Wasting Time with the Long Hunters

I’ve avoided researching the Skaggs Long Hunter family since there has been extensive research done in the 100+ years since Lyman Draper’s work.  However, the internet has created an opportunity for a lot of “fake news” regarding the Long Hunters. People are posting trees without any evidence that create a dog’s breakfast of confusion for Skaggs family researchers.  Some folks are also ignoring well-documented prior research in their haste to tie their ancestors to famous Long Hunters like Henry Skaggs.

Some of the more frequent errors regarding the Long Hunters are included below so that serious family historians can avoid all the “fake news” out there:

• Combining the parents of the Long Hunters, James and Rachel Skaggs, with the James and Susanna Scaggs who migrated to Warren County, Kentucky for the 1810 census.  There is substantial documentation that these were two separate families that happened to live as neighbors in southwest Virginia about the time of the American Revolution.  James and Rachel died in the New River area of Virginia while James and Susanna moved to eastern Tennessee and finally Warren County, Kentucky.
• Listing the wife of James Skaggs, father of the Long Hunters, as Rachel Mordock. This error has been committed for decades based on a letter inquiring about the genealogical history of the James and Susanna Skaggs listed above.  Let's stop doing this starting now.
• Adding unsubstantiated children to the family, e.g. William, Zachariah, Old Peter, Solomon.  The Moses Skaggs estate papers provide the list of children of James and Rachel Skaggs that were known to the court in the 1830s: Moses, Henry, Richard, Charles, John, Jacob, James Jr., Susannah, Lydia, Elizabeth and Nancy.  These are the Long Hunter Skaggs as proven in a court of law.  There is an exception, Aaron, who disappears from the record during the 1780s, likely was left off the Moses Skaggs estate papers due to his early death.  Guys like Old Peter, Zachariah and Peter’s brother Solomon were not sons of James and Rachel Skaggs since they died between 1818 and 1841 and would surely have been considered as Moses’ heirs if they truly were siblings to Moses.
• The Long Hunter, John Skaggs, the Revolutionary War soldier wounded at King’s Mountain, was not married to Ruth Elkins or Catherine Hicks.  His wife was Elizabeth who appeared as a widow in the 1810 Green County, KY census. Moses Skaggs’ widow Elizabeth also appeared in that census.  Catherine Hicks was married to the John Skaggs, son of Thomas who founded the West Virginia Skaggs in the Greenbrier region of what is now West Virginia.
• James“Longman” Skaggs Jr. is frequently listed as having eloped with neighbor’s wife, Leah Carter, to St. Louis, where he died in 1811. Though James did elope with Leah Carter, he wasn’t the James who died in Missouri in 1811.  That was his nephew James, son of Richard the Long Hunter. We know this because his estate was settled by his brother, Benjamin Skaggs. Extensive records in St. Louis show the appraisal and disbursement of his estate which amounted to $275.57.When Benjamin Skaggs died in 1825, he had never given James' children the money from their father's estate. Later court documents in Franklin and Gasconade Counties in Missouri give accounts of the struggle made by James's children to collect their inheritance. To my knowledge, nobody knows what happened to James “Longman” Skaggs and Leah Carter after they deeded their land to James’ sons and rode off into the sunset.

That’s enough for one post. If anyone has any more examples of dis-information about the Long Hunter Skaggs please post in the comments so we all can avoid spending our research hours with these time-wasters.