WCC's Bill Veselik published a third academic article in the Magazine of Virginia Genealogy.
An academic genealogical article pertaining to the Crow family of Wythe County and written by William A. “Bill” Veselik, archivist for the F.G. Kegley Library at Wytheville Community College, has been published by the Magazine of Virginia Genealogy, a publication of the Virginia Genealogical Society.
This is the third article by Veselik that has been published in the MVG. The first dealt with Thomas Allen of Smyth County and was published in 2015. The second article concerned the Mottesheard family of Monroe County (now West Virginia), which was published in 2018.
The most recent article, entitled “John Mackey Crow of Wythe County and the Burning Question of his Children’s Names,” solves a two-century-old genealogical question of who Crow married and provides concrete proof of the names of his offspring.
“Anyone who has researched the Crow family of Wythe County—specifically the details relating to John Mackey Crow, who died in 1815—has stumbled across a variety of printed and online sources that still confuse genealogists even in the year 2023,” said Veselik. “Some sources give his wife’s name as Elizabeth Snider (who later married Thomas Allen as her second husband), while others state that Crow was married to Mary Groseclose. When it comes to his children, some sources say he had a son named John Harvey Crow and a daughter named Jane Crow, while others claim he had a daughter named Lucinda, who died young, and a son named Thomas Jefferson Crow. Some online pedigrees don’t even bother to decide the issue and simply list both wives and all four children.”
Veselik added: “But my article in the Magazine of Virginia Genealogy answers the question once and for all, thanks to a single Wythe County court document from 1837 that lists the final heirs of John Mackey Crow who received their father’s share from the estate of John’s father, Edward Crow.”
The article, which contains documentation in the form of 85 footnotes and multiple images, shows that John Mackey Crow had only two children—John Harvey Crow, who married Lydia Jackson and later removed to the mid-West, and Jane Crow, who married Robert Thompson and remained a resident of Southwest Virginia. John Mackey Crow was married to Elizabeth Snider, not Mary Groseclose, Veselik noted, pointing out that the only Mary Groseclose found in contemporary Wythe County records was married to John Michael Spracher in December of 1815. She was the daughter of Adam Groseclose. However, at the time of her marriage, Mary’s name was recorded as Groseclose and not Crow, which would have been the case had she been previously married to John Mackey Crow.
“I have the Allen family bible in which the births of John Harvey and Jane Crow were recorded,” explained Veselik. “They are clearly listed as the children of John M. Crow and his wife, Elizabeth, who became Thomas Allen’s wife in 1821. In the 1837 settlement of the estate of Edward Crow, the only recorded heirs other than Edward’s surviving children were John H. Crow and Jane (Crow) Thompson, the children of John Mackey Crow. If he had been the father of Thomas Jefferson Crow, the executor of the estate would have been required to make a distribution to him, but that didn’t happen because John Mackey Crow wasn’t the father of Thomas Jefferson Crow.”
Although the article clearly proves the names of Crow’s children, Veselik is not confident that the information will change minds. “Genealogists can be stubborn,” he said. “Researchers who are proof-driven will read the article and accept the conclusions, but a great many other casual researchers who tend to incorporate undocumented pedigrees into their own family trees will likely not be persuaded. There are a lot of descendants of Thomas Jefferson Crow out there who are already convinced of his parentage—despite a complete lack of proof—and I’m sure they won’t be swayed.”
Part of the problem, said Veselik, is that so many researchers in the 21st Century rely on the online-published pedigrees of other family historians, most of which are undocumented. “It’s like a house of cards. Once you show a researcher that one or more of the ancestors in their pedigree are incorrect, the whole thing comes tumbling down. Most people don’t want to accept that and they’d rather go on believing what they’ve published online is accurate. Also, I think many researchers don’t want to take the time to go back and correct lineages that they have placed online. It takes too much effort. The real shame is that the undocumented and incorrect pedigrees get copied into other people’s family trees and the ‘infection’ spreads and spreads. It’s a problem that will never go away because too many researchers don’t require adequate proof of genealogical claims from others and they don’t even adequately document their own.”
Veselik himself is a descendant of Thomas Allen and Elizabeth (Snider) (Crow) Allen. His great-great-grandfather, Robert B. Allen, was a half-sibling to John Harvey Crow and Jane (Crow) Thompson. He is even in possession of a letter written by Jane Thompson in 1870 to Robert B. Allen, in which Jane asked her half-brother to come for a visit and to bring with him a saddle she had left in his care. “Robert B. Allen also served as the executor of the estate of his brother-in-law, Robert Thompson, who was married to Jane Crow,” said Veselik. “There has always been documentation in my family of the close relationship between the Crows and the Allens. Washington County records confirm that Thomas Allen even ended up being the legal guardian of both John H. and Jane Crow after he married their mother, Elizabeth. In the guardianship documents the children are clearly described as being the orphans of John M. Crow.”
The Crow article published in the MVG also includes information about the known children of John Harvey Crow and Jane (Crow) Thompson, many of whom have descendants living in the United States today.
The author is a graduate of Virginia Tech with a bachelor’s degree in history and has been researching his family tree since 1978. He served as Wytheville Community College’s public information coordinator for 26 years before retiring in 2015, after which he became the archivist for the F.B. Kegley Library. His historical articles have appeared in local newspapers and his genealogical articles have been published in the National Genealogical Society Magazine, the Wisconsin State Genealogical Society Newsletter and Stirpes, the Journal of the Texas State Genealogical Society.
The F.B. Kegley Library at Wytheville Community College is a regional genealogical and historical collection that was established in 1968. Since its founding, the library has also incorporated the collections of local historians Dr. W. Randolph Chitwood and Mary B. Kegley. The library houses about 250 manuscript collections, as well as 5,000 books and more than 8,000 photographs.
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