So the adventure begins!

Well, I am new to this blogging thing so please be patient with me! As most of you know, Becca and I are going to fly to Virginia this week to begin our long awaited adventure to find our ancestors! We leave on Friday and will get into Richmond Saturday morning. We have a lot of things planned for the week that we are there. We plan to visit the Library of Virginia,  Virginia Historical Society, Culpeper, Orange, and Spotsylvania counties, and then head up to Alexandria to be closer to D.C., where we will visit the National Archives and the Library of Congress.

Many of you have probably heard of the mystery of Timothy Holdaway. My mom (Darlene) spent a good majority of her life doing research on the Holdaway line, determined to find record of his birth and death, and any record of who his parents were.

According to Family Search, and what has been passed down, his father was Timothy Holdaway. Let me get this straight...in Becca's and mine research, we have given the 3 Timothy's names: Our Timothy (father of Daniel Webster Holdaway), Revolutionary War Timothy (believed to be the father of Our Timothy), and then there's Indentured Servant Timothy.

Our Timothy was born in Jefferson County, TN in 1801, although there are no records of his birth. There are land census records later on that show he lived there, however. The last record we have of Timothy is on the 1830 census in Hawkins County, TN. Daniel Webster was born in 1834 in Putnam County, Indiana. Then in 1837, Mary Trent Holdaway, wife of Timothy, remarried William Lunceford. This brings us to the big mystery of Timothy Holdaway. Nobody knows what happened to him.

Ok so for the last 2 generations, our family has been researching the Holdaway line from Our Timothy Holdaway backward to try and find his parents, and so on. The story of the original Holdaway in the United States that was passed down amongst the Holdaways, was basically that he had jumped ship somewhere along the line to get here. The story has been changed a few times, so obviously we can't treat this as fact. This leads us to Indentured Servant Timothy...

Back to last year...Becca found a record of a Timothy Holdaway a couple of years ago at the Family History Library (FHL) in a book called Spotsylvania County Court Records. This listed a Timothy Holdway being indentured to Alexander Spotswood in 1728. Spotswood was the Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. He brought many people, mainly men, from England to the states to be indentured to him for a set amount of time.

Becca and I had the idea to change our research up a bit. We decided to use this record and see if we could work from that direction to Our Timothy instead of the other way around. We went to the FHL in search of indentured servants. We struck out for a few hours. Then we remembered Becca found an article in an old book from DI that talked about indentured servants and gave a name for a guy who had dedicated most of his research to indentured servants. We decided to email him, but the email bounced back, as the email address was listed for England, and he obviously no longer worked at the university there. Then we decided to google him. Low and behold, it took us to the family search website and pulled up a picture of him. Right after the picture came up, an older missionary came over to see if we needed any help. He immediately saw the picture on the screen and said something along the lines of "Oh hey, Nathan works here!" Out of nowhere, I started bawling my eyes out and couldn't stop the tears. I was so embarrassed! But I knew it was the Spirit of my mom telling us that we were in the right direction with this research. It was no coincidence that those events happened the way they did. Thank goodness for the Spirit!

So Indentured Servant Timothy is the route of research we have taken since last year. We have a land record for him in 1734 in Spotsylvania County. A later court record from the 1770s states his wife's name was Bridget but we don't know the last name or marriage date. We also have his Will from 1791, listing 4 daughters named Anne, Phebe, Abigail, and Elizabeth. We know he died in Culpeper County, VA in 1791.

That brings us to Revolutionary War Timothy. We know he was born December 25, 1744, according to his war pension record. in 1778, he enlisted in the Revolutionary war in Wilkes County, NC. He fought in the Battle of King's Mountain. After the war ended, he was one of the first settlers of eastern Tennessee. His pension application doesn't list a wife or children. The records in Tennessee between 1800-1830 were all burned. His will in 1833, which was written in Jefferson Co, TN, leaves a balance of all his good to his two sons, Henry and David. This is part of the reason Becca and I believe that Rev. War Timothy may not be the father of Our Timothy, as there is no Timothy listed in the will. (As a side note, he would have been 57 when our Timothy Holdaway was born...which is another reason we believe he may not be the father of our Timothy.)   However, this is just a belief that we have not proven...yet. He died between Oct.-Dec. 1833, making him 89 years old.

As you can see, there are a lot of holes in our research. We hope to find our "holy grail". It would be awesome if we could find a family bible (this bible was mentioned in the Will of Rev. War Timothy, so we know it's out there somewhere!), where they are buried, any birth, marriage, or death record, or a ship record of Indentured Servant Timothy. We really aren't picky about what we find, as long as we find something!!

Quentin L. Cook said in the April 2014 Conference in the talk "Roots and Branches", "Don't under estimate the influence of the deceased in assisting your efforts and the joy of ultimately meeting those you serve. The eternally significant blessing of uniting our own families is almost beyond comprehension."

We hope and pray we will able to feel of our ancestors and have their guidance in our quest! Please feel free to pray for us, as we will need all the help we can get! We will be updating the blog hopefully every day with videos and maybe documents of what we have done and/or found.