Researching the Yeldells of Edgefield, SC
One of the most interesting families that I have ever researched happens to be one of my immediate lines the Yeldells of Edgefield, South Carolina. This family connects to me through my mother's father line. The name Yeldell is not common so when most Yeldell's meet each other they believe they are related. In Edgefield, however, the Yeldells believe they are two different sets of black Yeldells. In researching, I have learned that one white Yeldell traveled from England, so if you share his blood then they are all related. But what if you don't share his blood, does that means there are two sets? Well yes and no. If you don't share his blood your ancestor were either enslaved by the white Yeldells or just decided to use that name when changing the name was made possible after the Civil War. This means you are still getting the name from the same family. This was my problem with my family. My grandfather's father was not a Yeldell at birth. His mother changed his last name to Yeldell in 1880. But as I have gone deeper in my research and have graduated to DNA, I know that my mom shares DNA distantly with the beginning Yeldell family so even if we weren't connected at birth through documentation we are connected in some way.
This leads me to my next problem with this family. I have never come across a group of people that can disappear like the Yeldells. You have to have what I call a breakthrough to find them. For example when I first started researching my grandfather he could not be found as a child. This was due to name changes and spelling for him and everyone in his family. But if you are a first time researcher you wouldn't know this. I began to see this as a pattern for other Yeldell families as well. I also noticed that with them they didn't live around their own family like other people I researched. For example my mother's mother line of the Peterson took up an entire section called Pleasant Lane, every other house was a family member. The Yeldells however, would just arbitrarily pop up in a an neighbor and would be gone again by the next census in most cases never to be seen again. It is because of this that I creating trees for every black Yeldell family that I have found. Doing this I get to really see and study the families. I study that constant use of names like George, Robert, David, John and Thomas. I study their habits of disappearing two or three census records (that is 20 to 30 years) just to pop up dead with no listing of their parents name. They simply mastered the talent of hiding in plain site.
I wrote in my book about a cousin named John Yeldell (of course his name is John) and how he disappeared and eventually changed his name, his appearance and just simply who he was. Given the time that he did it I began to wonder is this why my family can become incognito at the blink of an eye. For whatever reason I will not stop looking for them. I will continue to connect them and I will bring their family back together.
