Tamer Hall Sarver

My 5th great-grandmother, generally known as Thamer Halle, is presumed by many online sources to have come from either Germany or France, specifically Alsace-Lorraine. This appears to be based entirely on family oral history, and I have never been able to find any evidence for it. She’s been a brick wall for some time. Recently, Ancestry’s latest project of indexing wills led me to conclude that “Thamer” was actually from North Carolina.

The will of James Hall, dated 22 March 1796 in Orange County, NC, clearly lists a daughter, “Tamer Server.” The name alone is so unusual that it is quite likely to be the same person. However, there are more facts to support the theory.

1.) James Hall was in Orange County at the same time as Tamer’s future husband, Henry Sarver. They did not live in the same district, per the tax lists, but that does not rule out the possibility that they were neighbors on either side of a district line. (Unfortunately, neither of them owned a great deal of land, which limits the information that deeds could provide.)

2.) At least two of Tamer’s many siblings moved to Sumner County, Tennessee. Polly Hall’s husband, Alexander Anderson, died in 1804, but not before purchasing land on Station Camp Creek, north of Gallatin. Levi Hall lived very near Henry and Tamer Sarver on the west fork of Drake’s Creek, a tributary of the Red River, also just north of Gallatin. They were, if not directly adjacent to each other, quite close neighbors. This was a typical migration pattern: multiple family members moving together to a new location.

3.) The Sarvers were German and Lutheran. Per online trees, James Hall and his wife, Mary Clenny, were also Lutheran, being members of Old Swedes Church in Wilmington, Delaware before moving to Orange County. It therefore seems likely that Henry and Tamer could have met in a church setting in Orange County: there probably wasn’t more than one Lutheran church in the area.

4.) I am not sure how Tamer’s name ended up spelled “Thamer” on her headstone. However, Thamer is actually a male name, Arabic or Turkish in origin. Tamer (or Tamar) on the other hand, is a Hebrew name from the Old Testament. While an unusual choice, Tamer is perfectly consistent with the other Old Testament names in James Hall’s family, which included a Levi, a Jehu, and a Deborah.

Now, how did so many people end up attributing Tamer’s origin to Germany or France? I think it is likely because, not only was her first name unusual, but according to online sources, her mother’s family were largely German and Swedish, part of a community of German and Swedish Lutherans in Christiana Hundred (around present-day New Castle), Delaware. And her surname, Hall, could have originated as Halle, the German and French variant. I’ll need to research James Hall’s family further to figure that out.

So, like many family oral histories, Tamer’s story is essentially true, but a little fuzzy on the details!