Migration patterns, and a little about Neilie Spencer

If you were to draw a map of the migration of my Spencer ancestors from those early settlers in 17th-century coastal Virginia, you would draw a line westward across Virginia, then eventually into Kentucky and finally to Bartholomew County, Indiana. On my mother's side (the Pittmans), the line would start with Quaker settlers in New Jersey, then move across southern Pennsylvania (stopping for a generation or so in Bedford County, near the Maryland border), then into northwestern Ohio for a generation, and finally to Brown County, Indiana.

These two lines would intersect at last in the town of Columbus, Indiana, where my Mom and Dad went to high school.

The lines would get pretty messy after that. In the 20th-century the time between moves shortened a great deal, and the direction in which people moved began to vary. Where people once spent at least a generation and often many generations in the same place, by the mid-20th-century people were moving numerous times in a single lifetime. And they began moving in every direction, not simply westward. I don't recall anyone among the 2300 people in my family tree who moved eastward; until my mother, that is. Since then, all bets are off.

On my wife's side of the family people tended to stay close to home. If you drew lines on the map for their movements, starting in Plymouth or up in Salem or on Cape Cod, some of the lines would move as far west as the Connecticut River valley, and some would move northward to Maine, but none of these lines would reach any further west than, in the 20th-century, Rochester, New York. 

But picture that map of the eastern united state with all these migration-lines drawn on it. Up in New England the lines are just a jumble, like a child's first scrawl with a crayon. Meanwhile, down South, the lines would start in eastern Virginia and waver westward, more or less following early roads, rivers, and mountain passes. Both these sets of lines cover about 300 years of history.

But wait. There is one line that strikes out from the jumble in New England and moves southward, joining the migration-line in Virginia. That represents Jane Alford, born in Windsor, Connecticut, in 1715. I'm not sure when she made the move or exactly why, but I do know she married a southerner Jacob Winfree and died in Cumberland County, Virginia (1772). 

Over several generations these Winfrees move around a bit, but generally trending westward, stopping for a while in Kentucky and then winding up down in Orchard, Texas. It's during those Kentucky years that Mary Addie Winfree marries James Cornelius (Neilie) Spencer, who was my great grandfather. These two had six children together.

This James Cornelius, a sharecropper who grew up near Knottsville, Kentucky, suffered from the progressive effect of "syphilis of the central nervous system." In the 1900 Census he is counted among the patients at the Western Kentucky Asylum for the Insane. In that year Mary Addie is back with her parents and the children have been parceled out to several households. 

The effects of the disease must have been quite debilitating, because by the time of the 1920 census, when "Neilie" would have been a little about 54 years old, he is no longer listed as the head of the household. Instead, his 16 year old son, James Franklin, my grandfather, is the head. Under "occupation" the son James is listed as a "foreman" on a farm, while his father is listed as a "cropper," which I take to mean sharecropper.

I didn't know James Franklin Spencer, my Dad's father, the boy who had charge of his household at such a young age. But we'll end with a picture of the Winfree family, with Addie the kneeling woman on the left. I have no idea whether her husband James Cornelius Spencer is in this picture. Could that be him standing behind her with the wide-brimmed hat shadowing his face?

Mary Addie and James Cornelius are both buried in the Baskett Cemetery in Henderson, Kentucky.