Vice President, Double Envelope Corporation

My Beard line, the ancestors of my great grandmother, Effie Davis Beard, used to be a brick wall until AncestryDNA testing helped me trace much of the family back to Adam Beard (1725-1777), who was the father of at least two Revolutionary War patriots.

Recently, I reached out to another Ancestry.com member who had a photograph of my great great grandfather's headstone on her tree. I wanted to know the name of the cemetery and how we might be related. She turned out to be a wonderful researcher, who had collected a trove of original documents about the family. She also provided the clues I needed to trace my great great grand uncle, Charles Edward Beard's daughter, Elmira Lorena Beard. She married Edmund Lowry Sublette on 21 March 1888 in Bedford County, Virginia. Together they had six children: Reyborn Roy "Pete," Carrie, Lounell "Nell," Mamie, Elizabeth Virginia, and Christine Sublette.

By 1900 the family had moved to Roanoke, Virginia, Edmund died in 1919 and his wife in 1938. By the time of her death, her oldest son, Reyborn, was vice president of Double Envelope Corporation.

According to the company's website, it was founded in 1917 and has always been a leading manufacturer of envelopes in the southeast U.S. Its assets were acquired in 2001 by BSC Ventures, a custom envelope manufacturer and web and off-set printer. The company is headquartered in Roanoke.

Reyborn Roy "Pete" Sublette was born on 21 March 1891 in Roanoke. On 5 June 1917, when he registered for the World War I draft, he was a clerk at the Norfolk & Western Railroad and had a wife, named Annie Mary Jones, and child. By 1920 he was the railroad's auditor of receipts. By 1922 he was vice president of the envelope company.  The family lived in progressively nicer houses until 1941 when they were listed as living at 20 Oakwood Drive, Roanoke.

20 Oakwood Drive, SW, Roanoke; photograph from Google Maps Street View

Reyburn's son, Reyborn Francise Sublette, also worked at Double Envelope Corporation by 1950 and retired from the company as an executive vice president in 1984. Many of the Sublette family's descendants are still living in Roanoke today.

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I must admit to being a little disappointed with the Double Envelope Corporation. Their website included very little about their company history and I tried writing to every email address listed. Each message bounced back as undeliverable. So I went searching for the history of the envelope...well, wouldn't you do the same?

I highly recommend The History of the Envelope by Maynard H. Benjamin.

AncestryDNA and Finding a New Cousin