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Is C. E. Whitehead related to Arthur Whitehead's descendants in NC?
Unfortunately, I just do not know. The genealogical information we have on the Whitehead side of the family comes from a tree in a family bible that belonged to my grandfather's aunt. The aunt's father's (my grandfather's grandfather's) Bible disappeared, probably going to the son of the aunt's stepmother who was my great grandfather's half brother. I've tried to use census data to go further than our records go, but with no luck--my ancestors came from Clarke County, Georgia (where Athens is), and Clarke County was not part of the U.S. census before 1820! Even then, only the name of the head of the household was listed and my great grandfather was just a child in 1820. In 1823 he was enrolled in the school for poor children by his mother (or perhaps step mother or guardian?). That's all we know about his childhood. But nevertheless, I found the idea of investigating the 18th century Whitehead homestead intriquging. After reading about land use on plantations, I realized that some of these ancient plantations were huge (people just claimed hundreds of acres), and land use was complex--many things were going on. Native Americans often did not feel they had ceded their hunting rights and wanted the rights to still hunt there. African Americans living in slave quarters on the plantations had their own community structures integrated to some degree into the community structure of the land owners. Some African Americans were able to secure plots of land for their use in their 'spare' time, often choosing to grow tobacco--a cash crop--on those plots, though they might have alsogrown extra corn to feed themselves. Various other persons, including people trying to sell alcohol and other 'forbiddens' to slaves who had earned some money, and runaway slaves visiting their children and collecting food gifts, frequented the uncleared areas of the plantations. In addition, because slaves were often barely fed, slaves sometimes looked to opportunities to secure an extra bit of corn from the cultivated fields. Land land ownership was relatively high then, with half of all free White family heads owning land; the number of households owning slaves was also around 50% in the 18th century, but by the invention of the cotton gin, was dropping as many plantations were 'failing' partly because the land was over-farmed, while others were getting bigger expanding to take advantage of the new cash crop, cotton. American Indians had somewhat different ideas about land ownership and land use than Europeans had, and indeed native land was in manycases held by the women. So I found it interesting and worth exploring regardless of my connection to the Nathan Whitehead household. (But yes, I did nevertheless hope to find as I studied the homestead through various records at least a scrap of genealogical information that would be relevantto my own family tree, but I have not turned up anything at this point--of course it might help if I forked out $20.00 and purchased a copy of 'The Whitehead Family Records' from North Carolina's archives; but it might not; I can't find anything though in the ancestry or roots web records, at least not so far; and I can't find anything by emailing other Whiteheads).Back to Top