Serving Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, and other towns of the North Carolina High Country | Founded 05-05-05

Mystery of Boone Name Half-Solved

Story by Bernadette Cahill Sandra Blankenship, Deep Gap resident and several-times great-niece of frontiersman Daniel Boone. Her passion for genealogy has helped reveal some details of a mystery woman in the Boone family lineage.

In the family tree in Robert Morgan’s 2007 biography of Daniel Boone, the entry for one of Boone’s brothers states the wife is unknown. But research for a story about local connections to the Boone family for the latest issue of High Country Magazine has uncovered something of her identity.

The mystery in the Boone family genealogy on the endpapers of Morgan’s work, Boone: A Biography, relates to the unknown wife of Daniel Boone’s older brother Israel, who lived from 1726 to1756. Sandra Blankenship of Deep Gap is a direct descendant of the Boone family from Israel—and she knows the first name of the mystery woman.

Blankenship, who had always known through family lore about her Boone ancestry and has recently applied for membership to the Daughters of the American Revolution because of her links to Revolutionary War heroes through several lines of her family, received her family tree from a distant cousin.

“I never knew how [I was related to the Boones] until my cousin told me it was Israel,” she said.

The information she received from her cousin took her halfway to solving the mystery of the unknown wife of her ancestor because the family name of Israel’s wife Martha is unknown. She is recorded simply as “Martha Boone” in recent genealogies, according to Blankenship.

Martha’s family name has been lost through the practice of a wife taking her husband’s name, and perhaps also because both she and her husband died young. She was born the same year—1726—as her husband and died in 1755, the year before his death.

Blankenship received one other piece of information about her direct Boone family ancestor’s wife from a member of another branch of her family: apparently Martha was a Native American.

“I was excited to know she was Indian,” said Blankenship. For her, the information helped to explain the physical features and complexion of some members of her family tree.

Blankenship’s passion is genealogy and has her lineage traced comprehensively through several branches of her family back to the eighteenth century and the frontier days of pioneer Daniel Boone.