John Sloan II Probate Transcription

Notes on Transcription

I finished my rough transcription of John Sloan II's entire probate file from 1854. You can view it online here or download the pdf. I still need to do a more thorough proofread run, but that can wait until my wrists recover. When I came across archaic, idiosyncratic, or incorrect spelling in the original, I did my best to preserve it as is, so many apparent mistakes are in the original.

Decipher every word here, then the rest of the ~5,000 in the probate

Sometimes I couldn't understand a word so I put my best approximation of the non-word it seemed to be, assuming at least some of these are old timey farming terms I'm simply unfamiliar with. Google was useful for some of these, but others got no results. I don't assume that means they weren't in use, but do take it as a sign I may be misreading them. For instance, a "hoaker" seems to be listed as some kind of farming implement one might get laid with steel and sharpened, but I can't find any other reference to such a thing.  I'm sure some of these will be more obvious to other readers, and I'd love for any suggestions/corrections on my mistakes. Other words were clearly alterations which I preserved, such as "thrashing" and "thraching" which I took to mean "threshing" in this context. (John Hamilton, the administrator of the estate, lists a day spent thrashing wheat as one of his charges. You may say I got overzealous on this and they clearly meant "threshing," but I swear some of those have to be As!)

Probate Structure

The probate is structured with three main reports. The first, filed on October 18th, 1854, presents a summary of John Sloan's estate--everything he owned--which was auctioned off, as well as an account of who purchased everything and for how much. This is probably the part most readers would find most interesting.

[ Excerpt ]

No.	Description of Property	Valuation of Property	No.	Property taken by the widow	Valuation of Property Taken By The Widow
1	Two [r?]igs	0.5	1	Two wash kettles	1.5
2	Two hoes	0.05	2	Three crocks	0.28
3	Lot of Sundries	0.5	3	Hand saw & augurs	1
4	Shovel plough	1	4	Stool & furniture	8
5	Well bucket	0.25	5	Churn & two buckets	0.87
6	Lot of Sundries	0.25	6	[L?] Side Saddle	5
7	Pair of harness & chains	0.1	7	Six chairs	4
8	Scythe & Corn Knife	0.1	8	Three wheels & two reels	3
9	Two Ovens	0.5	9	Bed stead & Bedding	11
10	Cupboard & Contents	0.37	10	Clock	1
11	One Harrow	3	11	Corner Cupboard	6
12	Crop cut saw	2	12	Five acres of corn	22.5

The second filing, on September 28th, 1855, is an update on all the debts and services Hamilton has settled out of the funds from the sale of the estate. It begins with an overview that refers to each attached receipt by number, so "(8)" refers to receipt 8, where $14.00 was paid to Daniel Wedman Co. on Christmas day in 1854 in payment for coffin and hearse, "(14)" is for payment to Charles Fromm for John Sloan's tombstone, etc. The receipts are linked to in the table of contents in the order in which Hamilton labeled them. 

[ Excerpt ]

Amt Brought Over					$4.75
As	Per	No	(4)		"6.44
"	"	"	(5)		"3.35
"	"	"	(6)		"X.XX 7.75
"	"	"	(7)		"1.00
"	"	"	(8)	Coffin & Hearse	14
"	"	"	(9)		"1.00
"	"	"	(10)		"26.37 1/2
"	"	"	(11)		"26.37 1/2
"	"	"	(12)		"6.00
"	"	"	(13)		"6.00
"	"	"	(14)		"25.00
"	"	"	(15)		25
"	"	"	(16)		5
"	"	"	(17)		"16.00
		Amt			$174.04
	Money on hand				119.00
			Total		$293.04

The final reports, filed on Christmas day in 1855, show the last of the funds being directed toward court charges and attorney fees, and what is left over divided among the children. This also contains the notice from William K.Compton, the husband of Jane P. Sloan (the eldest Sloan child), giving up all rights to their share in the inheritance "For and in consideration of money and property Received of John Sloan in his life time". 

 Received of John Hamilton Administrator of the

estate of John Sloan Decease forty dollars on sale

Bill December 13th 1855

Martha Sloan

Received of John Hamilton Administrator of the

estate of John Sloan Decesed Twenty dollars on

sale Bill December 13th 1855

F.P. Sloan

Received of John Hamilton five dollars and 25/100 cents on

sale Bill. December 13th 1855

Elisabeth C Sloan

Curiously, there is one single report filed after the final report, on December 31st, 1855, showing the $18 in medical expenses John had accrued during his final illness. It also notes $15 of this paid off by the heirs on January 2nd, 1856, which must have been added later since that's after the filing date. Did Dr. J.S. McClelland ever get his final $3? Perhaps we'll never know.

Final Notes

What can we learn from this? Well, aside from a great deal of wonderful details about John Sloan II's daily life (and that of his family), we now know that he was a reader, and very Presbyterian. Included in the receipts are payments to a James Prestley in New York City for four volumes of the United Presbyterian & Evangelical Guardian and to the same editor for four volumes of the Pulpit of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. Since he was an elder in the first church in the area, the Providence Presbyterian church, it makes sense. This also coincides with the Four Brothers Stalwart letter, which says of the brothers that they were all staunch Presbyterians. (And from other research I need to develop further they may have come over on a boat with a Presbyterian minister and his family, which was quarantined off the coast of Charleston for smallpox. But that's little more than a notion at this point.)

Original Receipt From Treasurer

Conspicuously absent is any detailed accounting on the division of land to the heirs, which I find odd. The only direct reference to his property that I recall coming across is a receipt from the treasurer for taxes paid on the land--that gobbeldygook about the "NE NE qn Sec 14 T 22" is about the northeast quarter of the northeast quarter of section 14, which is the same language used on John Sloan's land patents. That's going to be one of my next lines of research, and should be well documented.

As a reminder, you can view the original documents I've transcribed here. I'd like to eventually get together a page where you can view the originals and the transcriptions side-by-side, but that is a task for another day.

Introduction, Irish John, and John II's Legacy

This is going to be pretty rough for now, but I wanted to start sharing some of the stuff I've put together, so I figured I would just start throwing it up and clean it up later.

Introduction

Alright. So. For some context. (For simplicity's sake, I will refer to people as they are related to me, and you can figure out how it pertains to you from there.) My 4th great-grandfather (that is, my great-great-great-great-grandfather) was John Sloan (1793-1854), the first of our line of Sloans to move to Indiana. He came up from Newberry, South Carolina, around 1828-1830. His wife, Margaret, was his cousin. Awesome, right? Their parents came to the U.S. in the late 1700s from Antrim, Ireland. Here's a basic look at how they fit into our lineage:

For a more detailed look with everyone's dates, see here.

So that's three John Sloans in a row, which is a lot of John Sloans to handle. (I grew up with a later one, so I have a good idea.) For simplicity's sake, I'll call them John I, John II, and John III, or maybe Irish John, Cousin Marryin' John, and John R, as the spirit moves me.

Irish John

Irish John we know about thanks to records kept in an old Sloan family Bible which was published in a collection of such by Memory Lee Lester in 1974 called Old Southern Bible Records. It contains in it an account sometimes called "The Four Stalwart Sons of Erin," which tells of four brothers who sailed to South Carolina from Ireland, named Richard, Archibald, Robert, and John. Of these, John was Irish John, father of John II, and Archibald was father to Margaret, the cousin John II married, all of whom you can see in the chart above.

From this same account, we learn that Irish John lived to be an astonishing 113 years old. After losing his first wife and children to smallpox, he remarried at age 58 to a 13-year-old Irish girl named Jennet McNeer, and proceeded to have eleven more children. Not only did he have the energy to do all that, but he also took the time to fight in the revolutionary war, where he was wounded in the Siege of 96 and "carried the ball with him through his long life." Needless to say, he was also "an inveterate pipe smoker and took his toddy every morning."

John II

This is also where we learn why John II moved to Indiana:

"John married quite young to his cousin (Sloan) in Newberry. And being prejudiced against our institution of slavery, picked himself up and moved to Indiana, Lincoln co." 

This account was written by James Park Sloan (1828-1911), an officer in the confederate army during the Civil War, so I think we can trust him on this being John II's motivation. He does not mean it positively. While it feels good to know my 4th great-grandfather met the bare minimum of decency in recognizing the evil of slavery, it is still startling to see the concrete facts of my own heritage in our original national sin--like discovering your grandfather's Nazi uniform in the attic. (But that isn't a good analogy, because the Germans recognize and teach extensively the reality of their past evils, and we paper ours over.) I am still working on researching this aspect of our past, to address further in the future.

Anyway, I had a lot of trouble conclusively linking this South Carolina branch to our Indiana one. The story of the Four Stalwart Sons of Erin, and the character of Irish John, are so vivid and wonderful that I was wary of wishful thinking. I did not want to simply assume the connection. That being said, it seemed pretty safe, concerning he specifically mentions John II married a cousin named Sloan, and the John II in Indiana showed up from South Carolina with a wife whose maiden name was Sloan. (Even though one History of Clinton County notes of Emily Sloan, "Although her parents of the same name they were not related." Yeah. SURE, Emily.)

The first bit of evidence that seemed to push it into more sure territory was this obituary for John II's daughter, Frances Tousey, which states that she was born in Newberry, South Carolina--where the Four Stalwart Sons letter says John II went to marry his cousin. Then: the big break. This beautiful, terrible quality photo of a book listing abstracts of wills. It, in one low-resolution page, solved so many of my problems. Not only does it verify our John II is their John II (see where it says "John Sloan -w- Margaret . . . Some in Indiana") but even better, we absolutely, positively know it wasn't some other John-and-Margaret South Carolina love-cousins that came to Clinton County, Indiana, because you know who else is on that list? Samuel McQuerns and Martha Sloan. Two individuals I had pondered over endlessly, because they are buried in Mulberry, Indiana, right near our John II,

The McQuerns Problem

So there's this cemetery. A really old one. It holds a lot of the old timey pioneers of this area, most of them related to me in one way or another. But there's this one group there that appeared to be another set of Sloans that also weren't Sloans but McQuerns, and didn't seem to be related to my Sloans in any way that I saw. This perplexed me. In an effort to understand these folks, I did a search for McQuerns files in the Clinton County court archives, found one for Samuel McQuerns and Martha Sloan (the two confounding strangers at the head of the brood), went to the archives and took a look. Here is what I found. My best attempt at a transcription follows:

State of Indiana, Clinton County - Clinton Probate Court August [?] 1834

To the [?] on the probate court of said county-- the undersigned begs leave to suggest to your Honor that he was entitled to receive certain monies, in right of his wife in Newberry district S.C. That said money was coming from the Estate of Frances Sloan, the mother of Martha Sloan whom your informant married. That your informant married the said Martha Sloan, and they had seven children [?] Archibald aged about 19 years Frances aged about 17 years, James aged about 15 years, Jane aged about 13 years, Samual A. aged about 10 years, Margaret Ann aged about 8 years, and Newton aged about 4 years. That the said Martha the wife of your informant departed this life on the 25th day of November 1833 leaving the above named their[?] children, her heirs at law. That your informant has understood that there is a balance of about $45.10 yet due and payable from the estate of Frances Sloan, the mother of the wife of your informant to said children her heirs.

Therefore to secure the same for the proper nurture, and [education?] of said money the children of the said Martha and your informant he prays that your honor will appoint him guardian for said children money as aforesaid--and he as in duty bound will [?] pray.

Samuel McQuerns

Aug 11, 1834

 There's Newberry again! And now, thanks to that summary of the wills of Archibald and his wife, Frances "Fanny" Sloan, which lists Samuel McQuerns and Martha as heirs, we can conclusively say without any shred of doubt these are the same families. Samuel's wife Martha was Margaret's sister, therefore John II's cousin/sister-in-law. The money Samuel is talking about is from Fanny, who died in 1831. Martha died in 1833, presumably without managing to get her inheritance, and Samuel stepped in to get it in her stead.

So there you have it. McQuerns problem solved, and the Four Stalwart Sons connection solved.

Almost. My one reservation still is the line below Fanny Sloan's will in the low-resolution will document. It confuses me. It reads, as best as I can tell:

SLOAN, JOHN SR. Newberry Prob. Off. South Carolina, Aug. 13, 1840
              Died 30 July last. at res. Fairfield Dist. Age 8500Whig in Rev.
              War under Gen. Marion Presby

Does this propose a different revolutionary war soldier named John Sloan who had a son of the same name that married a cousin in Newberry and fled to Indiana? Or did they get the age wrong? Irish John died in December of 1829. But then I don't even know what book this is from, or what document that passage is describing, since that page is just an image someone uploaded onto Ancestry.com. This is something I will have to look into. An UNSOLVED MYSTERY.

John II's Indiana Legacy

One of John II's original land patents

We know from the histories of Clinton County (one, two, & others) that John II was one of the earliest settlers of Madison township, Clinton County, purchasing two 40-acre plots of land from the U.S. government (in 1835 and 1837). When Madison Township was first organized in 1839, John Sloan and William Henry were elected the first trustees. But his earliest recorded contribution came in 1832, when he was made one of the first elders of the first church in the area, Providence church, which stood in the same spot the old Providence cemetery sits today, where he is buried. Presumably he even helped build the church, as it was erected that same year. (That church was later moved down the road to the current location of Bunnel Cemetery, where most of the more recent Sloans are buried. After the move, the name was changed to Mount Pleasant. I must yet investigate if there is any connection to the current Pleasant Hill Presbyterian church that lies just outside Cambria, and which I attended as a child.)

We come now to what is certainly the most documented portion of John II's legacy: his physical legacy. Which is to say, we know every single thing he owned upon his death. For I, like Gandalf The Grey seeking information on the One Ring, descended deep into the bowels of the Clinton County archives, unearthing long forgotten manuscripts. (They're actually held in the wonderful Clinton County library, with not a tomb or cobweb in sight.) I intend to do a full transcription, but for now you can view the original documents with a few of my comments here.

If that doesn't sate your thirst for hard-to-read 19th century manuscripts, fear not--I have more. But those must wait until another time, because this runs long and I must sleep. Feel free to point out any errors you spot, or give helpful suggestions, or stinging critiques, or effusive praise--whatever moves you.

Thank for reading.