End of the Line

 

With the end of this month, I face relinquishing my chase to push forward the end of the line of my second great-grandmother, Sarah Catherine Laws. While the month did lead me to many resources—and almost convincingly point me to North Carolina native William Laws as her father—I still haven't located any documentation to confirm the connection.

Several details seem to push me toward accepting that as my conclusion. For one thing, after Sarah Catherine married Thomas Davis, their young family appeared in the 1870 census on the same page as William Laws and his household. If the family were of Irish descent, I might consider as a strong clue the fact that Thomas Davis named his first-born son after his own father, James, while the second-born son was named William—after his mother's father? As far as I can tell, that would not be the case for the Davis family's ethnic background, with Davis being Welsh. Sometimes, coincidence may seem to finger truth; I'm not sure which way to view this one.

Since this search entailed tracking people born during a time period and in a region in which local governmental record keeping of that sort was not instituted until long after their passing, I had hoped to find a family Bible containing personal verification. Serendipitously for me, genealogist and blogger Lisa Lisson recently posted an article on that very topic, as well as the transcription of her podcast on that same subject, providing me with some additional resources to consider.

I've already done a good deal of searching for such resources, but now I've found more possible places to look. I began thinking that if I could find a Bible belonging to William's parents with mention of this specific son plus his siblings, that might also aid in further research, so I looked up places to find old Bibles back in North Carolina. Fortunately, a collaboration of the State Library and the State Archives of North Carolina gave me a place to start my search in William's home state.

Lacking results in North Carolina, I moved on to William's adopted home in Tennessee. I looked everywhere, from a list of links regarding Greene County from the Tennessee Genealogical Society, to the page on Greene County from the Tennessee GenWeb site, and even went back to the FamilySearch.org wiki page for Greene County, just in case I missed anything from the first time.

Though I've come up empty-handed this month, I'll be back to revisit this research question in a future year. Formulating my to-do list for next time, I'll have these blog posts and links to refer back to, as well as the electronic sub-folder I've made in my genealogy file. The most frustrating part of this exploration is that I ran across an email mentioning a Laws Bible, but of course now I can't locate that note. There is one out there somewhere, but until I can find the current owner, it's as good as lost to me.

The main consolation, through all this month's research, is the DNA indication that I share some sort of genetic relationship with William Laws' two sons. Whether this implies a direct line with William as father of Sarah Catherine as well as the two sons, I can't yet say. Let's just close out this month by saying I may not be there yet, but I'm closer now than I was before to closing in on my research goal.

Keeping an Eye on Elijah

 

If my suspected third great-grandfather William Laws had lived next door to a man with the same surname who was aged over twenty years older, I'd say it might be a safe bet to assume the two were father and son. Risky, I know, since I don't yet have any documentation to show for my guess—but that means it's time to go looking for any such records.

While the two men lived in Yancey County, North Carolina, during the enumeration of the 1850 census, taking my question to FamilySearch Labs Full Text search with those details did not produce much helpful information. I tried linking the two names together, but while there were several hits for my query, none of them produced records in Yancey County.

Remembering the shifting borders of ever-evolving counties in the 1800s, I checked for history on Yancey County's formation. The county, it turns out, was created in 1833. If William himself was forty eight at the time of the 1850 census, I reasoned that there was plenty of time beforehand for William and Elijah to show up in records prior to 1833.

Based on that, my next step was to check what county or counties gave up territory that resulted in the newly-formed Yancey County: Burke County and Buncombe County. Back to the FamilySearch Labs to check for any records in either of those counties—nothing for Burke County, and in Buncombe, one sole mention of an Elijah Laws in the land description for a grant dated 1819. Signs of our Elijah? Hard to say at this point.

While there were no other mentions of Elijah Laws in those two counties, there were several mentions of an Elijah Laws in Wilkes County, including a summons to appear as a witness at the county courthouse in 1805. While Wilkes County was not exactly adjacent to the future Yancey County, it was nearby in the western portion of the state.

More to my purpose, though, was how reminiscent this find was of the results of my searches for William Laws, supposedly Elijah's son, in which William's own sons seemed to be always just one step ahead of local law enforcement before they finally slipped over the line into Tennessee.

With the end of January coming quickly to a close—and thus my time to tackle this research question any further—I'll add this to my ongoing to-do list for further research in a future year. Perhaps by then, more documents will be digitized, making it somewhat easier to locate the right Elijah Laws to determine if he and William Laws were indeed related—and how.

One Last Walk Around the Neighborhood

 

This may sound nostalgic, but how about one more walk around the neighborhood before we say goodbye to William Laws and his family? After all, one last look at William's F.A.N. Club, back in Yancey County, North Carolina, in 1850 might not hurt—and besides, I've got no other leads to follow at this point.

I've spent the month seeking leads on the possible parents of my second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine Laws. Though she spent her married life in Tennessee—mostly in Washington County and Unicoi County after its establishment—she was likely born in North Carolina. 

Fancy that! That's the same as William Laws, ancestor of some of my distant DNA matches. It's time to rewind the family history back to 1850 and take a look at the page where the Laws family's census entry showed up in Yancey County.

Last time I did that, I was more concerned with taking a glance across the Laws timeline from decade to decade in the census enumerations. Thus, I found the family moving from Yancey County across the state line to Washington County, then Carter County, and finally settling in Greene County, Tennessee.

What I missed in that quick overview, though, were the family, associates, and neighbors William Laws connected with, back in Yancey County in 1850. One look now and I can see he was surrounded by family in the place where he lived. Whether close relatives or distant—I hear that in the South, they call them "kin"—there were a lot of Laws surnames on the same page where William was listed. The household listed right above William's was that of sixty nine year old North Carolina native Elijah Laws. Along with a fifty year old woman Anna Laws, who was likely his wife, there was an eighty four year old woman named Judith Bennett, and three young men, all surnamed Ayres. My guess is that Anna may have been Elijah's second wife and a widow, being the mother of the three young Ayres men.

Not much farther up the census page from Elijah's household was an entry for another Ayres couple—Anna's brother-in-law and his wife?—in between Elijah's household and that of twenty three year old James Laws. Could James be another relative? Following those lines and building out a test tree might reveal some connections with our William Laws. Elijah was certainly of an age to have been father of a first-born William.

It's always worth the effort to test out family history hypotheses—but to do so, we'll need to access  supporting documentation. Whether I'll have the time to do so before the end of this month, I'm not yet sure. If nothing else, this is a good time to construct my to-do list for the next time I revisit this research question about my second great-grandmother's heritage.

Time to Wrap Up

 

It's wrap up week for goal number one of my Twelve Most Wanted for this year, and I haven't found much to write about. The end of the line for my Laws family still appears to be my second great-grandmother, Sarah Catherine Laws Davis.

Well, take that back. I do have some tiny DNA matches with several descendants of a man from Greene County, Tennessee, known as Larkin Laws, and a couple token DNA matches with Larkin's brother Pine Dexter Laws. 

Those matches point to a father for the brothers—and possibly Sarah Catherine, too—known as William Laws. But I'm still not really sure. Tiny shared segments of DNA could mean those matches are my fourth cousins—or they could mean more distant relationships, at least according to the Shared CentiMorgan Project. For all I know at this point, Larkin and Pine Dexter could be cousins of Sarah Catherine, not brothers.

With only three more days to work on this puzzle, there aren't many research options left before I need to move on to February's goal. I could go back to those DNA matches whose ThruLines results at Ancestry.com do not match the lines of descent I've been able to replicate through documentation, and try building their tree from the current generation backwards in time. In leading me to the right ancestor, that may help tie Sarah Catherine's as yet unknown parents to the right family group.

I'm still working on building the trees downward for Larkin and Pine Dexter, still waiting for a telltale obituary or newspaper headline to point me in a more useful direction. Searching through newspaper collections online for articles including the Laws family names might still yield some helpful answers. And I'm still poking around for other local resources to explore.

All told, though, at this point I'm not expecting any revealing breakthroughs. But doesn't it seem that it's always the last place we look where we find what we've been looking for?

The Whodunit Drive

 

I can't say this statement is genetically verifiable, but it's obvious many humans have a "whodunit" drive embedded in their DNA. We need to find out who did it, get to the punch line, discover the answer. We can't abide the vacuum of uncertainty.

I watched a brief video positioned at the end of a recent blog post by Seth Godin. The video took all of about three and a half minutes—yes, I said minutes, not hours—and the ending made me literally laugh out loud.

The introductory blog post—brief, in quintessential Godin style—was about choosing to learn and why we choose not to learn. The end of the post segued nicely into the YouTube video, an unedited version of his talk given at TED2014.

The talk (spoiler alert here) asked, "It is a note worth playing?" As Seth Godin began his monologue, he pulled a clarinet out of its case and assembled it, all the while discussing a mindset of determining that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing exceptionally. Clarinet in hand—and almost before the audience realized it was over—he concluded his remarks as he turned his back on the audience and exited the stage, never once having played a single note on his now at-the-ready instrument.

I laughed because I just witnessed a brilliant object lesson. He had our attention because we were waiting for his demonstration. 

The demonstration never came.

The other shoe never dropped.

He left us in mid-sentence, thought-wise, waiting to hear what should have happened next.

And with that disequilibrium, our only resolution is to fill in the blank. Finish the sentence for ourselves.

That's not education. That's learning.

I just spent an entire day at a genealogy seminar hosted by a D.A.R. chapter in an ocean town I often enjoy visiting. The many speakers presented useful material—I focused here mostly on technology tools and techniques—but if I don't go home and put that newfound knowledge to use on my own research projects, I will really have learned nothing.

Right now, we have entered a genealogical season of learning. Of worldwide attention right now is the approaching annual RootsTech conference in early March. Following on the heels of that event, another virtual family history seminar hosted by the African American Genealogy Society will feature Renate Yarborough Sanders. Just over a week later, the Jewish Genealogical Society at our state's capital—Sacramento—will feature a case study by Steve Morse. And rumor has it that another genealogical society in that same city—Root Cellar—has two notable guest speakers on their spring lineup: Daniel Horowitz from MyHeritage in March, and Judy Russell ("The Legal Genealogist") in May.

Some season of learning opportunities—but only if we put the education we've gained to personal use.

Finding the Family Details

 

There are several details about a family's history which may be available to those who know how to search through publicly-available records. But when there are no such records easily accessed—I'm thinking here of my suspected third great-grandfather William Laws of northeastern Tennessee, possible father of Sarah Catherine Laws Davis—the next step, besides looking locally, is to check for private records. That's why I reach out to others researching the same family lines, especially those who also have tested their DNA for genealogical purposes and discovered that we match.

I tend to presume that my DNA matches would know more about their direct line ancestors than I do for simple reasons. I think of all the descendants who inherited family heirlooms, or at least got some of the old family photos. When it comes to thinking about recipients of such generational gifts, that would not be me. However, in the case of one branch of this particular Laws family I'm researching, I'm thinking also of one valuable collectible I do have: the Davis family Bible.

My second great-grandmother, Sarah Catherine Laws, married a man by the name of Thomas Davis. Though the Bible I now possess doesn't reach back that far in the family's history, it does provide me with some full names, along with dates of birth, marriage, and death for my Davis ancestors, all written in the hand of an ancestor who gifted me with some of that Davis DNA.

Somewhere among all my Laws DNA matches, I'd like to hope a distant cousin might have a similar record of family members, passed along from generation to generation. So I keep reaching out to find someone.

There are other ways to check for family Bibles, of course. I was already aware of the family Bible record collection of the Daughters of the American Revolution, an index of over forty thousand such digitized records which can be searched online through their Genealogical Research System (GRS). But what I didn't know was that there are other resources for finding family records in Bibles kept by previous generations, such as through the Digital Public Library of America. Beyond that, some such resources are tucked away at various state archives and other repositories of historical material.

Granted, the patchwork spread of resources may make searching for a specific family's personally-kept records challenging. There may not even be such a record kept in prior centuries by my Laws ancestors, whoever they turn out to be. But at least I can start by reaching out to DNA matches and others who have their tree posted online and ask if they know of such a resource.

In the meantime, having such a treasure for my own Davis line makes me realize that the book, like all of us, is not getting any younger. It's time to check on the best way to help preserve it so that I can pass it on to future generations, intact and still legible. At some future point, someone may want to take a look at this keepsake for which I'm serving as current conservator. 

The Treasure in DNA Discoveries

 

Finding DNA matches may be fun for some—hence those now-antiquated Ancestry.com ads about trading one's lederhosen for a kilt—but I have an entirely different focus for testing my family's DNA: a focus of hope. It's not that I want to meet family, although that would be nice. Nor do I use DNA test results to plug my 2,597 (to date) matches into my ever-expanding family tree. For me, the real treasure in using genetic genealogy discoveries is to find someone out there who knows more than I do about that particular branch of the tree we share in common.

Every now and then, I'm fortunate to hear back from a DNA match whom I've messaged with that question about their family. But I'm disappointed when the respondent gets to the answer: no, apparently I know more about that match's family than he or she does. 

I'm holding out with my current exploration of the Laws family tree though. It has been encouraging to note that some near-doubtful branches on that expanded Laws family of Greene County, Tennessee, actually do match my test.

For instance, in working on the matches identified as descendants of Larkin Laws—whom I am theorizing was brother of my second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine Laws—I had run across some census records hinting at the possibility that Larkin had lost a first wife and, with second wife Matilda Oler, had raised an additional family. There was enough documentation for that second wife's children, but I still am lacking any record of a first wife; it's only the situation which intimates that Larkin was a widower at an earlier point. And the children from that earlier time period turn out to be the ancestors of some of my DNA matches.

Next step—and one taken with an abundance of hope—is to contact those matches to see if they know the rest of the story. After all, this is their direct line of the family. Maybe they'll know. Or maybe not. But it is always worth reaching out and asking. After all, somebody's got to know. 

No Flowery Obituaries to Mark Their Absence

 

It sometimes feels as if the family history pursuit is a chase that leads in circles. In this month's goal to determine exactly which line of the Laws family of North Carolina and Tennessee would be mine, it seems as if I haven't made much progress. Not that I haven't covered research ground; it's just that for every search term I try, it seems I round the final bend in the journey, coming back empty-handed.

There is something about Greene County, Tennessee, the place where William Laws settled his family by 1870. It seems to be a place where people may go to die—yet their demise never results in flowery obituaries, let alone a burial marker to commemorate their absence. With those items missing, my chance of uncovering clues about the dearly departed's loved ones left behind vanishes.

While I check alternate resources for such missing records—going local here for resources—I've returned to work through the seventeen Laws family DNA matches waiting for my confirmation at Ancestry's ThruLines tool. Tentative third great-grandfather William Laws may well be related to me somehow, as witnessed by the matches who claim his son Larkin Laws as their ancestor. A small victory—you wouldn't believe the tiny size of the shared centiMorgans here—but I'm glad to have one glimmer of hope. These are, after all, DNA connections at the fourth cousin level.

Documentation, however, would be nicer. And something tells me there has got to be a way to find it. Remembering that not every record is preserved online yet—despite remarkable progress by organizations such as FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, and MyHeritage.com—sometimes this dilemma calls for hands-on effort. Phone calls and emails seem so antiquated after years of instant access via online connections, but it's time to reach out and research other available avenues.

Reading Between the Lines

 

It is sometimes hard to support conjectures about the details we spot in ancestors' records. For William Laws—a man I don't yet have support to claim as my third great-grandfather—his paper trail seems to suggest changes, but confirming documentation for these hypotheses I've yet to find.

Take yesterday's theory that William's 1860 household actually contained three children from his son Larkin's possible deceased first wife. When I try to follow those children through the rest of their life history, I lack obituaries, even burial records to help trace their last days. I have yet to confirm my conjecture is right—but I can't find any reason to deny it. Yet.

There's another hint lurking between the lines in William's 1870 census entry: the possibility of a new wife and daughter. How else to explain that former wife Elizabeth was now missing, and that someone named Catharine—but not Catherine, my second great-grandmother—was in the household, along with a one year old daughter Mary?

Discovering details hidden between the lines in the usual documents prompts us to scour the possibilities of other records—one more time, if they were missed the first time around. It took a while for me to locate it, but there was indeed a marriage record in the Greene County books dated May 29, 1868, for one William Laws and a Catharine Margain Filler.

Filler? Hiller? Fuller? It is hard to read the handwriting—but at least there's a handwritten record to support my hypothesis. Sometimes, in order to read between the lines in an ancestor's life journey, we need to follow those ancestors, every step of the documented way from one end of life to the other.

Extra Children

 

Sometimes, when the seemingly never-ending list of children in the household grows to unbelievable extents, it might be just that: unbelievable. In the case of William Laws, his 1860 census entry included three extra children who hadn't been there in the last census. Granted, those three children were each under ten years of age, so it makes sense that they didn't appear in the 1850 census. But their inclusion in William's 1860 household might just be a clue about life events of the past ten years for a different member of the Laws household.

The three children in question in that 1860 household were Margaret Laws, age five, Elizabeth Laws, age two, and William Laws who, at the time that census was drawn up on July 13, 1860, was reported to be seven months old. All but the youngest were reported to have been born in North Carolina. Thus, baby William, born about December of the previous year, would serve as an approximate marker of when the entire Laws family arrived in Tennessee from their native North Carolina.

Theoretically, since by then William himself was reported to be fifty, and his wife Elizabeth forty nine, it was possible that they could have been the parents of these three additions to the Laws household. But I'm not quite so sure. Once I started following the separate households of each of William and Elizabeth's children—at least the ones I could trace in later censuses—a parallel set of youngsters seemed to show up in one of the senior Laws' sons' household. 

Of course, the handwritten census enumerations of that century being what they were, I have no guarantee that any of the reported details were exactly correct. Nor do I have a guarantee that what was given as answers in response to the enumerator's questions were correctly entered in the records. Thus, with a bit of grace for the wiggle room required of us for the 1870 entry for William's son Larkin—his name being entered then as Landon—we make a discovery: the two girls, Margaret and Elizabeth, were now residing in  Larkin's home, not William's.

Granted, none of these census years included reports of just how the members of the household might have been related to each other, but this seems to suggest that Margaret and Elizabeth were daughters of Larkin, not William.

On the other hand, for the 1870 entry for Larkin's home, Margaret's age was given as seventeen, while Larkin's wife Matilda was said to have been thirty that same year. Furthermore, Larkin Laws and Matilda Oler were married in 1862, far too late for Margaret to have been Matilda's daughter.

Though the ages for the two girls didn't neatly advance ten years between the two census entries where they appeared—1860 in William's household, 1870 in Larkin's—I've seen such aberrations before. But what about the third child from that 1860 census, William, the seven month old infant who was the only one in the Laws household to not have been born in North Carolina? Though ages didn't follow the expected ten year equation, William was likely still back in the household where I found the senior William in 1870, in Greene County, Tennessee, near his married daughter Catherine Davis.

My guess in all this shifting of the youngest members of the Laws household is that Larkin may have lost a first wife. That woman would have been the mother of the three children, Margaret, Elizabeth, and baby William. If her death was precipitated by baby William's birth in 1859, perhaps growing up in senior William's household was the only family the child knew. A second marriage often became a point at which children of the first spouse might have been left with grandparents, at least until the widower and his new wife felt more at home after setting up housekeeping on their own. By then, the older daughters might have become a welcome help to the new stepmother as she began having children of her own, thus moving into their father's new home. 

These are assumptions based on patterns I've seen repeated during this time period in the case of loss of a spouse in the families I've researched. The challenge now is to search for any documentation confirming or directly contradicting such assumptions. At this point, I'm only reading between the lines, but I'd sure prefer getting my hands on some records to point to solid answers. If nothing else, DNA matches and I would like to know just exactly how we connect.

The Blind Fiddler

 

There is one less-obvious column in the United States enumerations for the mid to late 1800s for which I've been grateful as I pore over records concerning the family of my possible third great-grandfather, William Laws. That column, often left blank, was the place for entries concerning serious health issues. The one detail that helped me tie William Laws' records together over each decade's move from county to county was the fact that his youngest son, Wiley, was blind.

I noticed that detail in the 1850 census, when the family lived in Yancey County, North Carolina. That same fact showed up for seventeen year old Wiley in the record ten years later, when the family surfaced in Carter County, Tennessee. But when a seemingly derogatory comment about "Wiley Laws, the blind fiddler" appeared in a Chattanooga newspaper from 1874, you know I had to take a closer look.

Yes, the Laws family seemed to have a less than favorable standing in the communities they had recently left. It seemed they kept one step ahead of impending trouble. Or perhaps it was trouble which attracted them—I have yet to figure out this family's dynamics. But one thing was certain: there was a lot going on in Greene County where they had settled. This Chattanooga newspaper was providing a glimpse of the latest disturbance.

The article itself was a retort to an article in the Greeneville American on April 1, 1874, regarding a local Temperance crusade. That article, in turn, quoted yet another newspaper's opinion that "the whisky war at Greeneville is degenerating into an interchange of personalities."

After the column's two long paragraphs which essentially comprised accusations volleyed between three newspapers regarding opinions on the women crusading on behalf of the Temperance Movement, out of the blue was this comment about Wiley Laws. As the newspaper set the scene—"one of indescribable character and almost beyond endurance"—here entered the mention which caught my eye.

Wiley Laws, the blind fiddler, kept by Gass & Campbell to annoy the ladies still continues to fiddle and blaspheme, but without affecting the determination of the crusaders.

Say what?! I had to take a closer look. Was that my Wiley Laws, the blind seven year old son of William from the 1850 census?

Since it was an archived historic newspaper resource which brought me that choice discovery—and left me with unanswered questions—this would be the perfect opportunity to put the company through its search paces.

Thankfully, Newspapers.com served up three other mentions about a blind fiddler named Wiley Laws. From the Jonesborough, Tennessee, Herald and Tribune on October 25, 1883, regarding a "Pic Nic and Dramatic Entertainment," the writer noted that "Wiley Laws and Mr. Henly were in attendance with their violins and discoursed some good music, as you all know Wiley makes no other kind."

A few years later, on February 2, 1888, the Johnson City Comet announced the entertainment for a fund raiser to benefit the poor of the city. Among those featured entertainers was Wiley Laws.

One final article I found, from February 14, 1884, must have been referencing the very episode at the Greeneville Temperance crusade which started me on my search. Back to where this all occurred, according to The Greeneville Herald, 

Wiley Laws, the blind fiddler, was in town making music on the streets on last Tuesday. It reminded us very much of the crusade of ten years ago.

Just as for his father William, Wiley's last days remain a blank slate for me. I have yet to find any mention of him after the 1888 newspaper entry. I am still looking for any record of his death or any burial information. I can't yet be certain this even is Wiley, the son of William Laws. It is almost as if each member of this family just faded off into the twilight toward the end of their lives.

We can't, however, just leave this unfinished research question where it currently lies. It's time to go back, review the documentation that has been found, and start reading between the lines. Perhaps somewhere buried within the details we already know, we may unearth additional clues.

Duplicate Laws

 

It was bound to happen at some point. Adding collateral lines to my hypothesized Laws line to find confirming DNA matches, I ran across what appeared to be a duplicate entry. A Laws family relative had lost his wife, and quickly remarried. He and his new wife, who had also recently lost a spouse, blended their families together.

A few years later, the wife's daughter from the previous marriage married the husband's son from his first wife. If I hadn't been focusing on researching this particular surname—Laws—I might have missed the fact that I had seen that name before. The only reason I had been tracing the other spouse's line from her previous marriage was to ensure that I didn't attribute the wrong children to the newer line. If not for that research detour, I might have missed the connection.

Thus, step-siblings became husband and wife, an unexpected progression—until you really think about it. Once I traced the connections and verified them to my satisfaction, I was able to merge the two entries for each person into one in my family tree database, unifying each identity in my tree.

Running into a situation like this is not new, and it reminds me that it is probably time to go through the entire database and harvest duplicate entries again. For isolated communities such as some mountain communities in the late 1800s, there is bound to be intermarriages over the generations—or, as we see in this case, blended families resulting in dual relationship labels. Much as I had seen in my mother-in-law's Perry County, Ohio, families where intermarriages over generations in a limited community led to what I call "endogamy lite," the Laws family in Greene County, Tennessee, may be headed in the same direction.

For now, my biweekly count shows me that I've added 150 new names to my tree this time, growing my family—collateral lines and all—to 38,961 documented individuals. Over the next two weeks, I'll review these Laws family names to make sure I haven't added any more duplicates. Likewise on my in-laws' tree, though I'm not focusing on their lines this month, I'll make sure that the 116 names I added there don't contain any duplicate entries. We'll see whether that 37,339 count will hold steady there after this double-check.

One more promising sign, as I review my biweekly report, is to see a spurt in additional new DNA matches. Over the past several months, I had gained from only five through seven new matches for each biweekly count, but perhaps with the earliest of the holiday sales results coming online now, I gained thirteen new DNA matches this time—although that didn't hold true for my husband's matches. Perhaps my own distant cousins just preferred catching the holiday sales earlier than the other side of the family did.

Burning Bridges

 

Speed-reading the genealogy of an extended family line can help spot patterns. In the case of my second great-grandmother's possible link to the line of William Laws of North Carolina, that pattern seemed to be skipping across the county line before the family's name was called in yet another court of law. Whether that was true or not, I can't yet say. I haven't followed up on the entries I found in Yancey County court records from North Carolina.

"Oh, but that would be the fun part," my daughter remarked when I told her what I had found—but she'll just have to wait until I can focus on solely tracing legal documents which, unfortunately, is not my forte. There is, however, another possibility driving the family's seeming disappearance during the time period I've been studying. For that, I needed to widen the lens to examine a broader view of history—not just the Laws family's own history, but that of the time period in which they lived. To put it in a nutshell, theirs was a time and a place for burning bridges.

So far, I had found William Laws' household in Yancey County, North Carolina, in the 1850s. Then it was  across the state line, first to Washington County, Tennessee, where daughter Sarah Catherine Laws married Thomas Davis in 1856, then onward again to Carter County. Finally, the family—along with my second great-grandmother's Davis household—appeared in Greene County, Tennessee.

All told, the time span stretched from 1850 to 1870, encapsulating a critical period in American history: the Civil War. While I don't know much about North Carolina history, I did know one thing about the counties where my maternal grandfather's line lived for generations: northeastern Tennessee, unlike the rest of the state, was pro-Union leading up to the vote regarding secession.

When the vote did not go the way the local populace wanted, there were enough of those independently-minded locals to take the path of the renegade. Perhaps the Laws family was of that same mind.

After reading several newspaper articles from that time period and region, it was clear to me that northeastern Tennessee might reveal some clues about the point of view of my own family if I dug deeper into the local history of those counties. Prime focus led to Greene County, where I found the family in the 1870 census—and where many of their descendants stayed, long after the close of that time period.

Newspapers would publish comments about "the whisky war at Greeneville," the county seat of Greene County, and other reports that gave an impression far removed from the bucolic ambience I might otherwise have ascribed to Tennessee. Greeneville, home of soon-to-be president Andrew Johnson, apparently had a long history of independent action, and was a hotbed of activity for a number of movements, such as the abolitionist movement of the early 1800s and, during the start of the Civil War, an effort to secede from the Confederate state of Tennessee to form a separate pro-Union state.

It was from that fertile ground that a Civil War era plot was hatched to—literally—burn bridges. The idea was shared by residents across several counties of northeastern Tennessee, and the nine bridges targeted were located along the eastern border of Tennessee, stretching from Bluff City near the Virginia border down to Chattanooga and even into Alabama. Among those targeted was one bridge in Greene County, as well as another in Carter and Washington Counties, home to Laws' relatives.

While I have no idea whether any of William Laws' sons were involved in the bridge-burning plot, just reviewing the history of the area points out the mindset that undoubtedly made the Laws family feel quite at home in the region during that era of American history.

Granted, I still want to pore over the original North Carolina court records to see just what incident inspired the Laws boys to step across the county line—and as a genealogist, I certainly am not appreciative of their history's shenanigans which have led me on such a paper chase. But this discovery about history's lesser-known local episodes aptly reminds me that we all are a product not only of our genes, but of our environment and culture, and it can sometimes help to take a step back and explore the headlines of our ancestors' own newspapers. 

One Last DNA Attempt

 

With an ancestral family comprised of many siblings, it is possible to test DNA connections through more than one branch of the family line. With my hypothetical father of second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine Laws Davis, I've already had the chance to check out DNA cousins who descended from Larkin Laws and Pine Dexter Laws—with more promising results coming from descendants of Larkin than those of his younger brother.

There was one more set of DNA matches to attempt unraveling: matches whose ancestral connection was through Larkin's and Pine Dexter's sister Elizabeth Laws. Tracing the line from Elizabeth to the ten supposed DNA cousins who descend from this branch of the Laws family has proven more tangled than my attempts with Pine Dexter's line.

To trace the line of Elizabeth Laws' descendants, I had to go back to some of the documents I had found at first this month. Reviewing these, though, opened my eyes to other family issues. If, for instance, Elizabeth was the head of this line of descent for this set of my Laws DNA matches, I needed to find a marriage record for her—or, at the very least, some records attributing births to this mother.

According to some of my DNA matches, their ancestral Elizabeth had children born as early as 1856. However, when I returned to the census records which contained her supposed father, William Laws, she was still listed in his household. If she had been married before the arrival of that child born in 1856, I would not expect to see a twenty two year old Elizabeth still in her father's household in the 1860 census. Granted, there are three very young children also in that household at the time, and enumerations from that time period did not explain relationships among those sharing the living quarters—but I believe I have discovered a different explanation for those three youngest children, none of whom have a different surname listed in the record.

Likewise for the 1870 census, where I found William Laws' household entered just up a few lines from that of his hypothesized daughter Sarah Catherine Laws Davis. Once again, there is a woman named Elizabeth in the Laws household. Though her age has advanced from twenty two in the 1860 census to only twenty eight in the 1870 census, such anomalies I have spotted before in other family lines.

The point in all this exploration is that it is likely that the proposed children for Elizabeth—at least according to the trees of those DNA matches—actually belong to someone from another line of the Laws family.

That, of course, leaves me with one fairly convincing exploration of DNA matches—that of Larkin Laws' seventeen descendants who match my DNA results—plus a somewhat less convincing set of matches from Pine Dexter's line, and a definite no-go for their sister Elizabeth's line. If I take the same approach as I did yesterday, though, and look both ways on that DNA street, perhaps that exploration may offer up some siblings or cousins for William Laws, himself, possibly pointing me to who William's parents may have been, as well.

Before I reach that far beyond my goal for this month, today's exploration pointed out a few additional details I need to examine about William Laws, himself. While I am still on the hunt for a will—or at least burial records—for William, I'll take some time next week to read between the lines on what I noticed about the census records over the decades for this William Laws household.

When Crossing the DNA Street, Look Both Ways

 

Finding DNA matches who confirm my connection to Larkin Laws, the possible brother of my second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine Laws, was encouraging. My goal is to determine whether Larkin's father William was also father of Sarah Catherine. But I can't just assume that the one line's connection is enough. After all, regardless of how unusual a name like Larkin might have been, there could be another sibling set out there paired with the same names.

To bolster my confidence in this conclusion about Larkin and his dad William, I decided to look at DNA matches who descend from Larkin's brother with the equally-unusual name, Pine Dexter. Although Larkin gifted me with seventeen DNA matches according to AncestryDNA's ThruLines tool, there were only four matches for Pine Dexter—but four, I thought, would be enough. Enough, that is, until I surveyed the situation more closely.

Starting from the top of the list—a DNA match who shared only forty two centiMorgans with me—it didn't take me long to realize the ThruLines lane that led from Pine Dexter to my match had a big road block two generations in. Pine Dexter I could document, and his son I could find records for, but the suggested grandson in this match's proposed line of descent was not one I could replicate through documentation.

Sometimes, we miss details about a family's immediate family. As I saw yesterday, it can be easy to miss one child out of the family, if changes are made mid-decade between census enumerations. But try as I might, I could not locate this person ThruLines claimed as being Pine Dexter's grandson. 

Since the entire line of descent is usually diagrammed in the ThruLines tool, I decided to reverse research directions. Instead of looking down the line of descent from Pine Dexter all the way to my DNA match, I looked the other way. Starting from the first person listed in the line of ascent with dates of both birth and death, I looked for documentation to confirm that relative, then move upwards from there, building my own tree.

There was a second reason for trying that approach: the second DNA match identified as a descendant of Pine Dexter also claimed that undocumented person as an ancestor. For this second roadblock, it was far easier to trace upwards, based on documentation. There, I could clearly see which line of the Laws family this DNA match should be claiming as an ancestor: someone named Aaron Laws, son of Erwin, who like my William also was born in North Carolina.

Whether these two DNA matches descend from a sibling of my William or one of William's cousins, it is clear that the matches—if the connection is based on this part of their family tree—are much more distant than are those descending from Larkin's line.

I'm not sure I'm ready yet to grapple with that relationship tangle. This exploration, however, did remind me not to rely too confidently on my past tree-building work. The reason I've developed such a broad, "bushy" tree is that I purposely include all collateral lines in each generation, then chart all their descendants.

With a tool like that, my natural inclination is to trust using what I've built to look downward through the generations, when in reality, I still need to be prepared to look upwards from the current generation's identified parents. That, of course, means building trees for matches from a reliable starting point, but with the ThruLines assist, that is easily accomplished, even for those subscribers with private trees who have opted in to sharing with matches.

Yes, for a tree like mine, it is easy to look up matches in one direction: from ancestor downwards. But I need to look at this as a two way research street, and look both ways. Sometimes, we need to look backwards in time from the present, to double check the work of our DNA match.

The Winding Path of DNA Descent

 

Genealogical puzzles, fortunately enough, can be approached in more ways than one. That is a good thing in my current case, while I'm puzzling over just who it might have been that was my second great-grandmother's father. The woman I was told was Sarah Catherine Laws, wife of Thomas Davis, showed up in so many records simply by the given name Catherine. I knew her maiden name was Laws—but which Catherine Laws? And which father would be the one for the right Catherine?

While I've spotted a possibility with William Laws—who, thankfully, gave three of his children un-missable names—it has been a rough go to pin him down as clearly the father of Catherine. For one thing, as we've seen, William moved around a lot. That pattern seemed to be adopted by his sons, making their unusual given names even more valuable to me. Although I can't seem to pin William down as to a date of death or place of burial yet—not to mention, a will would still be helpful—I realized there is another approach we can take: follow the winding path of his sons' DNA descent.

As you can imagine, even that approach has its challenges, as the family seemed to have a multi-generational way with moving from place to place, or appearing in multiple marriage records. But I decided to try my hand once again at the chase based on genetic genealogy this time.

If William Laws was my third great-grandfather, then right now I'd be seeking DNA matches at the approximate level of fourth cousin. A relationship that distant isn't likely to share much genetic material—the range, according to Blaine Bettinger's helpful Shared centiMorgan chart, could be up to 139 centiMorgans at the most, but 35 for a mid-range. Then again, it could be that my fourth cousins and I share absolutely no genetic material at all.

In the case of the ThruLines suggested DNA matches for my Laws ancestor at Ancestry.com, my top match for William's son Larkin's line shared a bit over ninety centiMorgans with me. The next closest match shared fifty five—and the further from the top of the list I got, the more precipitously the numbers dropped.

There was another problem with the Laws matches I found: that top match with over 90 cMs shared genetic material with me in four separate segments. I would have been far more encouraged to see those centiMorgans all contained within one segment. As the total centiMorgan count decreased, those many segments seemed to dilute the possibility of finding a verifiable match through corresponding documentation. But I tried my hand at it anyhow.

My first step was to look for Laws matches who shared one larger segment with me, rather than four or five smatterings of genetic material. For two matches who each shared one segment measuring twenty three cMs with me, I was able to confirm their line of descent. That was encouraging.

Then, I tried my hand at the names closer to the top of the list, the ones with the many segments shared. I had tried tracing those lines on paper several years ago without any success, but thankfully this year, the documentation was there to confirm the connections. Not that this was easy; many moves, many marriages, many incidents causing me to backtrack to pick up events hidden in between the census years made me wonder whether I'd ever find satisfactory confirmation of the connections.

So far, I've verified four out of seventeen matches in the ThruLines readout for William's son Larkin. I'll eventually work my way through the rest of that list. The work will certainly go more quickly, now that the trailblazing effort has laid out the patterns and the locations. From that point, I'll move on to confirm the four ThruLines matches descending from William's son Pine Dexter—a name which can't be missed, although one that has suffered much recorded abuse.

Then, unless I can find contradictory evidence that there was another William Laws out there during the same time period in that same northeastern Tennessee area—or another set of brothers named Larkin and Pine Dexter—I think it will be safe to assume my second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine was daughter of William Laws. It all comes down to doing the grunt work of building a solid paper trail—but DNA can certainly help point the way. 

Moving Along Now

 

There may have been a reason why William Laws and his sons Larkin and Pine Dexter were difficult to find, even though using the FamilySearch Labs' Full Text search. Perhaps they might have been just a shade over the side which in more recent times would have prompted law enforcement to warn, "Move along, now."

I went back to the FamilySearch Labs website for a second attempt at finding William—or at least his sons—mentioned in a will in either North Carolina or Tennessee. Bottom line: despite reversing my technique to use "Larkin Laws" as the keyword and William as the main search term, I couldn't find any last will—or even any property records. I looked in both North Carolina and Tennessee.

However, I did stumble upon something else.

Though I am not yet convinced that William Laws was my second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine Laws Davis' father, I have found her family living quite close to the household of a man by that name in the 1870 census. An added perk comes our way thanks to DNA matches who descend from those distinctively-named possible brothers, Larkin and Pine Dexter.

Though my second try at digging up wills or deeds has failed dismally—not that I'm quitting just yet—I did run across some odd records. 

Try this mention from the Yancey County, North Carolina, court minutes for the July term in 1855. Remember, I had spotted a William Laws family in Yancey County for the 1850 census, with a family which included names such as "Larken" and "Pendexter."

According to the North Carolina court minutes, there was a note about a judgement in regard to a case labeled "State vs. Larken Laws." No further detail, but looking for additional records, an earlier entry from the January 1854 term of the same court noted that the "defendant Larkin Laws," though called, failed to appear at that session.

Perhaps the no shows might have been owing to the family's decision to remove from the state for more comfortable quarters across the border. Remembering that William's possible daughter had married by 1856 and was living in Washington County, Tennessee—a match that always had me wondering about how the connection was initiated—I wasn't surprised to find the next mentions of the Laws family in that new location. The court minutes from Jonesborough, the county seat, at the beginning of 1857 provided a list of names for the "insolvent poll tax" for 1855 and 1856. If you guessed William Laws was mentioned, you are spot on. Bonus points if you wondered if his son Larkin was mentioned as well.

Looks like it was time to move on once again.

Some Choice Terms

 

It's the moment of truth: I'm using the FamilySearch Labs Full Text search to see if I can find any trace of what became of my second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine Laws Davis' potential father, William Laws. My hope is to easily find a will drawn up by William among the legal papers in the state of his last residence, Tennessee. 

The trick, apparently, is to choose my search terms wisely—date, place, record type, keywords. There is a reason for this. No—there are several reasons for this. Let me list the problem with the choices.

First is the obvious: looking for someone surnamed Laws in a collection of legal records may be difficult, if a good number of those records include the oft-use phrase, "according to the laws of...." So I thought of a preemptive strike: couple my search for William Laws with a keyword. I have two easy possibilities, each of them having to do with his penchant for selecting unusual names for his sons: the name Larkin, and the name Pine Dexter.

Well, Pine Dexter didn't help much. Apparently, there are several mentions in legal records in the state of Tennessee including the word pine. Why, I'm not sure, but the count of hits for this choice provided by the FamilySearch Labs search page was rather discouraging. And surprisingly, Larkin was a surname used enough times in Tennessee to hamper my search progress using the other keyword option. I have yet to try out the name of the third son—Wiley—but my gut tells me that name wouldn't serve me much better.

Pinpointing the location for a possible will for William also didn't help. I couldn't rely on his remaining in the same Tennessee county where I had found him for the 1870 census—Greene County—because I had already found him moving quite a bit for the enumerations I had traced him to in the past. However, it looks like it might be worth my while to return to the program to do a separate search for each county location.

It can make all the difference which search terms we use to find our ancestors. Even if we are using a tool as effective as the Full Text search, the approach sometimes requires us to experiment with the terms we use. Then, again, I have no way of knowing whether William stayed in the last Tennessee county where I found him, or backtracked through his previous locations during the prior decades in Tennessee—or, worse for my search, returned home to North Carolina where he had been born.

Then, too, it helps to use the online system when it is not displaying a warning that some features "may not be available" while the website operators are "making improvements" to the site. Perhaps, among other records, any details about William Laws simply weren't available during my late-night research sessions—one tacit way to put in a good word for the genealogical early birds among us.

Time to Make Choices

 

An email I received midweek reminded me: it's time to make my choices about the upcoming RootsTech conference. Yes, I know it doesn't begin until March 6 this year, but with 113 online workshops to choose from over the three full days of the event, this sounds like an opportunity well worth some advanced consideration.

Just looking over the RootsTech calendar of online events, I can see there are several sessions focused on technology—and especially the idea of integrating the use of artificial intelligence in genealogical research. Sessions on using DNA testing figure somewhat prominently in the workshop offerings—including a talk by now-retired Family Tree DNA founder, Bennett Greenspan, called "Bennett's Y-Chromosomal Time Machine."

Because of the worldwide focus of the organizers of RootsTech, it's no surprise to find several workshops focused on ethnic research. Everything from several sessions on addressing the many challenges of African-American research or Jewish genealogy to exploring Native American research can be found on the schedule. But that's not all. There are sessions on exploring Central and South American roots, Chinese ancestry, as well as the expected European origins such as Danish, Norwegian, Scottish, Irish, and French.

I was particularly encouraged to see a couple sessions being offered on Polish research, by fellow genealogy blogger Julie Szczepankiewicz of "From Shepherds and Shoemakers." It isn't often that I find any workshops on that topic in general conferences, despite the United States including a sizable Polish diaspora. Since Polish research figures prominently in my goals for my Twelve Most Wanted each year, I'd like to see more of such training made available.

Besides Polish research, another annual focus for me involves following my father-in-law's Irish ancestors through Canada to the U.S. In one particularly tricky branch of his family, I have been partnering with two Canadian researchers who are also interested in this same set of Irish surnames. We have lately been looking at emigration schemes from Ireland to Canada, some of them pre-famine, and for that I was delighted to find a RootsTech offering for this year on that very topic: American Ancestors' Melanie McComb discussing "Escaping the Famine: Exploring Irish Settlements in Canada."

Finally, for my mission to continue sharing family stories—especially those difficult-to-face episodes in our families' past—I found genea-blogger Laura Hedgecock's session, "Navigating Sensitive Topics," to be essential for those of us who need to put "difficult chapters of the family's history" into writing.

There is, of course, no way I could absorb each one of these 113 sessions offered at this year's RootsTech in a week's sitting. No problem, though: many workshops will be available on-demand for up to three years after the conference's close. Scheduling my watch list not only to plan my attendance but for later viewing will probably be a wise move, just in case last-minute Life happens. It's good that room for flexibility has been scheduled into the choices for the RootsTech plan, too.  

Outliers

 

"Ninety eight percent of women will experience...."

How many times do we see statistics that seem to put us in a box—and assume without further examination that that is where we belong? Not that I want to launch into a dissertation about standard deviations and obtuse calculations, but I have lately been reminded of a certain detail about my relationship to assertions about percentages: I am an outlier. If everyone else is part of the ninety eight percent, I'll be camped out with the two percent.

What that means is when those who know far more than I do about statistical calculations come up with their proclamations of the way the average person should be, I'm usually not in that group. In other words, when everyone else zigs, I zag. 

When it comes to family history, that scenario holds true. Several years ago, when my siblings, cousins, and I finally broke through the mystery brick wall concerning my Polish patriline, I kept on the research trail until I could pin down the precise location of where my paternal grandfather's parents might have lived: it was a specific region in what is now the country of Poland but was, back in that century, a part of Prussia known as Pomerania.

Shortly after that discovery about my roots, my husband and I traveled back east, where I got the chance to visit with my eldest paternal cousin and reveal what I had found.

"So we're Pomeranians?" my cousin quipped.

Not to be outdone, my husband—for whom I have almost pinpointed his maternal ancestry as coming from the region of Alsace-Lorraine, now in France—retorted, "Yeah, and I'm an Alsatian."

We seldom talk about these historic regions any more. They are swallowed up by larger nations without any thought about how the previous regions may have had differing characteristics which are now lost to the record. The heritage of these isolated people groups may have been lost to us, but could characteristics we think of as outliers actually owe their origin to these lost-to-time people groups?

This is not a dynamic isolated to those northern regions of Pomerania or Alsace, but expand to include other regions in Europe which also had a history as a distinct group. Catalonia as part of Spain comes to mind—as does the nearby Basque region, as well. The same holds true for the other continents, as well, as witnessed by the ongoing search to more accurately represent such people groups in the reference panels used by geneticists—and, by extension, genetic genealogists.

Conclusions based on results of studies drawn up using subjects from specific regions (or reference panels) may not apply as accurately to people who descend from a different isolated people group. In other words, a study based on the population of Japan, for instance, might not produce findings as accurate for descendants of people groups from Africa. In one way, we become each other's outliers.

On the other hand, as more of us from around the world participate in DNA testing, we broaden that universe by including our own "norm"—the outlier for those other groups—into the mix. I've read comments concerning the lack of medical studies including, for instance, indigenous populations of North America and how that could impede the ability to reach conclusions that would be more helpful for those "outliers." Likewise, I wonder how more applicable medical developments might be for those of African descent if individuals could someday pinpoint not only the regions of origin on the continent, but their specific ancestral people groups.

We may all be part of humankind, but we contain a world of difference between us. With discoveries in DNA, the more we all test, the more we can all discover about that fascinating genetic mosaic—the details we can now only chalk up to being part of a vague concept like "outliers." 

Searching for Sarah Catherine

 

FamilySearch Labs' Full Text search has been available since they announced the new development at last year's RootsTech conference, but I still run into people who have yet to give it a try.

As the old commercial used to say, "Try it; you'll like it." That, at least, is what I think about this resource. After putting the service through its paces on several ancestors last year, I'm certainly excited to see what else I can find, especially now that I'm stuck with the thought that perhaps my second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine Laws Davis might not be the family member I thought she was. I'm seeking a bit more firm footing, documentation-wise, in climbing this woman's 1838 to 1893 timeline in northeastern Tennessee.

Recently, the FamilySearch blog put out an article on "What to Expect From FamilySearch in 2025." Among the many anticipated upcoming developments, the article included a section on Full-text search. The January 6 article referred to how the FamilySearch Labs' Artificial Intelligence is "unlocking incredible discoveries hidden in unindexed, handwritten historical records that have never been searchable before now." Precisely why I want to use it to check for any connections between Sarah Catherine Laws, wife of Thomas Davis, and Catherine Laws, daughter of William Laws, the shoemaker from North Carolina.

The way the FamilySearch Labs is set up allows them to offer signed-in users a test drive of not just the Full Text search, but several other experimental features. All they ask in return is that researchers provide them with feedback on their user experience. As they note on the Labs' website, "You can influence important decisions on potential FamilySearch features and improvements."

The projects available have changed over time. Right now, the featured tools include options to apply as an early tester for an "enhanced tree feature," as well as an AI-assisted search on the FamilySearch.org website, and making "unforgettable memories" with "Together by FamilySearch."

When I first found out about the Full Text Search capability, I did test it out and provide feedback. I could see where it might be cumbersome for some search terms—I think at the time I was looking for more information on my ancestor John Carter, a name which doomed me to overload on possible hits. But I also realized its value in locating possible parents' names for some of my brick wall ancestors.

I'll be spending the weekend putting the program through its paces once again. Hopefully, William Laws will not be as overwhelming a search term to choose as was John Carter. At least in William's case, I already know some sons' names—Wiley, Larkin, and Pine Dexter—which couldn't possibly be among the most popular given names of his century. They will come in handy as keywords in this search for Sarah Catherine's presumed father, William Laws.

A Little D N A Guidance

 

I'm looking for clues as to whether a mystery family matches the records found for my ancestor, Sarah Catherine Laws Davis. In seeking the right William Laws, my second great-grandmother's possible father,  I am fortunate that he did not use the same typical names for his children. In some Catholic forebears in my mother-in-law's family, for instance, I'd see the same run of Williams and Margarets repeated, generation after generation. Not so for William Laws, the potential father of my second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine Laws Davis—and that is a relief, for today we need to take a peek at some of the DNA matches for my Laws line, to see if they provide any guidance.

Earlier this week, I had found Sarah "Catherine" Laws—by then, wife of Thomas Davis—listed on the same page of the 1870 census as a family headed by a man named William Laws. William, by then identified as a sixty six year old shoemaker from North Carolina, had four others in his household, all listed with the same surname Laws. Since the 1870 census did not give any guidance as to family relationships within the household, the wide range of ages made it difficult to determine who might be William's wife, and who might be his child—rather than grandchild.

Since I had hoped for more clarity on this William's identity, I traced his possible course back through each decennial enumeration. The previous census, drawn up in 1860, pinpointed a possible William Laws in Carter County, Tennessee. A fortunate find, because it included a list which seemed far more likely to be of William's wife and children, it was once again a listing of the household of a shoemaker from North Carolina.

A second gift from this 1860 household was its inclusion of singular given names. Besides the typical names expected in any American family—Caroline, Elizabeth, Margaret, and William—there were some more unusual names included. Names like Larkin, Wyley, and Poindexter were listed as part of that Laws family—and were unusual enough that I felt certain I could follow them back yet another decade.

I guessed right. Those names did indeed lead me back to North Carolina, where an 1850 household headed by a shoemaker named William Laws included residents named Larkin, Wiley, and—though not quite Poindexter—a supposed son named Pendexter.

The key point about these less common given names is that, in checking my ThruLines for DNA matches leading back to my second great-grandmother's Laws family, there are indeed suggested matches with descendants of Larkin Laws and another man listed as "Pine Dexter" Laws. Poindexter?

My closest match from the Larkin Laws line is a possible fourth cousin sharing 91 centiMorgans with me—with sixteen other matches also linked to that same ancestor. Pine Dexter Laws has four descendants who share DNA with me—although the closest match shares only 42 centiMorgans. ThruLines listed several other proposed ancestral lines linked to William Laws, but only one line—for daughter Elizabeth—was represented by an entry in the family's census entry for this William Laws of Yancey County, North Carolina.

Granted, Ancestry.com's ThruLines is a tool to help with guidelines and leads, not necessarily the arbiter of all ancestral connections. If enough subscribers have the wrong entries in their tree, that mistake can echo throughout their system.

Still, I have to wonder whether I've found the right father for my second great-grandmother. There is so much more to discover about her family connections. There is, possibly, one shortcut I can check out, now that I'm considering this William Laws as Sarah Catherine's father: I can see whether her name is linked with his in any legal documents, using FamilySearch's Full Text search. We'll start taking a look at that tomorrow.

In Search of a Shoemaker

 

What about William Laws, the sixty-six year old shoemaker from North Carolina whom we found living close to my second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine Laws Davis? It is tempting to assume that their proximity in the listing of the 1870 U.S. census would prove just the significance we hoped. Not so fast, though: let's walk through this connection step by step.

To begin with, neither William Laws or his presumed daughter Sarah Catherine were from the location where we found them in the 1870 census. That location in 1870 was Greene County, Tennessee—close to North Carolina, and close to the Davis household's previous residence in Tennessee's Washington County, but lacking information on why either family chose to move, we can't yet assume these are the right ones.

Looking back a decade for a shoemaker by the name of William Laws, I spotted one in the 1860 census, but in a different Tennessee county: Carter. Still near both Greene County, where we found both families in 1870, and Washington County, the Tennessee location which the Davis family called home in that previous decade, about the only similarity I can find with the Laws entry in the 1870 census was that he was a shoemaker from North Carolina.

Frustratingly, the ages didn't change a precise ten years from the more recent census. And there were several more names in the household than in 1870. The only positives I could find, besides the occupation and location of birth for William, were that the 1860 household did not contain a Catherine (our Catherine had been married four years by that point) and that the Laws family listing included several children's names.

Among those family members' names were a few which I recognized as belonging to proposed ancestors of my Laws DNA matches. This is beginning to look tempting—but you know we'll need to check this out far more carefully.

It's the Laws

 

Have you ever set yourself a research goal, but try though you might, you keep coming back to an empty slate? That's my situation with my second great-grandmother whose maiden name was Laws. She was known as Sarah, or Catherine, or possibly Sarah Catherine, but regardless of the doubt about her given name, she was surely a Laws.

Three years ago, I selected her as one of my Twelve Most Wanted. I had tried to find some details about her parents—or even a clue about any siblings—and found...nothing. Tantalizingly, at that time I also noticed several DNA matches whose ancestral trail led back to that same surname: Laws. However, I had no way to trace my line back to their ancestors. Whoever our shared most recent common ancestor might have been, I couldn't find any connection to my mystery second great-grandmother.

Now, however, I'm hoping that FamilySearch's Full Text Search might yield some hints about how Sarah Catherine connects to others in the extended Laws family in northeastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. In anticipation of such discoveries, I'm also building out lines of descent for some of these possible DNA cousins.

While I'm chomping at the bit to find the answer to this Laws puzzle—hey, forty one possible DNA cousins are already claiming me as family, according to just one of the five DNA companies where I've tested—let's start at the beginning by reviewing what I already know about Sarah Catherine Laws.

When my second great-grandmother showed up on my genealogical radar, she was already married to Thomas Davis and was mother of one year old son James. Unfortunately, the 1860 U.S. Census where I found that entry for Washington County, Tennessee, listed her name as Cassa, not Catherine. Thankfully, the next census in 1870 listed her as Catherine, and while she and her husband Thomas had moved to nearby Greene County with their growing family, it was encouraging to see their entry listed on the same page as that of the William Laws family. A connection?

By the time of the 1880 census, the Davis family was back in what was likely their original home—although now, that part of Washington County was now carved out to form a new county called Unicoi. Once again listed as Catherine, she was matriarch of a family of four children, including my great-grandfather William. A new clue indicated that she had been born in North Carolina—as had the William Laws we spotted when she lived near him in Greene County at the time of the 1870 census.

The 1890 census, of course, is lost to us, and before the 1900 enumeration was conducted, both Thomas Davis and his wife were long gone. The only information I've been able to glean on Thomas' wife's full name has been through the death records of their four children. Aggravatingly, one listed her name as Catherine, another as Sarah, another as "unknown," and the fourth record, belonging to my own great-grandfather William, was drawn up in 1911 and did not include parents' names. (I do know, however, that he died of pellagra, a disease rarely mentioned in our time.)

Whether her name was actually Sarah or Catherine—or, in the good ol' Southern manner, was a double given name combining the two, as I have heard from family members—I still can't confirm through documentation. However, finding the family moving from their accustomed location to a place where they lived so close to a Laws family does make that other family a tempting possibility to explore. We'll take a look at this possible connection tomorrow.  

Ancestor #12: A Polish Cousin Connection

 

There is something special about coming to the end of a sequence. Whether it is the closing night of a theater performance, or completing the last exam before finishing the degree, it is a time to celebrate. Thus, when I get to the last of these Twelve Most Wanted ancestors for 2025, I want to go out with a shout. And I think I've found the perfect research project to celebrate: it has to do with a cousin connection with whom I've actually had the pleasure of personally exchanging notes.

For the last three months of each research year, I focus on the brick wall Polish ancestors of my father. This side of the family has always been the most frustrating for me, thanks to my paternal grandfather taking most of what he knew about his family with him to the grave. For whatever reason, his origin was a closely held secret.

It has taken decades of work by siblings and cousins in my generation to break through this brick wall—with one exception: the discovery in a census record of a young woman by the surname Gramlewicz who had, for a brief time, lived with my father's maternal grandparents.

That surname, it turns out, has shown up in other documents for family members. I still don't know the exact connection, but I had, over the years—and I do mean back to the 1990s—written about this unusual surname. So much so, that someone by that same name sent me an unexpected reply to one of my forum posts. That began an exchange of emails as we both tried to piece together the story of how our families had connected, so many generations before.

I thought I had figured out that puzzle—until, that is, I began examining what record transcriptions I could find from 1800s Prussia. It turns out I may have presumed a cousin was actually a sibling. Now that I know where to find the actual digitized records for the area in question (and not just the transcriptions), I want to go back and retrace my steps. Better yet, I want to rebuild the entire family constellation for those family members related to my father's great-grandmother, Elżbieta Gramlewicz.

This time around, I'll look for the collateral lines for Elżbieta as well as those of her parents—tentatively identified now as Andrzej Gramlewicz and his wife Katarzyna Nowicka. I'll be examining records from Żerków in present-day Poland, the same place we had studied for my father's ancestors this past October and November, when I found further resources for digitized records.

Because I want to identify DNA matches to this line, I'll also be building out the Gramlewicz tree through their descendants, as far as the paper trail will allow me to go. Hopefully, at the close of this year, I'll be better prepared to determine just how I relate to my distant Gramlewicz cousin who had found me online so many years ago—and that will be something I can shout about!

Ancestor #11: Another Polish Wish

 

What a bright new world this Polish genealogical research has become, now that I've found resources containing extended sets of pertinent records. Looking over my choices for my paternal Twelve Most Wanted for the past five years, I can see my former doubt showing in the conservative choices I had made. Several times for each year's last quarter—the time period I'd usually spend researching my father's roots—I'd choose options vaguely connected to my father's history, like friends of the family, or collateral lines I knew about, once the family made it to New York City. I was hedging my bets, anticipating the worst. Pushing back through time, past my dad's great-grandparents, seemed an impossibility.

Not so with this Ancestor #11 selection for my Twelve Most Wanted. Almost as if this process has changed into selecting an ancestral Polish wish list, I've selected another one of my father's great-grandparents, Marianna Wojtaś, to research this coming November. All I know about Marianna so far is that she died in the same village where my paternal grandfather's mother's roots originated: Czarnylas. But I'm hoping this year's attempt will yield far more than I had expected in the past.

Just even finding the identity of that hometown took years to accomplish, so I need to take that as a reminder that some research projects take time—like years—to evolve into a shape roughly comparable to an actual answer. If I arrive at the end of this coming November without an answer to my questions about Marianna's parents and siblings, I know I can return to this puzzle again in a future year—and that, eventually, more records will help guide me through the maze and point me in the right direction for my next step.

Keeping track of my progress over the years has helped in the encouragement department, as well. While I've been selecting my choices for Twelve Most Wanted in the past two weeks, I've also been wrapping up some unfinished projects from the past year. That helped me add another fifty nine documented family members to my parents' tree, and 179 to my in-laws' tree. But it's the fact that my tree now has a total of 38,811 such relatives, and my in-laws' tree has 37,223 reminds me that this is a process of "here a little, there a little" over many years that gets the job done.

Not that a family tree is ever "done." There are always additional questions prompting more discoveries, and more family mysteries probing into personal history of the farmers, trades people and merchants in our families' past. But every time I think I've hit the brick wall that signals the end of the line, I need to remind myself that with patience and skill—not to mention, excellent resources—there is always a way to continue that search.

Ancestor #10: a Polish Patriline

 

Approaching the last three of my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors to research for the year of 2025, we move from the family lines of my father-in-law to those of my own dad. I have to smile to think that as I drew up these plans at this time last year, I had given up hope of finding anything further on my father's Polish roots. By the time I actually did the research this past fall, enough resources had opened up to enable me to progress far more than I had dreamed. Let's hope the same will hold true as I shift from last year's exploration of my father's maternal line to seeking his paternal roots next October.

First line of research for this coming fall will be on my dad's patriline, with his grandfather, Thomas Puchała. Thomas, of course, would be the English counterpart to whatever his given name actually might have been in Poland. I still have quite a bit of work to do to track down any actual documents to verify his existence.

But "Thomas" is not the only one I'll be seeking. I'd like to expand that search as wide as I can to determine if there were any of his siblings who survived to adulthood. At this point, I have not found any, but it would help to know, especially in the case of finding DNA cousins who are related to this line.

The search for the Puchała family this fall will take us to Lubichowo in northern Poland, in what once was the domain of the historic region of Pomerania. Hopefully, as happened last year, revisiting local genealogy websites will lead us to newer resources and, perhaps, additional documentation. I may have a skeletal sketch of my father's paternal family tree at this point, but it would be so beneficial to add collateral lines with some additional guidance on names, dates, and places for this extended Puchała family.

Ancestor #9: Finding the Flannery FAN Club

 

Sometimes, it takes a village to find an ancestor. In the case of my father-in-law's Ballina bunch from County Tipperary, Ireland, my only hope of isolating the right Flannery ancestral line for the wife of Denis Tully may be to explore the entire village. At least, the work will call for a re-examination of the F.A.N. Club—Family, Associates, and Neighbors—of Irish emigrants Margaret Flannery and her husband, Denis Tully.

I had worked before on Margaret Flannery, my father-in-law's great-grandmother who married Denis Tully in Ballina, County Tipperary. It was far easier to find her with her family after they immigrated to Canada, but there were certainly signs that the Flannerys had lived in Ballina. The question still remains, though, about Margaret's parents and siblings—and who among them also made the voyage to Canada.

Fortunately, since the last time I worked on this ancestor for my Twelve Most Wanted in 2023, I've connected with two DNA matches researching the same surnames in the same county—an excellent bonus from genetic genealogy companies which provide the research tools to reach out to our distant DNA cousins. By the time I get to researching Ancestor #9 this fall, I will have covered quite a bit of background information through books and videos, thanks to a lively exchange of emails with these two researchers, in preparing to tackle this ninth challenge.

Unlike my goal for the other months during this Twelve Most Wanted sequence, September will enable me to broaden my horizons in searching for the parents of Margaret Flannery by taking into consideration those associates and neighbors whose names kept popping up along with hers, from Ireland to Canada. Even if we don't discover Margaret's parents' names, we'll hopefully build a network of relatives and other associates whose connections may help move the process forward another step or two. 

Ancestor #8: Hoping for D N A Clues

 

There are some ancestors for whom we can handily point to several records in confirmation of our connection. Not so with this one of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025. My father-in-law's great-grandmother Johanna Falvey, my choice for a research focus this coming August, had proven hard to find the last time I tried to pursue her story. That was five years ago. It's about time to see whether any further clues will turn up.

That said, I'm sorry to say it, but I don't think there will be much more in the way of paper confirmations. Johanna Falvey was an Irish immigrant who came to Fort Wayne, Indiana, with her husband, John Kelly. Now that's a name to try your research hand at. I would have just about given up the chase for John Kelly's wife, except for two things. One was that her obituary tantalizingly mentioned that she had left several sisters behind in Ireland—plus another sibling who had immigrated to New Zealand. The other detail? Well, I've found some DNA matches who lead to Falvey ancestors in New Zealand.

And yet, it can't really be just that easy. I've tried finding the connections before. Frustratingly, the chase always seems to lead back to the same records void in Ireland. Here's hoping that now, five years later, there will be more DNA matches leading to more possibilities of finding records pointing to the right location and family circle back home in Ireland. I may be clutching tightly to my positive attitude mantra for this ancestor, but I'll never know if I can find any more details on Johanna Falvey unless I give this brick wall pursuit another try.