1. 1858 Caldwell, NC Bastardy Bond - Rebecca Wainscott and Hugh Porch; Ancestry.com Website.
"State of N, Carolina Caldwell County
'Know to all men by these presants that we Rebecca Waiscot and Hugh Porch are held and Firmly
bound unto the state in the sum of five hundred Dollars to the payment whereof we bind our selves
our heirs executors and adminsitrators jointly and severally firmly by these presents signed with our
hands and sealed with our seals this 12th day of June AD 1858."The condotion of this obligation is such that if the above bounder Rebecca Winscot shall well and
truly keep a certain bastare child of which now refuses to delare the father from the beginning
chargeable to said county then this obligation to be void otherwise to be be in full force.
her
"Test Rebecca X Winscott Seal
mark
Edwin Brown, JP Seal his
Hugh X Porch Seal
Mark
1. 1858 Caldwell, NC Bastardy Bond - Rebecca Wainscott and Hugh Porch; Ancestry.com Website.
"State of N, Carolina Caldwell County
'Know to all men by these presants that we Rebecca Waiscot and Hugh Porch are held and Firmly
bound unto the state in the sum of five hundred Dollars to the payment whereof we bind our selves
our heirs executors and adminsitrators jointly and severally firmly by these presents signed with our
hands and sealed with our seals this 12th day of June AD 1858."The condotion of this obligation is such that if the above bounder Rebecca Winscot shall well and
truly keep a certain bastare child of which now refuses to delare the father from the beginning
chargeable to said county then this obligation to be void otherwise to be be in full force.
her
"Test Rebecca X Winscott Seal
mark
Edwin Brown, JP Seal his
Hugh X Porch Seal
Mark
2. 1860 Censis, Caldwell Co, NC; Kinga Creek PO; taken 12 Jul 1860; Page 147 A; Family #772/701.
Listed as Rebecca Wainscott; age 26; born in NC; head of household.
3. 1870 Census, Caldwell Co, NC; Kings Creek PO; taken 14 Jul 1879; Page 16 A; Family #52/60.
Listed as Rebecca Winscot; age 37; born in NC; keeping house; head of household.
Georgeanna Elizabeth Wainscott
1. 1860 Censis, Caldwell Co, NC; Kinga Creek PO; taken 12 Jul 1860; Page 147 B; Family #772/701.
Listed as G.A. Wainscott; age 2; born in NC; in household of mother, Rebecca Wainscott.
1. 1870 Census, Caldwell Co, NC; Kings Creek PO; taken 14 Jul 1879; Page 16 A; Family #52/60.
Listed as Elizabeth Winscot; age 12; born in NC; at home; in household of mother Rebecca
E.Wainscott.
1. Caldwell co, NC: Marriage Registry; Vol #__(1876); Page 9; Ancestry.com Webite.
Andrew J. Duson; age 20; married on 22 Dec 1976 in Caldwell Co, NC Mary J. Winscote; age 21.
1. 1860 Censis, Caldwell Co, NC; Kinga Creek PO; taken 12 Jul 1860; Page 147 A; Family #772/701.
Listed as Jane Wainscott; age 5; born in NC; in household of mother, Rebecca Wainscott.
2. 1870 Census, Caldwell Co, NC; Kings Creek PO; taken 14 Jul 1879; Page 16 A; Family #52/60.
Listed as Mary J. Winscot; age 14; born in NC; at home; in household of mother Rebecca
E.Wainscott.
3. Caldwell co, NC: Marriage Registry; Vol #__(1876); Page 9; Ancestry.com Webite.
Andrew J. Duson; age 20; married on 22 Dec 1976 in Caldwell Co, NC Mary J. Winscote; age 21.
4.. "Folk Music of the Southern West Virginia Coalfields"; Website.
"On 28 August 1940 Professor Louis Chappell of West Virginia University visited Mary Jane Dyson at Lundale in Logan County, set up his aluminum disk recording equipment, and recorded fifteen of her unaccompanied songs. Chappell reported that she was eighty-six years old at that time. Although it does seem that by then the quality of her singing voice had diminished somewhat, her memory of the old songs was mostly intact; she sang full versions of most of her ballads, which is a bit unusual even for many much younger singers. When I began listening to those recordings, all I knew was that Chappell had found her in that coal camp on Buffalo Creek but by the time I finished I felt certain that she had come there from North Carolina; her repertoire included a number of songs that, although they eventually came to be more widely known later on, dealt with events in North Carolina. And she also sang much older English/Irish/Scottish songs that came to Appalachia in the early eighteenth century with emigrants from the Old World, including some ancient lines that went into the making of Pretty Saro, a ballad found in America most often in North Carolina."She began by singing Lady Gay for Chappell, the title given to her version of The Wife of Usher’s Well, a ballad about which Peggy Seeger said this: “This British ballad (Child No. 79) has been found much more in America than in the British Isles. It is one of the great favourites among mountain women, who feel deeply the cruelty of the mother who ‘sent her babes way off yonder over the mountains to study their grammer.’” The boys die after being sent away to school and return as ghosts to bid their mother farewell; they take leave of her, though she begs them to stay. Almost all of Mary Jane Dyson’s songs center on such tragedies and losses—abandonment, inequality, and men’s cruelty to women—and one would not be wrong to surmise that she had had a difficult life.
"Mary Jane Wainscott Dyson was indeed born in North Carolina, on 2 May 1855 in Wilkes County, to a single mother in difficult circumstances. For some years her mother Rebecca Wainscott supported herself and Mary Jane by working as a seamstress. In 1874 Mary Jane married Andrew Jefferson Dyson to whom she a number children before being divorced from him sometime before 1910. In the 1910 and 1920 censuses she stated that she was the head of household and working on a farm with her daughter and grand daughters. By 1930 she had moved to Lundale in West Virginia with her son Rumless Dyson, where he was employed as a teamster in a coal mine and in 1940 when Chappell found her, she was still in Lundale and although the census information is somewhat confusing, it appears that she was at that time living with her grandson Ray Pete Dyson, son of Rumless, who was working at the mine tipple.
"Mary Jane Wainscott Dyson died on 9 May 1943 in Mountain City, Tennessee and was buried there in the Donnelly Cemetery.
"—Gloria Goodwin Raheja, February 2021.
"Sources: Raheja’s research for her book Logan County Blues: Frank Hutchison in the Sonic Landscape of the Appalachian Coalfields, and the Louis Chappell Collection at the West Virginia University Library’s West Virginia and Regional History Center.
"Listen to Mrs. Dyson sing for Louis Watson Chappell in 1940
"-recordings used with permission from the West Virginia and Regional History Center"
1. 1858 Caldwell, NC Bastardy Bond - Rebecca Wainscott and Hugh Porch; Ancestry.com Website.
"State of N, Carolina Caldwell County
'Know to all men by these presants that we Rebecca Waiscot and Hugh Porch are held and Firmly
bound unto the state in the sum of five hundred Dollars to the payment whereof we bind our selves
our heirs executors and adminsitrators jointly and severally firmly by these presents signed with our
hands and sealed with our seals this 12th day of June AD 1858."The condotion of this obligation is such that if the above bounder Rebecca Winscot shall well and
truly keep a certain bastare child of which now refuses to delare the father from the beginning
chargeable to said county then this obligation to be void otherwise to be be in full force.
her
"Test Rebecca X Winscott Seal
mark
Edwin Brown, JP Seal his
Hugh X Porch Seal
Mark
2. 1860 Censis, Caldwell Co, NC; Kinga Creek PO; taken 12 Jul 1860; Page 147 A; Family #772/701.
Listed as Rebecca Wainscott; age 26; born in NC; head of household.
3. 1870 Census, Caldwell Co, NC; Kings Creek PO; taken 14 Jul 1879; Page 16 A; Family #52/60.
Listed as Rebecca Winscot; age 37; born in NC; keeping house; head of household.
1. Johnson Co, TN; Death Certificate #21025; Ancestry.com Website.
Mrs. Lou Ellen Hall; age 62 yrs, 0 mon, 2 days; born 22 Sep 1875 at Boomer, NC; widow; housewife;
daughter of Jeff and Mary Jane (Winscott) Dyson; died 24 Sep 1937 in Mountain City, TN; due to
apoplexy with chronic Bright's disease; buried 25 Sep 1937 in Donnelly Cemetery, Mountain City, TN
informant, Green Dyson, Moutaing City, TN.
1. 1900 Census, Logan Co, WV; Logan District; taken 18 Jun 1900; 58 B; Family #183/185.
Listed as Hugh Ellis; age 13; born in May 1887 in WV; in household of father, William H. Ellis.
2. Logan Co, WV; WW I Draft Registration Card #3233; 12 Sep 1918; Ancestry.com Website.
William Hughey Ellis; age 35; born 19 Aug 1883 ; living at Kitchen, Logan Co, WV; coal miner;
employed by Guyandotte Coal Co at Kitchen, WV; nearest relative, Myrtle Ellis, Kitchin, WV; tall; with
medium build; light brown eyes; black hair.
3.. "Folk Music of the Southern West Virginia Coalfields"; Website.
"When West Virginia University professor Patrick Gainer recorded William Hughie Ellis of Logan County in 1959, he sang and played the banjo, cracked jokes, regaled the small audience in the room with his ghost stories and humorous tall tales and said that he could play two hundred and sixty-eight different banjo tunes. And when asked if he ever played the fiddle he said “I used to play a right smart fiddle.”"William Hughie Ellis was born sometime between 1883 and 1887 (accounts and documents vary) at Henlawson, Logan County, on the farm his parents owned in what is now Chief Logan State Park. And he was raised there “right down at the head of Snap Creek” that flows into the Guyandotte River. We know of him and his music chiefly because he was an elder brother to Aunt Jennie Wilson, the well-known Logan County banjo player; his style is quite similar to hers. The Gainer tape is the only known recording of Mr. Ellis. In that recording he played in both clawhammer and finger-picking styles; the tunes he played included If I Were a Gambler, and the fiddle tune/breakdown Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss, which he calls My Blue-Eyed Daisy. After playing Cripple Creek, he said that he had “danced that a thousand times.”
"Mr. Ellis also spoke briefly about the kinds of work people did in his younger years. Coal mining took hold in Logan County in 1904 but in 1910 he was a laborer in a lumber camp and when interviewed by Gainer he remembered those years in which timbering was still a dominant industry in West Virginia. And so he spoke of digging for ginseng, cutting timber, running log rafts, and working on the boats that pushed the rafts down river.
"He seemed to relish telling of his experiences making molasses from the cane he grew, beginning at the age of seventeen. He said that “people bragged on” the molasses he made and he’d “let neighbors and friends all gang up in there and eat molasses and have a big time,” when no doubt he’d play music and they’d all dance.
"In 1910 his family still had the farm and he apparently lived there at the time he was working at a nearby lumber camp, but by 1917 he had moved to Kitchen and was working as a miner for the Guyandotte Coal Company. In 1920 he listed his occupation as laborer in the Chapmanville mines but by 1930 he had left mining and noted that he was a farmer working on his own land. In 1940 he was serving as a Justice of the Peace in Chapmanville.
"Mr. Ellis died on 2 February 1972 and was buried at the Maston Conley Family Cemetery at Chapmanville, very near where he lived. Above his name on the headstone is a banjo. [See photo below.]
"—Gloria Goodwin Raheja, February 2021, with musical commentary and additional information/pictures from Chris Haddox, via conversations with Danny Ellis, February 2022.
"Sources:
"Gloria Goodwin Raheja’s research for her book Logan County Blues: Frank Hutchison in the Sonic Landscape of the Appalachian Coalfields.
"Patrick Gainer Collection, A&M 3003, Tape 119 Side 2. West Virginia University Library, West Virginia and Regional History Center.
"Danny Ellis, Logan, WV, conversations with Chris Haddox, February 2022""Finding Hughie's Grave
"While many of the cemeteries in this project require some effort to find and visit, the Maston Conley cemetery--where Hughie is at rest--is nearly an in-town cemetery. It is situated up on a hill above Hughie's homeplace in Chapmanville, WV, above the four lane highway known as Corridor G, and just a stone's throw from the big Chapmanville school complex, numerous houses, and the Evans Funeral Home. As we learned, the road leading up to the cemetery is gated and locked as it leads to a private residence at the top of the wooded hill. Fortunately, access was easily attained after speaking with a nice gentleman at Evans Funeral home. He opened the gate and allowed us to drive up to visit the cemetery and in short order we found Hughie's grave. As referenced in the biography above, we do have a recording of Hughie talking with an audience where he references playing Cripple Creek quite often--a thousand times--so a little banjo rendition of that tune seemed an appropriate offering!
"Listen to Hughie Ellis entertain an audience in this sound recording made by Patrick Gainer in 1959."The physical setting for this conversation between Hughie and WVU Professor, Patrick Gainer, is unknown. I initially thought it might have been at the WV State Folk Festival in Glenville, WV, but the archives there have no records of Hughie Ellis having ever attended. Given that Hughie says in the recording that "this is about as far from home as I've ever been," and "you people up here probably don't believe everything I'm saying," I'm guessing that Gainer may have arranged for Hughie to come to Morgantown, where Gainer was based at the time.
"William Hughie Ellis interview with Patrick Gainer in 1959
"Go with us to Hughie's grave for a little banjo tune!"I butcher the name of the cemetery a bit in the video introduction, saying Conley Maston/Matson. Turns out that Maston Conley is one of the folks buried in the cemetery. Civil War buffs will find this interesting because of Maston's Confederate solider status. Interestingly, the gentleman who opened the gate for us referred to the cemetery as the Matheny Cemetery, and there is a Howard D. Mathena buried here.
"Hughie Ellis Grave Visit and Banjo Tune".
1. 1900 Census, Logan Co, WV; Logan District; taken 18 Jun 1900; 58 B; Family #183/185.
Listed as Hugh Ellis; age 52; born in Dec 1847 in WV; married 27 yrs; farm laborer; head of
household.
1. 1900 Census, Logan Co, WV; Logan District; taken 18 Jun 1900; 58 B; Family #183/185.
Listed as Lucinda Ellis; age 52; born in May 1854 in WV; married 27 yrs; 12 children, 11 living; in
household of husband, William H. Ellis.
1. 1900 Census, Logan Co, WV; Logan District; taken 18 Jun 1900; 58 B; Family #183/185.
Listed as Lewis Ellis; age 26; born in May 1874 in WV; married 6 yrs; day laborer; in household of
father, William H. Ellis.
1. 1900 Census, Logan Co, WV; Logan District; taken 18 Jun 1900; 58 B; Family #183/185.
Listed as Mandaville Ellis; age 24; born in Mar 1876 in WV; single; day laborer; in household of
father, William H. Ellis.
1. 1900 Census, Logan Co, WV; Logan District; taken 18 Jun 1900; 58 B; Family #183/185.
Listed as Jenevive Ellis; age 21; born in Aug 1878 in WV; married 1 yr; no children; kitchen servant;
in household of father, William H. Ellis.
1. 1900 Census, Logan Co, WV; Logan District; taken 18 Jun 1900; 58 B; Family #183/185.
Listed as Jesse Ellis; age 19; born in Apr 1881 in WV; single, day laborer; in household of father,
William H. Ellis.
1. 1900 Census, Logan Co, WV; Logan District; taken 18 Jun 1900; 58 B; Family #183/185.
Listed as Eliza Ellis; age 16; born in Apr 1884 in WV; single; at school; in household of father,
1. 1900 Census, Logan Co, WV; Logan District; taken 18 Jun 1900; 58 B; Family #183/185.
Listed as Otis Ellis; age 8; born in Jun 1891 in WV; single; in household of father,William H. Ellis.
1. 1900 Census, Logan Co, WV; Logan District; taken 18 Jun 1900; 58 B; Family #183/185.
Listed as Biddie Ellis; age 4; born in Jul 1895 in WV; in household of father,William H. Ellis.
1. 1900 Census, Logan Co, WV; Logan District; taken 18 Jun 1900; 58 B; Family #183/185.
Listed as Janie Ellis; age 1; born in Jun 1898 in WV; in household of father,William H. Ellis.