The Black Tree: In serach of John Womack

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

In serach of John Womack - Clue#6

I have been searching high and low for my Great, Great Grandfather, John Womack of Marshall, Texas. I had to stop and think...and my thought were to read up on Marshall, Texas some more. I read that "Marshall's history begin when the area that is now Marshall received it's first settlers in 1839", which would have made my Great, Great Grandfather, John Womack 45 years of age if he was born in "1835". Uhhm!!, I thought. Then I remember someone else telling me about the variations of spelling. I was surfing the internet and came across this:

"Methodology - <click this link for more information

I made heavy use of my subscriptions to Ancestry.com and Genealogy.com. Mostly, I used the census indexes as Ancestry.com, and looked at the images at Genealogy.com. Occasionally, an image was unreadable on one site or the other, so I compared the images on both sites.
Ancestry.com has both Soundex searches and wildcard searches. A wildcard is an asterisk used to represent zero to many possible letters. In general, I searched each state as follows:

Wom* wildcard search (in other words, every name that begins with letters "Wom")
Wam* wildcard search
Worm* wildcard search
Warm* wildcard search
Womack soundex seach
Wormack soundex search

This found most of the Womacks, but not all. I also looked at Womacks found by other researchers at WGN, particularly the list of indexes by Roger Womack and Sam Womack. The Ancestry.com indexes are based upon the Advanced Indexing Systems (AIS) Census Index books, which I know from experience are full of mistakes. The indexes at Ancestry.com are missing the entire county of Rankin, Mississippi, for example.

The Womack surname and its variations can easily be confused with other surname, including Warnock, Warnick, Winnick, Warman, Warmoth, Wilmoth, Warrick, Warwick. I some instances, I decided that persons indexed with these surnames were actually Womacks. In a few other instances, I saw that persons indexed as Womacks were actually some other surname - see They Were Not Really Womacks, Part II - Indexing Mistakes. When in doubt, I usually included the persons with a note as to the other interpretation of the name. See my Notes for names I skipped by state and county.

For those interested in the technical side, I entered this data into a Microsoft Excel 97 spreadsheet. I then wrote a simple C++ program (I am a computer programmer) to pull the data from the spreadsheet, sort it and do some simple processing, and write it to a XML format which I created. I then used an XSL stylesheet to transform the XML into an HTML file. I try to use pretty sparse HTML, preferring to put most of the presentation into a cascading style sheet (CSS). "

I mentioned before that research does not come over night...here's why

1880 - Census for John Womack

age 35
date of birth - abt 1845
birthplace - Georgia
home - Precint 3, Harrison, Texas
black
married - Nellie Womack (Montague)
father's birthplace - Georgia
mother's birthplace - Georgia
in the home during the Census -

Hanah Womack (Hubbard)
Levi Womack
Henry Womack
James Womack

1900 - Census for John Womack

age 65
date of birth - March 1835
birthplace - Mississippi
home - Marshall, Ward 2, Harrison, Texas
black
married - Nellie Womack (Montague)
father's birthplace - Mississippi
mother's birthplace - Mississippi
in the home during the Census-

Hanah Womack (Hubbard)
Eliza Womack (Walton)
Ras Womack
Maggie Womack ( Payne)
Octavia Womack (Roland)

I was unable to find the 1910 Census, I will keep searching by tweaking the search information as much as possible. I did find a 1914 City Directory, Marshall, Texas listed as John (Nellie) Womack - Frog Town and he was a driller. This tells me that he was living in Marshall, Texas and that he was still married to Nellie Womack (Montague).

1920 - Census for John Womack

age 70
date of birth - abt 1850
birthplace - Mississippi
home - Marshall, Harrison, Texas
black
married - Nellie Womack (Montague)
father's birthplace - Mississippi
mother's birthplace - North Carolina
in the home during the Census -

Octavia Womack (Roland)
John H. Roland
Wilbert Womack
Nathan Roland

I am still waiting on the Marshall Public Library to reply.

Quick link at the bottom of this Blog

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About Me

Hello Family Tree Researcher, my name is Jacqueline Joyce Thomas (born to Gene E. Thomas and Brendel Joyce Lewis) of Texas in '67 . I began doing my family tree search when my son (C. Hicks) was born. He was unfortunately born with Nephrogenic Insipidus Diabetes. When he was two weeks old I could not get him to take his formula, the only thing he would drink was water. We took him to the local emergency room, where the hospital staff spent hours doing test after test and the end result were "we are still uncertain of what is wrong with your son". My heart fell to pieces. The next few days, still nothing. Finally on the forty-fifth day of his prolonged stay , they decided to care flight him to a Children's Hospital where it still took nineteen days for the final results and even then they were not sure. The doctor came into the room with his long white doctor's coat and his glasses hanging from his nose with the final thought (not answer). Ms. Hicks (at the time), "could you have a seat?" My thought was, okay then comes "is you son mixed with Caucasian?" My reply with anger and confusion in my heart was, mixed, with who?...not what but who! And not that I was cared or anything, I have mixed nieces and nephews. Then he went on to explain to me that "that type of diabetes was uncommon, and that it only occurred in every three thousand children" annnnndddd'ah-Rah...here is the killer..."that it only occurred in Caucasian males." Gathering my thoughts and physical seemed to be out of the question. It was not until he turned four years old that I begin getting more and more curious. So next to my son being born with a rare type of diabetes that only (according the doctor) in Caucasian males and me being adopted, I became one curious Sista'. The search began.