{"id":6928,"date":"2018-07-12T15:08:36","date_gmt":"2018-07-12T19:08:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/?p=6928"},"modified":"2018-10-20T08:06:37","modified_gmt":"2018-10-20T12:06:37","slug":"a-black-sheep-52-ancestors-26","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/a-black-sheep-52-ancestors-26\/","title":{"rendered":"A Black Sheep – 52 Ancestors # 26"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I first read the theme for week 26, Black Sheep, I thought I knew who I would write about and why.\u00a0 Then I started thinking about the meaning of a black sheep.\u00a0 I saw in my mind\u2019s eye an image of a flock of sheep with one black one in the middle somewhere.\u00a0 Or a page filled with white rabbits with one black one.\u00a0 Noticeable but not necessarily a bad thing.\u00a0 As wikipedia<\/a> notes in English it means an odd or disreputable member of a group.\u00a0 It came from raising sheep, who have a recessive gene that occasionally results in a black sheep being born rather than the usual white color.\u00a0 These not only stand out in a flock of white sheep, but the wool was traditionally held to be less valuable.<\/p>\n

The term has come, often, to carry the connotation of more than odd or disreputable but also behaving badly or even illegally.\u00a0 Like a horse-thief or a cattle-rustler, or a riverboat gambler.\u00a0 Unlikely and even unable to behave in line with the rest of the community in a negative way.\u00a0 The ancestor I thought of is the closest I have yet found to a black sheep in my family lines, however, his bad behavior was seemingly limited to a single episode.<\/p>\n

John Salts or Salt was born in about 1783 in Virginia to my emigrant Salt ancestors.\u00a0 The family migrated to Kentucky in about 1790-1793, and John\u2019s older sisters started marrying soon thereafter.\u00a0 John and his brother Edward were younger and didn\u2019t marry until 1809 or after.\u00a0 The interesting part of John\u2019s tale involves his carrying on a relationship with two young women at about the same time and having been called before the law by the one he didn\u2019t marry.<\/p>\n

John may have spent some of his younger days as a school teacher before turning to farming and this may have been how he came to spend time with more than one young woman.\u00a0 At any rate, the only hard evidence is comprised of two documents filed in the Bracken County, Kentucky court and duly recorded.\u00a0 The first, dated 4 Jan 1810 by John Salts acknowledges that for \u201cnear two years\u201d he addressed Miss Nancy Wiley that they were engaged and then he used the engagement to persuade her to yield to his embraces.\u00a0 He goes on to say she is a girl of virtue and putting it in writing before the court is the only reparation he can then make for the injury he did her.<\/p>\n

The next day, 5 Jan 1810, Nancy Wiley released, acquitted, and discharged John Salts from all actions or causes of action arising to her from a breach of a marriage contract.\u00a0 She said that he had satisfied her as far as it remained in his power to do so.\u00a0 And that seems to have been that.<\/p>\n

The interesting detail is that John Salt reportedly had a marriage bond to marry Nancy Donovan dated 25 Nov 1809 (says a Salt cousin and researcher, although I do not have a copy of it myself).\u00a0 And by September 1810 they had a baby girl.\u00a0 So obviously John did not intend to marry Nancy Wiley after November 1809, and had to make this as right as he could soon after he married the other Nancy.<\/p>\n

A book1<\/a><\/sup> about the town in Kentucky where John lived at the time detailed the situation this way:\u00a0 \u201cThere were, as it turned out, procreative acts being performed without the sanction of either church or society.\u00a0 On at least one occasion, a Bracken County male made a public apology for seducing a young lady under false pretenses.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cNow that Salts had decided not to marry Nancy, he wanted the community to know that he nonetheless regarded her as a virtuous young lady.\u201d\u00a0 The author goes on to opine that it was not at all unusual for sexual relations to occur outside marriage and that there was apparently little social stigma associated with such behavior.\u00a0 Apparently the proportion of brides marrying after becoming pregnant increased during the late colonial period and early days of the new country.<\/p>\n

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  1. \u00a0 Algier, Keith.\u00a0 Ante-Bellum Augusta: The Life and Times of a Kentucky River Town.\u00a0 Bracken County Historical Society.\u00a0 Brooksville, Kentucky, 2002, pg 58. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    When I first read the theme for week 26, Black Sheep, I thought I knew who I would write about and why.\u00a0 Then I started thinking about the meaning of a black sheep.\u00a0 I saw in my mind\u2019s eye an …<\/p>\n

    A Black Sheep – 52 Ancestors # 26<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[378,394,104],"class_list":["post-6928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-misc","tag-52-ancestors","tag-bracken-county-kentucky","tag-salt-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6928"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7069,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6928\/revisions\/7069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogygals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}