia, William, and Missouri— on June 13, 1836. At the time of Dorsey’s death, the children were minors. Mary, Elizabeth, and Sophia were unmarried and between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, while William and Missouri were under the age of fourteen. Mary’s bond appears in the record first, implying that she was the oldest of the five. For some unknown reason, her paperwork was separated from her siblings in the guardianship book. The bond for Ann Clements, which was signed the same day, follows Mary, setting her apart from the four remaining Hoagland children. The Nelson County General Index of Wills, created decades later, omits Mary from its pages. So while overlooking Mary may be understandable, that excuse goes only so far. She was born between 1818-1822, based on this record. A year later, in May 1837, Mary Jane Hoagland purchased several items from Dorsey Hoagland’s final estate sale in her own name, suggesting perhaps that she was then of legal age, and therefore, making her birth year closer to 1818. The Nelson County guardianship books show final payments from the estate to Dorsey’s youngest four children, a detail which indicates Mary turned eighteen before Dorsey’s estate was divided between the adult siblings (or she died). The last recorded settlement of the estate, filed by James C. Hoagland, on November 12, 1839, neglects to mention the heirs or their disbursements. After the 1837 estate sale, Mary Hoagland disappears from the records.
Mary (Hoagland) Jewell, the wife of John P. Jewell, died in Greene County, Indiana, during the summer of 1849 of consumption, aged 45-49. The 1850 Federal Census Mortality Schedule records her place of birth as North Carolina. While Mary and John wed in Bullitt County in 1820/1, they lived in Kentucky for only a few years afterwards. Based on tax records and the births of their children, by the late 1820s, the couple and their two eldest daughters, Rachel and Sarah, moved across the Ohio River and settled over one hundred miles away in Greene County, Indiana.
Dorsey Hoagland married Mary Lydia Ellen Kurtz on December 10, 1800, in Nelson County, Kentucky. Dorsey lived in the region for most of his life. An old transcription, of a stone that no longer exists, gives Mary (Hoagland) Jewell the birth year of 1801. Dorsey and Mary could be Mary Jewell’s parents, based on that date, and this coincidence appears to be the reason for attaching Mary (Hoagland) Jewell to these parents. James C. Hoagland, the couple’s eldest son, was born on September 3, 1803. Another child could have been born between 1801-1803, but why would the couple name a younger daughter Mary in 1818, when the first still lived? In addition, one of the few existing records for Mary (Hoagland) Jewell places her birth in North Carolina, not Kentucky.
James Hoagland moved to Kentucky at the end of the Revolutionary War, when the land belonged to Virginia. He sired several known sons, including Dorsey. An extended Hoagland clan settled throughout the area, which later evolved into the modern counties of Nelson and Bullitt. Mary (Hoagland) Jewell fits into this family somehow, but just not as Dorsey Hoagland’s daughter.