My Search

I began my climb up the family tree in 1986. It was a school project for Texas History, assigned during the sesquicentennial celebration of Texas Independence from Mexico in 1836. My resources were few. All I had to go on was a box of old family photos and the recollections of my great-grandfather. That’s where I got my start.

My father, Bryan Lynn Stafford, was born in 1948, the son of Francis Lynn Stafford (1929-2011) and Olga June Beighle. Lynn was the son of Lewis Jackson Stafford (1910-1989) and Charlene Fayblane Guynes. Jack was the son of Francis Marion Stafford (1876-1956). There are many pictures of my dad with all of these men. He knew his great-grandfather and remembered him well. Frank was the son of James William Stafford (1843-1931) and Katherine Hartman, whom my great-grandfather Jack knew. We had pictures of all of them, the earliest of which dated to 1863-an official group photo of Company E, 129th Illinois Infantry, in which James enlisted during the Civil War. Another was a tintype of James and Katherine Stafford on the day of their wedding.

The Staffords had been a close-knit family. Dad had many memories of his great-grandfather’s brothers and sisters who would often come to the farm at Shamrock, Texas, for family gatherings. We wrote to one of Jack’s cousins, James Stafford of Vernon, who sent us information on his grandfather James Stafford and all of James & Kate’s children.

In the summer of 1986, Dad and I took a road trip to explore our Stafford roots. We went to Spur, Texas, first, where Aunt Sallie Stafford Harrington had operated a boarding house. We visited the Harrington graves in the Spur Cemetery, and in the Dickens County Court House we made our first official discovery: The death certificate of James W. Stafford. It contained a lot of biographical information, most of which we found out later was erroneous. It listed his birth date as 1844, his birthplace as Wisconsin, and his father as William Stafford.

Our next stop was Vernon, Texas, where we stayed a couple of days with cousin James Stafford and his wife Geneva. James drove us to Fargo, Texas, where his grandparents had settled in 1883. We saw the house where they raised their family, and also visited the Fargo cemetery where many of the Staffords are buried. Dad and I spent a day at the courthouse looking at marriage & death records. James also went through an old trunk filled with papers and pictures with us, where we made our second and third discoveries: the copy of a pencil-drawn portrait of "W Stafford", identified by James as his great-grandfather William Stafford who he thought was born in Ireland, and a poor copy of a picture of his grandfather James with his siblings.

That was the first time I heard the story of James Stafford’s missing brother. In the 1880s, James had a brother who disappeared "out west", leaving a family behind in Iowa, and was never heard from again.

Before we left, cousin James gave us two more items of interest, photocopies of two original documents in his possession: the marriage license of James and Katherine Hartman Stafford, dated 1871, and James’ discharge from the Union Army in 1865. The biographical information he gave the Army lent confusion rather than clarity, giving his age as 19 and his birthplace as Hampshire, Virginia.

Upon returning home, I immediately searched for Hampshire, Virginia. Imagine my disappointment when I couldn’t find it; it was several months before I found out Hampshire County was in West Virginia, and several years before I figured out the part of the county I should be interested in was actually now Mineral County, West Virginia.

I kept up a correspondence with James and Geneva, and at some point asked them about other cousins. They gave me several addresses, but the one who actually responded to my inquiries was T.E. (Ted) Stafford Jr. of Fort Worth. For 10 years, I corresponded and visited Ted, and gathered from him a wealth of information about the Staffords.

The first thing I learned from him was that James Stafford’s father was not William but George Washington Stafford; again not entirely accurate, but close enough for me to be able to continue my research. Our ancestor’s name was simply Washington, and there is no indication in any record that I have seen, that the name George was in any way applicable to him. When Ted was a young man, perhaps in the 1940s or ‘50s, he struck up a correspondence with his grandfather James Stafford’s youngest sister, Mazie Stafford McNeil. The letters were long gone, but Ted’s memory of them was intact. Among the details that Ted relayed to me were these: Washington Stafford was either the son or grandson of our immigrant ancestor, an unnamed man who had come to this country from Dublin, Ireland, as a Methodist minister, joined the Revolution, and then settled in Virginia.

In 1991, I took a trip to Washington, D.C., to participate in the National Young Leaders Conference. One day of the conference was designated for site seeing, but while everyone else went to the Smithsonian, I directed myself to the National Archives-not just to see the Declaration of Independence, but also to explore some genealogical records. I looked at my first census index, found my first microfilm, and used my first microfilm reader. I located the family of Washington Stafford in Livingston County in 1870 (intentionally) and the family of Lewis Hartman (unintentionally). I also looked at census records for Hampshire County, Virginia, where I added the names Joseph, Richard, and Wesley to my notes. I didn’t know how they related, but I figured they must.

In those years, I didn’t really understand how the census worked, or how to do real genealogy documentation. I made a lot of assumptions and imaginary connections. Because the name Joseph seemed connected to our family, I latched onto the Norfolk County Staffords because there were several Joseph Staffords in the census records for that county. And I kept looking.

Something else that happened about that time was the publication of one of those infamous family books claiming to give you important information about your genealogy: Sharon Taylor’s World Book of Staffords. I think we ended up with three different variations of that publication. Of course, what we all know now is that they were general "how-to" books about researching your genealogy, but they included the names and addresses of all Staffords everywhere who had a listing in the telephone directory. I wrote to several of them, all to no avail. One item of interest I found in them was the name John Stafford on a list of immigrant ministers from Ireland, age 16 and arriving in Baltimore in 1775.

Eventually I got the hang of what I was doing. I was able to trace Washington Stafford in the census: 1900, 1880, 1870, and 1860 in Livingston County, Illinois, and 1850 in Coshocton County, Ohio, where he was living near a Francis A. Stafford. One more new name to write down without knowing how he related. In Coshocton County, Francis and a Richard Stafford seemed to have been early pioneers, and I surmised that they might be Washington’s uncles.

In the mid-1990s, I began visiting the Special Collections Library in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a repository of records devoted to genealogical research. There I found many of the books that have been published containing transcriptions of the records of Hampshire County, Virginia. In one of them I found an abstract for the will of Catharine Stafford, dated 1810, naming her children Washington and Sarah, and witnessed by John F. & Joseph S. Stafford-giving me a possible sibling group. This Washington was too old to be my ancestor Washington, and too young to be his father, so I began to speculate that he was an uncle. I also found out that many Hampshire county residents actually got married in across the Potomac River in Cumberland, Allegany County, Maryland; marriage records for Allegany County showed Francis, Richard, John, Joseph and Washington-my Washington Stafford this time, getting married in 1842 to Elizabeth Licklighter. Land records for Hampshire County proved that Catharine Stafford was the widow of a Richard Stafford who bought several large tracts of land in Hampshire County in the 1780s and ’90s.

But I was still looking for a connection to any John Stafford I could find who was a Methodist minister and Revolutionary War soldier.

I sent some of the family history to Hallene Stafford Downing, the youngest of the Stafford cousins to my great-grandfather. She passed the information on to her sister Lucy Stafford Killette, who had been raised by her grandparents James and Katherine Stafford in Fargo. Lucy was very helpful with information on her own immediate family, and also added one bit of confirmation to my research: Her great-grandfather Washington Stafford was the son of Joseph Stafford, the same man I had found in the records for Hampshire County Virginia, and Allegany County, Maryland.

Shortly after making contact with Lucy, her nephew Troy Stafford of Riverton, Wyoming, called me. Recently retired from ranching, he had taken up genealogy as a hobby. We had several phone conversations and corresponded some. By then I was collecting information on every related Stafford I could find. I had put together a list of possible siblings, children of the immigrant that I was still calling John, which included Elizabeth, John, Francis, Richard, Joseph, Westley, Washington, and Sarah. Troy’s focus was on finding our Stafford ancestry, especially our connection to the historical Stafford family of medieval British nobility. His research took him to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, where he commissioned some assistance from one of the genealogists there. The conclusion they reached, based upon the records they found, was that Washington was the son of Joseph Stafford and Elizabeth Myer of Hampshire County, and that Joseph was the son of Richard and Catharine Stafford. Richard Stafford was one of the founding trustees of Fort Ashby in what is now Mineral County, West Virginia, in 1787. Unfortunately, our collaboration did not continue, and I was never able to see the research that had been done. It would be a few more years before I could compile enough information to prove that conclusion was true.

In the late 1990s, I came across information submitted online by John I. Funk regarding the descendants of Francis Asbury Stafford of Coshocton County, Ohio. John was deceased, but I was able to make contact with his sister Ruth Funk McKee who still lived in Coshocton. John had compiled a book on his ancestry and related families, which included a lot of information about the Staffords. His research had never been able to identify Francis A. Stafford’s origins, so Ruth was very pleased to have my research connecting him to Hampshire County, Virginia. Ruth sent me a copy of John’s book, as well as updated information on her immediate family, and copies of several pictures, including a faded portrait of Francis Asbury Stafford. Using John’s work on the Staffords to trace descendants of Francis Stafford’s daughters, I eventually obtained the Bible records for Francis and Eliza Stafford showing that his oldest children were born in Winchester, Virginia.

By 2003, I had made the conscious decision to trace all of the descendants of our immigrant ancestor, whom I assumed to be Richard Stafford. I was still operating under the assumption that he was a Methodist minister who arrived in the colonies in time to join the Revolution. In that quest, I located a family of Shubkagels in the Kansas City area who descended from Lydia Stafford Shubkagel, a sister to my great-great-great grandfather James Stafford. Someone was able to direct me to Wilma Shubkagel Huff, youngest of Lydia’s grandchildren. Wilma and her niece Bernita Barney Chance had done considerable research on our Stafford forbears; they had a wealth of family pictures, including multiple photos of Washington and Elizabeth Stafford and their children; they had compiled a book on the descendants of John & Lydia Stafford Shubkagel; and they shared with me the biography of Washington Stafford from The History of Livingston County, which turned out to the be original source of the pencil-drawn portrait I had been given nearly 20 years earlier!

According to that biography, Washington was one of eight children born to Joseph and Elizabeth Myer Stafford. It also said that Joseph and Elizabeth were natives of Hampshire County, and that Joseph was the son of John Stafford, "a native of Belfast, Ireland, whence he was brought to this country as a soldier by the British during the Revolutionary War. He was taken prisoner by the soldiers under Gen. Washington. He afterward married, and located in Hampshire County, Va., where he reared a family of eight children, all of whom have since passed away." Bernita Chance claimed to have documentation from British authorities regarding John Stafford that proved he was arrested in London and forced into the military, then shipped to America to put down the Revolution. Again, those are records I never saw.

In 2007, I spent five weeks in West Virginia, Ohio, and Indiana, visiting court houses, cemeteries, and libraries in Winchester, Frederick County, Virginia; Romney, Hampshire County, West Virginia; Fort Ashby and Keyser, Mineral County, West Virginia; Fairmont, Marion County, West Virginia; Cumberland, Allegany County, Maryland; Coshocton, Coshocton County, Ohio; Zanesville, Muskingum, Ohio; Warsaw, Kosciusko County, Indiana; and Columbia City, Whitley County, Indiana. I gathered a lot of family information, but three important finds are worth mentioning. In Romney, I was able to hold and examine the original Last Will and Testament of Catharine Stafford, dated 1810. I was also able to copy from microfilm the Appraisal and Settlement of Richard Stafford’s estate, dated 1808, which gave me new Stafford names to consider.

But in Winchester, Virginia, I found the most valuable document of all. In 1820, my ancestor Joseph S. Stafford filed a lawsuit in Chancery Court against his brothers and sisters, children of Richard and Catharine Stafford, and in sworn statements witnessed by others who knew the facts, he listed his siblings in the order of their birth. Those court papers finally gave me a full picture of the original Stafford household that hailed from the Blue Ridge country of Hampshire County, Virginia. Richard and Catharine’s children were: William J. Stafford, Francis A. Stafford, Richard A. Stafford, John F. Stafford, James B. Stafford, Joseph S. Stafford, Wesley Stafford, Washington Stafford (whose death in early childhood was the catalyst for the lawsuit), and Sarah (or Sally) Stafford. Joseph Stafford’s testimony was that his siblings were all still alive in 1823, and that none of them were living in the State of Virginia.

I corresponded with Richard Emberson Stafford in 2011, a descendant of Francis Asbury Stafford of Coshocton County, Ohio, always claimed they were from Wexford County, Ireland. It turns out, the largest concentration of Staffords in Ireland is in Wexford County, where a younger son of the noble Stafford family of Buckinghamshire settled in the 1300s.

One final discovery remained to be made. Late one night in the summer of 2011, I was googling random combinations of Stafford names and found a genealogical website that contained full names and dates of birth for Richard and Catharine’s children; marriage dates for Richard and Catharine and some of their children; Catharine’s maiden name; the death dates of Richard and Catharine and some of their children; and names and dates of birth for some of their grandchildren. After 25 years of research and correspondence with many Stafford descendants, I can safely say that I was the only researcher who had ever managed to connect all of the children to those parents and come up with a fairly complete history. Here was information, submitted by Rita Stafford Fawcett of Winter Park, Florida, that was more complete than anything I had ever seen! I managed to contact Rita Fawcett, who informed me that she had in her possession the Family Bible of Richard and Catharine Stafford, handed down in her family for eight generations.

In 2015, I went to Florida. I met Rita and four of her siblings. I held the Family Bible in my hands, purchased by Richard Stafford in 1804 and containing the records of his family presumably written in his own hand. Though Rita had already sent me copies, I took pictures of the Bible and its record pages. And in further records written in a later Family Bible, Rita’s mother recorded this piece of information: Richard Stafford was a Methodist minister.

My search for my immigrant ancestor is complete, and my search for his ancestors is barely begun. My quest for his descendants has identified over 10,000 descendants from five of his eight children who lived to adulthood, and it is ongoing. I don’t know that it can ever be completely finished. But today I can say with certainty that I am

Casey Lynn Stafford (born in 1972), the only son of
Bryan Lynn Stafford (1948-1998), the only son of
Francis Lynn Stafford (1929-2011), the oldest son of
Lewis Jackson Stafford (1910-1989), the only son of
Francis Marion Stafford (1876-1956), the oldest son of
James William Stafford (1843-1931), the oldest son of
Washington Stafford (1820-1909), the oldest son of
Joseph Stone Stafford (1790-1850s), the sixth son of
Richard Stafford (c1755-1808), who
Was probably born in Wexford County, Ireland,
came to this country in 1776 as a British soldier,
Was captured by the Continental Army and released into the wilderness of Northern Virginia,
Married Catharine Brobeker in 1780,
Lived for a time near Winchester, Virginia,
Before moving his family to Hampshire County, Virginia,
Settling in what is now Mineral County, West Virginia, about 1785.

Casey L. Stafford

Lovelady, Texas

25 March 2016

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