Anyone familiar with the will of Alexander Magruder, the Immigrant, knows that he named six children by two wives: James, Samuel, and John, sons of his first wife, Sarah, followed by Alexander, Nathaniel, and Elizabeth, children of his second wife, Elizabeth. A codicil added shortly before his death in 1677 clarified lines of inheritance, should any of his children die without heirs.

It is likewise my Will that if one or more of my sonns James Samuel & John shall die without issue that then the survivor or survivors of them shall enjoy the whole land left to all the three to them their heirs for Ever. And if one or more of my younger Children viz Alex Nathaniel Elizabeth shall die without issue, the survivor or survivors of them shall enjoy the land left to all the three to them & their heirs forever.

Land would not be inherited from one set of children to the other unless all the elder or all the younger children died without heirs. It’s pretty clear.

What you may not know is that in recent years some genealogists have asserted that Alexander had a seventh child–a daughter named Isabel (or Isabella) from his first marriage, to Sarah. This has been put forward by Mike Marshall on his generally reliable site, Early Colonial Settlers of Southern Maryland and Virginia’s Northern Neck Counties. Marshall usually includes evidence extracted from historical documents, but he provides none for his claims about Isabel Magruder’s parentage.

Managers of Isabel’s page on WikiTree have accepted Marshall’s claims uncritically–which, again, is atypical. Posts on WikiTree are supposed to include solid sources, not just that somebody said so, even if that somebody is considered a reliable researcher. From Marshall or on WikiTree, all sources for Isabel’s life begin with the 1739 will of her husband, John Henry.

Isabel Magruder is not a new discovery, by the way, only this theory of her parentage is new.

Traditionally, Magruders have identified Isabel as the daughter of Alexander’s eldest son, James, who died in December of 1685. James was born about 1658, making him only about nineteen when his father died. It’s clear in the will that he had not yet “entered upon” his own land and no grandchildren are mentioned in the will. His marriage (to an unidentified woman) is therefore assumed to have taken place after Alexander’s death, placing Isabel’s birth no earlier than 1678, and probably later.

So, what do we actually know about Isabel?

First, before Isabel Magruder married John Henry, she was married to a man named Alexander Lindores, born in Scotland about 1650. They had a child named Alice, who married James Lucas. Lucas children later show up as step-children in the records of John Henry. I have not personally looked into the Lindores marriage, but it seems to be uncontroversial among those who disagree about the rest of Isabel’s life.

Next, we know that when John Henry died, in 1739, his wife was named Isabel and four Magruder brothers, sons of the first Samuel, were intimately involved in settling his affairs. The will was witnessed by the second James Magruder, Ninian and William appraised the personal property, and Samuel (called “Senior” though he was the second one) was one of Henry’s creditors. This establishes a close family connection but does not define it.

No marriage record for John Henry and Isabel (Magruder) Lindores has been discovered. A marriage date of 1684 has been calculated backwards from the birth of John Henry’s oldest daughter, Eleanor, born in 1685. This presents a problem for the daughter-of-James theory, because if Isabel was born in 1678 she certainly did not bear a child seven years later.

This opens the door to imagining that she was Alexander’s daughter and James was her brother. These dates are only a problem, however, if we are certain that all of John Henry’s children were Isabel’s children. Let’s hold that thought while we look at the other theory.

Those who want Isabel to be Alexander’s daughter place her birth in 1667, creating time for her first marriage to come and go before 1684. This theory, too, has a timeline problem, however, because we know that Isabel Henry did not die until after 1768, some say as late as 1775, making her between 101 and 108 years old. This is not likely.

A comment posted on WikiTree challenges the daughter-of-Alexander theory on several grounds, and asserts that John Henry’s children–or at least the eldest three–were children from a previous marriage. This solves the problem quite neatly, leaving Isabel as the daughter of James, the young widow of Alexander Lindores, and the second wife of John Henry.

I like this theory, though no one has found an earlier marriage record for John Henry. So let’s take another tack. Let’s follow the land.

One of the documents cited on WikiTree is a 1767 sale by one of John Henry’s grandsons to John Read Magruder. The deed calls the parcel “part of Alexander.” It was properly called “Alexandria”–such errors are common and the described location exactly matches that of Alexandria, one of Alexander Magruder’s original properties. In his will, Alexander left Alexandria to his sons James and John and their heirs. John died young without heirs and by 1711 his portion belonged to Samuel.

It is logical that if John Henry owned the other part of Alexandria, he acquired it by marrying Isabel Magruder, who had inherited the land from her father, James.

This too is circumstantial, not a smoking gun, but in my mind it bears more weight than unsupported speculation about a seventh child of Alexander the Immigrant. Unless and until more evidence is corralled, I will go on believing that Isabel was the daughter of James and the granddaughter of the Immigrant. And that the four Magruder brothers who helped settle John Henry’s estate were Isabel’s cousins.

If you’ve read this post carefully, you may have noticed that a lot of information is missing. Who did James Magruder marry? What are the sources for Alexander Lindores and his marriage to Isabel Magruder? Is there a record for John Henry’s first marriage? When did John Magruder die? Such is the nature of 17th and 18th century genealogy. We take the fragments, line them up, and compose a theory of the case.

Sue Emerson, I’m afraid, did not line up her facts and do the math. She accepted that Isabel was James’s daughter, assigning a birth date of 1675–when James was about seventeen and Alexander was still alive–but also accepted 1684 as her marriage to John Henry. They married young in those days, but not that young.

Read everything carefully! Keep digging! Do your math! And let me know if you find something contradictory or something new about Isabel Magruder.

Because the answers aren’t always where you expect them to be. Because random stuff happens. Because an unrelated record may point to what you need. Here are four illustrations.

Proving a small but interesting detail: Reading estate papers for my g-g-grandfather’s older brother, Oliver Barron Magruder, who died in 1852, I found a receipt from the court for 25 cents for an unpaid fee at the courthouse, dating back to 1849. It confirmed that Oliver had been guardian to my ancestor, Fielder Montgomery Magruder, after their father died. In 1849, Oliver had distributed to Fielder what he had coming on his 21st birthday, but forgot to pay the 25-cent fee. It was paid by his estate in 1852.

Proving parentage: Fielder M. & Oliver B. Magruder’s grandfather was Haswell Magruder (1736-1811). One of Haswell’s sons, Samuel, was not mentioned in his will so most genealogists have missed him entirely. This causes additional confusion when researchers see his marriage, family, census, land records, tax records, etc., in Prince Georges County, and don’t know who this Samuel Magruder was. Some then conflate him with a different Samuel Magruder, from Montgomery County. I found confirmation of my Samuel’s existence and parentage in some of Haswell’s land records.

From 1789 to 1800 Haswell transferred slaves by name, and tracts of land by name to his children. For tracts of land surveyed in colonial Maryland the property’s name was part of its legal description and for generations continued to be recorded when properties changed hands. In 1789, Haswell gave part of “Berry’s Folly” to his son Samuel. (Two years later, he gave another piece of “Berry’s Folly” to another son, William, who is in the will.) Samuel died in 1826 and the estate was not quickly settled, so the 1833 tax records for Prince George’s (published by the P.G. County Historical Society in 1985) show “pt. of Berry’s Folly” as one of the tracts owned by “Samuel Magruder heirs,” close to land owned by William and another of their brothers. Samuel’s various records (including references to “part of Berry’s Folly”) then provided pathways to the estate of his widow, Anne, who wrote a detailed will in 1855. I am working on tracing enslaved families to emancipation through this line of inheritance. (I also, eventually, found records to confirm that the other Samuel Magruder stayed in Frederick and Montgomery counties and never moved to P.G.)

Proving divorce: From years of researching Roderick McGregor and the rest of the Prince George’s County family whose name was changed from Magruder to McGregor in the 1820s, I was convinced that Roderick and his wife, Anne E. E. Berry (widow Eaten or Ayten) had divorced. As I accumulated various records about them circumstances pointed to the year 1843. Unfortunately for me that was just after the legislature (whose records are online) delegated divorce cases to the county courts. County clerks did not index the Prince George’s court records at the time and case folders had been haphazardly boxed when the county transferred them to the Maryland State Archives, so a search was going to be daunting, if not impossible. Eventually (by which I mean in about twenty years) I narrowed the time frame to just a few months in 1843. With the help of an MSA archivist I found the court dockets for those months and–Eureka!–there was the McGregor divorce case!

Discovery! Vindication!

The archivist said that, armed with a date and case number, he could find and pull the case. You can imagine my excitement waiting for his next message! Sadly, he emailed with bad news: many folders were missing and McGregor v. McGregor was one of them.

So, what to do?

On my next in-person visit to the archives I combed many years of court dockets, noting every case showing either of their names. Most were irrelevant, but then…(drum roll, please!)…twelve years after they divorced, Roderick sued Ann and her brother. I pulled that case. Roderick wanted the court to stop Ann and her brother from digging a ditch that could have flooded part of his land. As part of the case his attorney submitted the entire transcript of their divorce case (presumably as evidence of ill-will) and it was duly entered into the record, with certification that it was accurate and complete. Hallelujah! I finally got to read the McGregors’ dirty laundry.

Finding an enslaved ancestor: A correspondent sought my help to identify the mother of an ancestor who was born in slavery and still a child at the time of emancipation. Her death certificate was unhelpful and those of siblings proved no more useful. We knew the last slaveholder’s name but probate records turned up nothing. Dead-ended there, I searched the name of a different slaveholder in the same family and found a newspaper advertisement listing people to be sold as part of an estate settlement. The little girl who started our search–the known ancestor–was named there as part of a family group with a woman and a boy. Since we knew the girl’s surname, I searched for the boy’s name with the same surname and found him in city directories after emancipation doing the same work he was noted for in the slaveholder’s records. It wasn’t proof that the woman in the ad was their mother but it was strong circumstantial evidence. The family was not sold, BTW, despite that advertisement–I found them in later records with the same slaveholder.