Susannah Turner
MILLEY TURNER-4 HOLMES’ father, YANCY TURNER-3, born October 30, 1786, was the illegitimate son of THOMAS GRAVES YANCEY and SUSANNAH TURNER-2 from Caswell County, North Carolina. Both of YANCY’s parents were from prominent families. THOMAS GRAVES YANCEY lived and died in Caswell County, North Carolina, but SUSANNAH TURNER-2 eventually married and moved to Sumner County with her husband, James Donoho, around 1805. [Doss, Simmons, Turner Family Bible, 1857.]
Illegitimacy was not as “rare” then as we might now suppose. In the post-Elizabethan- pre-Victorian era, women were frequently brought before the county courts to be prosecuted for producing bastard children. YANCY’s mother, SUSANNAH TURNER, however, because she was from one of the “better” families in the area, and would not become a “charge” [burden] on the church to support her and her child, was not prosecuted. In fact, SUSANNAH actually sued for, and apparently received, monetary damages from THOMAS YANCEY. In Genealogical Evidence, the author states on page 3, concerning bastards:
Sir William Blackstone summarized the rights [or lack of them] of illegitimate children thusly, “I proceed next to the right and incapacities which appertain to a bastard. The rights are very few, being only such as he can acquire, for he can inherit nothing, being looked upon as the son of nobody; and sometimes called filius nullius, somtimes filius populi. Yet he may gain a surname [sic] by reputation, though he have none by inheritance.
In 1786, HENRY TURNER’s daughter, SUSANNAH, may have caused quite a stir in the family by producing a bastard child by a neighbor, THOMAS GRAVES YANCEY, the son of another prosperous family living nearby. The YANCEY families who lived nearby on Country Line Creek were substantial and owned slaves and land. Whatever the reason, the two didn’t get married, and SUSANNAH sued THOMAS YANCEY for support for her bastard child. The agreement, recorded in the court records, stated that he would not try to take her “baseborn child” from her and she agreed to the amount he had paid which was unspecified.
It seems that there must have been a bit of spite or malice in SUSANNAH’s heart, however, for she named the child YANCY TURNER, as if she wanted the world to know who “done her wrong.” Since they didn’t get married, for some reason, even though they legally could have, why didn’t she name the child “John Turner” or “Henry Turner”—or anything except “Yancy”?
It is difficult to second guess someone’s motives over 200 years after the fact, or to imagine reasons and circumstances Why didn’t they just get married? It seems that would have been the simplest thing for them to do.
This is to certify that Susannah Turner of the County of Caswell, single woman do hereby acknowledge that I have received full satisfaction of Thomas Yancey concerning mantaing [sic] of her baseborn child hereafter provide he the said Yancey does not take away the said child from her. He paying up all costs whereof he has acqured [sic] in court or out of court given under my hand 19th Jan 1787.
Susannah Turner X her mark
Test John Douglas
Robert Parks Acknowledged Test A. E. Murphery Clk.
[Will Book B, Caswell County, North Carolina, page 165, January Court, 1787.]
The agreement didn’t mention the name of SUSANNAH’s child, but we can still be sure we have the right connection. The name itself, YANCY TURNER, is almost, in itself alone, proof of the connection. In addition, the will of SUSANNAH’s father, HENRY TURNER-1, mentions YANCY [SUSANNAH’s child] as his grandchild, and the will of her husband, James Donoho, mentioned YANCY for a legacy, leaving him a portion of his estate.
“Bastardy,” “fornication,” and pre-marital sex were not as uncommon as we might now suppose they were in those days. It was a post-Puritan and pre-Victorian era, and although there were civil laws against “immorality,” the statistics kept by a midwife in her journal of the era show that about 40% of the first babies of married couples were conceived out of wedlock. Apparently, it was quite common then for a wife to be pregnant, and sometimes, “well gone,” before the wedding. The government’s interest in preventing or punishing out of wedlock births seems to have been more from an angle of preventing the child’s having to be cared for at public expense rather than from a moral point of view. [Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale.]
The local midwife would question the mother at the time of the birth, and that testimony was enough to convict a man of parentage. The father was required to support the child or put up a bond that he would or could do so. It was important to the governing body that the child be provided for. The mother, by virtue of giving birth to an out of wedlock child was automatically “convicted” of being an unfit mother. If the father was upstanding, he could claim right to the child if he wanted it. Women usually had little if any legal standing in the situation. [Ibid.]
Rank or financial situation also had a great bearing on what happened to both the mother and the child. If the mother was an indentured servant, she might be held in bondage an additional year to compensate the master for the loss of her time during the pregnancy. This was true even if the child was his! Also, a poor mother might be given 50 or more lashes “well laid on her bare back” in the public square for her sin. The child of a poor mother might be bound out at birth, and kept in bondage up to age 30. Binding out was sometimes used as a form of “foster care”. The master was required to give a year’s schooling to the servant child, usually after the age of 15, and at the end of the time, the master had to equip the child with tools, clothes, and a little food. If the child worked well, and the master was a caring one, things went as planned. If the master was not a kind one, the servant would have very little recourse unless the master was very abusive, or outrageously so. Occasionally, a man would have his own bastard child bound to him and would raise the child in the house with his legitimate children. [Ibid.]
Bastard children did not inherit property from the father unless the father cared enough for them to give them a legacy in his will. Sometimes they were posthumously “adopted” by the father in his will. Generally, illegitimate children used the mother’s surname, though, at times they might use the father’s name as well, or “go by” both. If this had been the case with YANCY, he might have been known as “Yancy Turner, alias Yancey.” There would have been some stigma attached to the “baseborn” status of YANCY. Though mothers of bastard children usually went ahead and eventually married, SUSANNAH did not marry until her son was grown, so this “baseborn child” may have prevented her from obtaining a suitable marriage partner locally. When she did marry, she married a man who was not from that community, but had moved into the area, and would probably not have been so much concerned with her unwed-mother status as the local men might have been.
Plantation life in Colonial America included the women in a large capacity. Though they did not have full legal standing with men, they were part and parcel of the family plantation, whether it was a simple farm, or a large estate. The female members of the family were responsible for the household garden, care of the small livestock and milking, as well as the baking, scrubbing, cooking, laundry, birthing, administering nursing care within the family, and in the community. They shrouded and buried the dead, sewed the burial garments, and washed the body before interment. They gathered at the birth of new children to assist the midwife and help with the chores in the new mother’s household.
Sheep and flax, and in some places cotton, were grown for fiber. The wife and the daughters grew, processed, spun, and wove the fabric that clothed the family. The family vegetable garden was separate from the “fields.” The wife and her daughters grew the food for the family, butchered the meat, and preserved the seeds for next year’s crops. Providing for the family was a difficult task and required many hands. Before the Revolution, and for many years afterwards, hard currency was in short supply. The wife and her daughters spun thread for barter, and she traded and bartered in order to meet the needs of her household.
The local midwife was the provider of medical care and herbal remedies. Physicians [males], though more powerful in the social scheme of things, held little, if any, knowledge that was superior to the local midwife’s abilities, remedies, and knowledge. She practiced “social medicine,” administering her remedies to the female population, and the children, as primary care-giver. Male patients may sometimes have called upon her wisdom as well. [Ibid.]
Scarlet fever and group B strep were the primary causes of “chanker” and “rash,” which many times proved fatal to both children and new mothers. People weakened by worms and other health problems also succumbed. Cholera, malaria, pneumonia, and diabetes were frequently fatal. Remedies were frequently chilisters [blisters] applied to the skin to “draw out the evil humors.” They were applied to the back and chest. Herbs, “pukes,” and “purges” were also commonly administered medicines. Bleeding a patient was another way to reduce fevers. If these remedies were applied to one sufficiently sick, almost unto death anyway, they frequently pushed the patient over the edge, and sapped any remaining strength he had left to fight the disease. The main thing these remedies had in common was that they were very painful to the patient.
Due to lack of sanitation, intestinal worms were common. Round worms, as big as a pencil and twice as long, were not uncommon in children. These, though troubling and upsetting to the person who would pass them, actually did little to harm the patient, except to deplete the system of nutrition. But with worms added to other problems, it could be a factor that tipped the scale. Some worms, such as hook worms, could cause considerable damage to intestines.
Early midwives actually probably had less instances of childbed fever in their patients than did physicians. Physicians tended to use more drastic and dramatic active methods of delivering a child than the midwives who, more or less, “caught” the child when it emerged naturally. Physicians did considerable damage when they forcefully extracted the afterbirth or in forcefully removing a child. Waiting would have improved the result. [Ibid.]
SUSANNAH was probably one of the younger children of HENRY and ANN TURNER. Her father was born in 1721, and she had her child about 1786, so we know that if she were about 20 years old at the time she gave birth, she would have been born about 1766, or when her parents were middle-aged. She was most likely born in Culpepper County. She apparently stayed at home with her parents or lived with other relatives until she married a widower, James Donoho, April 23, 1802.
The same year that YANCY was born, in October, HENRY TURNER, Sr. bought another 400 acres from John McIntosh for 200 pounds cash.
HENRY TURNER-1 died December 9, 1809, at the age of 88. [Bible of Nancy Turner Kimbrough.] He had been born in 1721. ANNE lived several more years, possibly until as late as 1820. This might be an indication that ANNE was a younger [or second] wife. It also raises the question, was ANNE the mother of all of HENRY’s children? With ANNE still bearing children into the late 1770s, she must have been somewhat younger than HENRY, who would have been 58 years old about the beginning of the 1780s. ANNE was probably born no earlier than 1730. Assuming she was the mother of Henry Turner, Jr., born at least by 1755, she could not have been born any later than 1740. This narrows down the possible years of birth for ANNE as between 1730 and 1740, which would put her from 9 to 14 years younger than HENRY. If indeed ANNE was the first wife, that might imply a later date for the marriage, placing the marriage when she was at least 16 to 20 years old, therefore, meaning that HENRY might have been as old as 30+ before he married and started raising a family. At this time in Virginia, men tended to marry somewhat later than women, and did not usually marry until they could provide for a wife and family, either by their own work or by inheriting or receiving lands and goods from their parents.