The Carolina Origins of the Blalock Surname
My Blalock line remains a major brick wall. In a previous post, I identified William Blalock (1790-1850) as the father of 2GG Wesley Blalock (1825-1895). Click HERE to read it.
As a summary, Wesley was born in Bowling Green, Warren, Kentucky but by the time of the Civil War was living in Collinsville, Illinois. He was maimed in the left knee by a gunshot wound at the Battle of Fort Donelson in April 1862. Upon recuperation in a military hospital in Cincinnati, he remained in the area and died in Williamsburg, Ohio in 1895, living in dire poverty and leaving a wife and two daughters.
In the previous post, I made the comment that 3GG William Blalock was born in North or South Carolina.
How do we know that?
First, William’s suspected death record from January 1850 states that he was born in South Carolina.((“U.S., Federal Census Mortality Schedules Index, 1850-1880,” database, Ancestry.com : accessed 7 February 2018, entry for William Blalock, ID# 197_27173, Feb 1850, Madison County, Illinois; citing Ron V. Jackson, Accelerated Indexing Systems, comp.))
Secondly, the Blalock surname in early federal census records allows us to narrow down the birth location.
It’s another example of why rare surnames are so genealogically productive. The Blalock surname is uncommon enough in 19th century census records that it is not too difficult to quickly narrow down possible relations.
Below is a summary chart displaying Blalock surname distribution in U.S. census enumerations from 1790 to 1820, based upon nationwide searches of each federal census in Ancestry.com. (I applied the default feature, but the data may miss names which are so badly spelled that they do not appear in the search.)
U.S. Census – Blalock Surname Entries:
1790 = 18 families (13 North Carolina, 5 South Carolina)
1800 = 31 families (20 North Carolina, 11 South Carolina)
1810 = 38 families (25 North Carolina, 8 South Carolina, 3 Georgia, 3 Virginia, 2 Kentucky)
1820 = 78 families (29 NC, 16 Georgia, 13 SC, 8 Ohio, 4 Virginia, 3 Tenn., 2 Kentucky, 2 Miss., 1 NY)
Clearly, the Blalocks originated from the Carolinas. No one named Blalock or Blaylock is enumerated in 1790 or 1800 anywhere other than North or South Carolina. Unless he was an immigrant, the William Blalock enumerated in Warren County, Kentucky in 1820 must have been born before 1795 in North or South Carolina.
The lack of a relevant 1830 census record is a vital gap in this timeline. nd must have lived elsewhere before settling in southwestern Illinois. A wider search of William Blalocks in the 1830 U.S. census reveals twelve men with that name nationally, but none are located in Illinois. There is a William Blalock, age 40-49, located in Union County, South Carolina.[1] He heads a family of twelve in 1830 and the age data for the children is a good match to the 1820 Warren County, Kentucky enumeration. It would be unusual in the early 1800s for such a large family to first move east some 400 miles and then subsequently move west over 700 miles to arrive in southwestern Illinois by 1840 – but it cannot be completely discounted as a possibility.
Siblings Wesley, Elizabeth, and Rebecca Blalock were born in Kentucky in the 1810 and 1820s, but later show up in Collinsville, Illinois in 1850. If we assume the information about their hypothetical father relate to the same man, then William Blalock was born in the Carolinas in the late 18th century, became an apprentice carpenter in Warren County, Kentucky before 1810, and resided there through 1825 when Wesley was born in Warren County, and probably 1827, when Rebecca was born in Kentucky. He disappears from the record for over a decade, but re-appears in the Collinsville/ Caseyville, Illinois area in 1840 and dies there 1850.