The Stalnaker Family

Jacob, and the Tygart Valley

The Captain's only known son, Jacob Stalnaker, married Elizabeth Truby and in 1772 moved his family into the Tygart Valley — among the first permanent settlers of what is now Randolph County. Jacob died at Beverly in 1792, his will proving the date; Elizabeth lived until 1816. Among their eleven children were a Revolutionary pensioner son, Jacob Jr., and the next link in this line: another Samuel.

Grandma Myrl

Thelma Myrl Hitt Stalnaker was a widow at forty-five with two children still at home, and what her granddaughter Deb remembers of the next twenty years is a woman entirely present. “Grandma Myrl was the nurturing sort. She cooked navy beans with a ham hock, made corn bread, taught us how to crochet, kept her house in town open to us at all hours … and taught us to play a rather complicated version of canasta.” In the late 1950s her sons Fred and John ran an Esso station on West Second Street with a hamburger and ice-cream stand beside it, and she was the grill cook and soda jerk, with an eight-year-old granddaughter for a helper. From 1962 she and her daughter Esther had an apartment, then a house, at 344½ East 7th Street — which made the Hall grandchildren, bus kids from the farm, into town people with somewhere to walk to after school.

“She had a Chevy Corvette that she LOVED,” and drove them out to her sisters’ farms at Smoke Camp, Benson and Lightburn — the Hitt sisters, Esther, Mittie, Susan and Dulcie — where there were spring houses with butter in crocks, home-canned ketchup and piccalilli, sweet tea, and rockers on the porch: “a Norman Rockwell painting come to life.” She died of a heart attack in June 1970, at sixty-five. “Grandma was an anchor presence.”

Her other children, briefly, as Deb knew them. Fred and John were “the sorts of uncles who put everybody in the back of a pickup truck on a Sunday afternoon and took us exploring” — abandoned houses, dirt tracks up a hollow with a brick chimney showing through the trees; John left for Florida and the space programme around 1960. Esther Louise — “Cot,” for her frizzy red hair — was a registered nurse, the camp nurse at Jackson’s Mill, and then, for a few years in Florida, “climbing up rocket gantries in a skirt and starched white cap as the on-site EMT.” She came home and lived with her mother until 1970. When and where she died, the family has not yet been able to say.

Doddridge County, All Along

For two years this branch was the thinnest thing in the archive. Everything on this page came from the book Patricia wrote herself — a good book, by the family’s own first genealogist, but one source, and a secondary one. Search after search of the West Virginia death index turned up nothing to stand behind it.

The searches were looking in the wrong county. The Stalnakers died in Doddridge and Harrison. Everyone had been sweeping Lewis.

Samuel William Stalnaker, Patricia’s grandfather, died on 31 January 1939 in Doddridge County — the exact date her book gives. And his record does what a good death record does: it names his wife Emma Gertrude, his father Samuel M. Stalnaker, and his mother Sarah Ann Davisson. Three generations of this line, confirmed by the state of West Virginia in a single document.

Emma outlived him by twenty years. Her record — which the index carries under her maiden name, Emma Bolte Stalnaker — turns a bare year into a life: born 4 July 1873; died 29 December 1959 at Salem, Harrison County, aged eighty-six years, five months and twenty-five days; a widow; occupation housekeeper; and buried on New Year’s Day 1960 at Mt. Lebanon Cemetery, Kincheloe. This archive had held the year 1959 and nothing else.

And her record names her mother — which led to one more.

Emma Was Five

Rebecca S. Bolte died on 14 May 1879, aged thirty-six. Married; occupation, housewife; husband, Fred Bolte. Born, the clerk wrote, in “Mayland” — his spelling of Maryland, and a birthplace this archive did not have, which puts the family east of the mountains in the 1840s.

Her father is named too: Geo. Berns — George Behrens, a man no family paper had ever named.

Emma Gertrude Bolte was born on 4 July 1873. Her mother died on 14 May 1879. She was five years old.

There is a small puzzle in the paperwork that turns out not to be a puzzle. This archive has always carried the name as Behrens. Rebecca’s own death record says Berns. Her daughter Emma’s, eighty years later, says Barnes. It is not three families and it is not a contradiction — it is one German name being written down by three different clerks who each heard it and did their best.

Davissons on Both Sides

Patricia’s book makes a claim about her own ancestry that is easy to state and hard to prove: that she comes down from the Davissons of Hacker’s Creek twice over, on her father’s side and her mother’s both.

Two death records, filed twenty-one years apart in two different counties, confirm it.

On the Stalnaker side: Sarah Ann Stalnaker died in Doddridge County on 1 September 1925. Her record names her father William Davisson and her mother Elizabeth Alman.

On the Hitt side: Elizabeth Jane Hitt died in Lewis County on 12 September 1946, aged seventy-four years, three months and eighteen days. Her record names her husband James S. Hitt, her father Edgar Davisson and her mother Margaret McPherson.

Two Davisson daughters, two generations, two branches — meeting again in Patricia. A family story has become a documented fact.

And One Man Who Isn’t There

Patricia’s own father is in no West Virginia death record at all.

The index was searched for the surname Stalnaker with the given names Fred and Marion, loosely matched, across all fifty-six counties and every year — and then every Stalnaker death recorded in Lewis County for 1949 and 1950, of which there are only three, all in January. Frederick Marion Stalnaker is not among them.

That is not proof of anything except an absence. The index has gaps, county by county and year by year. He may have died out of state; the entry may sit under a spelling the search didn’t catch; or his county’s returns for that year may simply be missing.

It mattered because his death date was long unsettled — 1949 in his daughter’s book, 28 March 1950 on his memorial. His granddaughter Deb has now given the family’s own answer: 28 March 1950, at Spelter, at work. The state record that would seal it is still missing, and this is written down so that the next person to go looking knows where the search has already been — Harrison County, 1950, is the place to look.

Beech Lick

This page has called them the Beech Lick Stalnakers since it was written, on the strength of Patricia’s book. The county birth register’s own place column says it too — entry after entry, through three generations: Beech Lick, Doddridge, West Virginia.

Nine Stalnaker births are recorded there, and most of them are this family. Samuel W. Stalnaker, born 17 November 1867 — the exact date the book gives — to Samuel Stalnaker and Sarah. Loyd, 5 April 1873. Then, a generation on and numbered by the clerk in the margin: Mittie R. in 1897, Grace Lisetta in 1898 — “2nd Child”, and F. M. Stalnaker on 18 October 1900 — “3rd child.”

That last one is Patricia’s father. His record names his own father Samuel William Stalnaker, occupation farmer, and his mother Emma G. Boltz.

And it is worth sitting with, because of what the previous section could not find. Frederick Marion Stalnaker appears in no West Virginia death record at all. But here he is at the other end. The state wrote down his arrival and never wrote down his leaving.

Two more names come out of these pages. Samuel William Stalnaker Jr., born 11 December 1910 — a fourth child, an uncle of Patricia’s this archive did not know it had. And Willis E., born 1909, who turns out not to be Samuel William’s son at all but his brother Loyd’s — which finally gives Loyd a wife: Bertha.

Five Children in Six Years

Emma’s own birth is in the same register: 4 July 1873, father Fred W. Bolte, mother Sophia R. That date had already been worked out to the day from the age on her death certificate eighty-six years later. Two records, generations apart, agreeing exactly.

But the register does something else. It puts her mother’s whole short life in one column.

Charles in August 1871. Emma in July 1873. Allison in February 1875. And in June 1877, twins — the clerk wrote the word twice in the margin — F. W. and Lewis.

Five children in six years. She died on 14 May 1879, aged thirty-six. Emma was five years old. The twins were not yet two.

There is one more thing these pages settle, and it is a small vindication of the family’s own record-keeping. Across her five children’s birth entries the same woman is written Rebecca, then Sophia R., then Sophie R., then R. S.; her death record calls her Rebecca S. She was Sophia Rebecca, and she went by Rebecca — which is exactly what Patricia’s book said all along.

Married in Harrison, Farming in Doddridge

One line in the marriage index dates the whole migration. Samuel M. Stalnaker married Sarah Davisson on 8 October 1860, in Harrison County. The archive had carried “1860” from the book and nothing more. She was seventeen.

Seven years later their son Samuel W. was born in Doddridge. The family had moved, and it stayed — Beech Lick holds them for two more generations after that.

The index is frustrating in one respect worth admitting: its entries carry the date, the place and the two names, and leave every parent and grandparent field blank. Those are on the photographed register page, which has not been read yet. The same is true of Frederick and Thelma’s own marriage, indexed simply as 1926, Lewis County.