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.
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