It is sometimes hard to support conjectures about the details we spot in ancestors' records. For William Laws—a man I don't yet have support to claim as my third great-grandfather—his paper trail seems to suggest changes, but confirming documentation for these hypotheses I've yet to find.
Take yesterday's theory that William's 1860 household actually contained three children from his son Larkin's possible deceased first wife. When I try to follow those children through the rest of their life history, I lack obituaries, even burial records to help trace their last days. I have yet to confirm my conjecture is right—but I can't find any reason to deny it. Yet.
There's another hint lurking between the lines in William's 1870 census entry: the possibility of a new wife and daughter. How else to explain that former wife Elizabeth was now missing, and that someone named Catharine—but not Catherine, my second great-grandmother—was in the household, along with a one year old daughter Mary?
Discovering details hidden between the lines in the usual documents prompts us to scour the possibilities of other records—one more time, if they were missed the first time around. It took a while for me to locate it, but there was indeed a marriage record in the Greene County books dated May 29, 1868, for one William Laws and a Catharine Margain Filler.
Filler? Hiller? Fuller? It is hard to read the handwriting—but at least there's a handwritten record to support my hypothesis. Sometimes, in order to read between the lines in an ancestor's life journey, we need to follow those ancestors, every step of the documented way from one end of life to the other.
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