A mysterious phone call three decades ago set brothers Larry and Terrance Boothe on the path to discovering their not-so-distant connection to Isle of Wight County’s Civil War-era history.

An anonymous caller had reached their father, Randolph, in the mid-1990s, asking about the history of land in Isle of Wight County deeded in Randolph’s grandfather’s name. Randolph, who died at age 87 a few years later, had told the caller he didn’t know who his grandfather was, and wasn’t familiar with the property, and the caller hung up.

“After that, it was kind of left out there,” said Terrance, who’s since learned through genealogy research that he’s the great-grandson of Randall Booth, a man born into slavery who became the namesake of the Isle of Wight County Courthouse records room.

In addition to Randolph, a World War II-era Army veteran, Booth’s descendants include the late Gertie Boothe Williams, a beloved Petersburg schoolteacher with a link to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Booth’s living descendants can now be found nationwide.

 

Who was Randall Booth?

According to a circa-1907 written history of the county by E.M. Morrison, who in 1870 became the first superintendent of Isle of Wight’s fledgling public school system, Randall was one of several African Americans enslaved by Nathaniel Peyton Young, who served as clerk of court from 1841 to 1869.

Booth, believed to have been born in 1844 according to Ancestry.com, would have been only in his late teens in May of 1862 when Young gave him court records dating back to Isle of Wight’s 1634 founding and told him to hide them from the approaching Union troops who’d driven the Confederate army from Williamsburg that month.

“He was a young kid basically,” Larry said.

Booth took the records first to Greensville County in a cart, and then to Brunswick County, before returning to Isle of Wight months later, where he, according to Morrison’s account, “told, with much pride, of how he had remained in the woods and on the road for days at the time, with them.”

Morrison’s account states Booth remained faithful to Young even after the circa-1863 Emancipation Proclamation freed him from bondage. According to Helen Haverty King’s book “Historical Notes on Isle of Wight County, Virginia,” Young rewarded Booth for his efforts by naming him caretaker of the courthouse and gifting him with land from the Young family’s circa-1768 Oak Level plantation off Courthouse Highway, where Booth built a house.

The Isle of Wight County Museum has a circa-1900 photo of Booth in his mid-50s in its collection and another labeled “Aunt Allie, nurse and caregiver at Oak Level, died in 1880,” who Museum Director Jennifer England speculated could have been Booth’s wife. Larry’s genealogy research on Ancestry.com, however, lists a different name – Georgiana Tynes – as Booth’s spouse.

According to Haverty King’s book, Booth spent his later years driving the children of the neighborhood to school and died at Oak Level in 1904.

 

Putting the pieces together

Randolph “never really knew his father” and “didn’t even know who his grandfather was,” said Larry, who now lives in Tampa, Florida. “As a result, we didn’t have a lot of information going back.”

Coincidentally, “everybody called” Randolph “Randall” even before his father’s connection to the original Randall Booth was known, Larry said.

Larry said Randolph once told him he’d received deployment orders toward the end of World War II but a week before his unit was set to leave, the war ended. As a result, Randolph never saw combat and the family line endured.

Randolph’s father, John Boothe, was born the eldest son of the original Randall in 1869 and died in 1915 when Randolph was two years old, according to Ancestry.com records provided by Larry. Randolph, Larry said, was the youngest of six children, including two sisters.

The oldest, named Geneva, “I did know,” Larry said.

Though Geneva died when Larry was only 4 years old, “I still remember her,” he said. “She lived diagonally across the street from us” when the family resided in the Chuckatuck area of Suffolk.

Randolph’s other sister, Mary, was raised by her cousin, Georgie Tyler, another legendary figure in Isle of Wight history who’s the namesake of the county’s Georgie Tyler Middle School. Tyler began teaching at a one-room schoolhouse known as Muddy Fork in 1912 and was later a supervisor of 27 one- and two-room schools, according to the website for The Schoolhouse Museum, a Smithfield facility housed in the former Christian Home School that documents the early 20th century educational experience of African Americans in Isle of Wight County.

Mary’s daughter, Lila King, said her mother followed in Tyler’s footsteps by earning a college degree from Virginia State University and returning to Isle of Wight to teach in the Camptown area until she married a Franklin High School teacher and the couple relocated to Philadelphia, where King now lives. Mary was born in 1912 and died in 1993.

King said she “used to come to Smithfield every summer” to visit a woman she knew as “Aunt Hattie,” who was Tyler’s sister-in-law and lived in town near Brown’s AME Church off West Main Street.

 

A link to Martin Luther King

Linda Smith of Petersburg can also trace her ancestry to the original Randall Booth. She’s the daughter of Gertie Boothe Williams, who was Randall’s great niece.

Williams, who died in November at age 101, grew up in Isle of Wight County and attended what was then known as the Isle of Wight Training School. The formerly segregated 1960s-era school is now Westside Elementary.

“I, as a somewhat younger person, always found that to be very eye-opening how they called those schools for the Black and colored ‘training schools,’ as if they had to be trained, almost like animals,” Smith said.

Williams was born in 1923 to Claiborne Boothe and Eleanor Brown, the former descended from Randall and the latter from another former slave, Scipio Brown of Surry County, who according to the Brown family reunion website had been freed at age 44 in 1804.

“I never even met my grandparents because my mother was a baby of 14 children,” Smith said.

Smith said her mother, like Mary, attended VSU and pursued a career in education, obtaining her bachelor’s degree in 1945 and her master’s degree in the early 1980s. 

VSU now has a Gertie B. Williams Endowed Education Scholarship Fund named in her honor.

Williams began her teaching career in Sussex County, where she found herself teaching seventh- and eighth-graders only 10 years younger than she was. She later taught at the elementary level and retired from Petersburg Public Schools.

She was a “very loved and well known teacher in this area,” Smith said. “I’ve run into so many of her students even now who sing her praises.”

During her tenure with Petersburg, William became affiliated with the city’s historic Gillfield Baptist Church and the Rev. Wyatt T. Walker, a friend and contemporary of Martin Luther King Jr. who would become King’s chief of staff.

According to Virginia’s MLK Commission, it was at a meeting of the Petersburg Improvement Association at Gillfield that King announced Walker would accompany him to Atlanta as executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

“During the civil rights era, they would have a lot of meetings at that church,” Smith said.

According to Smith, there’s a very deliberate reason some Boothe descendants have an “e” at the end of their last name, and others don’t. Smith said some Boothe descendants sought to add the “e” shortly after the assassination of former President Abraham Lincoln to, in no uncertain terms, assert no relation to Lincoln’s killer, John Wilkes Booth.