Time to Wrap Up

 

It's wrap up week for goal number one of my Twelve Most Wanted for this year, and I haven't found much to write about. The end of the line for my Laws family still appears to be my second great-grandmother, Sarah Catherine Laws Davis.

Well, take that back. I do have some tiny DNA matches with several descendants of a man from Greene County, Tennessee, known as Larkin Laws, and a couple token DNA matches with Larkin's brother Pine Dexter Laws. 

Those matches point to a father for the brothers—and possibly Sarah Catherine, too—known as William Laws. But I'm still not really sure. Tiny shared segments of DNA could mean those matches are my fourth cousins—or they could mean more distant relationships, at least according to the Shared CentiMorgan Project. For all I know at this point, Larkin and Pine Dexter could be cousins of Sarah Catherine, not brothers.

With only three more days to work on this puzzle, there aren't many research options left before I need to move on to February's goal. I could go back to those DNA matches whose ThruLines results at Ancestry.com do not match the lines of descent I've been able to replicate through documentation, and try building their tree from the current generation backwards in time. In leading me to the right ancestor, that may help tie Sarah Catherine's as yet unknown parents to the right family group.

I'm still working on building the trees downward for Larkin and Pine Dexter, still waiting for a telltale obituary or newspaper headline to point me in a more useful direction. Searching through newspaper collections online for articles including the Laws family names might still yield some helpful answers. And I'm still poking around for other local resources to explore.

All told, though, at this point I'm not expecting any revealing breakthroughs. But doesn't it seem that it's always the last place we look where we find what we've been looking for?