Updated with new text and images on 2019 Feb 24.

In the next instance, Celia Rainwater is the wife of Elijah Cannon, who is a son of Nancy Wyatt and a grandson of Ellis. In this branch, Celia is the mother of Charity, Elhannah, Enoch, and Ellis. In both instances, Celia Rainwater is in the same generation at two branches removed from Ellis Cannon at the trunk. Is there any documentation that connects these two instances as either related individuals or as the same person?

If it turns out that there is only one Celia Rainwater in this tree, then she and her husband Elijah had the same grandparent, Ellis Cannon. That would make them first cousins of course and this was not uncommon in their time. I suspect it is true but I will need a lot more evidence before I can make a reasoned argument. As a soft conjecture I see that Elijah and Celia started their family in South Carolina close to the time that Mazie's great grandfather Nahum traveled to Tennessee to marry his first cousin, Cynthia Wyatt. Their children grew up far apart in South Carolina and Arkansas, yet Mazie's father Ed Cannon was already 14 years old when his great uncle, Elijah died. If he did not know them personally, he likely had a few stories from his South Carolina cousins, perhaps enough to have known that his great aunt and uncle were also first cousins. Again it is wildly speculative until there are some records to connect Elijah's wife Celia to Gabriel and to common parents. 

I do not have a full name for the spouse of Elizabeth Cannon Rainwater. ​We have only their father's surname and not his first name.  Next I will be continuing to reach out to my Ancestry contact who also has Celia and Gabriel Rainwater. Together I hope we can find the documentation that proves that our Celia and Gabriel Rainwater match up neatly.

In my prior post, I introduced an incomplete scan of a hand-drawn family tree. The detailed representation was penned by Rosemary and was based on confident recollections passed on by Mary Zerelda Cannon her father's sister, known as Aunt Mazie. This post digs into one section of the larger tree to illustrate the combination of various imperfections and helpful opportunities this tree offers to my research on my father's Cannon side.

As shown by a check mark in the image above, records have been found for William and Phoeby. From the pension application we know that Phoeby was severely afflicted and living at home with her widowed mother. She had no known children. Other than common variations in the spelling of her name, there is really nothing to add or alter about her small branch.

With the breadth of records that are now readily accessible in digital formats, this tree begs to be expanded by many new branches. As noted already, John Cannon would replace Louis in Mazie's tree. His wife Martha Moore and their six children were not known well enough to be part of this tree. William is shown correctly above but without his wife, Lucy Ward, and their nine additions to the grandchildren of Ellis and Elizabeth.  His sister Susanna also married a Ward and they added seven more grandchildren. Winnifred is also among these missing siblings; she and her husband John Vandiver would add nine more branches. The most valuable among the added branches would show Elijah Cannon (b. 1782) who married Darcus (Dorcas) Bowen and had eleven children. Adding their branch would help distinguish his records from those of his nephew, Elijah Cannon (b. 1796) born only 15 years later to Elijah's older brother Lewis Cannon (b. 1775).

Ellis Cannon is the starting point for a very helpful tree of his descendants. At each generation of descendants of Reverend Ellis Cannon, there continue to be both accurate, inaccurate, and omitted names. As with any family history that has been passed on from oral retellings, it remains an extraordinary inheritance especially with its imperfections.

This hand-drawn tree is a family research treasure map. I've already mined it repeatedly to initiate record searches that confirm and expand on the many household nodes it suggests. It has led the way to primary source documents such as US Census records. Recently I've returned to the tree for a closer look. This time, it promises to offer far more than confirmation of existing records. It may help me bridge from a dead end  in our Rainwater branch to a dead end another researcher's Rainwater branch to help reunite names from the original household. More about that in the next post, Leaping into the Rainwaters.