SNGF -- Rabbit Hole! Selman Research

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

It's Saturday Night again - 

Time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Our mission tonight from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is to:
 
1) Have you been down a genealogy rabbit hole lately?  What was it, and what did you find?  [If not, go find a rabbit hole! Try your FamilySearch Notifications or Ancestry.com Photos or Stories.]

Here's mine:
I am going down a rabbit hole right now. I have been working on my Selman line, those who came from Alabama to Cherokee County early during Texas statehood.

I began by making sure I had all the census records of the families in Texas from 1850 through 1900 and beyond, if they were still living. I added children to the families based on census records. I also added cemetery tombstone information from Find a Grave to their profiles.

Once I had the information found on Ancestry, I used FamilySearch's full-text search to locate documents I hadn’t yet seen. Because most of Cherokee County’s records are locked, only the tax records were available. These helped me place when they arrived in the county and then left for Leon County.

There are many Selman families in Texas, so I tried searching for “Greenlee Selman” in any county in Texas and came up with a surprise document that has me stumped. It is an 1885 request to the Van Zandt County court to probate the estate of Ward Brack, who died in Mississippi in 1853. Of the many heirs listed, my ancestor, Greenlee Selman, his children, Robert L. Selman, Mary C. Palmer, and Sarah H. Hutson, and the children from his wife’s first marriage, George W. Selman and Emma O. Griffin, are mentioned. I recognize these names. Then there is a long list of people named Hoyt, some living in Texas and others in Alabama. I have no idea who these people are.

I suspect they may be related through Greenlee’s second wife, Amanda Oldham, as she was the mother of the five Selman children mentioned in the probate. This is the first clue I have about a possible family for Amanda. I know there are trees out there that list her parents, some with the same names and some with different names.

My next steps are to locate additional documents about this probate in Texas, though I haven’t found any yet from the full-text search. Then start researching the Hoyts back, hoping to find a connection there. On FamilySearch Family Tree, I found a Hoyt-Brack connection, but there were no Oldhams among those descendants.

Wish me luck!

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