I was recently updating some ancestor profiles on WikiTree, and came across one that was a complete train wreck. The profile for William Yeager Sr. had birth and death dates and locations with no evidence to support them, and had linked to it over 25 children. Time to dig in and separate fact from fiction.
William Yeager Sr. was my 6th great-grandfather. His WikiTree entry began with the following:
“William W. Yeager Sr. was born on 24 September 1786, in Culpeper, Virginia, United States, his father, John Yager, was 35 and his mother, Ann Nancy Render, was 33.”
That’s incredibly specific information, and yet no source was attached to it. So, where the hell did it come from? Sometimes, it’s copied directly from someone’s entry in Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org, but these individual pages can be littered with bogus information – or, at least, information without sources. This is great information, if it’s true. But without legitimate sources, we have to assume it isn’t true. I haven’t found any records to support William’s date of birth or parentage at this point, so I stripped this information out and reposted it with a caveat in a new section called “Research Notes”. I want to keep it, because it does suggest a source exists, but I don’t want to treat it as fact until I have that source.
Census records do corroborate his year of birth. William appears in the 1850 U.S. Census of Barbour, Virginia1 at the age of 64, suggesting a birthdate of approximately 1786. In this census, he also identifies his place of birth as Virginia. So, I changed the opening sentence to this: “William’s birth year is estimated to be 1786, based upon census records. No birth record has yet been located, and his parentage is unknown.” Nothing in this sentence is misleading; instead, we are simply stating the best of what we know, and acknowledging what we do not know.
Genealogical research is all about amassing evidence and drawing conclusions. There are often vital documents, such as birth records, that are missing – either they were never created or they were lost/destroyed at a later date. So, when we write up a profile of someone who has been dead more than a century, we have to keep what we assert in line with the evidence we find.
The first document I could find and verify was the marriage record. William Yeager married Elizabeth Thorn on 19 Sep 1809 in Randolph County, Virginia. The marriage was performed by Simeon Harris (another of my great-grandfathers). FamilySearch2 had the information available, but did not have an image of the original record. But I was able to find it in the archives of the West Virginia Culture Center3. Here is the actual entry:
This document tells us the name of William’s wife (Elizabeth Thorn), and her father’s name (Frederick Thorn). Based upon our assumption of his birth year of 1786, William would have been about 23 years old at the time of this wedding. That age fits with cultural norms of the time. But how do we know this record is for our William Yeager?
The marriage record is from Randolph County, Virginia from 1809. In the 1810 U.S. Census4, there is only one William Yeager in Randolph County. There is another William Yeager enumerated in the 1810 Virginia census, but he lives in Loudon County, more than 200 miles away. It is sensible to assume then, that the William Yeager enumerated in Randolph County is the one who got married in Randolph County.
So far, we know that William Yeager was born about 1786 in Virginia. He married in 1809 a woman named Elizabeth Thorn in Randolph County, and was living in that same county in 1810. All of this information is supported by surviving documents that are easily accessible. If you want to see them for yourself, just use the links in the footnotes.
Next, we’ll start looking for his children.
- “United States, Census, 1850”, Accessed 03 Jan 2026 via FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M88G-594), Entry for William Yeager and Elizabeth Yeager, 1850. ↩︎
- “West Virginia, County Marriage Records, 1776-1971”, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:Q2ZX-JPC6 : Wed Dec 04 01:59:36 UTC 2024), Entry for Wm Yeager and Elizabeth Thorn, 19 September 1809. ↩︎
- Marriage Records for Randolph County, West Virginia. West Virginia Culture Center. Accessed 05 Jan 2026 via https://dach-image-proxy.digital-relativity.workers.dev/?film=808786&frame=00017 ↩︎
- “United States, Census, 1810”, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:XH28-X8Y : Fri Mar 08 02:25:08 UTC 2024), Entry for William Yeager, 1810. ↩︎