Currituck County is the far northeastern County in North Carolina, sharing the Great Dismal Swamp with Virginia in the north of the County and with the northern-most edge of the Outer Banks on the coastal side. The County first had European settlers in the latter half of the 1600’s, when it was part of the original Albemarle Precinct. The name is Currituck is said to have come from "Coratank", an Indian word for wild geese -- and spellings in early records range from Currytuck to Coratuck, among other variations.
In the early 1830’s, a number of Currituck County families made their way to Fountain County Indiana in two small migrations - one in 1832 and the second in 1835. Among them were my ancestors, the Taylors – Charles and his sister Catherine and her husband William Doxey. The brother of Catherine and Charles - Reuben Taylor - died in this period and his newly married wife - a widow within the first year of their marriage - traveled to Fountain County with their infant daughter Charlotte. Also in the same migration were members of the Whitehall, Poyner, Woodhouse, Voliva, and Hunnings families.
My great-great grandmother, Caroline Taylor [Clawson Foreman] was a young child and likely travelled with her family on this trip. She was the daughter of Reuben Taylor, by a marriage prior to his with Eliza Brumsey, who Reuben married before they left Currituck. His widow, by then Eliza Carson after her remarriage to James Carson, left for Illinois after a decade in Fountain County. Caroline was likely raised by her uncle Charles Taylor and his wife Cortney Nicholson. For a long period in my research, I thought she was their daughter.
I have worked over the last thirty years to establish her Currituck ancestry. As a result, I have done extensive research on what I thought were her Currituck ancestral lines – the surnames of Taylor, Nicholson, Doxey, Roberts, Cowell, Miller, Thompson, and Whitehurst. I have long text documents of most pre-civil war public references for persons in Currituck County with each of these surnames - text documents I am happy to share with interested researchers.
In 1995 I came upon the 1885 death record of Caroline’s possible brother Albertis Taylor in Fountain County. That record lists his mother’s surname as Doxey - the handwritten note from the Fountain-Warren health department is the header on this page. At the same time, I requested from the department the death certificate for Caroline Taylor. They responded that they did not have one on file.
Many years into my research, I found the death certificate for Caroline Taylor Clawson Foreman - it was on file with the state not the local department - and Reuben Taylor was identified as her father. That certificate is the header on the accompanying page about Josiah Nicholson.
I am now focusing my research on the Taylors and the Doxeys to see what I can establish. It’s clear that the original Taylor who appeared in Currituck County in the 1690’s, and who was married to a Nicholson, is our ancestor. Yet while the original books of deeds exist for the earliest decades of Currituck County’s organization, records for a period following are gone – and there is a link missing in how to connect the original Taylors with the subsequent generations.
There was also a courthouse fire in Currituck County in 1842 in which all marriage records prior to that period seem to have been lost. However, deed records and scattered probate account records survive.
In addition to trying to link my Reuben Taylor to an age-appropriate member of the Doxey families, I have surmised that the Taylor ancestry is from the original Currituck Taylor. The late Ruth Rickert, a Taylor descendent with whom I did some research together – had a working chart trying to link the various Taylors through those pre-civil war years. She also authored a brief work on her Taylor ancestry. I will try to continue her work.
When I thought Caroline was the daughter of Charles Taylor and Cortney Nicholson – I was drawn to Cortney’s father, Josiah Nicholson. She had not originally been linked clearly to Josiah. I worked to establish that relationship from Currituck records and document his life story. I authored a biography of him in the Currituck Families 2005 book. I have posted that article on this page - with the one correction that I do not descend from him. However, I was able to prove that she was his daughter, proof that is validated from the letters described just below.
I have posted a page on the possible ancestry of Caroline, and another page with the research of the late Ruth Rickert on the Taylor ancestry in Currituck County - bot her book, and a chart of possible connections between the earliest Taylors.
There are a series of letters that were sent from Currituck County to Fountain County and west from 1835 to 1866. Transcripts of those letters are in the North Carolina Archives. Another page on this site posts those letters, along with the surviving stories of the arduous trip from Currituck County to Indiana. I also, for the first time, indexed those letters - which contain many marriage and death notices of people in Currituck from the time records were scarce. It is a valuable research tool for Currituck researchers.
I hope to post other pages over time – addressing the research questions raised in this introduction – and welcome any inquiries on these families until I can get that done.
