Records suggest that your ancestor who was in Kentucky in the 1830s and after was in Amherst County, Virginia, before that. Don’t just grab the first guy you find in Amherst County, Virginia, in 1820 and assume you’ve got the right one.
There could be more than one guy in Amherst County with that name–see if there are guys with that name still living in Amherst County in 1830 after your guy has left. It could be that your guy wasn’t really in Amherst County at all, but lived near the border and actually appears in adjacent counties in those records.
And it could be that your guy had already left Virginia by 1820.
One response
You are exactly correct, and eerily so true of our William Alford, who married Lucinda Alford (some kind of cousin, but so far we don’t know the degree of kinship) in Amherst Co. in 1804. Just to complicate matters, her father was also named William Alford, but, since we are sure he didn’t marry his sister, that William can’t be our William’s father. Some of our William’s closest relatives (known by Y-DNA testing) did end up in Kentucky, but William, Lucinda, her older brother, and his 5 sons all pulled up before 1810 and moved to Davidson Co., TN. There our William remarried a Sarah “Sally” in 1823 after Lucinda’s death, and Lucinda’s nephew William had also married a Sarah “Sally” in 1814. It has been a long, hard job to get these 2 often-confused William Alfords and their Sarah/“Sally” wives untangled!