What are appropiate Appalachian categories for my fifth Ggrandparents?

Question

My fifth great grandparents, John Ledford b. 1749 in Montgomery, Virginia,  and Elizabeth Bryant b.1752 Rowan, North Carolina, were killed near the Cumberland Gap by a fallen tree (smashed their wagon as they slept) while camping during their migration with five other families to Knox, Kentucky (now Harlan). What are the appropriate categories for them?

Answer 1

Great question! The profile has the sticker coded to add the Kentucky Appalachians category, saying he lived in Kentucky, which might not be best considering that's where they died while moving from North Carolina to Kentucky (I'd recommend changing state=Kentucky to state=North Carolina & adding app-cat1=North Carolina).

If he were born in Virginia, it's likely he was born in Augusta County (where his parents were from), which at that time extended west into Appalachia, so you could add three of the project's categories for people profiles: Virginia Appalachians, Kentucky Appalachians, and North Carolina Appalachians. However, looking at the locations in the datafields for his parents & siblings, the family might have been in North Carolina already at the time of his birth (so scratch the Virginia Appalachians category for him).

The appropriate location categories, as evidenced by other comments, are a bit more complicated. Considering the datafield entries for where he married and where his children were born, coupled with those for his siblings, it would seem that he lived most of his life in North Carolina - Rowan and Burke Counties as a married man (Burke County today is in Appalachia & it is likely that the areas the family lived in were in Appalachia then).

So... location categories:

• [[Category: Burke County, North Carolina]] for sure
• [[Category: Rowan County, North Carolina]] - even though the modern-day Rowan County is not in Appalachia (see Counties of Appalachia), since the WikiTree category covers from the county's creation to the present.

There is not a category for Cumberland Gap, but there is for Wilderness Road (Wikipedia says the Cumberland Gap "was an important part of the Wilderness Road").

Comments

Shouldn't cumberland gap be a category though? I'm just truly wondering.

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At this point, I do not think so. But that might be a question to be posed separately. If you wanted to ask a new G2G question about it, I would recommend the tags North_Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, Southern_Colonies, and Appalachia

Answer 2

The Appalachia Project will help you with specific Appalachian categories starting with locations.  

Answer 3

For John - [[Category:Appalachia, Virginia]]

I would have to know where they were when they passed for her as Rowan, North Carolina isn’t Appalachian. 

If they lived in Virginia prior to their move they could both have…

{{Appalachia Sticker|lived

|state=Virginia

|app-cat=Virginia}}

Thanks for asking!! 

Pam

Comments

Hmmm, well upon studying the history of Rowan County formed 1753!, (after her birth) and before that was a vast territory with no certain western boundary. He was born in Virginia. They were married in Rowan, supposedly. They died on the Cumberland trail. Have you ever stood in that spot where you are in three different states at the same time? No proof of any of this, except that their surviving son wrote a memoir, and look at all those Ledfords in Harlan that need stickers. Whew!

I imagine there will be many cases like this with pioneers. 

P.S. I declare Rowan, NC is just as Appalachian as Montgomery, KY!

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Pam - I edited the template in your answer... state=Virginia will add text to the sticker & app-cat=Virginia adds Category: Virginia Appalachians

{{Appalachia Sticker |born |state= Virginia }}

... ... ... was born in Appalachia, in Virginia.

See https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Template:Appalachia_Sticker for more examples.

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Yup, WikiTree's guideline is to "use their convention, not ours", which means you go by what the land was called when they lived there. Which can be really hard to figure out!

The Workspace for North Carolina is still a work in progress, but it does cover Rowan County, saying (in part):

For project purposes, the most eastern counties covering land in Appalachia were Anson (created in 1750) and Rowan (created from the northern half of Anson in 1753). As counties to the west were formed from Anson and Rowan counties, the counties they were created from ceased to cover land in Appalachia.

Rowan County (1753-1788)^[11]

• Surry County (1770- )
  • Wilkes County (1777- ) and some land from District of Washington
• Burke County (1777- )
• Iredell County (1788-1847)
  • Alexander County (1847- )