Ancestors

Merinda Ball

Merinda Ball was born on 10 January 1844 in Tennessee. The date is on her death certificate, which gives her age to the day. Her name was written many ways in her lifetime and after it: Maranda, Marinda, Meranda, Miranda, Maronda, Marandia and once just Randy. She never learned to read or write, so the spelling was always the clerk's.

Her parents are not named on her death certificate, but the records around her point to Adonijah Ball, known as Nige, and his wife Mary, called Polly, whose maiden name was Hall. In 1850 a Maranda Ball, aged 3, was living in their household in Cocke County, Tennessee, with Nancy J., 7, John, 6, and Samuel L., 1. In 1860 the family was in the eighth civil district, and Maranda was 14. By then there were also Mary J., Martha, Ausborn, a second Mary and a baby, Dica. She was the only girl of that name and age in Cocke County in either year. In June 1880 she and her husband lived in the very next house to A. D. and Mary Ball, and she told the census taker her father was born in Tennessee and her mother in North Carolina, as Nige and Polly were. Her brother John Ball, 37, lived in the house on her other side. Long after, her daughter Mary spent her last years with Ragan James, a son of her sister Dica, and died in his home in 1954. No record of the time names Nige and Polly as her parents in so many words, and the ages in those early censuses put her birth two or three years later than her certificate does.

She married Bill Cagle, a Cocke County man of about her own age, around 1864, in the last years of the Civil War. In 1910 both of them told the census taker they had been married 46 years, and that it was the first marriage for each. Their marriage record does not survive. Cocke County's courthouse burned in 1876 and took the county's early marriage books with it.

Merinda bore ten children, and in 1910 all ten were alive. Nine are known by name: George, born at Newport, the county seat, on 6 May 1870; Mary, about 1875; Martha Jane, about 1876; Lydia, about 1880; Robert, about 1887; Rhoda, about 1888; Alice, about 1890; John, born 10 August 1891; and Bill. Mary never married and stayed near home all her life. Lydia and Rhoda both married men named Hall. Five of the children named Merinda as their mother, as Marinda Ball, Meranda Ball, Miranda Ball or Randy Ball, on their own death certificates and Social Security papers, between 1939 and 1968.

In June 1880 the family was living in the thirteenth civil district, the Grassy Fork country, next door to her parents. The census taker wrote them down as William and Miranda Messer and gave their ages as 27 and 26, ten years short of the truth. The children were Mourning, 13, Elisabeth, 11, George, 8, Martha, 5, Mary, 3, Lydda, 2, and William, 9 months old. Little Martha had dropsy, a swelling of the body with fluid, that summer.

In May 1910 Bill and Maranda were farming in the ninth civil district of Cocke County, near Del Rio on the French Broad River. Both were 67. Their son Robert, 23, lived with them with his wife Fannie, 20, and their little boy Ollie, a year and a half old. Bill farmed on his own account. Neither he nor Maranda could read or write.

Merinda was a midwife. That is the occupation written on her death certificate, and forty years after she died one of the mothers she had attended still remembered her by name. In September 1956 Frances Hall, 89, of Paint Rock, North Carolina, swore an affidavit in Cocke County so that her daughter Lora Belle Hall could get a delayed birth certificate. She could not write either, and signed with her mark. Her statement said only what she knew: "I am the mother of Lora Belle Hall. I am the mother of 12 children and this one is my 4th. child Maranda Cagle delivered her."

The county's birth registers for 1908 and 1909 show her still at the work in her mid sixties. They had a column for the name of the midwife present at each birth, and in School District 9 Miranda Cagle is written in it six times. She delivered a son of Elbert and Margaret Laws at Naillon on 30 January 1908, a son of Sarah Freeman at New Prospect, and Elmer, son of John Laws, at Del Rio on 3 January 1909. At Hartford she delivered Birdie Wild on 3 April 1909, a child of Joseph L. and Nancy Henderson, and a son of S. M. and Debbie Harris. Other women on the same pages were Cassie Ball, Sarah Hall, Rebecca Green and Martha Johnson.

Bill died between 1910 and 1916, and Merinda was a widow at the end. In February 1916 she fell ill with la grippe, the old name for influenza. Dr. A. B. Ford attended her from 22 February to 1 March. She died on 2 March 1916 in the ninth civil district of Cocke County, at a place the certificate spells Naillon, aged 72 years, 1 month and 22 days. W. B. Ford, who gave the facts for the certificate, also buried her, on 4 March 1916. Her grave is in the Bell Hill Cemetery at Del Rio, where her daughter Mary was buried in 1954.

Her son George crossed the mountains into Haywood County, North Carolina, and farmed at Fines Creek for most of his life. He named a daughter, born in 1905, after his mother. The girl was written Meranda in 1910 and grew up as Miranda Cagle.

If Merinda Ball is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Merinda Ball (1844-1916)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/merinda-ball-1844-1916-f300f4.