Lindsay Kolasa

Some of you know that I enjoy genealogy. Fewer of you know that I do lineage repair work. Even fewer of you know that I got into DNA based genealogy to find out who my unnamed GG grandmother was on my mother’s side.

What started with being hushed by my Great Aunt almost 10 years ago, ended with me finally discovering her name and where she came from (just last year!). When my mother and I were hushed just for asking about her…that moment really stuck with me. And now, I’m knee deep in DNA triangulation, historical documents, and family stories.

I’m about to share with you an article I wrote for the Parkes Society. My GG grandmother’s husband was a Parks and I turned to them for any insights they could offer me. Later, when I discovered the actual story of my ancestors, they said I should share my journey with others.

So, here you go. Here is a culmination of dozens upon dozens of hours (all late night) that I spent emailing people, being helped by genealogy geeks, researching data, sifting through family stories, and asking questions.

With that said, I want to put a plug in for the new season of Finding Your Roots with Henry Luis Gates Jr. I literally do not watch television and I hardly ever watch a movie (maybe three a year). However, I started watching this show last year and I just love it! I learn so much and I often cry because I’m always so profoundly touched by the intricate details of people’s lives…and how they respond to their family tree being revealed to them. It’s powerful.

So. Yes. GG Grandma. This is for you…and all of the other unnamed ones that may have suffered in silence.

***

Unbeknownst to me at the time, my winding genealogical journey began with my Great Aunt Carmen audibly ‘shushing’ me with wide eyes about 10 years ago.  She then said, “we don’t talk about that.”  My mother, aunt, and I sat on her couch in Louisville, Mississippi.  We all turned to look at each other in surprise.  

Later on, I would find out that this was not the first time someone was ‘shushed’ for asking about the parents of Ida Franklin Parks, my great grandmother.  Having reached out to descendants of Ida and her siblings, they all said a similar thing…that they were not to ask about the parents.

That moment in time of being ‘shushed’ really stuck with me.  What could be so terrible that we could not speak of it in our family?  

About seven years after this, my mother bought me a DNA test from Ancestry.  I hadn’t considered taking the test but I knew my mother purchased her annual membership every holiday season as a gift to herself.  She had done extensive work on building our family tree. My stepfather and I still teased her about all of the time she spent on Ancestry.

I decided I would take the test and see what kind of results I had.  Little did I know what a simple bit of saliva sent in the mail could reveal to me!  

After I got my results back, I was able to sift through my mother’s family tree and see where the brick walls were.  One was, indeed, the parents of Ida Franklin Parks (pictured above).  The other was the parents of my great great grandmother, a mixed race ancestor of mine.  It was these two pieces of my family tree that catapulted me into a deep dive of learning genealogical lingo and tools.

–

So, it was time to find out who Ida’s parents were.  My “shushing” Great Aunt Carmen had passed away a year or two before I doubled down on my research.  And, while I knew she wouldn’t share much information with me…I thought it would have been interesting to present my findings and ask her if she could tell me more.  She was the last of Ida’s children to pass away…and with that passing, a lot of stories vanished…

My first step, like all newbies to genealogy, entailed frantically posting on every Facebook group about ways to figure out who these people were (smile).  My naivete aided me, though, and a researcher agreed to help me color code my family lines and sift out some basic patterns.  

It felt bizarre to give a stranger access to my account, but I asked her questions and researched her a bit online.  From what I gathered, she was a qualified researcher and someone who enjoyed solving brick walls.  She would be my first guide and her work was essential in organizing my data on Ancestry.

As she worked, I would check back into my account and notice the color coding system she had created.  I began to understand the logic of the Leeds Method that she was using and began to sift through my DNA matches and add them to the appropriate family group/color.  Soon, I was using basic DNA match triangulation methods.

–

It was this ‘genealogy helper’ that identified my particular Parks lineage.  And, eventually, we were able to narrow down my great great grandfather to being one of three sons of Elisha F Parks (born 1823, TN) of Winston County, Mississippi (MS).  We ruled out the oldest son for reasons I don’t recall, now.  We ruled out the youngest son because the info on Ancestry indicated he had died in 1870.  So then, we landed on the second son and that maybe he had had a second wife or an affair.

After discussing this with descendants of the second son, it just didn’t seem probable that the second son was Ida’s father.  So then, I started to look at the youngest son more closely.  There were no supporting documents that indicated that the youngest son died in 1870.  I then sent off for copies of death certificates for three of the four children my great great grandparents had (including my Ida).

The names were W A Parks, Parks, and Billie Parks on the death certificates.  Well, what do you know…  This information pointed to the youngest son, William Ambrose Parks, who most certainly did not die in 1870 when he would have been 20 years old. 

William Ambrose Parks, which *all* trees on Ancestry had indicated as dead in 1870, lived many years past that date, I would discover.  There literally were no records on him past 1870, so I can see why people may have thought he died then.  In 1870, he was living with his mother, Elizabeth Caroline Parks (born 1830 in TN) and his stepfather, Alexander Fuller.  William’s father, Elisha F Parks (born 1823 in TN) had died in 1855, when William was just 5 years old.  Elizabeth Parks quickly remarried and continued having more children with Alexander Fuller.

(As a side note, I have visited the old homestead site of Elizabeth Parks and Alexander Fuller.  A friend of mine is a descendant of one of their children.  However, I visited this homesite before I ever knew that it was connected to my family lineage via Elizabeth Parks!  My William Ambrose Parks would have been raised there for 15 years before setting off on his own.)  

–

Soon enough, my ‘genealogy helper’ gave me a gentle nudge out of the proverbial nest and I was flying on my own now.  Because I couldn’t figure out what in the heck happened to William, I decided to turn my gaze to his wife…Mary F Parks. 

Who was she? What was her maiden name? Why did NONE of her children list her on their death certificates (only their father)? 

One thing my mother had identified already was a 1900 census record listing Mary F Parks with her four children – Sadie, Pairice, William Allen, and Ida.  The record did not say she was widowed or divorced.

Where did she come from?  I had no earlier or later census records or information on her.  I just had that 1900 census rightly listing her and her children living in a community outside of Louisville, Mississippi in Winston County. 

My mother had always thought that F in Mary F Parks must be Franklin like her daughter, Ida’s, middle name – Franklin.  She had found a Mary Franklin in Pontotoc County, MS that roughly matched the birth date of our Mary F Parks. 

Upon closer inspection, however, I discovered that Mary Franklin was attached to another paper trail from another family system.  And, while we did have some distant relatives from this Franklin lineage, they did not triangulate with the ones identified in the Parks lineage.

–

So, I turned to DNA at this point and I began teasing out people identified as RED which would mean the Parks lineage that did *not* also match Parks ancestors.  This would mean that these individuals were connected to me and my mother (she set me as a manager of her account) through the Mary F (Surname?) lineage.  I color coded these DNA matches in GREEN, the “mysterious Mary” lineage.

After I had teased out a distinct lineage of this mystery lineage of Mary F Parks, I started looking at the top matches for me and my mother.  I began combing through their family trees looking for hints or clues. This took a couple of weeks…

Some names started to appear in more distant relatives like Holliman.  And then, suddenly, I noticed that my top match (that was not related to me through one of Ida’s children) had notes on a particular ancestor, John Franklin Neal (born 1858 in Alabama). Hmmm…he had the same middle name as my G grandmother, Ida.

The notes for John Franklin Neal read as follows:

“He owned a Store/Hotel in downtown Quitman on Archusa Ave. He would never talk about where he was from or about his parents. If someone came to the store and said they knew of some Neals and was he related to them he would always very curtly deny having any family.

(Story 1) He was an orphan and had come from Alabama. We think that he and his mother and a little sister fled after the end of, or during the later part of, the Civil War when he was about 8 years old. His mother and sister died along the way of starvation, we think. All of this so traumatized him that he didn’t want to talk or think about it ever again. He was taken in as basically an indentured servant by a family in Mississippi. They did educate him

(Story 2) Towards the end of the War between the States when the South was being burned (he would have been 12?) he, his mother and a sister got a ride from Alabama to Mississippi with a farmer that was going that way to get away from the mess. All his mother knew how to do was fancy work sewing and couldn’t support all 3 of them. She gave him to a family that lived out in the country to raise and he never heard from her again.”

–

I knew, down deep in my gut, that this must be a sibling to my Mary F Parks.  Oh my, did it have a similar ring, family secrecy and all!  The 1900 census said that Mary F Parks was born in 1861 and that would put her at a good spacing with this person if they were siblings.

So, I began sifting through DNA matches that I shared with this particular DNA match.  I began to pick up on a theme I saw in our DNA matches, we were both related to a Mary Holliman who had married J J Sorrels AND we were related to a James Monroe Neal who had married Rebecca McClung.  There were a lot of DNA matches with families in Fayette County, Alabama and Lamar County, Alabama.

I then reached out to another descendant of John Franklin Neal and they were able to explain to me that Mary Holliman Sorrels and James Monroe Neal had left their first marriages and were the parents of John Franklin Neal.  They explained to me the complex situation of their union in broad brush strokes.  And, while they had never heard of my Mary F, they did not doubt that another child could have come of their union.  

This was enough for me to add John Franklin Neal as a brother to my Mary F……NEAL…  (Wow.  I had just given her a surname!)  I also entered Mary Holliman’s first marriage and James Monroe Neal’s first marriage and their respective children from those unions.  I wanted to see what ThruLines would pull up on Ancestry and see if those DNA matches properly triangulated with descendants of William Ambrose Parks and Mary F Parks.

I waited a couple of days for the information to populate on ThruLines.  Because I managed my mother’s account, I was able to update her tree and look at her ThruLines as well.  My mother had almost 50 DNA matches for James Monroe Neal and almost 40 for Mary Holliman.  The DNA matches elegantly triangulated with known descendants of my GG grandparents.

I then saw a story on Ancestry that (roughly) said that the children of Mary Holliman Sorrels Neal had been indentured and orphaned to a couple different families in Clarke County, Mississippi (quite a distance from where Mary Holliman was before in Fayette County, Alabama.) Sadly, I can’t remember where that story is now (!!!), but I was able to find the Clarke County, Mississippi census documents that, INDEED, listed MY Mary F. Neal with one of her half siblings, William Asa Sorrels, living with a Boykin family.  There were a couple other adopted kids living with them as well.  John Franklin Neal had been indentured to the Burt family and I found records for that as well.

Wow.  I had my finger on the pulse of the story from DNA triangulation, random family stories pieced together like a quilt, and documents!

–

Yet again, I asked – who was this Mary???  But, this time the question had to do with Mary F NEAL Parks’s mother – Mary Holliman.  Who was she?

Don’t forget that the Civil War was fought between 1861 and 1865.  My Mary F Neal (Parks) would have been born right in the midst of that confusion, loss, and destruction.  

I discovered that many folks thought that James Monroe Neal had died after his first marriage with McClung and listed it as such on Ancestry.  However, there was no proof and no grave.  I then realized that James Monroe Neal had one last union with Cornelia Penington in Lamar County, Alabama.  She was much younger than he and that brought the total number of children from these three unions, to twelve offspring.  Later, I would find out that the offspring of Cornelia and James Monroe did not realize he had two previous unions!  But I was able to show one descendant who was active in genealogy all the shared DNA matches we had in this regard and he updated his family tree.  

So then, what happened to Mary Holliman?  I must share that it is possible that James Monroe Neal and Mary Holliman may have had an affair.  Or, possibly they married but I can’t find a marriage record.  

I reached out to another descendant of John Franklin Neal to find out more.  This particular descendant had done a great deal of research.  Remember how I said that no one knew of my Mary F Neal?  She was the youngest of the bunch and had fallen through the cracks.  So I asked them kindly to add her to their trees so that she wasn’t erased out of history.  Strangely, that seemed to be her fate but I wasn’t having it.

Back to my contact, then.  This descendant of John had researched Mary Holliman extensively.  Mary Holliman’s family was from Lancaster County, South Carolina (where I have a number of distant DNA matches on this line linked to Plylars and Hollimans), and who settled in the Lamar County, Alabama area.  One of Mary’s brothers was a doctor, Joshua Caliph Holliman, who becomes an integral part of this story as you will soon find out.

Around 1895, Joshua Holliman filled out legal paperwork to become ‘owner’ of Mary Holliman Sorrels Neal’s children from both unions.  The legal paperwork did not say that he adopted them…more like he owned them.  It was he, I believe, that later indentured and adopted out Mary’s children, including my GG grandmother.  Why?  I’m not entirely clear. 

By 1870, Mary Holliman’s children were in a couple of households in Clarke County, Mississippi.  The oldest child of Mary’s, Daniel Cornelius, was old enough to be out on his own and he stayed in Alabama.  Descendants of Mary Holliman say that Mary and her second child, Georgia Ann, fled to Texas but I have found no record of this.  Her youngest son from the first union, William Asa, and her two children from the Neal union, John Franklin and Mary F…were indentured and adopted as I mentioned earlier.

So, yes, I finally found an 1870 census record with my GG grandmother listed.  Her half sibling was with her in the care of a Boykin couple in Clarke County, Mississippi.  She is 6 years old and her half brother is 14 years old (there are two other adopted children listed as well).  By 1880, she was the only adopted child left with the Boykins and she was 17 and had changed her surname to Boykin as well (1870 census had her listed as a Neal.)

It is no surprise to me why adoptions that happened over 150 years ago are so hard to research!  Goodness.  If I didn’t have the insights I gained from DNA triangulation (and particularly family stories posted to Ancestry), I would have never found my Mary F. Neal.

–

For months I tried to find her marriage certificate with William Ambrose Parks.  Just two months ago, I finally found it.  It was a Clarke County, Mississippi document dated 1884.  She went by the name Fannie Boykin. So, her middle initial F stood for Frances!  Fannie being the nickname for her middle name, Frances, and Boykin being her adopted name.  To make matters worse (in terms of researching), they had transcripted William’s first initial as “N” so that didn’t help.

Now I had four documents for my Mary FRANCES Neal when I had previously just had one, that mysterious 1900 census in Winston County, Mississippi that seemed to dangle in the air by itself.  And now, I had this complex, rich, storied history that still begged to be better understood.

–

All of this still didn’t answer the question of why my family wouldn’t talk about her and why her kids’ children were told not to ask about her.  Was it because she was adopted?  Was it because she was the child of a possible affair?  

At this point, I hit a standstill with my research.  Documents could not help anymore.  On a whim, I posted in the Mississippi Genealogy Facebook group that I needed help researching William Ambrose Parks and that newspapers would be the best place to look.  I didn’t have a subscription to the online newspaper database, so I thought I’d see if anyone could help me.  I gave a rough outline of the story and some dates.

A woman who I had helped with part of her family tree saw my post and reached out to me.  It turns out she is quite a good researcher and is based in Lowndes County, Mississippi just next door to Winston County, the county I grew up in (and where William Ambrose Parks was from). 

That very evening, she found some important newspaper clippings.  In 1877, William Ambrose Parks had killed a man in Noxubee County, Mississippi.  I suppose he did not serve time as he married Mary in 1884. 

Apparently, William Ambrose Parks was missing the lower part of his left arm starting just above the elbow.  This physical feature and his reputation earned him the name, ‘one armed slayer.’

Well, things started to make sense to me.  Especially after the second article the researcher sent me.  William Ambrose Parks killed another man in 1896.  This time, it was in Clarke County, Mississippi (where he had gotten married), in a community called De Soto.

The name for the community struck me because William’s son, William Allen Parks, had De Soto marked as his birthplace on a military record.  There is a DeSoto County in Mississippi and I assumed he meant that…but it didn’t make sense to me because it was not near Clarke or Winston counties.  When I saw this, I realized that De Soto was the community/town he was born in within Clarke County.

This 1896 killing led to a long court case that was moved to Lauderdale County, Mississippi.  It was just under a year later that he was sentenced to life in prison (October 1896). That’s why Mary is listed with her four kids in the 1900 Winston County, Mississippi census with no husband listed and yet with no indication that she was widowed or divorced.  

The researcher helping me also found a newspaper clipping in Noxubee County (a neighboring county to Winston) that Fannie Parks (my Mary F. Parks) had died in 1905 in Brooksville, Noxubee County, of Typhoid fever.  She was buried in the Borders Cemetery (now called Brooksville Cemetery).

The newspaper trail had run out with my new researcher friend.  She had given me tremendous help by sharing these new clippings with me (from Newspapers.com).  My last step was to find out what had happened to William. 

I had more questions.  Why did Mary move to Noxubee with four children further away from her husband’s relatives?  Did William die in prison?  If so, which one?  

I knew that, by 1910, their four children were split between two families associated with William’s extended Parks/Fuller family.  But I had always wondered what had happened to the parents.  With these new articles I knew where Mary was and how she died. However, I still didn’t know what had happened to William.

–

I decided to reach out to the help desk at the Mississippi Archives.  I suppose you see my style of research?  Ask everyone!  Ask a lot of questions!  Keep asking!

I sent them details about William Ambrose Parks.  I asked if they could help me find his prison records.  I asked them if they could help me find where he was buried.

Within a month’s time, I realized they had found the answers I was seeking.  He had been serving time at the “Rankin County Farm” and, after serving time for eight years, he had asked for a pardon so that he could return to his family (you can read about that in the 2nd paragraph of this article).  He said that he had killed the man in self-defense. 

In October of 1904 Governor Vardaman pardoned William Ambrose Parks.  Sadly, as you know, his wife passed from Typhoid fever in April of 1905.  And then, William Ambrose Parks died of a “slow and painful illness” in December of 1906.  

So that answered the question of why the children were split between two families.  Actually, this answered a lot of questions.  I read the articles aloud to my mother on the phone and she just said, ‘oh myyyyyy.’  

My great great grandfather had killed two men.  My great great grandmother was an adopted child with no family to turn to.  They had four children.  Two moved to Arkansas, William Allen and Sadie.  One died after her first child was born (Pairice).  My great grandmother, Ida, died right after her ninth child was born, in 1931.  She would have been 36 years old.

I created a FindAGrave profile for both of my GG grandparents even though their gravestones are not listed at the cemetery where I know they are buried.  I emailed a few people that managed a number of FindAGrave profiles for that cemetery.  One responded back and looked around for me at the cemetery.  

She didn’t find anything, but I almost knew that would be the case.  They were poor.  They had very complicated and not socially acceptable histories…even shameful histories.  And yet, they are people.  They are people who had problems.  They are people who struggled.  They are people whose stories were almost completely forgotten because of the silence around them.

–

Even though I know the possible affair that birthed my GG grandmother, Mary Frances Neal. Even though I knew she was adopted. I still don’t understand why the silence around her name was more profound and intense than the silence around my GG grandfather’s name. I mean. After all, he had killed two people (whether in self-defense, we will never really know). 

What was so terrible about her and her life to cause her children to not even write her name down on their death certificates?

Maybe I will figure this out one day…

–

To be honest, I think that family secrets create burdens for future generations.  I think it’s wise to learn about them and face them whenever a family can.  I suppose it was my family’s time to learn the truth.  And, I hope I restored some kind of dignity to people in my family who were doing the best they could with what they knew…in the dire situation of the Civil War and its aftermath. 

I suppose I didn’t get into genealogy to find royalty in my family line like some others seem to do.  I got into genealogy to give names to the nameless and to listen well enough so that I could hear the untold stories.  Maybe I could give them the words that they lacked at the time?  

Personally, I think that’s the beauty of the process of walking the lines of my family tree. This particular line definitely needed some light shed on it. 

This entire journey has been an opportunity for me to do something that the more recent generations in my family weren’t able to do.  For whatever reason, I was ready to accept it all…to humanize these people with their colorful stories…and to remember where I’ve come from…all of the terrible things…and all of the wonderful things that make up these tangled histories. 

–  

Since this article was written, I visited my mother in Mississippi. We drove down the lonely two-lane highways to Brooksville, Mississippi (near Macon) so that we could visit the Borders/Brooksville Cemetery.

Even though we did not find their graves. We saw plenty of sunken graves with no markers. We figured those were the ones of our GG grandparents. My 6 year old daughter had brought some flowers and herbs from my mother’s garden and we left the bouquet there in that large, field just outside the main cemetery. 

Mary Frances Neal and William Ambrose Parks — I hear you. I see you. May you be free.