Ramsey Family History by Phil Hayes

Introduction

During research on some of my other family lines, I [Phil Hayes] had seen a bright orange book with RAMSEY FAMILY HISTORY on the rib. It was on a shelf in the Heritage Room of the Raleigh County Library.Since the Ramseys in our family were in Clay County, I didn't expect the book to be about our family. But…curiosity finally got the better of me, and I took the book off the shelf one day when I had a few minutes and thumbed through it. Well, first, I found a page heading for Abner. Reading further, I found that he had a daughter Mary E. who married Samuel Hamrick. That matched a great-great grandmother Mary Ellen who was married to Samuel Black Hamrick. I read further and found the book even more interesting. Well, suffice it to say, the book is about our family line.

James Clark Ramsey (son of James Riley, son of Bartholomew, son of Richard, possibly son of John or maybe Bartholomew, the elder) wrote the book. It is a rather comprehensive history of his branch of the Ramsey family. The book was apparently written over a period of time, before the Great Depression. His history was created as a series of newspaper articles which were then published as a book in 1933. There was no listing for a publisher or other acknowledgment. Since I had found the book in the Raleigh County, West Virginia, Public Library, I asked the librarian about the source of the book on the chance that I might buy a copy from the publisher. After checking his records, the librarian told me that the book had probably been published by a contractor (if that is the right term) during the Depression as a project of the WPA.

Anyway, one of the most interesting things that I discovered at that time was that Granddad Abner had been in the Civil War. I then took information from the book and went to the Archives in the Cultural Center at Charleston where I found Granddad's military  records. With copies of his records, I ordered a military tombstone for him. When it arrived, several members of the family chipped in to pay for having Granddad's wives' (there were three) names engraved on the back, so there would be a permanent record, of sorts, since his wives' graves are not marked. Other family members helped set the stone.

During the course of discovering the names and dates for the wives, I was put in contact with Wanda Paxton Workman Acree who is the daughter of Florina Hamrick, daughter of Mary Ellen Ramsey. She also has an active interest in family history and has a two-volume set, Ramsey Family History. It was edited and indexed by Richard McGraw and Linda Duffy. The set was published in 1997 by Richard L. McGraw, 2016 Graywalsh Dr. Wilmington. North Carolina. He has a note on the flyleaf above the publisher credit which reads, “This book may be reproduced or duplicated as you wish."

Well...interestingly, the set is a reprint of the Clark Ramsey book with some added editing and a complete index of the names found throughout the work.

I have used the above books liberally with a little outside research, primarily a few interviews with living family members, census reports, and the military records found in the State Archives. I have also used the history of the 7th West Virginia Cavalry for further information about Granddad Abner's military service. My sources are listed in the Reference section at the end of this paper.

Readers who find my paper too limited or boring may write to the publisher listed above for a copy of the 2-volume set which is more "in-depth" and provides much more genealogy. My interest, thus my paper, is pretty much limited to my direct line of descent. That doesn't mean that other membersof our family are not interesting, far from it. Rather, I feel I won't live long enough to pursue all the interesting relatives in my ancestral past. I pursue my life's persistent question, "Where did I come from?"

Clark Ramsey apparently wrote his history in fits and starts, as time and information afforded itself. He writes about one ancestor, remembers something about another; whereupon he digresses to that person where he continues in rather the same erratic manner. His book is interesting, but hellishly disjointed—at least in my opinion. In any case, I have attempted to "comb out" the information about my direct ancestors in order to list it in, more or less, chronological order. My writing model is astylized narrative which I hope will serve to tell a more straightforward story, but also serve as a ready reference. Simply put, I have rearranged and limited Mr. Ramsey's book as it pertains to me.

Clark Ramsey begins with information about John whom he believes to be Richard's father. His"conclusion" seems a little dubious to me. The co-editor of the two-volume set, Linda Duffy, offers Bartholomew as Richard's father in a separate paper (a family chart), however, it isn't credited with a source. I have begun with this rather murky view of a distant time to, more or less, establish the beginning of relatively reliable information.

So, with that, let us begin with John...