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.