Sepia Saturday: A Jollett by any other name

Sepia Saturday challenges bloggers to share family history through old photographs.

The obvious topic for this week’s Sepia Saturday should be the movie theater, but since I’ve done that already, I have no choice but to look for inspiration in the movie being shown in the prompt, “The Ex-Convict.”

The world of the family historian is usually rather dull and pedestrian.  It means sifting through census records, studying handwriting and fiddling with magnifying glasses to discern the name of a missing ancestor. It means posting inquiries on surname boards and county forums in hopes of connecting with a distant cousin who wants to share information.  It means creating a family chart with 7 generations only to have your husband/daughter/cousin/BFF say, “Wow that’s a lot of work. What time does the game come on?”

If it weren’t for the few criminals in my family tree, I’d have nothing to look forward to as a family historian. 

Actually, most of my ancestors' crimes are not THAT shocking:  a couple of guys perpetrating fraud and some Confederate deserters.  I have a wife abuser and one murderer – maybe it was manslaughter. 

But my favorite criminal actually served some serious time.  Yes, in jail.  The joint.  The clink.  The pokey.  The slammer.  The hoosegow.  The Big House. 

And the crime?  He was a horse thief.

In the nineteenth century, a horse was more than just transportation; it was a means to making a living.  Even more than that, it was essential to survival when one needed to escape from harm.  Horse theft was a serious crime that led to the hanging tree out west.  But here in Virginia, William H. Jollett (my great-grandfather’s nephew, my first cousin three times removed) got to spend about four years of a five-year sentence in Richmond’s “Greybar Hotel.”  

1870 Richmond Census
Click to enlarge

Horse thieves were considered to be no good, dirty, rotten scoundrels. And by all accounts, William H. Jollett was just that.  He reportedly ate soap in order to get sick enough for ol’ Doc Shuller to approve his early release from prison so that he could recuperate at the home of his father’s half-brother in Rockingham County, Virginia.

From there William Jollett’s life really went to hell. He got a young girl “in a family way” and then took off on his sister’s black mare.  From that moment William H. Jollett ceased to exist.  He is nowhere to be found in census records, death records, or land dealings.  

But a year later in 1876 a Giles County, Virginia, girl named Hattie Echols married one William P. Boyd, a man who did not exist before then.

William and Hattie Echols Boyd
photo courtesy of Tim Rugenstein via Dexter Boyd

Boyd researchers have some strong evidence that their ancestor William Preston Boyd was the notorious William Henry Jollett, a man on the run for committing some unknown act more horrific than stealing a horse and getting a girl pregnant, a man whose questionable and shameful past was revealed only to two who succeeded in taking the truth to their graves.

It would be absolutely criminal to miss what’s showing over at Sepia Saturday.  

©2014, Wendy Mathias.  All rights reserved.