The Trivettes of Western North Carolina

This website is copyrighted 2004

||||| Introduction ||||| The Earliest Trivettes ||||| North Carolina Political Boundaries ||||| Whose Child Is Whose? |||||

||||| How Do You Spell Trivette? ||||| Sorting Out the William Trivettes ||||| Trivettes in the Civil War |||||

||||| Descendants of John and Richard Trivette ||||| What Was It Like As An Early Trivette? |||||

|||| What Happened To Nathaniel C. Tribet? |||| Works Cited ||||

Introduction

This website is about John and Richard Trivette and their direct descendants. John and Richard were brothers who came to North Carolina with their mother and stepfather before 1790. I also provide some discussion of their ancestors. They initially settled in early Rowan County and later in the northwestern counties of Ashe, Watauga, Iredell, and Wilkes. In the more than 200 years since their arrival, many have obviously moved on to other parts of the country, and I have also attempted to follow several of them. The earliest was Thomas Trivette, who along with two sons, their families, and three slaves, settled in Arkansas in the early 1850s. Some of those later moved on to the Indian Territories, now Oklahoma, and to southern Texas. Around the time of the Civil War, three Trivette brothers move to eastern Kentucky, and most Trivettes there today descend from one of two of them. The third moved on to Indiana, Minnesota, and then South Dakota. Two other brothers moved to Kansas about the same time. Yet another group moved to the Pulaski County, Kentucky area from North Carolina much later.

I qualify my discussions to North Carolina Trivettes because there are certainly Trivettes in America who are not related. Through the years it operated from 1892 to 1924 as an immigrant processing center, Ellis Island recorded over 200 people who spelled their surnames as “Trivett” or “Trivette” among the 22 million who passed through there (40). Also, there probably are Trivettes here who really aren’t Trivettes, biologically speaking, their names having morphed over time from something else. Most of the Trivettes in today’s Western North Carolina definitely are related. It should be noted, however, that there was one distinct line of Trivettes that had its recorded origin in Virgina in the late 1780s. They moved to Tennessee and on to Monroe County, Kentucky after the civil war. They could not have descended from John and Richard.

I also discuss what I know and don’t know about the spelling of the Trivette name since there have been numerous variations over the years. Whenever I refer to the Trivette name in general, I spell it Trivette. Whenever I refer to an individual or family mentioned in documentation, such as the U.S. Census, I provide the spelling used in that instance.

Almost all of the information provided on this website was taken from publicly available documents. The exceptions are the Levi Trivitt family bible, the Nora Trivette Smith letter, and one or two private, personal conversations which I note as such. One other is the South Fork Baptist Church minutes. While they were microfilmed by the North Carolina State Division of Archives and History and the microfilm is housed there, it cannot be viewed without written permission of South Fork Church. The administration of such materials by the state is governed by North Carolina statute. Of the publicly available information, the large majority of it comes from the United States census. For Americans whose ancestors were here as early as 1790, the year of the first federal census, it is probably the single most important source of genealogical information. This website would not have been possible without it. The census also contains many errors, some due to careless enumerators and some due to illiterate reporting populations, as the earlier Trivettes largely were.

Throughout this website there are numbers shown in parentheses. These identify the source of the preceding information and are detailed in the Works Cited section.

Finally, a critical part of my ability to produce this site was my local public library. I live in a medium-size city and there is a genealogy room at my nearest branch with microfilm readers, all census microfilm, many books, and access to subscription genealogy websites such as ancestry.com and heritagequest.com. They also have several wonderful people who work there who know a lot more than I do and are very helpful. I have benefited greatly from that facility and those people.

It is my uneducated guess that 90% of the people who have ever walked the face of this earth have no written record of their existence and no living person with memories of them. From the perspective of history, it’s as if they never existed. Don’t let that happen to your family. The choice is yours.

I have formally copyrighted this website. While history itself cannot be copyrighted, there are parts herein that are applicable to copyright statutes. I hope you will find this site informative and perhaps even use it as a basis for your own research. If you have comments on this website or additional information on the Trivettes, please contact me at trivettehistory@yahoo.com.