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.