She has no birth year, no birthplace, no maiden name, and no gravestone I know of. For most of her life the records of Wilkes County, Georgia do not admit she exists. Then, in March 1807, dying, she dictated a will — and for one document she is the only voice in the room. She is my fifth-great-grandmother.
Women of her time and place enter the record at the pleasure of other people’s paperwork. A wife in post-Revolutionary Georgia could not ordinarily hold property while her husband lived; she surfaces, if at all, in his deeds and his estate. So nearly everything I know about Anastasia Catching’s life is back-shadow from men’s documents — until the end, when the property was finally hers, and the clerk had to take down what she said.
Here is what she said, in the spelling the paper actually carries:
“i anestacy Catching of the County of Wilks…”
And then she named her household, child by child: “my Loving son Mereidith Catchings” … “my son isack Wilkey” … “my son Richard madden” … “my Loving Daughter nancy mulkhey” … “my Daughter Katy fletcher” … “my grand son Richard trale.”
Read that list again, because it is a family history in six names. Catchings, Wilkes, Madden — her children carry three different surnames, which is how you know, with no marriage record surviving, that she had been married before she married my ancestor Meredith Catching Sr. She came to that marriage a widow with sons, and the blended household she ran shows up nowhere in the county’s records except here, in her own accounting of who her people were. Her husband had gone first: in July 1798, dying, Meredith deeded nine enslaved people to his son and was gone within days, leaving no will at all. Anastasia outlived him by nine years and did what he had not — she put the family on paper.
She signed it on the 6th of March, 1807 — signed it the only way she could:
“her — unestacy Catchings — mark”
She could not write her own name. The clerk wrote it around her X, and even he couldn’t settle the spelling — anestacy in the opening line, unestacy at the mark, “Unesstacy” in the county’s own will index. On the 6th of April, one month later, the will was sworn in open court. She died somewhere inside those thirty days; the bracket is all the death date she has.
The estate papers that follow are the ledger of what a middling Georgia plantation was, and I record them the way I record everything else. The appraisement came to $1,030.50, and it names two enslaved people: Mose and Jess. They were valued in the same inventory as the furniture. They are the first enslaved people this branch’s records have given names to, and I write them here so that anyone searching for them can find them.
One more thing, and it is my favorite kind of finding. The family’s published genealogy — a careful, certified-transcription book printed in 1921 — renders her daughter as Nancy “Murphey.” The original will, in the clerk’s own hand, plainly reads “mulkhey.” Somewhere between 1807 and 1921 an editor smoothed a name he didn’t recognize into one he did. It is a small thing, but it is the whole argument for reading originals: even the good books polish. The conflict stays open in my tree, recorded and unresolved, until a record for Nancy herself settles what her married name actually was.
How the line runs down to me
- Anastasia (maiden name unknown; died between 6 March and 6 April 1807, Wilkes County, Georgia) was the wife of Meredith Catching Sr. (c. 1740–1798), of the Revolutionary bounty-land generation of Wilkes County
- Her son Meredith Catchings — “my Loving son” — administered her estate; the line runs through the Meredith who farmed Crow Creek, Franklin County, Tennessee (that junction has one honestly open link, flagged in the tree)
- Down through Benjamin Franklin Catchings Sr. and Jr. to James Thomas Catchings (1882–1944), born in Travis County and farming at Taft in South Texas — my great-great-grandfather
- Anastasia is my fifth-great-grandmother
Anastasia’s own page in the family wing holds the records behind this story: owentemple.com/family/people/i2227.html. The full working tree is on Ancestry — her profile there (sign-in required; Ancestry’s rule, not mine).
Sources
- Will of Anastasia Catching, written (by mark) 6 Mar 1807, sworn in open court 6 Apr 1807, recorded Book G, f. 132, 18 Jan 1808 — Wilkes County, Georgia loose court records, imaged at the Georgia Archives Virtual Vault (collection wccr, id 16800; read on the original images, 3 Aug 2026)
- Estate of Anastasia Catching — administration bond c.t.a. to Meredith Catchings, 6 Jul 1807; appraisement ($1,030.50, naming Mose and Jess); sale bill; legatee receipts (Georgia Archives Virtual Vault loose estate files)
- Wilkes County wills index 1794–1819 (“Catching, Unesstacy | will | 1807”)
- The Catchings and Holliday Families (1921) — the Ordinary’s certified transcription, and the “Murphey” reading the original contradicts