Palace Revisited

When I spoke of Palace Tapscott, great grandmother of Horace Tapscott, in my previous blog, I stated “we will probably never know Palace's origins with any certainty.” We may be coming closer. Terry Bullock, a family history collaborator, who has been of immense help to me over the years, has found a delayed birth certificate for Valentine Tapscott, one of Palace and James R. Tapscott’s ten children. Not all the information in the certificate is trustworthy since the document was created in 1941, sixty-eight years after Valentine's birth and over three decades after the deaths of Palace and James. Nevertheless, that the information was supplied by sons John and Valentine provides some reliability. The certificate states that James R. Tapscott’s full name was “James Robert Tapscott,” very likely since his father was "Robert Tapscott." More important is that the certificate gives Palace’s maiden name as “Palace Matilda Pettus.” Now that’s very interesting since in Kemper Co, Mississippi, where James Robert Tapscott had lived in 1850 before moving to Washington Co, Texas, were three families with the slightly unusual name “Pettus,” and all three owned slaves. (In Ancestry.com the name in the 1850 Slave Schedule is incorrectly transcribed “Petters.”). One slave owner, J. J. Pettus, owned 24 slaves. J. J. Pettus was “John Jones Pettus,” who would twice be the governor of Mississippi, once when the state seceded from the Union.

It is not unlikely that Palace was once a slave of a Kemper Co Pettus family, was sold to the Tapscotts, and was taken with the Tapscotts to Washington Co, Texas, during the 1850s. At some point Palace may have assumed or been given the name of her former slave owner. John Jones Pettus is known to have spent some time in Alabama, where Palace claims to have been born. J. J. spent his childhood in Limestone Co, Alabama, and studied law in Sumter Co, Alabama.