And I just found out the younger sister to Bettie, ended up not being a Bass after all. Turns out "Mollie" married a man named Nicholas Judson Bass, and her maiden name had been Mason.
Mary "Mollie" Dora Mason Bass was born in FEB 1864 in Cherokee County, Texas, and she died in 1916 in Roane, Navarro Co., TX. So I've deleted her from Mary Ann Powell Bass and Col. Richard Bass' family, and tried to see if Nicholas Bass was a cousin of any kind.
Let me just mention that the number of Bass families in the south in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is about like Smith or Jones in number. Oh dear, it was pretty impossible. Especially since they had repeating names through generations. The numbers of Williams and Alexanders, and Marys...you have to be sure that you have the right ones married to the right ones, and the same for children.
Liendo Plantation, Waller County, north of Hempstead TX Historic American Buildings Survey, James I. Campbell, Photographer March 10, 1934 FRONT ELEVATION
And many freed slaves by the 1870 census were listed having given their former masters' names as their last names (since they had not had any of their own prior to emancipation.) So I know I have relations who are blacks. I don't know if they were children of the slave owners, or had been freed slaves. But I can count that we're related somehow.
So as of looking through ancestry, I have gone back a few generations to find Nicholas, but have not found a definite connection.
The only thing I'm sure of is that Mollie wasn't my great grandmother's sister after all.
Actually, enslaved people did have last names prior to freedom. Sometimes they did take the name of the current slave holder upon the end of slavery, as did my father's family. Some took a previous slave holders name and some took their father's last name. Some took one unrelated to any of the former owners. In probate records where they are passing people around, you often see people listed with first and last names. Not everybody, but enough so it's not odd.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen any last names in the few wills I've read where slaves were bequeathed as part of the "belongings". Glad to know there were some people who had last names. I have had trouble keeping track of your family, Kristin, where different arms of it had the same name but weren't related. I'm glad you've done good research to know who was related to whom!
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