We all know we “come from people,” but to learn their names and to begin to imagine their lives is a powerful thing. They become real.
I’m excited to have one more name to speak aloud, one more life story to dig into: my newest 3x great-grandparent, Gilbert Wilkerson.
Gilbert is my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s father. Put differently, he’s the father of Martha (Wilkerson) Thomas, grandfather of Nancy (Thomas) Cooper, and great-grandfather of Elnora (Cooper) Shepherd, my maternal grandmother.
A Holiday Curiosity Bender
How did I get to him? Well, probably like many family historians and genealogists who work full-time jobs, I get a lot of my research done during holiday breaks (notice when I’m writing this!). I’ve always been curious about my strictly maternal line – the mothers who got me here – and have long wondered about Martha (Wilkerson) Thomas’ roots. But I’d been busy focusing on other lines. Frankly, I still am – I have lots of unfinished work on other lines! But I decided to indulge my curiosity over the Thanksgiving break this year, just to explore a little and see what I could find.
My first task was to confirm that great-great-grandma Martha’s maiden name was actually Wilkerson, or perhaps I should say, confirm that Wilkerson was consistently given as her maiden in other records, since finding out who her parents were (and thus what her maiden name was) was actually the goal of this project. I reviewed what I had on her: 1885 marriage license and return; 1910, 1930, and 1940 federal census records; several city directory listings from the early 1940s; and an assortment of records about her 9 children. Of these documents, three provided her maiden name: a listing from the Social Security Applications and Claims Index on Ancestry for one of her daughters, a different Social Security claim record for another daughter, and the marriage license and return. They all said Wilkerson.
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| Snippet of 1885 Richmond County Marriage Return, accessed via Ancestry.com |
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| Snippet of SSA Form 9638 for Martha's daughter Nancy. |
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| Ancestry.com screenshot for U.S. Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936-2007 for Martha's daughter Minnie. |
Could I find more records to corroborate this? I hoped so, and to make it happen I went on a bit of a document-ordering spree. For a variety of reasons, her children’s applications for Social Security Numbers were my best option for getting this info quickly (or at all), so I placed orders for all the children whose social security numbers I knew and for whom I didn’t already have an original record. In total, that was 4: Minnie, Fancy (Frances), Richard, William Jr.). And by some sort of holiday miracle, these records - which normally take weeks-to-months to arrive, and which I would have thought would have taken even longer because of this pandemic – arrived in about 2 weeks!
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| Snippet of SSN App for Martha's son William, Jr. |
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| Snippet of SSN App for Martha's son Richard. |
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| Snippet of SSN Form OA-C790 for Martha's daughter Frances (aka Fancy). |
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| Snippet of SSN App for Martha's daughter Minnie. |
Wilkerson, with the odd Wilksons. But note that this is from the same daughter for whom a later Social Security claim record was listed in Ancestry.com’s database as Wilkerson. That’s Minnie, and she shows up again later on. So, so far, so good.
Finding Martha’s Ending to Find Her Beginning
There’s one other document I didn’t have for Martha, though: her death certificate. Actually, I didn’t even know when she’d died. (Remember, I hadn’t been focusing on this branch of the family tree.) I did know she’d been living with her daughter, Minnie Jane Cooper, in Florida in the early 1940s, per the US Census and a few city directories. After that, I couldn’t find her. Ancestry.com has a listing in their Florida Death Index for a Martha Thomas who died in Dade County in 1944. While Martha Thomas isn’t exactly the most uncommon name, the location was correct, and “my” Martha had been born during or just after the Civil War, so she was in her late 70s-early 80s in the early 1940s. Passing away in 1944 wouldn’t be crazy. So, I ordered the record. And…success!
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| Snippet of Martha (Wilkerson) Thomas's 1944 Florida Certificate of Death. |
The details – place of birth, birth year, spouse’s name – aligned with what I knew. The burial location suggests she was buried in the Cooper family cemetery, which makes sense given that two of her daughters – including my great-grandmother Nancy – married two Cooper men (an uncle and nephew). And look at the father’s name: Gilbert Wilkerson!
To be honest, this actually wasn’t my first time encountering his name. I’d known that Martha had married William Thomas in Richmond County in 1885 when she was a late teen or early twenty-something, thanks to the previously-mentioned marriage license and return. I knew that's where several of her oldest children were born. I figured that’s where I would find her as a kid. Noodling around in Ancestry had brought up a 3-year-old Martha Wilkerson with presumed parents Gilbert and Frances in the 1870 U.S. Census (“presumed” because that census enumeration doesn’t list familial relationships). But how could I be sure it was “my” Martha?
Well, this death certificate is pretty strong evidence. Why? While the informant for the document clearly wasn’t Martha herself, it was her daughter, Minnie, with whom she’d been living for several years before she’d passed. Given all the other aligned details on the death certificate, I’m inclined to say that, as far as documentation goes, great-great-grandma Martha (Wilkerson) Thomas’s father was Gilbert Wilkerson.
So, What Do I Known About Gilbert?
Let’s go back to that 1870 U.S. Census record, taken just 5 years after the Civil War’s end.
You can see my great-great-grandma Martha, 3 years old and “at
home.” Just below her is another new name for me, her presumed little brother,
James, only 1 year old. Gilbert is two lines above Martha, 26 years old, and
born in Georgia. His presumed wife, and - given their ages - likely the mother
of his children, Frances, is listed next. She is 23 years old, and also born in
Georgia. If she is Martha’s mother, this would explain why Martha named one of
her daughters – her oldest - Frances. (She's generally known as Fancy, though.)
Gilbert is listed as a farm hand. He is likely employed by the white family listed directly above the Wilkersons, that of John (a farmer) and Virginia Harris. In fact, it appears that the Wilkersons and Harrises live on the same property. The Harrises have 3 children, including a 3-year-old daughter named Anna. I wonder if she and Martha were playmates?
I don’t know if Gilbert and Frances were enslaved, but it’s likely they were. Richmond County was firmly cotton country and had just under 8,400 enslaved residents in the 1860 Census, taken when they would have been teenagers. If they were living there at the time, they were likely among that number. Still, there were 490 free people of African descent. Were they among them? Or did they know them? Either way, how did the Civil War change their lives? I’ll be exploring this further in the future, as I will with other members of the various branches of my family tree.
And I’ll be trying to see what else I can discover, about great-great-grandma Martha, her brother James, and parents Gilbert and Frances. Be patient with me, though – I’ve got so many stories to research, and so little time!
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Do you know something about Gilbert Wilkerson or the Wilkerson family in Richmond County, Georgia? Leave me a message in the comments below!
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