Researching the Dick Family, Part 2

So, after doing quite a bit of research on the Dick family for the next few days, I was very excited when I found Morris and Lafayette’s parents! And since I didn’t just go online and find them right away – it took some researching and putting the clues together until I figured it out for sure – I really felt like a detective who had solved a case. How exciting! And it’s not every day that you “find” direct ancestors.

So, Lafayette Dick’s parents were Eleanor Butcher and John Joseph Dick of Cabell County, Virginia.  (Cabell County was part of Virginia until 1863 when West Virginia seceded from the state during the Civil War and Cabell County became part of West Virginia.  This explains why so many records show that the birthplaces of both John Joseph Dick and Lafayette Dick were either Virginia or West Virginia).

I started focusing on Cabell County when I found Lafayette Dick living there on the 1850 census.  Then I happened to find Dicks buried in the cemetery of the Mud River Baptist Church in Barboursville, Cabell County, West Virginia, which reminded me of what my great grandmother had said about Lafayette's father being buried in the Mud River Flat Church cemetery in Tennessee.  Everything else I've found says that they were from Virginia or West Virginia, not Tennessee.  So, it seems that my great grandmother got the state wrong, but did have the right name for the cemetery. 

Anyways, on that 1850 Cabell Co, Virginia census, I found 18-year old Lafayette Dick (along with 23-year old Andrew Dick, 20-year old Reuben Dick, and 6-year-old America Dick) living with the family of widow, Rachael Butcher. Wondering if Lafayette was living with the Butcher family because his parents may have recently passed away before 1850, I started searching the county for his brother, Morris. I found 4 other individuals with the surname Dick in Cabell Co. in 1850, all in their 20s or teens, and all living with families with surnames other than their own: 25-year old Notley Dick living with the Robert & Mary McKendree family, 19-year old Polly Dick living with the Benjamin & Sarah Davis family, 13-year old Mary Dick living with the John Merrit family, and 13-year old Joseph Dick living with Rufus & Mary Lenerd family.  [Oh, and I also later found that a number of Andrew Dick’s family members were buried in the Mud River Baptist Church Cemetery.]

(In my searches I’d also come across a marriage record for a Joseph Dick and Eleanor Butcher in Cabell County on 14 March 1822, and that stuck with me because Lafayette Dick was living with a Butcher family on that 1850 census).

But I hadn’t found Morris yet on the 1850 census. So I wondered if the kids were all living with other families in the area, maybe Morris was listed under the surname of the family he was living with. So I looked for anyone with the name Morris in Cabell Co., and there was only one with a birth year within 3 or 4 years of Morris Dick: 13-year old Morris Lusher living with the Matthew & Margaret Lusher family. Interestingly, the family of Matthew and Margaret Lusher is listed with four children, ages 7, 5, 4, and 1 years, and 13-year old Morris is listed last, after all of the other younger children. Although we can’t know for sure if this is Morris Dick, it might explain why we can’t find a Morris Dick in the area at the time. (And I checked on the 1860 and 1870 censuses and couldn’t find a Morris Lusher, so it’s a possibility). Also, in my later research I found another connection between the Dick family and the Lusher family: I found a record posted to the rootsweb site by a descendant of the Cyrus family (Lafayette’s eldest brother, Notley Dick, later married Catherine Cyrus) that stated that Notley Dick “was elected constable in Cabell County, West Virginia, in fall of 1853. In February 1854, Notley stabbed Matthew Lusher h.o. Margaret Blake; Matthew died March 1854; court records show Notley resigned as constable in March 1854. . . .” So, apparently Notley Dick stabbed Matthew Lusher, the head of the household where a Morris was living in the 1850 census, and it appears that Matthew Lusher later died from these wounds. I wonder if the stabbing was related to Notley’s job as a constable, or if it was just a fight between the two men – could it have had anything to do with Notley’s little brother, Morris, possibly living with the Lusher family???

Then I thought I’d look up some of the siblings living with Lafayette on the 1850 census and see if I could catch any leads. I started with Andrew Dick, and I found numerous people who had submitted family trees on ancestry.com showing Andrew Jackson Dick with parents, John Joseph Dick and Eleanor Butcher – so that marriage record that I’d come across earlier was the right one. (Some of the family trees listed the father as John Dick, a few said John Joseph Dick, but the majority listed him as Joseph Dick). I haven’t come across anything yet that lists parents for Joseph Dick. So, I need to find more original records, but there are enough family trees that agree on the names of the parents that it’s likely correct. It looks like Joseph Dick had a second wife, and they had a number of children too. (The one thing that I noticed was that Lafayette was listed as a child in the family in several of the family trees that I looked at, but none of them listed Morris in the family. I wonder if that is because someone researched the census records and they didn’t find Morris because he wasn’t recorded under the surname Dick?)

Oh, and it turns out that the Rachael Butcher family that Lafayette was living with on the 1850 census is family too. I found a marriage record showing that Rachael Butcher’s maiden name was actually Dick. And her husband, who was no longer living at the time of the 1850 census, was Reuben Butcher. And it turns out that Reuben Dick and Eleanor Butcher Dick were siblings. I also assume that Rachael Dick Butcher was related to Joseph Dick (could they have been siblings also? Or maybe cousins?), but since I do not yet know who Joseph Dick’s parents were, I haven’t been able to learn more about how Joseph and Rachael may have been connected (other than the fact that their spouses were siblings).

So, I’ve got lots of notes I’ve taken as I’ve been doing this that I now need to sort through and add everything into my genealogy file. I’ve been typing up this information here and there in my spare time since early January, and have compiled quite a bit data – much of it about the children of Eleanor and Joseph Dick, and the children from Joseph’s 2nd marriage to Catherine Cook after Eleanor passed away. I’ve still got a number of records that I’ve found and need to look over and add to my file, but I think I’ll try to start posting my research notes of what I’ve found so far sometime in the next few days, and then add more as I get to it. I’m just glad that I got that e-mail asking me about Lafayette Dick’s parents, because I wouldn’t have started researching that family otherwise (at least not right now). So, anyways, I’ll post the source info for this information with my research notes on my next post, but just wanted to get this info posted for now. If you happen to be another family researcher and you are connected to the Dick or Butcher families, I’d love to share family info!