by Warren Skidmore

[These notes have been put together at the request of David Armstrong, editor of the Allegheny Regional Ancestors, who feels that the truth about a widely-believed error should be better known.]

Act One of our drama begins with Archibald W. Corley, a great-grandson of Andrew Skidmore and Margaret Johnson of Randolph County. (l) He took a considerable interest (even pride) in his Skidmore ancestry in a period when this was not common. As a practicing attorney he spent much of his time in courthouses and had "stoped (sic) off one time at Harrisonburg from the train to look at the old records for my family." It was doubtless at this time that he located an Andrew Johnson there, made him the father of Margaret Skidmore (she was in fact his youngest sister, a posthumous child of Arthur Johnson), and produced a tale out of the whole cloth that this Andrew Johnson was the grandfather of the president of the same name.

In 1914 his distant cousin, Minna S. Hyman (Mrs. Harry), of San Antonio, Texas, wrote to Counsellor Corley (now in his mid-sixties and practicing in a sleepy country town) asking for some genealogical information. She was descended from William Wilson who had married Sarah Friend, a daughter of Jonas and Sarah (Skidmore) Friend. Corley answered her letter on 2 October 1914, and wrote again on 19 December 1914 sending her some rather careless information on her Randolph and Pendleton County ancestors. Mrs. Hyman was not a descendant of the Johnsons, but he wrote gratuitously in December (on the stationery of A. W. Corley and C. F. Greene, Attorneys and Counselors at Law, Sutton, West Virginia):

"Andrew Skidmore was born in 1751, died in 1827, his wife was Margaret Johnson of Andrew Johnson, she died in Randolph County, Virginia, in 1809 and is buried on what is now the Odd fellows home for W. Va. at Elkins, she was an aunt of Andrew Johnson the 17th President of the United States." (2)

Most genealogical correspondence eventually gets trashed but Mrs. Hyman saved hers, and I was able to make pencil copies of these letters (and another from Claude W. Maxwell, Counsellor at Law at Elkins, dealing largely with Friend's Fort) back in the pre-Xerox period.

The Second Act involved John D. Sutton who received a somewhat embellished tale of the Johnson connection which he published in January 1919 (after Corley's death) in his History of Braxton County and Central West Virginia. (3) Publication led to an immediate acceptance, and Act Three was played on the grounds of the Old Fellow's Home at Elkins. Here, on 8 July 1929, the Margaret Johnson Skidmore monument (now sadly vandalized) was unveiled and dedicated before about 2000 people. The plaque parroted the Corley correspondence:

"Margaret Johnson Skidmore; daughter of Andrew Johnson; sister of Jacob Johnson; Aunt of Andrew Johnson, 17th President of the United States. Was married to Andrew Skidmore, a soldier of the Revolution in 1783, the mother of twelve children. She died in 1808."

The speakers included a United States Senator, and a special Skidmore-Johnson issue of the Randolph County Historical Society Magazine was published to commemorate the event.

Sadly, more than one member of the West Virginia family later visited the Greeneville, Tennessee, home of the president and convinced Mrs. Margaret Johnson Patterson Bartlett (a great-granddaughter) of the truth of the Pendleton County story. They were true believers who had been led down the garden path, and it would serve no useful purpose to identify them at this late date. There can be no doubt, however, that the acceptance by the president's family has made Corley's tale even harder to stamp out.

If I may be permitted a personal aside, I have told anyone who would listen since the 1940s that the Johnson connection was completely fraudulent but have resisted telling the full story until now. (4) I put the editors of the Henckel genealogy (Andrew Johnson of Pendleton County had married Hannah Henckel as his first wife) on the alert before publication, but they still repeated the presidential story. Since then I have also published two editions of my Skidmore family history and denounced the Johnson error in both. (5)

The next actor in our drama was the late Mary Harter (1911-1992), my candidate for the first inductee to the West Virginia Genealogists' Hall of Fame when it is formed. (6) We knew that Andrew Johnson had sold all his lands in Pendleton County but where he went, if it was not North Carolina, was still unknown. Mary, with more faith that the truth would out than I could muster, undertook to find him. She had the means and leisure to travel and find him she did in Nicholas County, Kentucky, after a county-by-county search that took three years! She announced her discovery in the Fall 1973 issue of the Henckel Genealogical Bulletin which she then edited and published.

It was a remarkable detective story. Andrew Johnson had married Alsey (Elsie or Else), a daughter of Henry Black, as his second wife by a bond dated 11 October 1783 in Rockingham County. The original bond survived signed by both Andrew Johnson and Andrew Skidmore, his bondsman. Mary had a tracing of these signatures, and found a microfilm of the original consent note dated 29 May 1796 at Paris, Kentucky, to the marriage of Andrew Johnson's daughter Abigail and Enoch Robnett. The two signatures (written over 12 years apart) matched perfectly, and most fortuitously Alsey Johnson (while only a stepmother), signed giving her consent as well. Proof positive (all that Mary would accept) had been found. Johnson died there before 9 May 1805 when an inventory was filed of his estate in Nicholas County.

Mary's account of the pursuit is still in print and recommended highly to the interested reader. She included a short sermon:

"It is tragic that the Junkins [who edited the Henckel Genealogy] were imposed an by self-styled historians, and used this material [on the presidential connection]. The real tragedy is that once an error such as this appears in print, it is almost impossible to correct it. One thousand copies of this mistake are in print to haunt family researchers forever. It is surely true that in a 1447-page [Henckel] genealogy, not every person listed can be so placed with "documentry evidence" ... but when a well-known person is listed without proof, it reflects on the accuracy of the entire book." (7)

To which we can only add Amen!

Recently I looked at a reference book published just two years ago called American Presidential Families. It has 792 pages, some colored coat of arms, an eminent publisher, and sells for $95.00. (8) After some nonsense about a differing Virginia ancestry for the president it adds parenthetically, perhaps from the Greeneville homestead, "(other authorities have argued that Andrew JOHNSON, of Augusta County, Va, was the father of Jacob Johnson mentioned below)." Corley the authority has a nice ring to it!

Now for the epilogue to our drama. The writer Lately Thomas (who spent weeks working in the Johnson papers at the Library of Congress) found that the president learned very late in life, long after it was of much interest to either him or the Tennessee electorate, that his father Jacob Johnson was born in England and had sailed from Newcastle for America about 1795! (9)

1. He was a son of William Fogg Corley and Sarah Ann Skidmore (1821-1880), and a grandson of James Skidmore (1784-1860) and Sarah Kittle of Elkins.

2. Corley had published earlier an expanded account of this in a five-page biographical sketch written with his cousin John Henry Conrad, clerk of the circuit court of Lewis County, in Bernard L. Butcher's Genealogical and Personal History of the Upper Monongahela Valley West Virginia (New York, 1912), II, 778-82. Conrad was a grandson of James Madison and Edith (Skidmore) Corley and this article had sections on their mutual Corley and Skidmore-Johnson ancestors.

3. The Johnson fiction is told here once again on page 431, and Sutton added an appreciative note about the help received from the late A. W. Corley on page 434. I do not want to malign the work of John D. Sutton who did collect a great deal of exceedingly useful (and remarkably accurate) information from several of his other elderly Skidmore cousins then living in the Braxton County area.

4. I have no great quarrel with A. W. Corley, who was no doubt a lovely man apart from his aspirations to bask in reflected glory. He wrote friendly, well-intentioned letters to Mrs. Hyman, and does not seem to have ever expected any payment for his troubles.

5. Thomas Skidmore (Scudamore), 1605-1684, of Westerleigh, Gloucestershire, and Fairfield, Connecticut. See page 80 in the first edition (1980), and page 99 in the second (1985). A third edition is in preparation.

6. Mary Elizabeth (McCollam) Harter was a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists, an organization limited to 50 family historians elected for their contributions to the field.. She conceived and pushed to completion the indexes to the 1830 and 1850 censuses of Ohio, edited the 1810 census index of Pennsylvania, wrote innumerable articles and books on West Virginia families, lectured widely, did two printed editions of the Pendleton County marriages, and abstracted all of the early Pendleton County deeds with any genealogical significance. (These are only her accomplishments that I either participated in or have benefited from; doubtless there were many others.) She was born at Belington, but lived for many years near Akron. She dropped by the house frequently (Bert's greyish- lavender Thunderbird gave a bit of unaccustomed class to the driveway) always bearing gifts of fresh produce or chestnuts in season from the farm, or something for the children. She and Bert later retired to Key West. Florida, and we have yet to see her replacement

7. Henckel Genealogical Bulletin, Volume 4 Number 2, page 153. The complete volume is currently available from Mrs. Nedra D. Brill, C.G., 2410 N.E. 58th Street, Portland, OR 97213-4002 for $10.00. (Mrs. Brill is the current editor of the Bulletin who has maintained the level of excellence found in the early years.) To the notes given by Harter on page 154 the following unpublished information may be added Arthur Johnson, Senior, was in what is now Rockingham County, Virginia, as early as 15 September 1742 when he appears on a list of Captain Hugh Thompson's delinquents. His son John Johnson (born 1745) married Mary Sheltman (or Shelpman) on 17 August 1763 at the Cook's Creek Presbyterian Church. They were living in 1785 in Harrison County (and for a year or two thereafter, perhaps that part now Randolph), but had returned by 1788 to Rockingham County where the probate on his estate was given to his eldest son John Johnson, Junior, on 22 February 1796. Arthur Johnson, Junior, the youngest son (born about 1750), and his wife Elizabeth Harrison lived for a time on the North Fork in Pendleton County near his brother Andrew, but moved later to Harrison County. He was taxed there as late as 1807 on the West Fork River, but removed in the same year to Bath Township, Greene County, Ohio. After an interval in Indiana he died in March 1823 in Grandview Township, Edgar County, Illinois.

8. American Presidential Families, with Political Essays by Hugh Brogan and Family Essays by Charles Mosley. Biographical Details and Descendants Tables Compiled by Charles Mosley. Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, and Maxwell Macmillan Canada, Toronto, 1993.

9. Lately Thomas, The First President Johnson, The Three Lives of the Seventeenth President of the United States of America. New York, 1968, pages 8-9.

Allegheny Regional Family History Society
Post Office Box 1804
Elkins, West Virginia 26241

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