The story
The road this branch travels is a short one and it runs clean. Benedict Crouch was born about 1800 at Jefferson, in Greene County, in Pennsylvania's southwestern corner, and died in 1882 across the line at Fallowfield. His son William T. Crouch, born at Beallsville in 1830, married Josephine Allen of Maryland and made the long move to Wise County, Texas. The next William — William Benedict Crouch — was born at Arkadelphia, in Arkansas, and died at Nacogdoches. And his daughter Hal Christine Crouch was born in 1891 on the Arkansas side of Texarkana, a single town with a state line down the middle, four years and one state apart from the Temple man she married on Christmas Eve, 1910, on her side of the line.
Above Benedict there is nothing. No parents, no county of origin, no record yet found that names his father or his mother — which is an odd silence for a man who is otherwise easy to find. Washington County's books hold him twenty-two times over: deeds, a will proved the year he died, an estate file. His father has a name, Elijah, and the name comes from exactly one place. In 1893 a subscription county history printed a sketch of the family supplied by Benedict's own son, and it is there that Elijah appears, with four children — Elisha, Benedict, Stephen and Mary. That is the whole of it. The county's deeds, wills, estate files, court dockets and tax lists contain no Elijah Crouch at all, and neither does Crumrine's 1882 history of the same county, which knows this family well enough to name four of Benedict's sons. A man attested by one grandson's memory and by no paper he ever signed is a name, not yet a father.
There is a second Elijah Crouch, and he is the reason this branch runs deeper in other people's trees than it does here — Find A Grave carries the same join. He was born in Halifax County, Virginia in 1763, married Mary Ellis, and died in Tennessee in 1825; the two of them lie together at Sinking Creek Baptist Church in Carter County, where she outlived him by twenty-four years. What carries him to Pennsylvania is one word. He married in Washington County — Washington County, Tennessee. Read as Washington County, Pennsylvania, that single word moves a family six hundred miles, and everything above it comes along: an attachment to Nathan Crouch of Cecil County, Maryland, and through Nathan to a documented Eastern Shore family reaching back to the grand jurors of Wicomico Hundred in the 1690s. The seam shows if you look at the children. As assembled, one woman bore nine of them across four states — Tennessee, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Illinois — over twenty-nine years, and eight of the nine carry no citation of any kind. That is not one family. The 1893 sketch names four of the nine, and the two of those with recorded birthplaces are the two born in Pennsylvania; the five it does not name are the ones born in Tennessee, Maryland and Illinois.
The Maryland half of it can be tested, and it fails on the single document whose legal function was to state it. When a man dies without a will, the court settling his estate must account for every child, including a child who died before him, whose share passes by name to that child's own children. In June 1838 the orphans' court of Cecil County, Maryland passed the final account of Nathan Crouch's estate and struck the distribution of what was left. It names seven children: Amelia, who married John Scott; Mary, who married Sampson Lum; Rosanne, who married John George; Margaret and Elizabeth, who both married a Joshua Hyland; Rachel, who married Humphry Riddle; and John F. Crouch, the son who administered the estate. Margaret and Rachel were already dead. The court named them anyway and sent their shares down to their five children between them. There is no Elijah on the list, and no issue of an Elijah.
The scan of that page is poor, so I did not see him there would not be enough on its own — but the money settles it without reading the list at all. The balance in the administrator's hands was $122.39½ and a share was $17.48½, which is seven shares exactly: six would have left money in the estate and eight would have overdrawn it. Seven names were written and seven shares were paid, so nobody was lost in the ink. A repair was available here, and it was declined — invent a Pennsylvania Elijah to hold the join. Adding a person in order to carry a name is the move that built the graft in the first place.
So the branch stops at Benedict, and the oldest people in this room are not Crouches at all. They are the Edwardses, who arrive through Hallie — Harriet Edwards, who married William Benedict Crouch — and who travelled a well-worn road of their own from Louisa County, Virginia to Robertson County, Tennessee and on into southwestern Arkansas, back to a William Edwards born about 1752. As for the Eastern Shore Crouches, and the 1735 estate account that gave Anne Toadvine a father and four named siblings: they are real people, those are real documents, and Anne Toadvine's own parentage is as firmly proven as anything in this tree. They simply belong to somebody else's family.