Ancestors

Bill Cagle

Bill Cagle was born in Tennessee about 1843, by his age of 67 in 1910. Both his parents were Tennessee born. He was a farmer in Cocke County all his known life. Cocke County lies on the North Carolina line, where the French Broad and the Pigeon Rivers come down out of the mountains, and its seat is Newport.

About 1864 he married Merinda Ball, a Cocke County girl born in 1844. In 1910 they told the census taker they had been married 46 years, the first marriage for both. The county's early marriage books burned with its courthouse in 1876, so no record of the wedding survives.

Bill and Merinda had ten children, and all ten were living in 1910. Nine are known: George, born at Newport on 6 May 1870, Mary, Martha Jane, Lydia, Robert, Rhoda, Alice, John and Bill. Five of them named him as their father, as Bill or William Cagle, on their death certificates and Social Security papers, with Merinda as their mother.

In June 1880 Bill and Merinda were living in the thirteenth civil district, the Grassy Fork country, in the house between her parents, A. D. and Mary Ball, and her brother John Ball. The census taker wrote the family as William and Miranda Messer, aged 27 and 26, about ten years too young. Their children that summer were Mourning, 13, Elisabeth, 11, George, 8, Martha, 5, Mary, 3, Lydda, 2, and William, 9 months. William said his father and mother were born in North Carolina. The wife of John Ball was also named Mourning, and a family history of Cocke County households makes her a daughter of the same George Messer Cagle and Cynthia James named there as the parents of William.

In May 1910 Bill and Maranda, both 67, were farming in the ninth civil district of Cocke County, near Del Rio. Their son Robert, 23, lived with them with his wife Fannie and their baby, Ollie. Bill worked his farm on his own account. Neither he nor his wife could read or write. Merinda also worked as a midwife, and that was the trade written on her death certificate.

Bill died between May 1910 and March 1916, when Merinda was recorded as a widow at her own death. His burial place is not known. His children stayed close to home. Mary, Lydia, Robert, Alice and Bill lived out their lives around Del Rio and Slabtown, on Big Creek. Rhoda went to Waynesville, North Carolina, and George to the mountain farms of Fines Creek in Haywood County, just across the state line.

A family history of Cocke County households lists a William Cagle, born in Cocke County in 1847, whose wife was named Maranda. It makes him the son of George Cagle, born in 1822 in North Carolina, and Cynthia James, who married in Buncombe County, North Carolina, in 1844. The wife's name fits. The year does not: a man born in 1847 would have married at seventeen, and Bill gave his age as 67 in 1910. Whether that William is this Bill Cagle, no record of the time shows.

If Bill Cagle is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Bill Cagle (b. 1843)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/bill-cagle-1843-b0572c.