Susan Ann Carruth (Lankford) - Who is the husband of Susan Ann Lankford Carruth?

Ephraim Carruth. I added him to the tree. Thanks!

They are the great grandparents of my grandfather. Do you have any pictures of them or their descendants?

No, I'm sorry that I don't. If you have any pictures of any of your ancestors, please add them to their profiles. Like you, I love seeing photos.

Are you connected to Ephraim and Susan on Geni? If you need my help making the connection, please let me know.

Dick, I see you don't have a tree built. Please add your parents, grandparents, etc. on Geni and we will find many new connections for you. Geni doesn't help you much without your having a tree to connect to the "big tree." You'll be very pleased.

I've been working on developing the Rutherford and Polk County (NC) trees since there are so many interconnected families. I would really appreciate anything you can add!

Pam, thanks for your messages. I will try to get a tree built. Thanks for your offer to assist. Are you near Transylvania County, NC? Their historical society is supposed to have a document written or dictated by Elizabeth Lankford Jones in 1915. I wrote some years ago to request a copy but the clould not locate it. One of many loose ends. Both of my maternal grandparents have Lankfors sisters in their lines (Elizabeth and Susan) and they go back to Nancy Taylor, a Cherokee. I can find very little about Nancy Taylor except her dates and the name of her husband and daughter (Lewis Taylor, Sybil Taylor).

Look at Susan's About section and you'll see a link to her estate papers in Polk County, which are digitized on Ancestry.com. They are very extensive, and from them I've spent the last 36 hours building down her descendants' tree--it was apparently a long, drawn-out estate settlement administered by WP Carruth, and some of the geographically far-flung family members (Wards and Fishers mostly, as I recall) were apparently hard to locate--and it's not clear to me if they ever got notice of their inheritances.

I don't personally have Carruth and Lankford ancestors directly but these families have intermarried into so many of my Polk and Rutherford County families that I'm keeping track of them, too. The families that lived in the Pacolet Valley in the 1800s were very closely connected!

I live north of Atlanta so don't get to western NC as often as I'd like to anymore.

I don't know anything about Nancy Taylor, I'm afraid. I'm working on the Cherokee tree on Geni (I have no personal connections, but that's one of my areas as curator) and without more than a first name, it will be nearly impossible to know who she was, since Nancy (the English version of Nan-yi) was a very common name. Also, there is almost no documentation of Cherokee families before about 1800, which makes it even more difficult. Also, it would have been highly unusual for a man from Rutherford County to have met and married a Cherokee woman and brought her back to Rutherford County, since the Cherokee have a matrilineal clan system and women tend to stay near their mothers. If they married white men, usually those men settled near or with the tribe.

That's not to say she would not be Native American, but she might not be Cherokee. The Catawba tribe was closer, in the foothills rather than the mountains, and there were other tribes farther north and east (in NC and VA) that were more accessible to white interactions at that time c 1700s.

Once you build your tree, we can see how we are connected. I'll send you a collaboration request (look in your inbox under Requests).

Wow! That’s a lot of new information. I managed to recover my Family Tree Maker tree file, which I had feared to be lost or damaged, and linked it with a 2009 version of FTM I purchased at a yard sale. Is the 2018 version a useful improvement over 2009?

I don't know, since I stopped using FTM about a decade ago. I build it all on Geni now. Then you can download a gedcom from Geni as a backup every once in a while and display it on whatever software you want. But I keep mine online here so it's public and it's collaborative. I realized long ago that there is no value to being proprietary about genealogy. Geni has really been the best thing that every happened to me, and I've been doing digital genealogy since 1997.

I have a tree on MyHeritage.com
Can that be transferred to Geni without having to start from scratch?

I took a quick look as Susan Carruth’s Geni page and noticed that she is listed as being born in Granville County, NC. I think that is incorrect. In the NC state census of 1784?, there are 2 Men named Lewis Taylor, both apparently married to women named Nancy. The Granville County Lewis Taylor was married to a woman named Nancy Oakley; the Rutherford County Lewis Taylor was married to Nan-yi (Nancy) Taylor, a Cherokee (or some other Native tribe). One of the children of the Rutherford County couple was Sybil Taylor who married Robert W. Lankford. Susan or Susannah Lankford was one of their children. She married Ephraim Carruth.

Thanks, Dick. What is the source for your 1784 NC census?

I can help transfer to Geni--please send me the link to the appropriate profiles in your MyHeritage tree. Thanks!

The source is “State Census of North Carolina 1784-1787”, 1971, Second Edition. I tried to post a photo here in this reply box but it would not work. If I had your email address I could send the photos I took at the genealogy room at my local library.

Here is the link to my tree:
https://www.myheritage.com/site-family-tree-290587431/marti

Great! So, tell me specifically, please, which clusters of ancestry you want to transfer into Geni from the MH tree? I can move one person--which includes their parents, siblings, and children--at a time.

> In the NC state census of 1784?, there are 2 Men named Lewis Taylor, both apparently >married to women named Nancy. The Granville County Lewis Taylor was married to a >woman named Nancy Oakley; the Rutherford County Lewis Taylor was married to Nan-yi >(Nancy) Taylor, a Cherokee (or some other Native tribe).

Dick, when I search that census on Ancestry.com, the only Lewis Taylor that comes up is in Granville. Is there another spelling I should search or another county? I don't find a Taylor family in Rutherford County.

Also, that census does not provide names of wives, just heads of households and numbers. Do you have another source for the distinctions between the two Lewis Taylors and their wives?

I tried to send you a copy of a photo of page 119 of the NC 1784-1787 state census which is where the Rutherford County Lewis Taylor is listed. Apparently photos can’t be pasted here. If you send your email address I can send it to you. Mine is dickmarti14@gmail.com

Here is a link on Ancestry thst mentions Arrena Ballard Thompson’s parents, date and place of birth, and her children, including my great-grandmother, Matilda.

On the matter of the two Lewis Taylors, I checked the book again and see that only the Granville County Lewis Taylor is listed. It appears tgat western NC was not included in this census. But in the 1790, 1800, and 1820 Federal census, the two Lewis Taylors are listed, one in Granville County and one in Rutherford County. The one in Rutherford County is listed between two men named Lankford and Lewis Taylor’s daughter, Sybil Taylor Lankford was married to one of those men, Robert Lankford.

As far as which line to transfer, use my great-grandmother, Matilda Thompson Forrest (1855-1955).

https://www.ancestry.com/genealogy/records/arrena-ballard-thompson-...

Hi, Dick. I worked on this tree a lot yesterday.

One problem I found is that your MH tree seems to have conflated two women into one--I don't believe that the Elizabeth Lankford who married Andrew Thompson is the same as the Martha "Patsy" Lankford who married Daniel Foster. They could not be the same as you have it set up, since Elizabeth gave birth to the Thompson children long after you have her (as Martha) marrying Daniel Foster (when Martha then gave birth to the Foster children).

I marked Elizabeth as "uncertain parentage" although she is usually positioned as a child of Robert and Sybil; however, I haven't seen yet any evidence for this. Also, we need to disentangle the birth and death dates for Elizabeth Lankford Thompson and Martha Lankford Foster.

In looking more closely at the Lankford ancestry, I've become very skeptical of what all the online family trees say about William Lankford William Lankford . I've found indications that William and his wife Amanda Stone likely lived in what is now Surry County, NC (before the 1770s, it was Rowan County). The Stone and Ballard families were closely interwoven there, with many intermarriages. At least one of them was a Quaker family. My best guess is that Amanda Stone possible daughter Amanda Lankford who married William Lankford was the sister of both Usly/Ursly (Ursula) Stone Usly Ballard who married Thomas Ballard Thomas Ballard, and both were sisters of Eusebius Stone Eusebius Stone, Sr. who married Susannah Ballard, who is discussed in detail here: https://ballardofvirginia.com/richard-ballard-of-caroline-county-vi....

Here are the links for Elizabeth Lankford Thompson Elizabeth Thompson, uncertain parentage and Martha Lankford Foster Martha "Patsy" Patsey Foster, mentioned above.

Also, the Ballard family ancestry is a mess and needs research to clean up. The Richard, father of Susannah, should be Richard Sr., according to https://ballardofvirginia.com/richard-ballard-of-caroline-county-vi.... However, the Geni tree has his wives and children and those of a Richard Jr. somewhat muddled. THey need to be clarified with some research documentation.

Looking at Thomas Ballard, here are my research notes so far:

Is this the same Thomas Ballard?

According to https://www.carolana.com/NC/Towns/Windsor_NC.html, Thomas Ballard was a prominent citizen of Bertie County and was instrumental in the formation of the county seat of Windsor. Before it was formed, when it was Gray's Landing on the Cashie River, "Ballard, Gray, and others had a thriving business at the lower landings."

"When the colonial House of Burgesses met in December of 1767, the Committee returned in favor of Gray's Landing, and thus, on January 8, 1768, the General Assembly passed an Act to create New Windsor on the Cashie River. Cullen Pollock, David Standley, and Thomas Ballard were appointed commissioners to sell lots on which each purchaser had two years to build a suitable edifice at least sixteen feet square with a brick chimney."

"In 1774, the General Assembly appointed William Gray, Thomas Ballard, Thomas Clark, Zedekiah Stone, and David Standley to build a court house, prison, pillory, and stocks in the town of Windsor, and Windsor has been the county seat for Bertie County ever since."

Zedekiah Stone (Jr) and Thomas Ballard were among the Patriots who gathered in Hillsboro, NC as delegates from Bertie County to an assembly (Historical Sketches of North Carolina: From 1584 to 1851 By John Hill Wheeler, p. 31).

---------------------------------
Is this the same Thomas Ballard?

There are also records in Surry County, in north central NC, of a land transfer of 150 acres from Micajah Clark to William Lankford (date unknown at this time), which William Lankford then transferred to Isaac Cloud and from there, Cloud transferred to Thomas Ballard. This raises a flag of interest since the Lankfords of Rutherford County (John, Robert), thought to be sons of William, had a sister Sarah/Sallie Lankford who married an Isaac Cloud (1746-1825). So this could be the same William Lankford in Surry County as the one believed to have lived in what became Rutherford County. Isaac Cloud was apparently from Henry or Brunswick County, Virginia, so Surry County, NC, could have been a way station en route to Rutherford County. A Thomas Ballard was also an ancestor to Rutherford County families who married in to the Lankford family. So this record may give us a clue that these three families (Ballard, Lankford, and Cloud) migrated southwestwardly together into Rutherford County from the Surry County area. Further, it appears that Thomas Ballard's wife was a Stone, as was William Lankford's, so they may have been sisters (Ursula "Usly" and Amanda). However, I've found two seemingly unrelated Stone families with whom a Thomas Ballard had relationships--first, the Zedekiah Stone family of Bertie County, NC (originally from Massachusetts) and second, the Stone family of Surry County, NC (originally from Caroline County, VA)

https://axaem.archives.ncdcr.gov//solrDetailPages/series/NCA/Series...

File No.2636, Thomas Ballard [assignee of Isaac Cloud, who was assignee of William Lankford, who was assignee of Micajah Clark], 1799, 1811 Secretary of State Record Group > Land Office (Colonial and State) > Land Warrants, Plats of Survey, and Related Land Grant Records > Surry County > File No.2636, Thomas Ballard [assignee of Isaac Cloud, who was assignee of William Lankford, who was assignee of Micajah Clark]

Record ID: 12.14.113.2656 Date Expression: 1799, 1811 From Date: 1799 Thru Date: 1811

Creator: Office of Secretary of State Repository: State Archives of North Carolina

Land Grant: Acres: 150 Grant No.: 2599 Issued: Dec. 16, 1899 [NOTE: This must be a typo] Entry No.: 1103 Entered: Nov. 29, 1799 Book: 126 Page: 80 Location: On waters of Big Creek

Also, I can't find any evidence that Arrena Ballard Arrena Thompson, wife of William M. Thompson, was the daughter of Reuben Henry Ballard. She is not listed among their children in the Family Bible, as you know, and her parents are not listed on her death certificate.