Weaving together a story with extremely nebulous threads
A first attempt to make some sense of things
The past few days I have been all the way down the rabbit hole. Like, trying to get off my computer to go do something else but stuck for hours at a time because I have felt like I’m “onto something”. It’s a good feeling, but now that I seem to have come to a resting point, I need to organize my thoughts about what I have been finding. So I’m going to attempt to do that here; apologies if this post ends up being more rambly than my usual. I’m still trying to figure out how everything fits together. I could wait to write about everything until I feel like the topic is “done”, but I think I’d be doing myself a disservice if I did, and that day may be far in the future. And who knows, maybe others will have thoughts that could inspire new areas of inquiry. ;-)
I’ve written previously about my most stubborn brick wall, Aaron King. Throughout the years I’ve spent working on this, it’s felt like I’ve gone in circles, danced around the central question, and ended up back where I’ve started over and over again. I have learned so much but still cannot answer my fundamental question, which is, who was this dude? At times I’ve felt that I was starting to form an idea of the answer, but then I’d find something new and my hypothesis would morph into something different. All of my ideas seemed about equally likely to be correct. Maybe he was this, maybe he was that, maybe he was from New York, or England, or Canada. Maybe he left to go to Texas. Maybe maybe maybe. I don’t have documentary evidence showing any of my maybes to be true. It’s all guesswork and nebulous clues and reasoning using people who were associated as proxies.
Aaron is found on only one census in Terrebonne Parish, the 1830. I’ve searched high and low all over Louisiana and beyond to try to find him somewhere before or after 1830 and ruled out many other Aaron Kings as being the same person, most notably an Aaron King who lived in St. Landry Parish and whose family seems to have a lot of similarities with mine. (They might be related somehow, but they aren’t the same guy.)
There is an “Aran King” on the 1810 census in Ouachita Parish. I’ve been aware of him for quite some time now, but I never could find anything to show that he may have been “mine”. This guy bought and sold some land there in 1812, which is documented in the voluminous court records relating to the Bastrop land claims.
I have spent a lot of time reading about the Bastrop and Maison Rouge land cases. Both were long-running cases fought in court over huge tracts of land that were allegedly granted under Spanish rule. My interest in these cases comes from the involvement of a man named Richard King. Richard claimed a huge amount of land in these cases and fought in court for years to try to get clear titles. The details of these cases are pretty boring, so I won’t go into them here. The report I linked is over 800 pages long. Thank God FamilySearch made it searchable, because it is not a fun read. :-)
But let’s talk about Richard King, the man himself is more interesting to me. Richard was originally from near Natchez, Mississippi. His father was from New York and came to Mississippi sometime in the late 1700s as part of the Jersey Settlers group. Richard’s father, Richard King, Sr., was once the proprietor of King’s Tavern in Natchez, the oldest building still standing in that very old city. That tavern is famously “haunted”; in the 1930s, three skeletons were found hidden in a wall of the tavern. One is said to have been Richard Sr.’s mistress, a teenaged waitress who was supposed to have been murdered by or on behalf of Richard’s enraged wife after she learned of the indiscretion.
The Kings were quite wealthy and owned plantations and slaves in the Natchez area. Richard King, Jr. ended up settling his own family in the Ouachita country of northeastern Louisiana and had his main residence in that area from before 1820 until his death about 1867.
Richard Jr.’s brother Caleb had a plantation in Terrebonne Parish, which was Caleb’s residence. Richard was a partner and part owner of the Terrebonne plantation and traveled back and forth between there and Ouachita regularly enough for there to have at one point been a debate in court over whether Richard should or should not be considered a Terrebonne resident. The land the plantation was on Bayou Grand Caillou and was purchased from James Bowie.
No. 490 2/344 On December 19, 1827 James BOWIE sold land to Richard KING of Cattahoula Parish, to wit, land lying on both banks of Bayou Grand Caillou, containing 30 arpens front on each side, with 40 arpens depth on each side, forming 2,400 superficial acres for $12,000. This land was purchased by James BOWIE from Jacques LAMBEY, to whom the land was granted by Governor MIRO in 1789 and confirmed by an act of Congress dated February 28, 1823, bounded above by lands of Lemuel TANNER and below by lands Lemuel TANNER. Witnessed by Lemuel TANNER and Jh. DELAPORTE.
Caleb died in 1832.
16 July 1832 - The petition of Richard KING, surviving partner of Caleb C. KING, deceased. Inventory taken on Bayou Grand Caillou at the plantation of Richard KING; the appraisers were Philip H. DARCE and William Claiborn WATKINS; John GIBSON was appointed attorney to represent William KING, Samuel KING, and Jacob KING, there being no lawyers to be had.
16 July 1832 - The petition of Richard KING, of Catahoula Parish, represents that he and Caleb C. KING, his brother, were partners in a planting partnership in Terrebonne for more than three years when Caleb died last February leaving an estate in the possession of the petitioner and his heirs, all of whom except the petitioner are inhabitants of Mississippi. Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, Civil Suits and Probate Records, Book 4 # 33-48
Prior to Caleb’s death we see Richard regularly on the conveyance records of Terrebonne buying and selling land and slaves. However, he was never recorded on a census in Terrebonne, and it seems he spent most of his time in Ouachita, although he did bring his wife and children with him to Terrebonne when he visited, at least sometimes.
Richard’s wife was named Laura Elizabeth Hook. They had four children together; however, they have no known living descendants. Two children died in a yellow fever epidemic in 1840, and the other two were killed in the explosion of the steamboat Buckeye in 1844.
Laura died not long after that in 1848. Her obituary is pretty heartbreaking.
So from 1848, Richard had no wife or children. He passed away about 1867.
Now, I need to back up a bit and explain what I’ve found that brought all of this to the forefront of my mind again. It has bothered me for several years now that I could never find any connection between my King family and these people. It’s not like King was a super popular surname in southeast Louisiana at the time. There aren’t multiple King families in the area back then; it’s my family and these brothers from Natchez, and that’s it. It has always struck me as odd that my Kings just so happened to be in the same place at the same time as these people, but there’s more than that. There are many “coincidences” and parallels I’ve found between the two groups. I’ll start with some smaller ones before I dive into the crazier ones.
Laura Hook’s obituary notes that she was a member of the Episcopal church. My King family were also members of the Episcopal church, which is notable mostly because in Terrebonne Parish back then it was out of the ordinary to not be Catholic.
Aaron King’s first born son was named Richard
Aaron and Richard both appear on Terrebonne conveyance documents involving the Bowies
None of those in itself is great evidence of anything, but I think they are worth noting. On to the more mind-melting finds of the past few days…
I started looking into the other people involved in the land cases with Richard King. The most oft-cited case he was involved in was United States v. King & Coxe. Daniel Coxe was a merchant from Pennsylvania who was a business partner of Daniel Clark. Together they had engaged in business and land speculation, and when Clark died in 1813, Coxe held all the land that was later contested so heavily in court and eventually sold it to Richard King. Daniel Clark is super interesting in his own right and played a big part in Louisiana (and U.S.) history. (He was the person who initially started making noise about James Wilkinson being a spy for Spain, which eventually led to the arrest of Aaron Burr for conspiracy. Also, his daughter was Myra Clark Gaines, and her court cases involving her inheritance constitute the longest-running court case in U. S. history; it lasted over seventy years. Daniel had essentially owned 1/3 of New Orleans at the time of his death, so there was much to fight about.)
As I read more about Daniel Clark, I started to wonder if he was related to the Clark family I knew to have lived in Terrebonne in 1830. I started Wikitreeing my way through church records, adding and connecting people as I found documentation, to get an idea of where they came from and where they may have gone, what connections they had to other families. This sort of circuitous research method works for me and has the added advantage of making what I find immediately available to others.
Eventually I did find a connection; Daniel’s uncle was the patriarch of the group of Clarks I was looking at in Terrebonne. Many members of Daniel’s immediate family had moved to the U. S. from Ireland in the mid 1700s. Daniel moved first to Pennsylvania before eventually moving south at the request of another uncle, also named Daniel Clark, who had property in Mississippi and Louisiana and wished Daniel to be involved in his business dealings. These Clarks really got around!
I didn’t realize this when I first started trying to connect the Clark families, but I looked at the 1830 census again afterwards to see where exactly they lived in relation to my family.
William Roddy’s mother was Marie Clark, Daniel Clark’s first cousin. They were not just close to my family, they were next door neighbors!
At this point I just had to laugh, because I have been trying to find this exact type of connection between my King family and Richard King’s family for years and never found anything, but when I went to do it for Daniel Clark it only took a few hours for things to become clear. Clark is a common name just like King is. Not fair! But somewhat encouraging, too. These people seem to all be connected somehow…
There’s another very intriguing coincidence I found while I was stuck on this line of inquiry. This is an old forum post, written in 2000 by my grandfather’s first cousin, my first cousin twice removed, Nettie Dunn. Nettie passed away a few years ago, but her genealogical research survives with me; her husband was so kind as to send me all her binders full of documents and even a CD-ROM that had her tree on it. It’s been invaluable to me, but I do so wish I could chat with her myself; I was too late and only became interested around the time she passed away. I didn’t yet know that she was a person I needed to talk to, and then she was gone. (Don’t waste time talking to relatives because you never know how long you have to do it!)
Most of the information in her post is the same as what I have found myself; a few details are a bit off, but nothing too major. If Aunt Ida gave Nettie all those names for Eloise’s husband from memory, she did indeed know what she was talking about. But that comment about Aaron King marrying the adopted daughter of the French ambassador to Louisiana was something I could attempt to work with. I had not come across that anywhere myself.
It was surprisingly difficult to put my finger on which official and adopted daughter she was referring to here, even with the time and place specified. I wasn’t able to figure out which people that was by just searching for it directly, so I put it aside for awhile. However, while I was reading about the Bastrop and Maison Rouge land cases, suddenly there they were, jumping off the page at me. There’s a very detailed article about these cases in the Louisiana Historical Quarterly archives. It was written in the 1930s.
I looked up the Chevalier d’Anemours. He “served as French Consul General at Baltimore from 1779 to 1793.” He later moved to the Ouachita region, bringing his adopted daughter with him. Her mother had passed away when she was young, so she was raised by the Chevalier.
And then, a little bit further on:
Yes, that’s right. The adopted daughter of the French consul was none other than Laura Elizabeth Hook’s mother. The mother-in-law of our friend Richard King.
What does that mean? How does it all fit together? I have no idea, but it pushes the bounds of my belief that all of this is coincidental.
Could Richard and Aaron be the same person? I think it’s very unlikely. Both are recorded signing documents in Terrebonne Parish during the same years (but never at the same time). It would seem a bit weird if Richard only sometimes signed his name as Aaron King. There are only a few documents Aaron witnessed, nothing where he was actually a party to the transaction. Richard is on the 1830 census in Catahoula Parish, and Aaron is on it in Terrebonne.
Could Richard be Aaron’s father? Also unlikely, as they should have been around the same age.
Could Richard and Aaron be brothers? This seems more likely than the other two possibilities I listed, but still leaves many questions. Richard King’s family is quite well-documented, and I’ve found lots of information regarding four other brothers of Richard. None of them are named Aaron, and none of them could have been him. Why would just one brother be utterly undocumented? I have also dug into Richard’s family more broadly, uncles and cousins, and found no one who would fit the bill.
I did find this fascinating blog post that actually mentions the Aaron King found in 1810 in Ouachita by name, but only in passing, as a neighbor of the person the article is actually about. The article is about an ancestor named Charlot Roi, who has an incredibly interesting story in his own right; his father was Auguste Roi, a planter, and his mother was probably an enslaved black woman. Charlot married a woman named Dorcas or Hannah who was the daughter of a white woman and an unknown black man. Dorcas was indentured for 31 years at birth due to the laws at that time regarding the mixed race illegitimate children of white women and black men. Her mother married a white man named Hezekiah Hargrave just a couple months before she gave birth to Dorcas. Dorcas ended up with a Burney family in Ouachita before eventually being freed from her indenture and marrying Charlot Roi. Charlot was freed at an early date and can be seen on the census in Ouachita for several years. On the 1810, he is indeed a neighbor of Aaron, and he’s counted as white.
I don’t know why the author of that post mentioned Aaron King specifically. I would love to talk to her and have attempted to communicate via several channels but so far haven’t heard back; the post is pretty old. But man, do I ever want to know what she thinks of that. Aaron’s sort of lumped in together in the post with the other free “colored” residents of Ouachita. Some of Charlot Roi’s kids did indeed go by King instead of Roi. Most of them left the area within one or two generations and moved on to lands unknown, perhaps “passing” as white. The article mentions some of them potentially going to Illinois. Some later took the surname Charlot which morphed into Shiloh.
The Rois/Roys and the Richard King family were not related to each other despite the name similarities (roi is French for king), but they did all live in the same area. We know Richard King traveled back and forth to Terrebonne. Perhaps that was what brought Aaron there initially. Whether it’s because they were family, friends, or something else, I have no idea. Perhaps Aaron was a son or brother of Charlot… perhaps he was an illegitimate half brother of Richard. Lots of perhaps going on here. I have no idea. But my spidey senses are definitely tingling, and I tend to feel that, if nothing else, the Aaron King in Ouachita and “my” Aaron King were probably the same person. Where he came from, who his parents were, even whether he was white or black are all mysteries to me, but I am hoping this is one step closer to figuring out who the heck he actually was. If anyone has any thoughts, I am always open to hearing them, even if they seem like crazy tangents. ;-)
Reasonably exhaustive research is, well, exhausting. Keep digging!
Your detective work is paying off. Slow steady progress is best. Thank you for your work on my Clark peeps.