The recent brick wall concerning my husband’s collateral Williams/Woodson family has been a long standing brick wall and it’s one which I’ve written about a couple of times and returned to perhaps a half dozen times.

Yet, it was only with this most recent attempt to crack through a very persistent wall that I was able to make a sliver of progress.

How did I do that?

This deep dive took a couple of weeks to complete and with repeated viewings of several types of records.

I have long been aware of the Virginia Chancery Court records available online thanks to the Library of Virginia. The 1823 lawsuit in which Roger Williams, father of Thomas Williams, deceased, sued John E. Woodson, Thomas’s estate administrator.

That lawsuit provided me with the names of Thomas’s five sons, who they lived with for the first year or two after Thomas died, and the fact that John E. Woodson was the brother-in-law of Thomas Williams.

I knew from Thomas’s marriage record that wife Elizabeth Woodson was the daughter of Anderson Woodson.

From those facts, I could build a small FAN club to investigate.

A review of census records for 1820, 1830 and 1840 filled in more bits of information.

I also read the 1826 will of Anderson Woodson, which further expanded the family, naming Elizabeth Williams and her siblings. That, in turn, meant more people/families to follow.

Tax records are one of my favorite resources and digital images of land tax and personal property tax records are available for Bedford County, Campbell County and Cumberland County, where the Williams and Woodson clans had lived.

The tax records are what tipped me off to the fact that there were not one or two William W. Williams, but three of them, all living in Campbell County at the same time.

This discovery led me back to the census records, hoping that the two William W. Williams could be sorted out from mine.

On the off chance that something might unexpectedly turn up, I made use of FamilySearch’s full-text search, which did find several documents that further identified those men along with a handful of other men of the same name.

I had formed a hypothesis about the birth order of the five Williams boys based on the order in which they were named in grandfather Roger Williams’ will. That hypothesis was revised several times to fit the facts which were uncovered piece by piece.

I also had a theory about what happened to the Williams/Woodson clan, which also had to be revised, based on appearances of their names in the full-text search.

I had searched a limited range of tax lists, but had to expand the years by quite a lot in order to further sort out people of the same name, and had to return to probate records looking for these “duplicate” people to make sure which man belonged to which family and which tax record.

I now know more about the five Williams children and believe that Woodson was the youngest son and died in childhood. I also now can prove that Thomas Williams Jr. died in late 1830 or early 1831. Further, Elizabeth (Woodson) Williams and her brother John E. Woodson were living in Campbell County as late as 1833.

Neither Elizabeth nor John or her three surviving sons (all living as late as 1831) are found in any Campbell County record after 1831. That leads me to believe that they removed as a group from the area, assuming that Elizabeth and John didn’t pass away during the 1830s decade and the sons then left for parts unknown.

My tip for successful genealogy research is to leave no stone unturned. This family didn’t own land – perhaps the males practiced a trade like blacksmith or wheelwright and only rented the property where they lived. I had to examine several other types of records to be successful.

Records searched/Methodology:

1. Land Records
2. Wills
3. Estate Administrations/Inventories
4. Personal Property Tax Lists
5. Land Tax Lists
6. County Court Records
7. Chancery Court Lawsuits
8. Census Records
9. County Histories
10. Online trees
11. Full-Text Search on FamilySearch
12. Google Search

I am once again stymied and must wait and hope for still more records to appear concerning William W., Samuel B. and John Williams along with Elizabeth (Woodson) Williams and John E. Woodson, who married, but apparently had no children. There is also the loose end of the (probable) daughter of Thomas Williams Jr., born in late 1830. The name of his wife is unknown and it is uncertain whether the child survived to adulthood.

Perhaps in the future, DNA matches might provide more clues and answers, but, so far, that hasn’t been the case.

I am happy, though, that I know more about this family now than I did when I started this new search.