William Grimes, Part 2...and Some Thead Men

I had a most interesting (but brief) conversation with Ms. Regina Mason recently. As people tend to do so much these days, we "talked" via Facebook...not entirely a satisfactory communication, but it was about all I could manage at the time. Words are sometimes easier to write than to say.

Ms. Mason is the great-great-great-granddaughter of William Grimes, who wrote what most scholars view at the first narrative of an ex-slave. And, as I said in my previous post, Coleman Thead was overseer for a time at Montpelier plantation in Virginia, where William Grimes was a slave.

Page 36, Life of William Grimes

Ms. Mason, her husband Brandon, and I exchanged several messages for a couple of days, commenting on how the stain of slavery still affects American life. Like Ms. Mason--who wanted to trace her family lines and wept on discovering that her three-times-great-grandfather was William Grimes--I also had searched for a long time to find something else, anything else, about this man named Coleman Thead. As I told Gina, she experienced the high of elation--I sank to the nadir.

Though I am not a Thead by birth, this stunning piece of history found by Janis Wilson (who IS a Thead by blood) made me think these past weeks an awful lot about slavery. I bought the 2008 edition of the Life of William Grimes and read it. In the blog I'm doing for my own side of the family (allthingsalawine.blogspot.com), I talked about slavery in regards to a particular ancestor--no new revelation to me, finding it there.

But, as my daughter pointed out, it's one thing to know intellectually that your ancestors were slave-owners, Indian-fighters, or whatever, but quite another thing altogether when you find evidence of what they actually DID to people. In my own case, I had to put this book down for a while when I read that different owners would force their slaves to take different names--John, or Solomon, or what-have-you--for the owners' convenience...say, for instance, if they already had a slave by a certain name. That was just too stunning for me to process for a day or two.

I still am thinking about what this means and how we move forward from our collective pasts. Ms. Mason and I promised to stay in touch with each other.
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In the meantime, we're going to look at a couple of other Thead things. Janis discovered this tidbit in a London newspaper dated 1745:

One of my daughters found the "s's" (which look like fancy "f's") hard to decipher in this old print. To help you out, take a look at this "snip" from the original:

It says, "...touching the Ground, with his toes worked in the Earth so deep, as was surprizing to those that saw it."

Now, further down, it says that one Richard Thead was "convicted for a Robbery on the Highway." In the second half of the paragraph, however, the notice states that "the two former were reprieved"--meaning that James Goswell and Richard got off, for some reason; whereas Jonathan Byerly received "Sentence of Death" for breaking into the house of Thomas Shore and stealing several things. Whew. 

This was in August of 1745, you see above, and I'd LOVE to know if this particular Richard Thead was the one who ended up in Virginia later. If so, he was most likely NOT the son of the Thomas who "left England in 1733 on the Caesar, an emigrant in bondage." The Richard whose identity tantalizes me--the one in Virginia--died at some time in 1783 and had his "estate" inventoried, as I showed in the first post of this blog. But perhaps that Richard WAS the same as this fellow in England, some thirty-three years earlier; and perhaps, having been "reprieved" from the crime of "Robbery on the Highway," he hightailed it out of England and headed to the Colonies.

Well, we'll let Janis find another ancestor, perhaps!

She also located tax rolls from 1835, -36, -37, -38, and -39. Here's the 1835 one:

1835 Tax Roll, Clark County, MS

Before we talk about the Civil War in the next post, and what happened to the Theads in Mississippi during those years, here's a copy-of-a-copy of the portrait presumed to be of Columbus Alexander Thead, of Silas (or Bladon Springs--they're close), Alabama. People from Alabama tell me he was known as "Lum", instead of "Alex," which was his father's name, you recall. He didn't live long after the War.

Columbus "Lum" Alexander Thead

Janis found one more intriguing bit in a newspaper in Miles City, Montana (Montana!), in 1912. Does anybody have an idea who this musician could've been?

Ælfwine