Wavetops: Amos Clark
No, not that one - the older one
I feel like we all say this a lot, but: Don’t accept unverified research until you’ve checked out the sources.
I don’t know who did the research on my Clark family before I started looking into genealogy, but I was given a tree that showed Amos Clark and Sarah Stumbo (or Stambaugh) as the parents of my 2nd-great grandfather, Joel Clark.
There wasn’t a lot of information for me to work with in the beginning. I remember finding a marriage record for Amos Clark and Sally Stumbough, dated 8 April 1824 in Lawrence County, Ohio. Joel Clark’s death certificate listed his parents as Amos Clark (place of birth “not known”) and Sarah Stumbo (born in Virginia) - and since “Sally” was a common nickname for “Sarah” I can accept that with Joel’s 1828 birthdate, I have the right people.
That’s about where I sat for many years before digging into that branch of the family more deeply and learning about the area where they lived.
The geography of that particular stretch of the Ohio River is interesting because, in the present day, it forms the Huntington–Ashland metropolitan area - which “spans seven counties in the three states of Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia.”
Four of those counties - Boyd and Greenup, KY; Lawrence, OH; and Cabell, WV - kept turning up in the records for other descendants and relatives of the Clark family. Joel’s second wife, Sarah Jane Bellamy, was born in Cabell County, Virginia, (in 1836, decades before the state of West Virginia split from Virginia in 1863). Their son, David Ulysses Clark, was born in Greenup County and raised most of his family in Boyd County. And, of course, Amos and Sarah were married in Lawrence County - so I started digging there.
I found a lot of information about Amos Clark - multiple dates of death, multiple Census records…. some from the same years. Things quickly stopped adding up.
Eventually, I sorted some of the mystery out and discovered that there were at least three men named Amos Clark living in or around Ironton, OH, during the years I was researching. Later, thanks to another researcher on Ancestry, I found a court document in which Sarah Clark had filed a Petition for Dower, naming several of her minor children and establishing the date of death for her late husband.
“To the Court of Common Pleas within and for the County of Lawrence and State of Ohio in chancery sitting Sarah Clark of said County represents that Amos Clark late of said County departed this life on or about the first day of January A.D. 1848 leaving your petitioner his widow and Jacob Clark[,] Hannah Clark[,] Jackson Clark[,] George W Clark[,] and Elizabeth Clark Gannon his heirs at law and legal representation who are all persons under the age of twenty one years…”
Joel would have turned 21 about two months after this petition was filed (on 31 October 1848), and he didn’t marry his first wife until 1853, so it seems odd that he is not named here. However, I have found no records for a “Jacob Clark” anywhere, and Sarah’s 1850 Census shows her living with Joel, Jackson, and George W. - so it’s possible that the children in the petition are listed in order of birth, and that “Jacob” is Joel.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be digging into the descendants of these Clark children to see if I can track down cousins from other branches who might be able to compare DNA results with me or with other known Clark descendants.
One piece of information I haven’t been able to either confirm or rule out is the birth information I found on Amos’ WikiTree page. It was an “orphaned” page and I have since taken over as the profile manager. The person who added the birth info - “Born about 3 Nov 1802 [uncertain] in Westfield, Union, New Jersey, United” - also included records from another Amos Clark who lived after our Amos’ death in 1848. While it seems unlikely that the Amos Clark I’m interested in was from New Jersey… I just don’t know.
But the search goes on!