By Jessica Gorman
Several months ago, I wrote about Emily Garrison Boone. Several items belonging to the Boone family had been donated to the museum. Among them was Mrs. Boone’s diploma from the Minden Female College.
Last week, more items from the Boone family were donated. As I was sorting through them, skimming and scanning postcards and letters to get an idea of what was there, one letter caught my attention. It was dated 1831 and addressed to William C. Garrison, Esq. at Liberty, Tennessee. The thing that stood out was the location.
Liberty, Tennessee was founded in 1797 by Adam Dale, my sixth great-granduncle. Family members and other settlers from Maryland soon followed, including Adam’s parents, my seventh great-grandparents, Thomas Dale and Elizabeth Evans. Coincidentally, my first memories of interest in family history are when I was about nine or ten years old. I remember reading through our copy of “A Dale Family History” and being fascinated.
When I saw Liberty, Tennessee on the front of that letter, I knew that William Garrison would have known my ancestors. As I started looking back at the information I had on the Garrisons, I was reminded that Mr. Garrison had died and his wife, Melvina, had remarried to R. A. Lancaster in Harrison County, Texas in 1845 before moving to Bossier Parish. Mr. Lancaster served several terms as mayor of Minden. As I reviewed the records, I was reminded of another detail that didn’t hold any particular significance before. In census records, Melvina’s mother is listed in the household. Her name was Mary Evans and she was born in Maryland. With the knowledge that my seventh great-grandmother, Elizabeth Evans, was also from Maryland, I knew that I was going to find out that we were related. I just had to prove it.
I was born and raised in Minden, but I don’t consider myself to have deep family roots here. Several generations of my family have lived here, but not before the late 1920s when my great-grandmother’s sister moved here and the rest of the family followed. My maiden name is Stewart. Whether or not I am of the Webster Parish Stewarts is not an uncommon question. I am not. My Stewarts descend from the Dales of Liberty, Tennessee, and are from Illinois. I never imagined that I could have a connection to Minden’s early history.
Much of the Dale family history has already been documented and there are multiple marriages between the Dale and Evans families. This led me to believe it would be fairly easy to find the Evans connection I was looking for. In reality, it was a little more difficult than I expected. Records from the time are missing. Without those records, I started cross-referencing everything I could think of, looking for any clue, any relevant piece of information, to put the pieces together.
Monday afternoon, I remembered that there is an Evans buried in the old section of the Minden Cemetery. A quick check of FindAGrave reminded me that it was Martha, wife of Dr. John Evans. A few more clicks revealed that Dr. Evans was also born in Maryland, just like Elizabeth and Mary. This gave me another avenue of collateral research to pursue.
At first, I kept hitting some of the same roadblocks, still not finding the information I needed to put it all together. And then, I found it. In a document, a member of the Evans family recorded their history. One of the sources cited was a letter, written in 1827, from William Dale, my sixth great-grandfather, to his cousin, Dr. John Reed Evans, whose wife is buried in the Minden Cemetery. In this letter, William explains to John how they are related.
William’s father, Thomas, and John’s grandmother, Sarah, were brother and sister. At the same time, William’s mother, Elizabeth, was a niece of John’s grandfather, Joseph. On the Dale side, they were first cousins once removed. On the Evans side, they were 2nd cousins.
In June 2022, I was in Liberty, Tennessee. We visited the church founded in 1809 and the adjacent cemetery. We saw the historical marker commemorating the founding of the town and the mill stone from Adam Dale’s mill that was located on Smith Fork Creek. I stood at William Dale’s grave, never imagining that a little over a year and a half later, and on the 155th anniversary of the death of Dr. John Reed Evans, a letter written by William nearly 200 years ago would tell me I had relatives living in Minden in the 1850s and 1860s, that Miss Emily Garrison, whose diploma now hangs in the museum, was my cousin.
(Jessica Gorman is the Executive Director of the Dorcheat Historical Association Museum, Webster Parish Historian, and an avid genealogist.)