Tonight I made the striking realization that an ancestor on my mother's side lived in Nicholasville, KY, the same town as William Lear, who is on my father's side. Somehow, I never noticed this before. I was just reading my ancestor, Jacob Grindstaff's, pension file and saw Nicholasville and it stuck. I imagine because I did not find William's exact birth place until after I had taken a break from searching for my Grindstaffs. This got me thinking, since Kentucky was a place many Revolutionary War veterans got land, maybe William Lear's father, or more likely, grandfather, served in the revolution.
I started searching on Fold3.com for William Lears in Revolutionary War pensions, because my William's death certificate lists his parents as William Lear and Bessie Pound of Virginia. According to very reliable sources in the family, Bessie was Native American. The stories I have heard say she was "the same tribe as Pocahontas, but NOT related to her." Seeming to back this up is the story that around 1911, William got a letter from the government (presumably the Bureau of Indian Affairs) that he was entitled to land in Oklahoma (Indian Territory at the time) and that he had to move there to claim it, and if he failed to move there, he would be giving up his rights to any Indian benefits and his name would be struck from the rolls. William decided given his advanced age that he was not moving to Oklahoma alone for some land. Thank you, William.
Tonight, as I searched on Fold3, I found a William Lear born in VA (too old to be William's father) and married to a Hannah Bailey (William had a daughter named Hannah). According to the usually flawed, but sometimes useful, ancestry.com member trees, this William was related to a Lear family who went to Gerard County, Kentucky. One son was Jesse Lear, who was married to a Betsey Brown. Could it be that Jesse, who is the right age to be William Lear's father, was in fact his father? And someone mistook Betsey Brown for Bessie Pound?
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