A man of education

 

FamilySearch. Fayette County, KY. 14 Apr 1797.

The indenture above named Thomas Romine as an apprentice to Jesse Guthrie, until Thomas reached the age of 21 years old. Jesse was a well-known teacher in Lexington, Kentucky at the time. The indenture was signed by Levi Todd, grandfather of future First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln. Under the terms of apprenticeship, Jesse would teach young Romine how to read, write and use arithmetic and the "rule of three". He would provide Romine with a new suit of clothes, "common wearing apparel" and pay him a wage of 3 pounds 10 shillings.

Jesse Guthrie published a book titled The American Schoolmaster's Assistant (1804; via HathiTrust), which became an early popular textbook for teaching arithmetic. This was one of the first school books published in Kentucky.

Guthrie. 1804.

Lexington Independent Gazetteer. 24 Jan 1804.

The initial publication came with recommendations from the President of Transylvania University in Lexington and several Transylvania professors, along with the Secretary of State of Kentucky, giving some indication of the kind of circles of society that Guthrie worked in during the time.

Indep. Gazetteer. 1804.

In late 1822, Jesse Guthrie and family moved from Harrison County, Kentucky to Posey County, Indiana, a developing trading area on the Ohio River. He died around September 1823 (the administrators of his estate filed papers with the Posey County Court on 15 September 1823). A final settlement of his estate in 1840 included a disposition of his extensive library, which deserves its own post.

Coleman v Mattox, 1824

 

Lexington Weekly Press, 31 Jan 1825.

The notice above was published in the Lexington (Kentucky) Weekly Press between 6 December 1824 and 31 January 1825, as part of a chancery case filed in Harrison County Court on 15 January 1824. The case named Priscilla Guthrie, widow of Jesse Guthrie, and his children Polly (Guthrie) Martin, Priscilla Guthrie, Reuben Guthrie, Rebecca Guthrie, Maryann Guthrie and Suckeyann (Susan Ann) Guthrie. The original action from Harrison County is available online via FamilySearch Labs' Full Text Search.

Jesse Guthrie has been appearing for a while in Ancestry's ThruLines for my Dad's results as a possible 4th-great-grandfather, which would place him as a 5th-great-grandfather to me. There's a quite bit more to sort through. I'm starting with the Coleman v Mattox case and looking at land deeds involving Jesse and Priscilla in Kentucky. Some of the land in the case had been conveyed previously by Jesse and Priscilla to Thomas Morrow on 10 November 1822 (see below):

FamilySearch. Harrison County, KY. 1822.

James Coleman brought his action against Edmond Mattox and the Guthrie survivors as Jesse had at one time held a bond for a conveyance for 130 acres in Harrison County. Jesse, Priscilla and their family moved to Indiana in late 1822 or early 1823, where Jesse died in September 1823. There was a survey error in the acreage of the plot, and Coleman claims the amount of the extra land conveyed to Mattox, Thomas Morrow and others is owed to him.

Coleman v Mattox complaint. 1824.

It looks like a representative of the Guthries answered that they have no further property in Kentucky, and were non-residents of the state. They said if Mattox owed a debt to Guthrie for the extra land the debt should be paid over to Coleman. Priscilla and the heirs of Jesse were dismissed from the case (see the order from the Harrison County Court here on FamilySearch.

In June 1825, the court dismissed an action brought by Priscilla Guthrie against Edmond Mattox.

One more note - there's quite a lot online from other researchers of Jesse and Priscilla Guthrie. More to follow on this interesting branch.

Slow progress

I'm making slow and steady additions to the Irish in La Salle in the 1850s network. Currently I am just adding people to the network who are listed in the 1850 US Census entry for La Salle County several pages on either side of my 3rd-great-grandmother Bridget. I'm not at the stage of analyzing who these people were or where they came from before arriving in Illinois. I have to keep reminding myself this is more like a 10 mile run than a three mile run, and while I don't want to do either, I definitely have to go slow, try not to trip, and take in a bit of the scenery along the way.

Another challenge is that I'm bouncing around on various research questions, not sticking to one topic. There probably are better ways to make the most of the limited research time, but the hope is I'll uncover some gems and surface interesting stories.

A link to the old country

 

Abraham Storck. Izmir, 1645-1710.

One of my current research questions is to work with the DNA matches descending from Jose Jesus Amado and Gertrudis Palomino (my 5th-great-grandparents). They lived in Sonora, Mexico from roughly 1780s (possibly earlier) to the 1820s (possibly later). The Amado surname is believed to be connected with the Amados of Spain and Portugal, and known to be a converso family of Sephardic origin. We have a number of mystery matches who descend from Dionisio Sanchez in early Los Angeles, and his mother was likely a descendant of the Amados in Sonora.

There's another well known Amado family in Los Angeles, with historic ties to the Sephardic community. This family were among the founders of Sephardic Temple Tifereth Israel in Los Angeles, and have left a huge legacy to UCLA via the Maurice Amado Foundation. I do not know how or even if our Amados connect into this Amado family. The path of their story, as Sephardic Jews who settled in the Ottoman Empire after their expulsion from Spain, hints at a very distant link.

Maurice, his brother Raphael, and their families immigrated to the United States from Smyrna (now Izmir, Türkiye) in the Ottoman Empire about 1903. Maurice was involved in the tobacco business and used the fortunes from that business to found and grow the Sephardic community in Los Angeles.

The father of Maurice and Raphael, Solomon Amado, appears to have been born in Izmir about 1845. It would be interesting to see what records are available in Türkiye, and if any of those records tell the story of the family's journey across the Mediterranean. Izmir has been on my list to visit in the future, and now I have even more reason to try to plan a stop.

I need to watch Trees Cry for Rain: A Sephardic Journey (1989) (see also on Vimeo), a documentary film about Rachel Amado Bortnick and her Sephardic roots from Izmir.

Another network example

 

Ancestry Network. April 2025.

Following yesterday's post testing Ancestry's new Networks tool on my Thornhill case, I have started to build out a network based on Irish immigrants in La Salle County, Illinois in the 1850 US Census. My hope is this will identify research leads on the family of my 3rd-great-grandmother Bridget. Last June I looked at Timothy Hanley, a neighbor of Bridget in the 1850 Census entry. Using the Networks tool, I've added him and his brother Thomas Hanley, and am continuing to build out the network with other Irish immigrant neighbors. I suspect several of them will be from Roscommon and Longford in Ireland.

In addition, I created a custom tag "Irish in La Salle Network" on each entry so that anyone who stumbles on these people in my tree will see that I've put them in a network. Networks are still in Beta and not visible to others.

This is still work in progress.