One Last Walk Around the Neighborhood

 

This may sound nostalgic, but how about one more walk around the neighborhood before we say goodbye to William Laws and his family? After all, one last look at William's F.A.N. Club, back in Yancey County, North Carolina, in 1850 might not hurt—and besides, I've got no other leads to follow at this point.

I've spent the month seeking leads on the possible parents of my second great-grandmother Sarah Catherine Laws. Though she spent her married life in Tennessee—mostly in Washington County and Unicoi County after its establishment—she was likely born in North Carolina. 

Fancy that! That's the same as William Laws, ancestor of some of my distant DNA matches. It's time to rewind the family history back to 1850 and take a look at the page where the Laws family's census entry showed up in Yancey County.

Last time I did that, I was more concerned with taking a glance across the Laws timeline from decade to decade in the census enumerations. Thus, I found the family moving from Yancey County across the state line to Washington County, then Carter County, and finally settling in Greene County, Tennessee.

What I missed in that quick overview, though, were the family, associates, and neighbors William Laws connected with, back in Yancey County in 1850. One look now and I can see he was surrounded by family in the place where he lived. Whether close relatives or distant—I hear that in the South, they call them "kin"—there were a lot of Laws surnames on the same page where William was listed. The household listed right above William's was that of sixty nine year old North Carolina native Elijah Laws. Along with a fifty year old woman Anna Laws, who was likely his wife, there was an eighty four year old woman named Judith Bennett, and three young men, all surnamed Ayres. My guess is that Anna may have been Elijah's second wife and a widow, being the mother of the three young Ayres men.

Not much farther up the census page from Elijah's household was an entry for another Ayres couple—Anna's brother-in-law and his wife?—in between Elijah's household and that of twenty three year old James Laws. Could James be another relative? Following those lines and building out a test tree might reveal some connections with our William Laws. Elijah was certainly of an age to have been father of a first-born William.

It's always worth the effort to test out family history hypotheses—but to do so, we'll need to access  supporting documentation. Whether I'll have the time to do so before the end of this month, I'm not yet sure. If nothing else, this is a good time to construct my to-do list for the next time I revisit this research question about my second great-grandmother's heritage.