A Second Start

Finding Page Kinslow—whom I hoped would turn out to be brother of my targeted Sarah Kinslow Stinebaugh—in Barren County, Kentucky, was a start. This helped me trace back from Missouri to a likely birthplace for Sarah. If, that is, she was sister of Page Kinslow.

Though some thoughtful volunteers had posted Barren County marriage records online—henceforth saving them from at least the fate of a burned courthouse—I still had some tap dancing to do, once I landed on that helpful page of transcriptions. Why? Because the record I found on the 1850 census for that county showed Page and his sister—whatever her name was—in the household of a man named Joseph Huckaby.

I thought it might be a good idea to waltz on over to the transcribed marriage entries underneath the heading "H" to take a look.

Sure enough, there was a Joseph Huckaby entered on the list of grooms in Barren County. On June 23, 1841, he apparently was wed to a woman named Agnes Kinslow. Since the 1850 census showed the Joseph Huckaby household including a thirty year old female named "Agness" combined with a twenty three year old William Huckaby on the next line, this could either be an older daughter of Joseph, or possibly a second wife, since there were others listed in the household under the age of ten, including the two Kinslow children.

If this Agnes were Joseph's wife, by 1850 they would have been married for nine years. Joseph Huckaby, by this time aged fifty eight, likely had been married before, though no entry on the Barren County marriage transcriptions fit that scenario. Correspondingly, the groom's list for the "K" entries had shown a marriage between a Joseph Kinslow and an "Aggy" Payne on August 3, 1837—leaving just enough time for Aggy to bear Joseph one or possibly two children before his untimely death and Aggy's subsequent marriage.

At least, that sounded like a reasonable scenario. After all, even in a county with the twenty thousand people Barren County contained at that point, what were the chances that there would be two Agnes Kinslows there?

I don't like chances much, though, so I thought I'd take another look.

As it turned out, Page Kinslow had a memorial on Find A Grave. Some helpful volunteer had noted on that entry that Page was son of Joseph Kinslow and Agnes Payne.

Well, at least someone agrees with me.

Come to find out, there were others who thought so, too. Though I couldn't find any memorials on Find A Grave for the unfortunate man who left Agnes a widow so soon, there was an entry for her second husband—and one for Agnes, herself. And they weren't sparse entries, either. Someone—or two, or three—was being a wonderful Find A Grave volunteer, indeed.