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| Blackwater River in southern Virginia |
Assembling our Raney/Rainey family line, whose roots lie deep in Virginia soil, is analogous to piecing together a large jigsaw puzzle. First you piece the frame. I created a family tree of all the early Virginian Raineys I could locate, knowing only that we were descended most likely from the immigrant William Ranye (c1666 Ulster-1722 Virginia). We knew our family had come out of Tidewater Virginia because Pat Raney's yDNA test in 2007 informed us the descendants of those Raineys were our closest Rainey kin. I hoped the pieces of our Rainey ascent would easily fall into place, but they didn't. As I've sometimes done with a puzzle, I tried forcing in a piece I thought should fit - trying to connect our 3rd great-grandfather James to selected Rainey/Raney men as possible fathers. As we know, the more complete the puzzle, the easier to find and place the pieces. I might have reached that tipping point.
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| Blackwater Swamp. Lots of swamps in Sussex County |
What makes a man to wander,
What makes a man to roam;
What makes a man leave bed and board
And turn his back on home?
Followed by a mournful, Ride away . . . ride away . . . ride a-wa-y.
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| Sussex County, Virginia, formed in 1754 |
Our 4th great-grandfather James Rainey (c1774-1838/40), likely born in Sussex County, but reared across the line in Northampton County, North Carolina, traveled back to Sussex County to marry Martha Parham on 3 April of 1800. James' oldest daughter, Mary "Polly" Rainey Davidson, in her 1850 Pulaski County, Kentucky census, claimed to have been born in 1800 in Virginia (that date easier to recall than her likely birth of 1801). Her brother William Rainey (1805-1885), of whom I wrote last month, was mostly consistent on censuses in placing his birth in North Carolina. It may be that this young Rainey family spent a few years in North Carolina before appearing on the 1810 census in Pulaski County, Kentucky, where our 3rd great-grandfather James Rainey was born in 1814. Rainey cousins had migrated south into the Carolinas and Georgia by 1800. 
Pulaski County, Kentucky
After having ten children - some still unidentified - Martha Parham Rainey died in Pulaski County, Kentucky, after the birth of John C. Rainey in 1817 and before the 1820 census, which shows no female over the age of 16-25. It would be no wonder that James Rainey remarried. There is a marriage between a James Rainey and a Polly Dunn in 1821 in Pulaski County. James' son Stephen Rainey (c1803 - unknown) married Delilia Dunn in 1825. Were the two women related? Others have claimed Polly Dunn, marrying her to a different James Raney. James' 1830 White County, Tennessee, census indicates no additional children born to him, but has a woman aged 30-39 in his household. Too old to be Polly Rainey, who married James Davidson in 1826 and remained in Pulaski County. The last tax payment I find for the elder James in White County, Tennessee, is for 1838 when he was about 60 years old. He must have rented his farm, for it shows no owned acreage. Did he die that year or the next . . . or did he move on? He had lived in four states. Did he seek out greener pastures elsewhere?
White County, Tennessee
I did some reading online of a book titled Sussex County: A Tale of Three Centuries, published in 1942 by the Works Project Administration (WPA) for the American Guide Series. A real gem for researchers, it lists land patents from 1701, when Sussex was still part of Surry County, down the years to just before the American Revolutionary War.
The county line dividing Surry from Sussex County is the Blackwater River
Settlement of what was to become Sussex County was prohibited throughout the 17th century, first, because the Native American tribes had been pushed south across the Blackwater River; second, in 1693 William & Mary granted 10,000 acres of that large swatch of land to William & Mary College in Williamsburg. Native American power declined rapidly after the massacre of white Virginians in 1644 and by the end of the 17th century landowners in adjoining counties cast greedy eyes on that pine-covered land, petitioning the Crown to open it for settlement; otherwise, they warned, settlers would head south into North Carolina. There must have been good tobacco-growing land there, with the Nottoway and Blackwater rivers, navigable waters, bisecting it.
After much bickering and lawsuits against illegal settlers, the land was finally surveyed and patents issued beginning in 1701. Among the initial patent holders are the surnames of men whose genes had been or would be absorbed into our Rainey line - Eppes, Wynne and Parham. Our Rainey ancestor, William Ranye, the Immigrant (1666 County Antrim, Ulster - 1722 Prince George Co., Virginia), purchased 250 acres on Racoon Swamp in 1713 (perhaps for a son, for he himself died in Prince George County).
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| Prince George County. Note its closeness to what became Sussex County with convenient river travel on either the Blackwater or the Nottoway rivers (previous image). |
Through the years descendants of these families, and other families to whom we are related, purchased more land in what would become Sussex County in 1754, after settlers complained that crossing the Blackwater River to get to the Surry courthouse for business was a hardship and petitioned for their own courthouse south of the Blackwater.
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| Nottaway River, Sussex County, Virginia |
In 1746 a William Rainey purchased 145 acres in what would become Sussex County. Was he fourth-great-grandfather James Rainey's grandfather? I don't know yet. For the tax year 1782 two Rainey men are listed in Sussex County - William Rainey and Peter Rainey (1756-1826). One of them must have been James' father.
I have much more to tell you about Martha Parham's family lines. In the meantime listen to the theme from The Searchers, sung by Tex Ritter HERE
