One Last DNA Attempt

 

With an ancestral family comprised of many siblings, it is possible to test DNA connections through more than one branch of the family line. With my hypothetical father of second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine Laws Davis, I've already had the chance to check out DNA cousins who descended from Larkin Laws and Pine Dexter Laws—with more promising results coming from descendants of Larkin than those of his younger brother.

There was one more set of DNA matches to attempt unraveling: matches whose ancestral connection was through Larkin's and Pine Dexter's sister Elizabeth Laws. Tracing the line from Elizabeth to the ten supposed DNA cousins who descend from this branch of the Laws family has proven more tangled than my attempts with Pine Dexter's line.

To trace the line of Elizabeth Laws' descendants, I had to go back to some of the documents I had found at first this month. Reviewing these, though, opened my eyes to other family issues. If, for instance, Elizabeth was the head of this line of descent for this set of my Laws DNA matches, I needed to find a marriage record for her—or, at the very least, some records attributing births to this mother.

According to some of my DNA matches, their ancestral Elizabeth had children born as early as 1856. However, when I returned to the census records which contained her supposed father, William Laws, she was still listed in his household. If she had been married before the arrival of that child born in 1856, I would not expect to see a twenty two year old Elizabeth still in her father's household in the 1860 census. Granted, there are three very young children also in that household at the time, and enumerations from that time period did not explain relationships among those sharing the living quarters—but I believe I have discovered a different explanation for those three youngest children, none of whom have a different surname listed in the record.

Likewise for the 1870 census, where I found William Laws' household entered just up a few lines from that of his hypothesized daughter Sarah Catherine Laws Davis. Once again, there is a woman named Elizabeth in the Laws household. Though her age has advanced from twenty two in the 1860 census to only twenty eight in the 1870 census, such anomalies I have spotted before in other family lines.

The point in all this exploration is that it is likely that the proposed children for Elizabeth—at least according to the trees of those DNA matches—actually belong to someone from another line of the Laws family.

That, of course, leaves me with one fairly convincing exploration of DNA matches—that of Larkin Laws' seventeen descendants who match my DNA results—plus a somewhat less convincing set of matches from Pine Dexter's line, and a definite no-go for their sister Elizabeth's line. If I take the same approach as I did yesterday, though, and look both ways on that DNA street, perhaps that exploration may offer up some siblings or cousins for William Laws, himself, possibly pointing me to who William's parents may have been, as well.

Before I reach that far beyond my goal for this month, today's exploration pointed out a few additional details I need to examine about William Laws, himself. While I am still on the hunt for a will—or at least burial records—for William, I'll take some time next week to read between the lines on what I noticed about the census records over the decades for this William Laws household.