My last name, Shenaut, has interested me since I was a little kid. By the way, my immediate family has always pronounced it ʃə 'no, sort of quasi-French style. That's what initially got me interested in genealogy as a hobby, and it's what this diary is about.
My dad was born in Galesburg IL in 1912, and was raised mostly in Camp Point IL. He joined the Marines in the 1930's and never resided in IL after that. I knew only one of my father's relatives, his half-sister Barbara. She was not a Shenaut, however: her mother had married my father's father after the death of her husband. However, she provided useful information in that she always pronounced the name 'ʃæ nɪt. Apparently, he decided to change the pronunciation after he was in the Marines, partially at my Mom's urging. I found out recently that one of his cousins had also made the same change, about the same time. Being in a Marine family growing up, we lived quite a bit in the South, and there, everyone usually assumed that the name was actually Chenault, and pronounced it as such: ʃə 'nɔlt. Obviously, with an unusually-spelled name like mine, there were many other pronunciations given it by others through the years, but those three are the most common ones. My dad died in 1968, before I had really started looking into the history of the name. His dad died in 1919, his mom in 1932. He had one brother, killed in Tunisia in 1943. When I started getting interested in this, I had no relatives I could ask about any of this. Furthermore, when in the past I had actually asked my parents and my aunt about this, they had all clammed up and suggested in various indirect ways that there had been some kind of family feud and they didn't want to talk about it. So I really didn't have much to go on.
The first step came when I was in grad school. I was basically procrastinating one day in the library and I decided to look myself up (at the time I had had a couple of conference presentations and I master's thesis, and it was still interesting to see my name in print). What I found was another Shenaut, John Shenaut, who was an orchestra conductor in Shreveport LA. I had seen the name in various lists before, but what made this very interesting to me was there was a small bio, and it turns out that Maestro Shenaut was born in Galesburg IL, the same as my dad. My first thought was to contact him, but then I remembered the feud business, plus I wasn't really sure he was a relative, so I didn't. But that was an interesting data point.
The second step was in some ways a step backwards. When I was driving across country one time, I decided to stop in Galesburg for lunch, and while I was there, I saw the county courthouse. I went in, and I asked to see my dad's birth certificate. His dad (my grandfather) was named George and was born in Carter County KY. So based on that, I did several unproductive things: I ordered the local telephone directory to see if there were any Shenauts (there weren't) and I spent quite a bit of time leafing through various Kentucky lists but never found anything. Things stalled there until the Internet.
Once there was Internet, there was ancestry.com, and at a certain point a few years ago, I subscribed. However, it still wasn't easy.
The main problem is spelling. As I already mentioned, the name has several pronunciations. Well, it has many spellings, especially in old, handwritten official records. There are the usual scribal errors and transcription errors, but this was exacerbated in my case because of the shifting pronunciation. And, things were much worse because I was under the impression that the family had come out of Kentucky, where there are many Chenaults of various permutations.
After more than a year (I kid you not), I basically stumbled over an 1880 US census record for a Wm J. Shinant in Lawrence Co OH. The oldest son was named George (check) and he was shown as having been born in KY. However, Wm J was not from KY, he was from VA, and everyone else (his wife, my ggrandmother and their other kids) were all from OH. I later found out that my ggrandmother's family owned some kind of property in Carter CO, KY, which is right across the Ohio River from Lawrence Co OH, and they simply must have been there when my grandfather was born.
Well, I've found many other things out about what happened to Wm J (William Joseph) and his family. He himself was what was called an “ore miner”, digging in the dirt for iron ore. He was killed when the wall of one of the mines collapsed on him in 1882. My grandmother, Elizabeth Walters Shenaut, remarried and the family was raised by him (further obscuring the situation). That batch of Shenaut brothers plus half-brothers mostly relocated around 1900-1910 to Galesburg to work in the Purington Brickyards.
I also found a cousin who lives in the Galesburg area and who is also interested in genealogy. My grandfather George Shenaut is her ggrandfather. She and I have corresponded and talked quite a bit, and we've each found some interesting tidbits. She spoke on the phone with the John Shenaut in Shreveport mentioned above, who turns out to be my father's first cousin.
However, while certainly all very interesting, it still didn't answer my primary question about the origins of my family name. I've now spent probably about three years looking in fits and starts for where Wm J came from.
The most probable thing by far is that we are part of the very large and well-researched Chenault family. I spent considerable time looking VA for Williams born around 1850-1851, which according to the 1880 census is when he was born. This date is reinforced in various documents, never with any precision, just as a compatible age. There were several possibilities, but I was able to eliminate each one. Finally, I decided to contact someone from the Chenault Family Association (chenault.org) and ask if they could help me.
First, they agreed that my name was probably a variant of Chenault. They also told me that there were certain regions (generally in Appalachian North Carolina and Virginia) where the name was spelled with Sh, usually Shi. This also seemed to fit with the iron mining and the extreme south of Ohio, which is also in the Appalachian sprawl. However, the only specific suggestion was that it could be someone from the 1860 Whythe Co VA Census named Joel Shinalt, who sort of evaporated after 1860. The idea was that Joel may have been a nickname for Joseph and that that was how he was called.
The Joel-as-nickname-for-Joseph theory never excited me too much. I actually prefer a related one, that his middle name actually was Joel, not Joseph. His wife may never have known his full middle name and may have put Joseph on his tombstone (the main evidence for “Joseph” just as a guess). In fact, it was fairly common for people to be known by their middle names (my mom and her dad were called by their middle names all their lives, for example). I've also tried to track down Joel's parents and siblings, but once again, no link.
The problem is that I've not found any actual link between Joel Shinalt and Wm J Shinant. One thing I did do was to get ahold of a book giving the names of students in state-supported schools (i.e., poor kids) in the 1850's in Wythe Co, and he was there big as life, as Joel. So the nickname theory was unsupported. However, that still leaves me with no link.
And that's where it stands for the moment. I'm mostly assuming that my ggrandfather was actually William Joel Shinaut, pronounced ʃə 'nɔt, also a pronunciation I've heard many times, and that the “e” was put in in Ohio because of “Chenault”, along with the change from Joel to Joseph. I also think that the strange pronunciation used by my aunt and also by the cousin I mentioned before happened in Ohio as my grandfather and his brothers were growing up. But, I have no actual proof of this. I'd really like to know for sure where my ggrandfather came from.
I'll end with the “feud” I mentioned before. My grandfather worked as a brickmaker in Galesburg around 1895-1915. He was married and had several kids. His wife died, and he soon became enamored of a young widow from southern Illinois farm country. When they married, deeply in love, he granted her greatest wish: to return to farm life in Southern Illinois. They bought a farm and moved down there, sometime between my dad's birth in 1912 and that of his brother in 1918. However, this was leaving a well-established, middle-class existence in town for abject poverty on a dirt farm, run by a man who had never farmed in his life and came from iron mining and brickmaking. The other Shenaut relatives basically abandoned them, including his kids. Not only that, within a very few years, he up and died. My dad and his brother were first raised by their mom alone on that farm, and then when she died too, they were fostered by two widows, also in farm country in Southern Illinois. So there wasn't really a feud, but my dad's immediate family always resented being sort of cut off socially and financially by their relatives (probably not all that reasonable, really), and their relatives basically blamed my grandmother for “killing” my grandfather by convincing him to move away from Galesburg (probably true, actually). So, the two groups went their own separate ways.
Greg Shenaut