Belle Gray Grimes

Belle E. Gray Grimes

(Grandmom)

Belle E. Gray was born in King George County, Virginia in April 1894.

Her Parents were Peyton Gray and Nancy Jane Evans also of King George County.

I looked her up in the 1900 census and discovered that she is living with her parents and 6 brothers and sisters. That  her father is listed as a farmer who owns his farm free of mortgage.

Something I noticed in the census was that Thomas Gray 1885 and Mary E. Gray 1880 are listed as son and daughter respectively. This is not likely true but maybe someone can find out the answer for us. I am going to suggest that they are possibly younger 

siblings of Peyton Gray senior. I discovered when I was looking for Peyton Gray that his parents in an earlier census were a couple named Filmore but more about that later. 

• Peyton Gray  -March 1872
• Nancy Gray  -October 1874
• Thomas Gray  -March  1885
• Mary E. Gray  -October 1880
• Simon Gray  -April 1892
• Belle E. Gray  -April 1894
• Charles Gray  -Feb. 1896
• Peyton Gray  -May 1897
• Mary E. Gray  -March 1900 
• Harry Gray   -1903
• Olden Gray   -1905
• Beulah Gray  -1907
• Ashby Gray   -1900
• Nathaniel H. Gray  -1912
• Robert S. Gray  -1916

The names are color coded Because they are from different  census years. The names in red are from the 1910 census they didn't put the birth month and year on that year, just the age at the time of the census, so I approximated the birth years. If anyone knows these birthdays please let me know. 

The Last census I'm going to list for Peyton and Nancy is the 1920 census because 2 more uncles came along in that decade. (phew, they used to keep busy day and night in those days) 

Unfortunately for me I never got to go down to the homesteads in Virginia. I think Mike got down there and maybe he has something to say about it and uncle Percy (Junie) must have gone down and I'm hoping he'll fill us in with more details. 

I did get to visit the area on my way to Richmond several years ago and I looked up The church that Amelia Pryor had refered to in her arkstones.txt

The Little Ark Baptist Church

This is the cemetary adjacent to the church.

If you walk all the way to where the trees are on the right,

in the photo above,

you'll find the graves of Peyton and Nancy Gray,

along with the graves of some of their children.

Percy A. Grimes

Percy A. Grimes

(Grandpop)

Grandpop was born in Dec. 1894 in Virginia to Allen Grymes born about June 1860 and Lucy Grymes born about 1875. According to the 1900 census for King George County, Potomac district. Also listed are an older brother whose name I can't read born Dec. 1891 and younger twin brother Thomas and twin sister Martha M. whom Aunt Annie says they called Marie. The twins were born Sept. 1896. Allen's occupation is listed as farmer.

Even though I was using Ancestry .com I had a really hard time finding anything about grandpop's family. In fact I skipped over them a bunch of times until I decided to try the Grymes spelling. Then bingo!!!, I hit bigtime. Well maybe not that big because I did hit the wall after his Grandfather.

I don't know the story of how grandpop's name became Grimes when everyone else in his family was a Grymes.
Maybe we can get some help on that from Virginia or Marie Gray in Moorestown Because their mother Izora Dunlop Gray was grandpop's first cousin. I don't know how much they know about the Grymes side but we should ask because otherwise we'll have to start looking in Virginia for answers.

As I have said before about looking for family connections nothing beats Ancestry.com except maybe traveling around looking up census records and court records, but Ancestry .com is not free and some folks find it too expensive, personally I don't think it is if you're going to use it and they do upgrade it regularly plus they offer all kinds of very nice features. In my travels online I did find a site that gives access to census and some other records at a much better cost than Ancestry. It's called Heritage Quest Online. You can click on the Name to link to it. In fact I'll give you a head start and set up a link to the Grymes page and you can start exploring from there. Just bookmark them for later reference.
Do it while you can because I have no idea how long we can continue to do these searches for free.
As it turns out I don't have the right to link to this site, so you'll have to subscribe to a library to see it.

First steps, Black History Month 2010

Well I've been thinking about this blog for some time now. I guess cousin Brian's

-Grimes family Facebook group- gave me the push I needed to get started.

My name is Stacy Johnston my Grandparents are Percy Alexander Grimes and Bell Gray Grimes they both come from King George county, Virginia, and they both had quite a few siblings. They are where I will start and I hope we'll work in both directions, that's ancestors and descendants. Hopefully with luck and the help of the internet we can bring some of the extended family in contact and at the same time find out more about our historical roots.

I haven't ever tried something like this before so I don't have any idea what kind of format to start with. I do have a few ideas that might come into play a little bit down the line but for now I'll just put this out there and contact those of you that I know and we'll see what happens from here. Please feel free to comment, offer ideas, contribute family info, stories, photos or there documents and links if you have any. Don't be shy to ask questions or correct any information that you think might be wrong. Please share this blog with any family members that you are aware of.

I've been doing some research, so although I myself never really got to meet

any of the family in Virginia, except for the ones that came up to New Jersey,

usually for a funeral, I do have quite a few names. I also discovered that, so many of our family was from King George County that it was not too difficult to come up with lots of info.

Two items that were instrumental in my research were a hand drawn family tree called

EVANS, GRAY, GRIMES Family Tree 1988 by Virginia Gray Winchester and a list called arkstones.txt created by Amelia Pryor from the cemetery adjacent to Little Ark Baptist Church. I should also add that I had a subscription to Ancestry.Com that combined with the other two documents was a very powerful tool.

The family names we'll start with are - EVANS, GRAY, GRIMES, GRYMES, DUNLOP, BARCLAY, PRYOR, PRIOR,  BUMBREY, HOWARD, JACKSON, JOHNSON, LEWIS

If you are aware of any names that should be added please don't be shy to comment what they are and why you think they should be added. I'll mention here that the spelling isn't always what you think it would be. For example when I was searching Grimes I found nothing related to our family but when I changed the spelling to Grymes, I found that grandpop's father and the rest of his family was spelling it that way on the census. Another time, I found one Evans that I was looking for had the name spelled ivans this was possibly an error that happened when the name was being transposed to digital. Anyway be alert and don't be shy to check out alternate spelling if you do get to search records and documents.

This is the family tree mentioned above click on it to enlarge the image.

I guess this is a big enough first step. I'm looking forward to hearing from you all real soon.

Stacy