The Georges and the Gordons of Stokes County

She was spooling thread one night when the lightning struck. He was waiting out the storm stretched out in bed. Sarah and her husband Thomas Gordon never had to find out what it would be like to live without the other.

The fire caused by that summer lightning storm burned down the house Sarah and Thomas had built in the wake of Revolutionary War twenty-three years prior. Their kids were all safe in the kitchen which, like many houses those days, was a separate building. (pic of grave) The couple was laid to rest together in what would become over time a small family plot. That same plot of land years later would be sold to Chang and Eng Bunker, the conjoined brothers whom the world knew as the original Siamese Twins.

A half of century earlier and still a young child, Thomas Gordon had come to America with his widowed mother. His father had died back in County Down in Northern Ireland, and his mother had decided it was time to start over. They settled in Albemarle County in Virginia in a town named for family, Gordonsville. Thomas grew up, met Sarah, and they had their first son, John Gordon, in 1772. Then the American Revolution started.

As a young father, Thomas enlisted in January 1777 when George Washington sent Colonel William Grayson to drum up recruits. Thomas signed up for two years of service, and fought directly under Washington’s command in several battles. He would even endure the historically harsh winter of 1777 in Valley Forge with Washington and the rest of the Continental Army. Family history says that he was captured once by the British, and they tied his hands with green hickory withes which cut deep into his wrists as they dried leaving scars that he’d have for the rest of his life.

Things quietened down after the War, and Thomas moved his family south from Virginia to North Carolina around 1780. There they settled down near Mount Airy, built their home with their separate kitchen, and went back to farming for the next twenty-three years.

Four generations would bridge Thomas Gordon and Wesley Gordon, the adoptive father of Ida C. George and grandfather of Julian Boyles. All four generations were yeoman farmers who called Stokes County home. And from what we can see in the records, they managed to produce enough to live on without having too much extra to go to waste.

When it comes to Julian’s mother, Ida C. George, Skip loves to tell the story about the time the twins, still babies at that point, managed to get out of Grandma Ida’s sight for just a moment too long. Skip and Julian had just returned back to the States from Germany and the twins, James and Janet, were young enough to still be in diapers. Ida had offered to watch the grandkids for the afternoon while Skip went uptown for a mothers-day-out. When Skip got back home that evening and stepped into the kitchen, she found her mother-in-law Ida sitting at the kitchen table and ”practically in hysterics”. She was so caught up in laughter that she wasn’t even able to tell Skip what had happened, she could only point towards the bathroom door. Skip looked in, and saw Julian with the twins in the tub, trying his best to scrub them clean. Turns out the twins had crawled into the pantry when Grandma Ida wasn’t looking and got into a jar of their grandpa Jack’s honey and set to “painting” the entire pantry as high as they could reach. Honey was everywhere, and it was left to Julian to wash it out of their hair, “a solid goo”, Skip says. And Ida at the kitchen table laughing the entire time. This kind of light-heartedness and mirth figured greatly in Ida. Her son Julian would name his first daughter after her: Ida Mitchell “Mitchie” Boyles.

One of our biggest family mysteries centers on Ida’s childhood. Nobody knows where Ida C. George was the first twenty-five years of her life. Her son Julian likely would have known; Skip doesn’t recall. Ida never once appears with her mother, Sara Martha George, or her father, Wesley Gordon, on any census, not in 1880 when she would’ve been two years old, or in 1900 at age twenty-two before she married Jack Boyles. (The 1890 census was lost to fire.)  It’s seems likely that she was raised by someone other than her mother and may have even gone by a different name, at least as far as the census-taker was told. We do know from later records that Ida was born in 1878, two years before her mother Sara George marries Wesley Gordon. And when you look at Ida’s marriage certificate from 1903, she gives her name as Ida C. George, not Gordon as she would later in life. The line where Ida’s father’s name ought to appear has been left blank. It’s plausible that the clerk slipped up and wrote the father’s name to the left of where he should, but what does his cursive say? “Lwaw Gordons?” And then how do we explain that he was neither living nor deceased at the time of Ida’s wedding? Looking through hundreds of Stokes County marriage certificates from the same year and by this same clerk (himself a Gordon), you see that he never left a line blank. He often wrote ‘not known’, but he didn’t leave it blank. Why he did so in this particular case is lost to history. To complicate the matter further, notice how on the bottom half of the marriage certificate that the wedding took place at Wesley Gordon’s house. It’s obvious Ida and Wesley were present in each other’s lives, and years later, Wesley would even be listed as her legal father on various records. As far as we know, the first time Ida C. Gordon appears on public record is a quarter-century after she was born and using her mother’s last name.

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