The following request was received by the Patrick County Genealogy Society.

I hope you might be able to connect me with someone within your group who has some knowledge of mid 1800s families in the Patrick County (Mayo River) area and surrounding.

I am trying to confirm my great grandparents who we believe are all from that area. (I am submitting my DNA to Ancestry.com, but it could be two-months before I hear anything back from them and I need a few missing pieces of information to complete the puzzle from my end.)

I think I am a descendant of Flayl Booker Saunders (1820-1862) m. Francis Ann David (1821-1899). They had 10 children and one of them is my great grandmother–I think. Booker divorced Francis Ann but when he died, the children inherited the farm and they sold it back to their mom for $1. She is buried at the Saunders-Keaton cemetery on their 100-acre homestead on what is now the Trent Golf Course.

Their third child, Susan S. Saunders (1850-?) married Fleming Jackson Crawford (1850-1917) in 1871. He was the son of Cary and Olive Crawford and he was the middle child of nine. I can confirm that Susan and Fleming had three daughters as I have their birthdates. My grandfather and his brother were supposedly born of this union in 1880 and 1885, but Fleming had already run off with Susan’s sister and was having children with her in North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky.

My grandfather and his brother fall in the gap but I cannot find birth records for either of them or even death records for their mother and sisters, except for their eldest sister, Eliza Ann (Annie). My guess is that these two boys belong to someone else but I have been searching off and on for years trying to find anything that would confirm paternity for them or that they were born to Susan Saunders Crawford. She stopped going by Crawford after he left her according to an 1880 census. She moved back home with her mom and siblings with her three girls.

The boys I’m hunting birth records for are (were) James or John Samuel,  born May 31, 1880 or 1882, and Joseph David Crawford, August 3, 1885, both supposedly in Patrick County. We were always told that their father died in a coal mining accident and that their mom had died so they were sent to North Carolina to live with a Quaker family until they were old enough to live independently.

To be frank, I don’t know what to believe. And there is always a possibility that these two boys actually belong to another “Jack and Susan Saunders Crawford.” The only thing that makes me think not is that on the 1900 census, their Annie (m. Coble) is listed with them at a boarding house in Rowan County. All three are working at the Salisbury Cotton Mill and they are aged 28, 18 and 15.

Interesting to note – of the three older sisters, the two younger ones died just a few days apart at the ages of 18 and 19. I have no idea when their mom died but my suspicion is that all three are buried at the Saunders-Keaton cemetery in unmarked graves which I visited on my last trip to the Patrick County Courthouse a week ago. I keep wondering if it was some kind of illness or tragedy like a house fire or worse.

Since the 1890 census is gone and no one wrote anything down, I am at the end of my resources online and apparently at the courthouse. I am the last living member of the Crawford family and I have been searching through all of this ever since my father’s death. He and his sisters had started looking, but without the aid of online resources, they didn’t get very far, and I wonder if they have the right family or not. I have to suppose they do until proven otherwise. Please respond to Jan Crawford Karen, 3109 Fairbluff Ct., Summerfield, NC 27358, (336) 339-1204 or jckirven@aol.com.

This genealogy notice is a free service and cooperative effort of the Patrick County Genealogy Society and The Enterprise since August 2000. We offer a limited research, charging only for copies and postage. Please be specific about the information you are seeking and provide what information you already have to help us follow the correct family lines. We need your complete USPS address, your email and your phone number if you care to give it. Send queries to: David A. Sheley, 4522 Dobyns Road, Stuart, Va. 24171-3535 or famalpha@yahoo.com.

PCGS is in need of more genealogy queries and requests for pictures so if you have any, please mail or email to the address listed above.

David A. Sheley
President