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.