The Mystery of Lucy - Solved! (Part I)

Last year I wrote a post about my husband’s great-great-grandmother – Lucy. At the time I had just received her death certificate, along with the death certificate of her daughter – Sadie. Both had left me with a lot of questions.

A few weeks ago I took some time to revisit the information I had on Lucy and to see what new information I might find on FamilySearch.org. (If you've never been to FamilySearch.org I'd recommend a quick visit - after all it's free and there's a lot of interesting family information just waiting to be found.)

Turns out that FamilySearch.org has a database of Virginia marriages from 1785 – 1940 that gave me the missing information I needed to put together a more complete picture of Lucy’s life. I’m sure there’s more to be learned (there always is!) but I'm going to post as much as I know here over the next few weeks.

Lucy Bagley was born April 16, 1885 in Blackstone, Virginia. Blackstone is 35 miles southwest of Petersburg, Virginia and is a rural tobacco farming area. Lucy was born just twenty years after the end of the civil war and her parents may very well have been born in slavery.

According to her marriage information, Lucy was the daughter of William Bagley and Mary Williams. Once I knew the names of her parents and the place where she was born, I found her parents listed in the 1880 census, five years before her birth.


Assuming this is the correct William and Mary Bagley, it appears that Lucy had an older sister named Lizzie. Since there are other documents that show that Lucy named one of her daughters Mary Lizzie, I believe I've found the correct family.

Up next: the family moves to Petersburg, Virginia