Family secrets maybe revealed

Sam McMahan & "Willie Katherine Chandler McMahan" - no date. I just found out who she is, because his wife was named Blanche Carter Clabough.  Willie Katherine Chandler (not McMahan) was a cousin to Samuel Timothy Chandler McMahan. Her father John Chandler Jr, was Sam McMahan's grandmother's brother. But they must have all lived in the same area, and visited between families. Incidentally, Willie Katherine was quite a few years older than Sam McMahan, her cousin. Why were they posed like this, I wonder...

This family had many secrets.

And as noted in my last post, their servants knew about them, and their cook, Padge Chandler, even told someone who wrote it down in remembering the 4 generations of Chandler black people being part of the family. There were a couple of sisters who outlived Padge, living till they were 99 or 100, and one who lived until 2013.

But I want to investigate the rest of the records to see if I can find out any more. Did the son murder his father in a fight, as Padge's family record described it? (see yesterday's post).

Here's a copy of Samuel Timothy Chandler McMahan's death certificate.

Whatever caused his death was something from a soft injury to his bowels...I am not sure what the details are, but it looks like perforation.  But under number 21, "If death was due to external causes, fill in the following" the physician just checked, "means of injury." He avoided accident, suicide or homicide, date of occurrence etc.

Samuel Timothy Chandler McMahan's date of birth is in 1899, not 1896 as he gave to the draft board when he registered for the first world war in 1918. I wonder why he wanted to be 3 years older...and did he serve?

But the fight that he had with his 19 year old son (called Sonny because he had the same name), which Padge Chandler had probably witnessed, is not mentioned.

I originally thought the son was probably at fault, the way Padge worded his "murdered his father." However, perhaps the father was to blame.

I am also reminded how the father had been mentioned earlier in Padge's reporting of family events that Timothy McMahan Sr. had impregnated Padges' 22 year old sister Celia when a teenager. And that she had been married at the time.  So I'm going to see if there are any records about that and what might have happened to the McMahan child.  Off I go in another direction on Ancestry.

These are distant relations after all, the McMahans were descendants of the wife (Mary Chandler) of my great times 4 Uncle Spencer Clack Rogers.

And the way things seem to always have stumbling blocks, in Sevier County there were 2 black families with the head named Lewis Chandler. So I have to find the mother or Padge in the census records...as well as Celia.

Ah ha. I've got some of the facts (and probably a few mixed up ones to boot).

Walter Padge Chandler turns out to not have been real certain about his birth date. Neither did Celia.  But without any church records, or state records, it all depended upon family members remembering the date.

Celia may have lived to 100, as her headstone records. Her descendants (many) listed her as being born a year earlier than some census data.  She was married for a while, and probably divorced from a black man, Charlie E. Chandler.

There are photos of news clipping about her, as would be expected of a centurion. Unfortunately the photo is blurred, and we only get an idea that Mrs. Celia Chandler looked pretty good at whatever age the article was written. (I'm pretty sure if I looked for the Knoxville Journal I could find it however.)

The same source also had another photo of another news article, which may have been the source of the information "Four Generations," which I've shared onto many of this family's tree pages over on Ancestry. I quoted the whole article in yesterday's blog post.

You can go blind trying to read this, but it's amusing to see Padge Chandler cooking, when he was fairly young apparently. (Another article probably from Knoxville' paper.)

We also can remember that he worked until 1952 when he was probably 55 (or maybe 68) according to either the article "Four Generations of Chandlers" or the census reports.

And I think I figured out who was the daughter of Celia and her rapist, Samuel Timothy Chandler McMahan. As mentioned before, Celia had been married at the time, to Charlie Chandler. Going by the census reported date of Celia's birth and Padge's article which said she was 22 when raped, then a birth of Rosa Hazel Chandler born on July 15, 1914, when Celia was 23 would be the most likely child.

And in 1913 Celia's husband had had a child with another woman. So perhaps there was a separation. We don't know for sure who the fathers of some of her children were.  And though several siblings lived quite long lives, they worked in domestic situations. Rosa lived until 2013, having just had her 99th birthday.

So I'm going to leave this family for now. I've found a few answers and discovered more questions, the way genealogy frequently happens.

Oh, where is Chandler Gap? Sevier County definitely. But there's a zip code, and that's about all I can find. It's near the Smoky Mountain National Park, where some older buildings have been saved.

 The Ogle homestead in the great Smoky Mountain national Park. (NOT any of the housing of the Chandler families.)

Ruined homes with only the fireplaces are scattered throughout the woods of Tennessee, (indeed all of Appalachia.)

Boyds Creek TN is between Sevierville and Seymour. It is probably where Wheatlands, the Chapman plantation home is located, if it's still standing.

Wheatlands, Sevier County, TN, built 1825.