James Knox Polk and Me

This connection makes sense at first glance.  I recognize all of the names in my direct lineage through #9, William Gaines.  The connection between William’s brother Henry and James K. Polk seems valid – I was able to recreate this connection through information I found on Ancestry.  According to Ancestry, President Polk is the brother-in-law of the grandniece of the wife of my 7^th great uncle. 

This is another view of the relationship between me and President James K. Polk

Although James K. Polk was born in 1795 in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, he moved to Tennessee with his parents and other family members in 1806.  His family were among the founders of the town of Columbia  (about 40 miles south of Nashville) and dominated politics in Maury County for decades.

My connection to President Polk goes through my Botts/Gaines thicket in central Virginia, as has been the case with many of the connections I’ve worked on in this project.  After the American Revolution, Henry Gaines and his family moved from Virginia to Laurens County, South Carolina.  Henry died in 1796 due to injuries he sustained while working to build, and he was buried on the Gaines property in the county.

Genealogists exploring this family’s history are delighted by this marker on Henry’s grave in South Carolina. 

Henry was married to Mariah Wood; Mariah’s first husband, John Stepp, died in 1750.  I was very confused about Mariah; her parents, John and Sarah Barden Wood, were from Massachusetts.  It wasn’t clear to me how they had come to be in the Carolinas.  Someone on Ancestry shared this snippet from a Wood Family History.

Without some indication of the sources of this information, this is not adequate proof that the John Wood born in Massachusetts is the same John Wood who we find in the Carolinas after the Revolution. But this is about as much work as I want to put into this today.  I’m going to say the connection is okay, although I recognize it would not qualify me for any lineage society.  That’s not my goal.

This John Wood had a son (Mariah’s brother) named Reuben, who was also born in Massachusetts (so was Mariah) and moved with his parents to North Carolina.  Reuben’s daughter Mary Wood (born in North Carolina) married Joseph Wilson in that state in 1797.  Mary and Joseph’s daughter Laura married Marshall Tate Knox, a younger brother of President James K. Polk.  In researching this, I found three questions that I would explore if I had more time to spend on this link.  First, why do two of President Polk’s siblings have the middle name “Tate?”  Next, how does this connect to William Caldwell Tate, the man Laura married after Marshall’s death in 1831? And last, what killed President Polk’s younger brothers Franklin, Marshall, and John in 1831.  They died several months apart in the same year.  I can’t find evidence of a significant epidemic in central Tennessee in 1831, although it’s certainly possible that some contagion spread within the family – or that this family experienced a run of bad luck that led to the death of three otherwise healthy young men at the ages of 29, 26, and 24.

All things considered, this connection gets a good grade.

Now let’s look at how well Geni did on this connection. 

Once again, Geni takes me through my Walton family line – and again, through William Walton.  And again again, through the “wrong” William Walton.  My 4^th great-grandfather William Walton was born in 1784 and married his cousin, Barbara Allen Walton.  The William Walton that Geni thinks I’m descended from was born in 1777 and is the son of Mary Ann Hobson (Walton), which shows on this connection.  I can probably get to James K. Polk through the correct William Walton; both Williams have a common 2^nd great-grandfather, Edward Walton (1672-1720-1772).  This makes them 3^rd cousins.  So I give this a passing grade – the connection is there, but not the way Geni diagrammed it. 

So I have one final question before I (mercifully) abandon this essay:  why didn’t Geni come up with the connection through the Gaines family that WikiTree outlined?  I began to trace this back from President Polk, and the Geni family tree doesn’t include a woman named “Mary” as the wife of Reuben Wood; without this marriage, the connection falls apart on Geni.

But Geni isn’t finished yet.

As I have come to realize it always does, Geni suggests another connection – this one through my mother’s (Workman) family line to President Polk’s Knox family from Scotland.  I’m not going to check this out – life is too short.