Elizabeth Leatha "Lettie" Mullins Fleming

I love when I find more about someone who folks assummed was gone.  Robert Fleming and Betsy Stumbaugh had a son Robert Jefferson "Big Jeff" Fleming.  He had children with at least four women.  One of them was Elizabeth Leatha "Lettie" Mullins.  She had eleven of his children.  She was born in September of 1825 in Pike County.  Her father was William Mullins.

In most genealogies I have seen where Lettie is listed they have her date of death as April 1900.  When starting out on someone I will put down what I find but then I have to try to document.

Again, because of the contact with my Yonts cousin, I was got into working on the Flemings.  I had stopped at William "Red Billy" Fleming and left myself a note to pick it up later.  I started on it this morning. I always end up going up and down the line and as I find census records or death certificates I add the information in to document what I have.  I started going through William's children and trying to find his wife.  I found his death certificate and it said his wife's name was Nicatie Fleming.  Whenever I see the same last name for the wife, I try to figure out if the document has the real maiden name for the woman or if that truly was her family name.  So I went looking for Nickatie Fleming.

I found she was the daughter of Solomon Fleming and Mahala Sarah Mullins.  In looking for any census records for this couple I found a death certificate for a Farrell Fleming.  It was the wrong age for Kenes Farrell, one of their sons, but I determined it was their grandson.  He was coal miner in Clintwood.  He died in Letcher county when he fell from a moving train and fractured his skull and incurred other various bodily injuries.  His wife's name was Ruth.

I kept striking out on Kenes, but I had found through that death certificate that his wife's name was Lydia Deel. Well, they had it as Lybia, but I figured that was an error.  I found the 1900 census right away under her name.  Kenes was spelled Kenis by the transcriber, but there was no dot for an i on the original record.  I picked up two sisters for Farrell and saw that William Fleming lived next door to Kenes and Lydia.

With William was a sister-in-law named Deel.  Since I knew Kenes' wife was Deel, I looked harder.  Turns out this William was the one I started with on this little journey.  William "Red Billy" was living with his wife, Lydia Robinson.  Also in the household was his  mother, Letty Fleming.  Since I had the April 1900 date of death for her, I went to the top of the census records and found it was done in June 1900.  If she died in 1900 it certainly wasn't in April.

I guess that is one of the things I really like about having the census records available online.  As much as I hate the transcription errors for the indexes, it does allow me to find folks who were near to Letcher county but across a state line and therefore would have been a much harder search when using paper or microfilmed records.

One of the people I was working on the other day I believe went from Kentucky to Oregan and then back again.  I would never have looked in Oregan for him.  His wife died.  He remarried.  There was a lapse of 20 years between census records so when I picked him up again he had been married for 17 years.  Then suddenly he is back in Kentucky again.  Boy would I like to know why he moved and why he came back.  I am still working on him, but when I figure it out, I will write more of his story.

So now I am back to Red Billy and his mother and the Flemings.  I love these puzzle pieces.