All My Ancestors

I’ve been thinking about my 4th great-grandfather–Merriman Landrum.

I’ve blogged about him before–he’s the one with the 3 sentence will. The engraving on his tombstone is longer.

Maybe more telling is the inventory of his estate. My genealogical studies tell me that you can tell a lot by what a person leaves as well as how that estate gets inventoried. I haven’t fully decided what the listing of Merriman’s property tells me, but I know that he’s my only relative whose inventory includes a bookcase and a list of books by title.
I have found no official direct record of this, but he was supposedly a teacher and a minister. Well, I guess if you count his tombstone and the biography of his son, and the listing of the titles in his book case, you could count those as records. A preponderence of evidence, as they say, does indeed point to his being a minister and a teacher.

Tradition is that he was a Presbyterian minister. I don’t think so because I’m fairly certain that he didn’t go to seminary or attend college. And the Presbyterians, even at that time, had rigid requirements about their ministers having certain degrees–see Princeton. He was born in up country South Carolina and lived most of his short life in Tennessee–on the frontier. He may have been affiliated in some way with the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, which came into being about 1810. As I understand it, the name of the church came from a Kentucky Synod that decided to ordain some young men who did not strictly meet the educational requirements.

More likely he was some sort of lay minister. I don’t know if I’ll every know for sure–I do know that his descendants were Presbyterians, not Cumberlands. His son-in-law Job Cooper and granddaughters are in the records of the Presbyterian Church in San Augustine, Texas, before statehood. And in the 1950s, his great great granddaughter, my Grandmother Osborne, was ordained an elder in a Presbyterian Church in Texas that she’d helped establish.

Back to Merriman. Below are the 3 versions of the books enumerated in his estate–there may be others inventories, but these are the ones I found, conducted for the January 1827, the January 1829, and the January 1831 Court Sessions in Williamson County, Tennessee. The spelling is creative in some cases, but when I looked up these titles in World-Cat, a sort of uber electronic card-catalog, it was clear that several of these titles were written specifically for teachers.

It looks like some of the titles disappeared between the first and the second inventory. I’ve read that the oldest son, John Gill Landrum, was sent, or at least went, back to South Carolina to study with some of his Ray family who were ministers. He would have been about 16 or 17 when his father died in 1826, so maybe he took some of them for his own study. And he taught school himself for a while, so perhaps he dipped into his father’s library for his start. And it can’t escape notice that the son was undoubtedly named for the author of the commentaries–John Gill.

I haven’t been able to ferret out the subject of the Life of Merriam or Marian or however it’s spelled. My own family was a bit schizophrenic on the spelling of this name–I think my great Uncle George Cooper’s middle name was spelled Merimon. And I understand that The Life of George Washington was standard fare for early pupils. It was written just 8 years after his death and would have been one of the best sellers of the day. I wonder where Merriman got his copy?

Sometime I’ll post more about the other items in the inventories. He obviously wasn’t a wealthy man, but neither was he poor by the day’s standards. But I still think it’s telling that the book titles are listed in each year’s inventory.

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