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 the 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.