I’ve been working on a family mystery for over a decade now. My paternal grandmother’s great-grandparents (I’ll pause so that can sink in) had the last names of Price (g-grandfather) and Robinson (g-grandmother). The former, Duncan Bright, was born around 1844 and the latter, Laura Ann, was born around 1854 and they married when Laura was about 16 (YIKES, I know).

Here is the mystery:

I have no idea where either of them came from.

Not only are there no pictures of them in any of my grandparents extensive photo collection, but there is nothing about them online before 1870. I’ve obsessed over census records, contacted cemeteries, historical societies, and they didn’t seem to exist together before the first official census after the Civil War. The only inkling I have for Duncan is that there is a D.B. Price who was from Orangeburg who fought in the Civil War and that is where his family lived later.

Did D.B. Cooper get his moniker from my 3rd great grandfather?

Conveniently, they both died before South Carolina required death certificates to be on file, thus leaving me without any possible way of finding out who their parents could have been or where they could have been from. However, typically people stayed near where they grew up back then (especially in the south) and they lived around Orangeburg for the rest of the census information until Laura died in 1902 “after a long illness” and Duncan died in 1912.

I’ve found other Prices and other Robinsons in the area prior to 1870, but no one with a name even close to similar to my relatives. Since quite a few churches were burned during the war, I’ve wondered over the years if that’s actually what happened to their wedding or birth records.

Here are some of the routes I’ve taken to try and put this puzzle together:

• This first and only son was named Henry Donald. I still think it’s possible that he could have been named after one of their fathers or grandfathers.
• Duncan’s middle name of Bright could have been his mother’s maiden name or somehow connected to her family, but I can’t find any marriages between a Bright and Price within the potential years.
• It’s possible her family didn’t want them to be married and they ran off after meeting sometime after the war
• Maybe she was from his hometown, they knew each other growing up, and married after the war, but the records were simply lost.
• Several families married cousins in the mid-1800s, so they could potentially be from the same family.

At any rate, it’s something that has continued to gnaw at me over the years. I started a book to chronicle all of my findings about a decade ago and even though its marginally finished, I can’t bring myself to publish it because this feels like the final chapter to complete.

I’ve got hopes to travel to Orangeburg in 2022 and see if I can look through records there myself to try and locate any family ties for them and figure out who Duncan and Laura really were; simple farmers or bank robbers on the lam?

The mystery continues…