case file № 6 · from The Temples
This tree said eleven children. The will said eleven children. Ten of them were the same people.
Edward Bass Fowlkes has been carried in this tree as a son of Henry Bass Fowlkes of Nottoway County, Virginia, for as long as the tree has existed, on no evidence whatever — the link arrived unsourced and stayed unsourced. That is ordinary; a great deal of any inherited tree is like that. What makes this one a case file is that the obvious test existed, was findable, and had never been run: the father left a will, and a Virginia will of 1808 names its children.
The first attempt failed in a way worth explaining, because it is the commonest way genealogical searches go wrong. The will's pages have been machine-read, and a search of that machine transcription found no Edward — which looks like an answer and is not one. The same transcription renders the testator's own opening words, “I Henry Foulkes Sen.r”, as “I Henry Lou thes Senr”. A name the machine mangled and a name that was never there return exactly the same zero. An absence found by a broken instrument is not an absence. So all four manuscript pages were read by eye instead, in overlapping strips so that no line could fall between two screenfuls.
He is not there. Not in any clause, not in any spelling. And what turned up in his place is the part that lifts this above an argument from silence: the will names eleven children, this tree held eleven, and ten of them are the same ten. The will's eleventh is a daughter, Nancy, who was not in this tree at all until that afternoon and now has a page of her own. The tree's eleventh is Edward, who is not in the will. That is a one-for-one substitution, not an oversight.
He has not been quietly deleted. No other father has been found for him, and a man detached from a wrong family and attached to nothing is a worse record than a man shown where he has always been shown with the contradiction written on his page. So he stays, his parents carry no proof mark, and the note on his page says what the will says. A document you go looking for in order to confirm something can just as easily take it away.
Eleven children named, clause by clause — Theodorick, Charles H., Elizabeth B., Branch, Henry, John B., Elisha, Liberty B., Martha, Nancy, Tabitha H. No Edward.
Nottoway County Will Book 2, pages 441–444; written 27 April 1808, proved that September. Read by eye on the manuscript, all four pages.
The machine transcription of these pages reads the testator's own name as “I Henry Lou thes Senr”.
A mangled name and an absent name return the identical zero. That is why the pages had to be read rather than searched.
Eleven in the will. Eleven in the tree. Ten of them the same. The will's eleventh is Nancy, who was not in this tree; the tree's eleventh is Edward, who is not in the will.
A one-for-one substitution. This is what separates the finding from an argument from silence.
“a saddle and Bridle which he has received & nothing else” — the entire inheritance of one son, spelled out rather than passed over.
A will can omit a living child. But a testator careful enough to disinherit one son by name, and to provide for any child who loses property before coming of age, does not silently forget another. An argument, not a proof — which is why the link is marked unproven rather than disproved.
The mother's own will, seventeen years later and in a different clerk's hand, also omits him.
Corroborative and weak on its own: it disposes of household goods, names only four children and a granddaughter, and leaves out five of the others too.
✦ Edward Bass Fowlkes (1785–1853) · ✦ Henry Bass Fowlkes I (1750–1808) · Nancy Foulkes