Following the Family Line

Is it just coincidence that, after emigration from Kentucky, the only other family sharing Sarah Stinebaugh's maiden name lived just across the county line, in Bolivar, Missouri? I thought I'd try an experiment and see what could be found about the kin of Page C. Kinslow, formerly of Barren County, Kentucky.

Fortunately, someone had kindly transcribed that Kentucky county's marriage records for the decades I'd like to see, and posted them online. All told, there were seventeen entries for marriages with a Kinslow groom listed, beginning with Adam Kinslow and Charlotte Drake in 1809, and stretching up to the 1849 nuptials of Massa Kinslow and Francis A. Mansfield. Undoubtedly, several of them were for second marriages.

Just as was predicted by the Find A Grave entry for the man we're pursuing—Page C. Kinslow, buried in Missouri in 1926—his stated parents, Joseph Kinslow and "Aggy" Payne, were showing on the list, married in Kentucky on August 3, 1837. That would be in plenty of time to welcome their baby boy on July 31, 1838—if, indeed, this Page Kinslow, now in Polk County, Missouri, was their son.

Since Page didn't seem to show up in Missouri census records until 1870, it seemed likely that he could be found back in his hometown in Kentucky during his childhood years on the 1850 census. Though the 1850 census doesn't specifically finger family relationships, it would be a handy place to uncover the name of any possible sibling inferences—especially the hoped-for connection with Sarah A. Kinslow, who supposedly became the Sarah A. Stinebaugh we've been pursuing.

Pulling up the search bar—both at Ancestry.com and on FamilySearch.org—that attempt ran into problems. While I was able to flush out an approximately-eleven-year-old Page Kinslow in Barren County for that 1850 census, he wasn't living in the Kinslow household. He was listed as part of a Barren County household headed by one Joseph Huckaby.

Complicating matters was the fact that, though he was listed in the Huckaby household alongside another child with his own surname—Kinslow—that ten year old girl had a given name entered that looked very much as if it should have read "Joseph." Only there was a letter missing. Plus the enumerator's habit of forming concluding Ss in the colonial style: what we would now misread as an "f-s." Was that last letter an S? Or an F? Or possibly a P or an H? The enumerator must have been suffering from writer's cramp by this point in his circuit.

What became of Sarah Kinslow? If this ten year old Kinslow girl was a poorly-transcribed Sarah, we could say she was likely Page's sister. But it would take a lot of imagination to reconstruct that given name as Sarah.

There was another Sarah Kinslow in Barren County. However, her age didn't align as neatly with the consistently-stated age of our Sarah, as she appeared in the Stinebaugh household of both 1860 in Missouri and 1880 in Texas.

Besides, who was this Joseph Huckaby? While I had noticed that there were neighboring Huckaby families settled near the property Page Kinslow had secured for himself as a married man in Missouri, it took another trip back to the online records of the Kentucky county to help reconstruct the family's story.