William Tracy Gould and Anne McKinne Gardiner Gould
It’s hard to convey to people exactly how connected the nation was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. No telephone, no Internet, no wi-fi. And yet, when we begin to do research on nearly any artifact or document with a relationship to one of the students, we inevitably find that they were acquainted or related with so many others. We recently purchased a letter on e-bay written by William Tracy Gould’s sister-in-law to his wife who was visiting Litchfield. As you may know, William Tracy Gould was the son of James Gould, who taught at the Litchfield Law School with Tapping Reeve. Following his studies, the younger Gould moved to Georgia where he opened a law school of his own. He married Anna Gardiner of Augusta, with whom he had three children.
I began research to locate life dates of the author, Elizabeth G. Rose, and from basic searches of a few genealogy sites, was able to determine that this was Anna Gardiner’s sister. Several sources indicated that Gould’s wife was a widow upon their marriage, but I believe they had confused her with another Anna McKinne, and that McKinne was his wife’s given middle name, as it was her mother’s maiden name. According to the genealogy sites I checked, the Anna McKinne who was a widow of Joseph McKinne did not have a sister named Elizabeth.
I would like to say that what happened next is unusual, but I fear it is not. I fell down the rabbit hole of the LLS social network. I happened upon an article about James Gardiner, who had the same parents listed as Elizabeth. I began to read it in the hopes of finding further genealogical information. What I found was far more interesting. James was the editor of a newspaper in Augusta. In 1861, he wrote a series of editorials endorsing Eugenius Aristides Nisbet (LLS 1823) for the governorship of Georgia. He went on to publish a literary journal, and one of its contributors was Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (LLS 1813). He later endorsed Horace Greeley in his bid for the Presidency. Greeley’s wife had attended the Female Academy in 1827.
As if that isn’t enough to convince you it’s a small world, it turns out that Elizabeth’s husband, Arthur Gordon Rose, had been married previously to Elizabeth Wigg Barnwell whose brother, William Wigg Barnwell attended the Litchfield Law School in 1817. Having found the information I was seeking, I stopped, though I’m sure this is only a snippet of who was on their list of friends. Now to update all of those Ledger pages!
Additional Information:
In addition to the Ledger pages linked to above, these are resources that helped me in my research:
Find-A-Grave: Arthur Gordon Rose
Biographies of Richmond County, GA
Augusta’s Other Voice: James Gardner and the Constitutionalist
Russell K. Brown
The Georgia Historical Quarterly
Vol. 85, No. 4 (WINTER 2001), pp. 592-607