Postscript

     The real Benjamin Reed died in 1837 and was buried in Hazel Valley, Arkansas. He'd lived his seventy-seven years in three distinct places that still bear the family name: Along Reed Creek near Tazewell, Virginia; At the Reed Branch of Johnson Fort at Cow Creek, Magoffin County, Kentucky; And in Reed Township in Washington County, Arkansas. 

     Benjamin married a Charity Vaughn on December 17, 1792 in Warren County, North Carolina. He obtained land grants for sixty acres in Tazewell, Russell County, Virginia in 1805 and for three-hundred acres in Morgan County, Kentucky (now Magoffin County) in 1824. There the couple raised their children in the Cow Creek community on the Johnson Fork of the Licking River. This is the extent of the definitive record for my great-great-great-grandfather.

     Reed family oral tradition adds that Benjamin had fought in the revolutionary war Battle of King's Mountain, though the surviving soldier rolls for that battle do not list him for either side. There are also recurrent rumblings that the family has Native American blood. The Cow Creek drainage is on former Cherokee-inhabited land and is just over the ridge from an early mixed race or Melungeon community in Royalton, Kentucky. That land, along with most of eastern Kentucky when it was part of the Virginia colony, had been claimed by the Colonel William Preston family of Blacksburg, Virginia. 

     The spoken history adds that Old Benny moved on to Arkansas late in life, and this is corroborated by a death record for a Benjamin Reed in Washington County, Arkansas in 1837. Coincidentally or not, Washington County is adjacent to and formerly part of the Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma.

    Two professional genealogists, one pre- and one post-internet, reported that the birthplace for Benjamin Reed of Magoffin County, Kentucky was uncertain, though most likely in either Monroe County, Virginia or Gates County, North Carolina. Since Monroe County has since been excluded by a death record on a conflicting date, Gates County on the Albemarle Sound is the most likely birthplace for my progenitor. The early censuses for Gates County do list a household with the surname, variably spelled Reede (1790), Reed (1800), and Redd (1810). All of these homes were peopled by "free persons of color."

     The Albemarle colony was initially populated, after the Native American dispersal, by ex-patriots from Jamestown, Virginia. Among the first settlers of Jamestown in 1607 was a blacksmith named James Read who soon disappears from resident lists. In 1622 a George Read, blacksmith and soldier, is listed as having died in Jamestown. During that time period, numerous indentured seamstresses were brought to the colony, several of whom were thought to have been of Turkish origin. These disparate tidbits of history are the basis for parts of this conjectural family origin story. 

     The Jamestown and Albemarle connections notwithstanding, my ancestor Benjamin Reed apparently had three distinct lives, first in Tazewell, Virginia, then in Cow Creek, Kentucky, and finally in Washington County, Arkansas. This is not an unusual life trajectory for male heads-of-household of the colonial period when women were at high risk of early death during childbirth. What is unusual is the Jamestown immigration point for a Scotch-Irish family, most of whom arrived in the northeast and traveled across Pennsylvania and down the Shenandoah Valley before settling in the Appalachians. Skilled craftmanship in smithing and distilling would have been welcomed in any community and could have accounted for the Reed family's unusual pathway.

     Benjamin's great-great-granddaughter, my own mother, was a sworn teetotaler after an uncle gave her a swig to calm her sixteen-year-old's anxiety before a grandmother's funeral. She slept through the important passing and never forgave him or the family recipe that had been passed down through the generations on Cow Creek.

     As Benjamin Reed's descendant with bicolored eyes (heterochromia, an autosomal dominant genetic trait) and 2.4% Turkish ancestry, his life story as presented here feels representational, so, barring any additional records coming to light, this short story is what I see for The Three Lives Of Old Benny Reed.