United, They're Traceable

 

Trying to find ancestors in America prior to the 1850 census can be challenging. Without a listing of all household members by name, individual relatives seem to disappear into the nameless data. When their names reappear in that expanded 1850 record, far from the home where they were born decades prior, we can't always be sure such common names signify the specific ancestor we're seeking.

There is one exception to that predicament, however. While we couldn't necessarily be sure of the right identity, assuming the ancestor had traveled alone, the fact that those who migrated westward in those early years of the 1800s often did so in the company of many others may turn a fruitless search into a more favorable outcome for us researchers. United, those traveling ancestors were often more traceable.

It was a fortunate discovery, while researching the descendants of my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather Lyman Jackson, to find his grandson Royal along with two of his siblings in a census record, long after they had all left their home in Erie County, Pennsylvania. Granted, I wouldn't have spotted that coincidence, had I not taken the time to actually look at the document in question. That little now-habitual exercise has paid off well in research dividends.

Researching those ancestors whose American life story unfolded prior to the 1850 census enumeration can be challenging. As children of pioneers took up their parents' pioneering spirit and continued that westward movement, it could sometimes be challenging to trace each family member. And yet, given the time period, people often moved in clusters—for mutual support, sure, but primarily for safety.

Apparently, when Lyman's grandson Royal began his move westward, he, too, heeded that admonition to travel in numbers. Those numbers—judging from his landing place in Wisconsin in time for the 1850 census—gained names and faces, at least if we can rely on the similarity of his neighbors' names to those of the siblings in his family.

One entry below Royal Jackson's household was that of Charles M. King, whom I already had learned was husband of Royal's oldest sister Rosanna. By the time of the 1850 census, the King household included four sons as well as Royal's sister Rosanna, giving me more names to research as I complete the picture of Lyman Jackson's many descendant lines.

In addition to that discovery was the appearance of another brother on that same census page. Apparently, on his way to Wisconsin, Ebenezer Dunham Jackson had stopped in Summit County, Ohio, to obtain a marriage license to wed Angeline Hine in 1845. By the time this Jackson family was recorded in the 1850 census in the town of Adams in Green County, Wisconsin, the household included three young sons.

While not making much progress in tracing each of these Jackson lines individually, taking time to study the entire page of the census enumeration for just one of them yielded the discovery of two additional siblings. Once again supporting the concept of cluster genealogy, we discover that those pre-1850 American families, when traveling united, are more easily traceable. 

A Path to the Past

 

You know the drill in genealogy: you start with what you know, then move incrementally backwards into the past, seeking documentation to confirm the validity of each step. In this month's case, though, I'll be following that path to the past more slowly than if we'd been on a chase to merely name the ancestors of this month's selection of my Twelve Most Wanted. I already know Lyman Jackson was the father of my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather, John Jay Jackson. And I've already discovered that Michael Jackson, in turn, was Lyman's father.

This month, we'll take the details already found on Lyman Jackson's life and zoom in to see what additional information we can glean on this family. For one thing, Lyman Jackson and his wife, Deidama Dunham, were said to be parents of thirteen children. I don't yet know how many of those Jackson children left descendants of their own, but I'm thinking our DNA account should contain far more than the seventy DNA cousins who have been spotted by Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool up to this point. I'll be busy adding lines of descent—times thirteen—to this couple's family tree.

From what I've already found, Lyman Jackson was buried in 1835 in Albion, a township in Erie County, Pennsylvania. Checking the 1830 census for that same location, there is a listing for the household of one Lyman Jackson, along with entries for the families of his sons, Michael, David, and Royal.

Leaping over ten years to reach the next census, we find Lyman Jackson was still in Erie County, according to the 1820 census. In addition, three of his sons were listed in their own separate households: "J. D." (probably Jesse Dunham Jackson), Michael, and Abner. However, for this decade, the Jackson households were located in Conneaut Township.

Even in the 1810 census, we find Lyman Jackson and his household still located in Erie County, where the population at that time was less than four thousand people.

Rewinding history yet another decade, Lyman and his family were no longer in Pennsylvania for the 1800 census. They had moved the distance of 350 miles to Exeter in Otsego County, New York. At this earlier date, the corresponding entry for one Michael Jackson was likely not Lyman's son, but his father.

Another significant move occurred during the previous decade, for in the 1790 census, Lyman Jackson was showing in the records of the town of Pownal in Vermont. Among the names of heads of households there can be spotted the name of Obadiah Dunham, father of Lyman's wife Deidama.

For a time period in which travel would have been considered difficult at best, this large family managed to navigate at least two significant moves—to say nothing of what brought Lyman from his birthplace in Simsbury, Connecticut, up north to Vermont.

Looking at an itinerary like that just begs me to dig a bit deeper into the story behind each of those moves for the Jackson family.

More Flanagan Sightings

 

Still in pursuit of documentation on the extended Flanagan family of my father-in-law's great-grandmother, I went looking at what few records are still available from that time period in County Limerick, Ireland. James Flanagan was listed as the ancestor of a DNA match to my husband's test at Ancestry.com, so I've been keen to piece together that family line.

It was helpful to find someone named James Flanagan listed in the property valuation rolls in the townland of Cappananty in County Limerick at about the same time as our relative William Flanagan, before William left Ireland around 1855. Finding that James once, I wanted to find more of him in Irish documents. That, of course, is difficult, considering the tragic loss of records between that time in the mid 1800s and the 1901 Irish census. But I tried.

Part of the attempt, by reason of loss of alternatives, is to trust what family members post in online trees about their own direct family line, but part of the effort is a leap of faith into the vast void, extrapolating a person's landing place in, say, 1901, after nearly fifty years of absent records. Here is what little I could find.

First of all, we've already found a James Flanagan and Elizabeth Hanrahan in Catholic baptismal records, presenting their son, also named James, for baptism on November 7, 1864. Presumably, as was traditionally the case with Catholic baptisms, the child was baptized as an infant, so likely born in that same year of 1864.

Fast forward thirty seven years, and let's see what can be found of the Flanagans in the townland of Cappananty in the 1901 census. The entire townland is transcribed in the website of the National Archives of Ireland, and by the fourth page of listings, I spot an entry for someone listed as James Flanigan. Looking at the actual document for the 1901 census, we see that James Flanigan listed as head of household, along with two older women, one of whom is listed as Bess Flanigan, his mother. 

Elizabeth?

Granted, James' claimed age as thirty five doesn't quite add up, considering our James was baptized in 1864, but with some rounding upwards, I suppose that estimate could be passable. If this was our James, seeing his mother living in his home suggests she had lost her husband by this point. Indeed, if we can rely on the family tree of our DNA match, the senior James was said to have died in 1900.

Moving on to the next census in 1911, James was in the same townland, but his family situation was different. Gone was any mention of Bess, his mother, narrowing her estimated date of death to a ten year parameter—unless she had simply moved to the home of another Flanagan child.

In her place were six additional people. First listing was for James' wife, Ellen, whom he had married five years prior to that census enumeration. Following Ellen's listing was that for what appears to be two twin daughters, Kate and Lizzie, who at that point were four years of age. Following the twins was another daughter, Mary, three years old. The youngest child in this family was the long-awaited son, also named James.

In addition to James' immediate family, there was one other relative living in the household: a sister, by the name of Anne. That, if you remember, was the name of the other child of the elder James Flanagan and Elizabeth Hanrahan, baptized on July 14, 1867, helping bolster my confidence that we have found, in 1911, the right Flanagan household linked to those baptismal records from almost fifty years prior.

There is one other reason I needed to find some sort of documentation about this James Flanagan family: the ages given. From the family tree I had found linked to that Flanagan DNA match, the generations seemed separated by a bit too long of an age span, causing some doubt. Before we move further, perhaps it would help to examine that sequence of generations, as given by the family member who had posted that tree online. We'll take some time to review that tomorrow. 

Meanwhile, on the Miller Side

 

While the routine grunt work of plowing through Anspach records continues in the background—not the scintillating reading material one would prefer—I thought I'd wander over to the other side of the family representing my mother-in-law's Miller roots in Perry County, Ohio. While I seldom like to pay attention to hints copied from other people's trees, I thought just this once, I'd explore a suggestion about mystery ancestor Lidia Miller's possible father.

The suggestion, from ThruLines, was to look for someone named Jacob Miller. Since there was a Jacob Miller listed in the 1820 census in Reading Township, the same place in Perry County where Lidia and her husband William Gordon lived, that was as good a place to start with this suggestion as any.

Though the age brackets used for the 1820 census aren't very helpful for our purposes—the adult age bracket stretches from age twenty six through forty four—I first wanted to check for signs of a young daughter. Indeed, there was one, though the bracket included all girls under ten. Since Lidia died early in 1840, not even two years after her marriage, I have no way to know how old she was. However, we can safely guess she was about twenty when married, putting her birth before 1820, and thus within that "under ten" age bracket for Jacob Miller's 1820 census readout.

At the same time I noticed the one girl in the Jacob Miller household, I spotted three sons, also under ten years of age. Could one of them have been Jonathan Miller, the one whose property we've been following this past week? Hard to say at this point, though the broad age bracket could include both Lidia and Jonathan, as he appears from other records to have been almost ten years Lidia's senior. 

Using Ancestry.com's ProTools, I'm building a Miller network which includes all three of these Millers from Reading Township, just to have a place to park all my discoveries on this possible F.A.N. Club. But as I stockpile records on Jacob Miller from Perry County's Reading Township, I begin to notice a few detracting details. One is that there may have been more than one Jacob Miller in the neighborhood. And for this particular Jacob Miller in the 1850 census, his arrival in America was not only after having married, but just before the birth of his sixteen year old daughter Margaret.

In other words, the Jacob Miller in the 1850 census couldn't have been the Jacob Miller of the 1820 census. 

Think Phonetically

 

The search for Adam Onsbaugh was on. I had found him in the Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office Records as the 1806 owner of a parcel of land which bore the same township, range, and section number as the property which, years later, Jonathan Miller was bequeathing to his two sons. Could I find any other records on this man?

I probably wouldn't have launched such a search, if it hadn't been for the unknown roots of my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother. Also bearing the surname Miller, Lidia had become the wife of William H. Gordon; after the couple's untimely deaths in Perry County, Ohio, their orphaned son Adam was raised by his paternal grandmother, herself a widow by that point. To connect Lidia to her past meant exploring any possible connections through the friends, associates, or neighbors surrounding the unfortunate young family. Searching Miller neighbors was one approach to this cluster research method.

Land owner Adam Onsbaugh, I reasoned, must be somehow connected to that Miller F.A.N. Club, and I needed to at least examine who he might have been. Could the Millers and Gordons have migrated en masse from Pennsylvania with Adam Onsbaugh? Did they know him in the past, and thus get inspired to follow his migration trail west to Ohio? I had to at least find him in the census records in Perry County to learn a bit more about this pioneer settler.

Searching for Adam in the 1810 census—the first enumeration after he acquired his land in Ohio—presented a problem. Perry County itself was not a county until 1818. The county was formed from portions of Fairfield, Washington, and Muskingum counties. Thus when the Land Office Records identified the location of the Onsbaugh property as Perry County, they were apparently identifying that land by current jurisdiction, not the county in existence in 1806. So I wouldn't have been surprised if no  Adam Onsbaugh showed up in the 1810 census in Perry County—but there was no one by that name listed in the entire state of Ohio.

No matter; let's fast forward to the 1820 census. There, I did find an Adam Onsbaugh in nearby Hocking County, but no one with that spelling in Perry County. However, there were two other listings: one for Adam Onspough, and another one for someone named John Onspough, both in Reading Township where our Jonathan Miller eventually lived.

I moved further on to the 1830 census, where I found several others with similar spelling variations. All in the same Reading Township, I found someone named John Anspaugh heading up one page of the census, and several others listed two pages earlier. All with that same surname spelling, they were David, Christian, Adam, and Benjamin.

Could Onsbaugh be the same as Anspaugh? I barely had time to consider that, when the 1840 census brought me more discoveries. There was a Benjamin and an Adam Anspach listed, again in Reading Township—in fact, on the same page which launched us on this journey when I discovered William Gordon's listing on the same page as "Johnathan" Miller. 

If you think about this morphing surname situation phonetically, it seems quite possible. We started with Onsbaugh. Realizing that several languages pronounce the letter "a" more like an "ahh," it could be possible that an "Onsbaugh" could also have been spelled "Ansbaugh." Then, too, the guttural ending, "gh" could seem similar to some ears as the German rendition of the ending "ch" and thus be substituted in spelling. Thus, we could move from Onsbaugh to Ansbaugh to Anspauch—and possible even to Anspach, as we saw in the 1840 census, all by thinking phonetically.

I couldn't help but notice the Find A Grave memorial for one Johann Adam Anspach, buried in Somerset—the town in Perry County surrounded by Reading Township—in 1838. The sponsored memorial includes a listing of his many possible children, including married names for the daughters. Though this list would represent descendants from a generation removed from our Jonathan Miller, I couldn't help but notice some similarities from names listed in a previous page of another document I had already been reviewing: Jonathan Miller's own will.  

Last Best Guesses

 

It can sometimes be hard to close the book on an unfinished research project. Still, a month is a month, and I promised myself that each of my yearly Twelve Most Wanted ancestors would receive only a month of my attention before I move on to wrestle with the next research puzzle. That said, today I'd like to lay down my last best guesses before closing the book on this chapter.

My goal this month was to find the parents of my second great-grandfather. When I began the month—indeed, when I laid out my research plans for Ancestor #3 back in December of 2024—I had thought I'd be searching for someone born in 1812 by the name William Alexander Boothe. That was what a prodigious researcher had told me years ago, but after only a few days of digging into the records, lack of any documents with the name William persuaded me to discard that report. Further searching pointed to a birth year of 1816 rather than 1812, and I again altered my trajectory.

Just as I had for the previous month's research challenge, I looked to results from DNA testing to bolster my exploration. However, unlike February's ancestor, who brought me well over one hundred DNA matches, any DNA Boothe connections beyond Alexander's own descendants were quite slim. Those few others pointed to a presumed ancestor—at least by Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool—named Daniel Booth. Daniel's birth in New York and subsequent lifetime spent mostly in Ohio dissuaded me from giving that suggestion any more credence, despite the fact that two of his children were born in Virginia (albeit many miles from Alexander's birthplace).

My main approach from that point was to zero in on Nansemond County in Virginia, the very county in which I had found Alexander's household in the 1840 census, and from which I had extracted his name in tax records. Since there were four other Boothe households in that county that year, my research tactic was to follow what documentation I could find on each of those other Boothe men, in hopes of identifying a possible father for Alexander.

Those four Boothe men in Nansemond County were named Robert, Kinchen, Nathaniel, and Andrew. Robert, who appeared to be the oldest of the four, had one son in his household who would have been the right age to be Alexander. This could have been promising, except for one detail: that male child under ten years of age in the 1820 census turned out to be his son named Daniel, not Alexander. Granted, one of Daniel's descendants was named William Horace Boothe, the very name my Alexander gave to one of his own sons, but other than that tempting detail, there was no way to make Alexander fit in the census age brackets that would fit his own specifics.

Kinchen, likewise, was old enough to have been father to Alexander, but given the use of age brackets for census records before 1850, plus the inaccuracies of age estimations in those earlier years, the wiggle room left too much uncertainty. Yes, if Kinchen's son Abram, said to be born about 1820, was actually one year younger, it might have been possible to squeeze my Alexander into that age slot, and count Abram in the next, younger, age category along with his brother Henry. But that "if" would be my conjecture, not supported by any documentation. I'll need to search further for records on that family which might include the missing information I'm seeking—a task for another year.

As for Andrew Boothe, apparently the youngest of the Nansemond County Boothe men, his age alone would disqualify him from being Alexander's father. I could not even find a listing for Andrew in the 1820 census, where Alexander would have shown up as a son in the "under ten" age category. Even the 1830 census showed a household of a young married couple with only children under the age of five.

If any of the Nansemond County Boothe men were to be my suspected direct line ancestor, it would have to be Nathaniel Boothe. Though his death—and any possible will—occurred just before an unfortunate courthouse fire, obliterating any hope of finding handy documentation, the son administering his (apparently considerable) estate—Joseph—was a child born of what appeared to be a second marriage, and one long post-dating Alexander's own birth. Indeed, Nathaniel's 1830 census suggested a household comprised solely of one adult male and one male child between the ages of ten and fourteen, precisely where Alexander would have fit in. Alexander's entry just one line below Nathaniel's in a personal property tax register for 1836—just when Alexander would have turned twenty—seemed also to indicate a connection. And the fact that the next decade's enumeration for Nathaniel indicated the arrival of a new wife and baby a few years after that previous census might well have been Alexander's signal to leave home (and step-mother) and start afresh with his own family for that 1840 census.

While I can point to no records which would positively assure me that that guess was spot on, I wonder, given Nathaniel's successful business reputation, whether he might have had a son from a previous marriage who would have been knowledgeable about horsemanship to the extent that Alexander seemed to exhibit. Even in his later years, Alexander was simultaneously claiming extreme poverty and a reputation for owning—possibly selling—stallions. Two different newspapers ran announcements of the passing of "Uncle" Alex Boothe. The Comet of Johnson City, Tennessee, where Alexander died in 1895, noted on August 8  that he was "well known in this and adjoining counties" for traveling through the area "with famous stallions" in past years. News of his death was also carried by the Knoxville Journal two days later, mentioning also that he died at the home of his eldest daughter, Laura Caroline, wife of William F. Brooks.

There will be another year for returning to this puzzle. Hopefully, more records will become available online, aiding research for those not at liberty to fly across country to personally dig through locally archived documents. But even as we discovered this month, old published genealogies, while containing errors, may provide helpful pointers, and thorough searches through collateral lines may turn up answers where we least expect them. Next chance I get to revisit Alexander's past, it will be time to explore as much of the extended Boothe kin in Nansemond County as I can find. The answer may well be hidden in records that didn't burn down in courthouse fires. It's just a matter of patience and turning lots of dusty pages.

Image above: Insertion on page four of the August 8, 1895, Johnson City, Tennessee, newspaper, The Comet, regarding the death of Alexander Boothe; image courtesy of GenealogyBank.

Last of the Nansemond Boothe Men

 

There were six Boothe men listed in the 1840 census for Nansemond County, Virginia, birthplace of my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe. Still unable to verify Alexander's parents' names, my quest this month has been to sift through all available records to examine the stories of each of the other Boothe men in that county who might be kin to Alexander.

Last on our list is Andrew Boothe, someone we encountered briefly when noticing that his final appearance in census records was in the household of Nathaniel Boothe in 1860. Not having any confirmation of family connections at that time—the 1860 census gave the names of each resident in the household, but not the relationship—all I could do was note the occurrence. 

Now, we'll focus in on Andrew himself, finding him in each decade's records in hopes of gaining a brief sketch of his life story, at least the part indicating any possibility that my Alexander might have been related to him.

Unlike our exploration of Kinchen Boothe, one of the other Boothe residents in Nansemond County, I was not able to locate Andrew in the 1820 census. This likely meant that Andrew was still living in the home of his own parents, possibly still a minor. The younger the person was, the less likely it would be that he was father of my Alexander, who was reported to have been born in 1816.

Jumping ahead a decade to the 1830 census, I located Andrew Boothe's household. Showing as a thirty-something male along with a woman in her twenties, Andrew's household was completed by two possible sons under five years of age. We can guess that Andrew was married sometime after 1820 but by 1825—but unless marriage records can be found for that time period in Nansemond County, we'll never know for sure.

The 1840 census revealed a growing family for Andrew, but prompts questions about whether he had the same wife. Predictably, Andrew had aged by ten years, but indications were that his wife was more than ten years older than the wife showing in the 1830 census. Of course, that could have meant that his wife was at the top of the range for the previous age bracket given—twenty to twenty nine—and for the 1840 census, she had just passed a birthday moving her from, say, thirty nine to forty to fit into that forty to forty nine year bracket.

Or, Andrew was a widower who married a woman slightly older than his previous wife. Hard to tell from such broad age brackets, given how so many people seemed to estimate their age.

The 1850 census was our chance to get a less fuzzy snapshot of the family constellation, keeping in mind that some of the children noted by tick marks in previous enumerations might now be married and in their own households—or possibly had met a premature death. There at the head of his household was a sixty year old Andrew, said to have been born in Nansemond County. Along with him was his forty five year old wife, Priscilla, and two daughters. One, aged fifteen, was listed as Amelia, while the younger, named Elizabeth, was ten years younger. None of the sons from previous enumerations was showing in this 1850 Boothe household.

A far different story was revealed by the 1860 census, as we've already noted. Andrew was living with Nathaniel Boothe. Both men appeared to have lost their wives, though Nathaniel's son Joseph was still in the household. Not much later, on October 25 of that same year, sixty year old Andrew died of "paralysis." In the county's death register, Andrew's parents' names were given as Abram and Cherry Booth. The reporting party was listed as brother Nathaniel Booth.

Thus, that reasonable guess that the two men were brothers was confirmed by one line in the younger one's death record. Looking a bit further, an 1856 marriage record for Henry Skinner and Andrew Boothe's elder daughter—under the name Permelia—confirmed her mother's name was Priscilla. Fast forwarding even further, a 1913 death record for Mrs. Mary E. Brinkley—likely the five year old Elizabeth in Andrew Boothe's 1850 census readout—gave us the maiden name for Andrew's wife: Spivey.

Seeing that Andrew's death record gave his specific relationship to Nathaniel—as brothers—can we now assume the other Boothe men in Nansemond County were also part of the same family? It seems tempting, except for one snag: I've run into an old genealogy book which indicates otherwise. Let's take a look at that report tomorrow.

Could Kinchen be Kin?

 

If my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe was born in Nansemond County, Virginia, then it would stand to reason that any of the other six Boothe men listed along with him in that county's 1840 census could possibly be kin—better yet, this brick wall ancestor's own father. We've already searched for records on three of those Boothe men—Nathaniel, Robert, and Henry—without finding convincing documentation, though the door is still open for possibilities with either Nathaniel or Robert.

Next, we'll consider another of the older men, in hopes that his records might indicate the possibility of a son the age of my Alexander who, according to his widow's Civil War pension application, was said to have been born in 1816. This man, Kinchen, made his appearance in the same 1840 census where I had found Alexander: in his native Nansemond County. There, Kinchen was listed as a man in his fifties, along with an unnamed wife said to be in her forties.

It was the listing of Kinchen's children which caught my eye. Kinchen reported one boy between the ages of ten and fourteen, another two in their upper teen years, and one man in his twenties. At the time of the 1840 census, my Alexander would have been twenty four years of age—if we can believe his wife's report about his date of birth—but by then, he was already married and showing in his own household. Could he have been reported in two entries?

Rewinding those census reports another ten years, though, would show a household which could have included a much younger and single Alexander. Could Kinchen's 1830 enumeration reveal a spot for Alexander? In that census, Kinchen actually reported five possible sons: one under five years of age, three between the ages of five and nine, and one between ten and fourteen years of age. At that point, Alexander would have been fourteen, putting him in the eldest age bracket for Kinchen's possible sons. Indeed, if we peek back another ten years to the 1820 census—where Kinchen was mislabeled as "Rinchin"—the only child in that household at the time was listed as a boy under the age of ten.

The catch in all this hopeful thinking is the difficulty in pinning ages within the brackets used in those pre-1850 census records. As it turns out, fast forwarding through time to the actual 1850 census, we discover the names of the two remaining sons in Kinchen's household. The younger was named Henry, who by then reported his age as twenty three, making his year of birth approximately 1827. The older remaining son was named Abram. And that is the sticking point: Abram's age was given as thirty, putting his year of birth at approximately 1820.

With a birth date in 1820, Abram could well have been that first son showing in the 1820 census as a child under ten. Thus, he would have been the one male in 1830 in the age bracket ten through fourteen—in other words, the only son in that category, the same grouping where we would expect Alexander to appear, if he were son of Kinchen.

That is a sticking point—if we could assume that year of birth were accurate. However, pushing ahead just one more decade to the 1860 census, Abram, now listed as head of the household which included his parents, gave his age as thirty nine, thus yielding a birth year of 1821, pushing him down to the second age bracket in the 1830 census.

Could Abram have been Kinchen's second-born son, and Alexander the eldest in this household? It's a moot point, seeing Alexander would have married and moved out of the household by 1840. I'm not too convinced, but it's hard to tell without further documentation. It's a vague possibility we need to keep in mind.

Finding a Missing Son

 

Questions about family composition become complicated, once our genealogical research pulls us behind the curtain of the 1850 census. Before that date, everyone but the head of each household becomes a nameless tick mark on a page in the enumeration. 

As we go through the possible Boothe men residing in Nansemond County, Virginia, during the 1840 census, we've been exploring each household's composition to see where a young man in his twenties might once have fit in before his marriage. The young man in question this month is my second great-grandfather, Alexander Boothe, who was born in Nansemond County about 1816, and lived there through the early 1840s, according to the one census record in which his name appeared.

So far, we've explored the possibility that Alexander might have been part of Nathaniel Boothe's household—but with no solid leads, thanks mostly to Nathaniel's intestate situation at the time of his death, plus a courthouse fire just as his son Joseph was appointed administrator of his estate. We've also begun working our way through the list of the other Boothe men resident in that county, according to the 1840 census, beginning with Robert Boothe.

Up through the 1830 census, it became apparent that Robert Boothe had two sons in his household. One son, as we discovered by pushing forward in time to that precedent-breaking 1850 census, was named Daniel, who was born about 1816, same as my Alexander Boothe, but who, unlike Alex, remained in Nansemond until his death in 1882.

However, Robert also had another son, according to that 1830 census—someone who would have been in his thirties by the time of the 1840 census. Could we assume, by the juxtaposition of Henry Boothe's name after Robert's own entry in the 1840 census, that Henry could have been that son? Or could it have been Alexander, with a vaguely incorrect year of birth? We'll need to take a look.

Just as I did yesterday in following Robert's own appearances in each decennial enumeration, we'll trace Henry's own census track record. Before 1840, as suspected, I couldn't find any entry specifically naming Henry in Nansemond County's results. But in 1840, Henry's household reportedly contained one male in his thirties, one girl under the age of five, and two young women between the ages of fifteen and nineteen.

That didn't paint too clear a picture of the family constellation. Even assuming the youngest girl were only one year of age, if either of the older girls were nineteen at the time—the upper limit of that age bracket—that would have meant a wife marrying at age eighteen. Granted, that was more than possible, but we don't want to assume anything here without checking for other confirmations.

That census, conveniently, was only ten years away from the record which named every member of the household. The 1850 census captured the details that the head of the household, Henry, was born in Nansemond County about 1809. Although this census did not specify relationships, the next entry was for a twenty eight year old woman named Mary J. Boothe—but she was followed by another household member also named Mary. This second Mary—Mary A.—was about fourteen years of age.

Looking to the next census in 1860 in hopes of finding clarification, we can see Henry and the elder Mary in a household which includes another Mary—but this time, the younger Mary's surname is Morgan, not Boothe. Along with this Mary was her supposed husband, Augustus Morgan, and a son, whom they named, predictably, Henry.

With this clue, I looked for any marriage confirmations, and fortunately found one helpful record. On May 24, 1858, this younger Mary from Henry's household married Augustus Morgan, son of a woman named Patsey Morgan. The record also confirmed that Mary's father was indeed Henry, although her mother was not the elder Mary in the 1850 household, but a woman named Amelia, thus calming my suspicions about the two Marys being too close in age to have been mother and daughter.

That resolved the question about the identity of the other son in Robert Boothe's earliest census records in 1820 and 1830, but what about Alexander Boothe? It seems clear that he couldn't have fit in that family grouping unless he had left the home as a young child before the 1820 census—an unlikely story.

With that question about Robert's other son resolved, it's time to move on to the rest of the Boothe men included in that 1840 enumeration. Our next focus: another Boothe man then in his fifties, Kinchen Boothe. 

About Robert — and His Sons

 

Running down the decennial census results in pre-1850 Nansemond County, Virginia, to assemble a list of Boothe households is my desperate attempt to figure out just who might be the father of Alexander Boothe. Alexander—or Alex, as he often was called after he moved to Tennessee—was my second great-grandfather, and the brick-wall end of the line for that part of my family tree.

If answers don't come easy, maybe the hard work will produce what I'm looking for. I've assembled the names of each of the Boothe heads of household listed in the 1840 census. The next step has been to see how far back I can go for each one of them, first with census records, then with tax and land records (and hopefully a will thrown in for good measure, though Nansemond County hasn't been helpful in the courthouse fire department).

In Robert Boothe's case, going through each decade's census has been informative. Granted, there are a lot of blanks to fill in and not much information to glean from the tick marks on those early census returns, but a possible story does emerge. Here's a brief tour of the findings.

Let's start with 1820, the earliest enumeration in which I could find Robert named. In that Boothe household, there was one man, aged between twenty six and forty four—I would presume that was Robert himself— plus two boys. One (presumed) son was aged between ten and fifteen, and a younger boy was under ten years of age. Rounding out the household was one girl under ten, and another young woman between sixteen and twenty five. The puzzling part was the addition of not one but two women over twenty five years of age, but below forty four—a wife and a sister, perhaps, but hard to tell without further guidance.

Moving ahead ten years, the household showed some predictable changes. The two boys had advanced by ten years for the 1830 census, with the younger one in his later teen years, the elder now a man in his twenties. There are some changes among the women from the last census: the youngest girl is now in her later teens, but in addition, there was only one other woman in her fifties. I suspect the other two girls were by now married, unless having lost their lives to the many diseases and dangers of the time. Robert himself was in the fifty to fifty nine age bracket, and extrapolating from his age bracket given in 1820, that would mean he was about fifty four or younger, possibly with a birth year on or before 1780.

By the 1840 census, this Boothe household had shrunken to three people: the younger son, now in his twenties, plus his parents, Robert and his wife.

The 1850 census provided the big reveal, at least for Robert's remaining son. Judging from Robert's given age, he was born in 1779. However, I am presuming his wife had, by this time, died, as the only woman remaining in the household, though of a right age, was named Honor Brasely. From this census, we also learn that Robert's son was named Daniel, born about 1814, making him the younger of the two male children from Robert's earlier census reports. And sure enough, finding Daniel's October 26, 1856, marriage record, we learn that his mother's given name was Christian, not Honor.

Seeing the big picture on the Robert Boothe family, I'm left wondering: who was Robert's older son, and what became of him? Perhaps that's where the next entry in the 1840 census comes in: the household of Henry Boothe.

Until the Cookie Crumbles

 

As Dennis the Menace once said, "If I can't have a horse, can I have a cookie?" If I can't find the will for Nathaniel Boothe, my second great-grandfather's possible father, can I at least uncover his family circle?

We've already run into the disappointing news that not only did Nathaniel Boothe not have a will—his son Joseph was appointed administrator of his estate—but that a courthouse fire had destroyed what records might have been in existence concerning any deeds in which he might have been named.

So what's next? I've already found a listing of five other Boothe men living in Nansemond County, Virginia, in the 1840 census. That was the last year in which my great-grandfather Alexander was listed as a resident of Virginia before moving to Tennessee. It's just a matter of going down the list to look for wills that bequeathed property to sons.

A likely next possibility might be another Boothe household in Nansemond County which seems to have the same composition as Alexander's own family in 1840: young man, young woman, and child. But when I pull up the enumeration for the first name on my Boothe list—for Robert, another household with three individuals—I immediately notice another tempting juxtaposition. Like Nathaniel and Alexander had been listed next to each other in a 1830s tax record, Robert's listing was immediately followed by the census entry for Henry Boothe.

Could this be another father and son possibility? In researching these two, even if I can't win the "horse" of my quest to discover Alexander's father, could I at least get the "cookie" of seeing a family constellation take shape?

However, rather than finding indications that Robert might be son of Henry, the details reveal a possible second narrative: that Robert and his wife might not only be the sixty-something parents of an unnamed son in his twenties shown in the census, but that he could also have been father to another son, as well. Alexander?

The next line down in the 1840 census shows Henry Boothe's household. The numbers in that enumeration show possibility of a different story than I had assumed, as well. Henry, in his thirties, has only young females in his household: two girls in their later teenage years, and a child under the age of five. Perhaps, as we had previously noted with Nathaniel's entry next to a possible brother, Andrew Boothe, Robert might be the younger brother of Henry, rather than his son, as I at first had surmised. 

Sometimes, we hope for a horse...and get a cookie. Sometimes, even the cookie crumbles. But we won't know until we take a closer look.

Considering Some Alternatives

 

When we're staring down brick wall ancestors, in negotiating the impasse, sometimes it helps to consider possible alternatives. That's what I'm ready to explore this week, since I can't find any records revealing much more about my second great-grandfather Alexander Boothe's early years in Virginia.

Last week, when we explored tax records for Nansemond County, the Virginia location where Alexander supposedly originated, there was one entry that had caught my eye. The tax list for 1836 contained a litany of names of men in the county who were considered "persons chargeable" with tax, being white males above sixteen years of age. Among the names listed was an entry for someone named Nathaniel Boothe.

Directly below Nathaniel's entry in this tax roll was a note: "Do for Boothe, Alexander." Was that "Do" an abbreviation for "ditto"? No other entry on the page had such an introductory statement—just each man's name in the format of surname followed by given name.

Could this have implied that Alexander was a young man coming of age in Nathaniel's household? Since I hadn't been able to locate Alexander in census records before 1840—when he would have been about twenty four years of age—I thought Nathaniel might be a reasonable starting point for my experiment with all the Boothe men resident in Nansemond County to determine Alexander's likely father.

I've already identified six Boothe men resident in Nansemond County: besides Nathaniel, there were Robert, Henry, Andrew, Edmond, and Kinchea. For no other reason than the hunch flowing from that unusual entry in the tax ledger, I decided to pursue Nathaniel's records first, in hopes of finding a possible place for a younger Alexander at home with Nathaniel.

With that, I did a survey of all the census years I could access online for Nathaniel, beginning with the 1830 census and moving through to the 1860 census, the last one in which I could find his name. Whether Nathaniel was kin to Alexander, I can't yet tell, but this exercise helped draw a picture about the man's own life.

Here's what the numbers looked like. In 1830, Nathaniel's household contained only two free persons: one male between the ages of ten and fourteen, and another male between thirty and thirty nine. My guess: Nathaniel has lost his wife, the mother of the boy in the household.

By 1840, that scenario was rectified. Nathaniel's household now shows him ten years older, a tick mark in the category of male, ages forty through forty nine. Along with him is a woman in that same age bracket, indicating that Nathaniel has remarried. But there are surprises. There is, for instance, another woman about twenty years older than that, in the sixty to sixty-nine age bracket—the woman's widowed mother? And now there is a boy between the ages of five and nine.

Gone by then was any possibility of our Alexander being part of this household, for we've already located him in his one cameo appearance in Nansemond County before his migration to Tennessee. By 1840, Alexander was listed as a male between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine in his own household, along with a woman of that same age range, and a boy under the age of five, a clear indication that whatever household he might previously been a part of, this was the demarcation line.

But what about moving forward? After all, by the time of the 1850 census, we move into the arena of names listed for each member of the household. I had to take a peek at what Nathaniel's household looked like following that change in documentation. 

It will come as no surprise to see that Nathaniel was then listed as sixty years of age, having been born in Virginia. His wife now had a name—Mary—and was said to be fifty five years of age. The elder woman was, by 1850, no longer in their household, but the boy who had been under nine years of age in the last census now showed up as eighteen year old Joseph, having been born about 1832. Nathaniel's household was listed next to another Boothe household—that of a man named Andrew Boothe.

Moving one more decade, Nathaniel was still in Nansemond County for the 1860 census. This time, his age was listed as sixty nine, and he was still listed as born in Virginia. Mary, however, was no longer in the household, presumably having died before reaching the age of sixty five in that census year. Joseph was still in the household, though, as well as that former neighboring Boothe man by the name of Andrew—someone I had also spotted earlier in old tax records. Perhaps this is the beginning of seeing the family constellation take shape.

Could Alexander have fit into this family scenario? Possibly, if his wife Rachel's report of his year of birth as 1816 was correct—which it likely was, given the fact that he appeared in the 1836 tax record when he would have been twenty. If, however, Alexander was that fourteen year old boy in the 1830 census in Nathaniel's home, he would have been a child who had lost his mother at an early age, not the son of Mary.

Eventually, I'll repeat this exercise for the other Boothe men found in Nansemond County. As we've already seen with the appearance of Andrew in Nathaniel's household, this exercise may help provide more detail about the extended Boothe family in Nansemond County.

First, though, I'm tempted to start using the Full Text search at FamilySearch Labs to see if I can find any further information on Nathaniel Boothe, himself. A will, for instance, would make my day.

Re-Start With What you Know

 

If one of the guiding principles of genealogy is to start with what you know, then when we find ourselves stuck, perhaps the corollary should be to re-start with what we know. This month, in puzzling over my brick wall second great-grandfather, that is exactly how I need to get started.

I'll give you an example right off the bat. I had always thought this man's name was William Alexander Boothe. Why? Because years ago, when I first started working on my maternal grandfather's roots, I had found information on a man named Alexander Boothe. Not much, mind you, but at least the bare essentials.

Back then, there was no access to FamilySearch.org, let alone all the powerhouse research resources we have now—but there was an active community of researchers reaching out to each other via email, "listservs" and, eventually, online forums. From such resources, I discovered there was a man who not only was actively pursuing this same second great-grandfather, but online, he was prolific in his sharing of what he had found about the man. I connected with him by email, then eventually by telephone, and learned quite a bit about what he had discovered about our mutual ancestor.

There was, however, one problem: this researcher insisted the ancestor's name was not simply Alexander Boothe, but William Alexander Boothe. His influence was apparently quite widespread. Now, I can find many trees mentioning that given name in combination with the Alexander I saw—without supporting documentation.

Now that I look back over every document I've found to support what I know about this second great-grandfather, I'm realizing one glaring omission. You guessed it: no mention of the given name William in any of those records. Could chasing William have been the rabbit trail which caused that left turn I missed in Albuquerque? 

Take, for example, this run of census records. In 1880, shown with his wife Rachel and eight of their children (including my great-grandmother Cassie), the head of the Boothe household was listed by the name Alexander. Same goes for the 1870 census. You might get a sense of something happening here by the time we check the 1860 census, and feel more of a certainty about the man's name when we press back, even before his marriage to Rachel Riley in 1854, to the 1850 census, where Alexander was enumerated along with his two eldest sons, Quinton and David, still in Washington County, Tennessee.

In each of those enumerations, Alexander was listed—consistently—as having been born in Virginia, not Tennessee. Checking—just in case I could find something—there was someone named Alexander Boothe in the 1840 census in the now-nonexistent Nansemond County, Virginia, being of the approximate age indicated in subsequent enumerations, along with a wife and child under five years of age. Our Alexander? Hard to tell, but the ages and scenario seem to fit.

What's missing in each of those records was any sign of a given name William. Perhaps, as we start off this month looking for my brick wall second great-grandfather, we should agree to stick with a search for Alexander, and set aside any notion of a man named William Boothe. After all, with a surname as common as that, following the wrong given name might lead us far from the person we're seeking.

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.

Reading Between the Lines

 

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.

The Blind Fiddler

 

There is one less-obvious column in the United States enumerations for the mid to late 1800s for which I've been grateful as I pore over records concerning the family of my possible third great-grandfather, William Laws. That column, often left blank, was the place for entries concerning serious health issues. The one detail that helped me tie William Laws' records together over each decade's move from county to county was the fact that his youngest son, Wiley, was blind.

I noticed that detail in the 1850 census, when the family lived in Yancey County, North Carolina. That same fact showed up for seventeen year old Wiley in the record ten years later, when the family surfaced in Carter County, Tennessee. But when a seemingly derogatory comment about "Wiley Laws, the blind fiddler" appeared in a Chattanooga newspaper from 1874, you know I had to take a closer look.

Yes, the Laws family seemed to have a less than favorable standing in the communities they had recently left. It seemed they kept one step ahead of impending trouble. Or perhaps it was trouble which attracted them—I have yet to figure out this family's dynamics. But one thing was certain: there was a lot going on in Greene County where they had settled. This Chattanooga newspaper was providing a glimpse of the latest disturbance.

The article itself was a retort to an article in the Greeneville American on April 1, 1874, regarding a local Temperance crusade. That article, in turn, quoted yet another newspaper's opinion that "the whisky war at Greeneville is degenerating into an interchange of personalities."

After the column's two long paragraphs which essentially comprised accusations volleyed between three newspapers regarding opinions on the women crusading on behalf of the Temperance Movement, out of the blue was this comment about Wiley Laws. As the newspaper set the scene—"one of indescribable character and almost beyond endurance"—here entered the mention which caught my eye.

Wiley Laws, the blind fiddler, kept by Gass & Campbell to annoy the ladies still continues to fiddle and blaspheme, but without affecting the determination of the crusaders.

Say what?! I had to take a closer look. Was that my Wiley Laws, the blind seven year old son of William from the 1850 census?

Since it was an archived historic newspaper resource which brought me that choice discovery—and left me with unanswered questions—this would be the perfect opportunity to put the company through its search paces.

Thankfully, Newspapers.com served up three other mentions about a blind fiddler named Wiley Laws. From the Jonesborough, Tennessee, Herald and Tribune on October 25, 1883, regarding a "Pic Nic and Dramatic Entertainment," the writer noted that "Wiley Laws and Mr. Henly were in attendance with their violins and discoursed some good music, as you all know Wiley makes no other kind."

A few years later, on February 2, 1888, the Johnson City Comet announced the entertainment for a fund raiser to benefit the poor of the city. Among those featured entertainers was Wiley Laws.

One final article I found, from February 14, 1884, must have been referencing the very episode at the Greeneville Temperance crusade which started me on my search. Back to where this all occurred, according to The Greeneville Herald, 

Wiley Laws, the blind fiddler, was in town making music on the streets on last Tuesday. It reminded us very much of the crusade of ten years ago.

Just as for his father William, Wiley's last days remain a blank slate for me. I have yet to find any mention of him after the 1888 newspaper entry. I am still looking for any record of his death or any burial information. I can't yet be certain this even is Wiley, the son of William Laws. It is almost as if each member of this family just faded off into the twilight toward the end of their lives.

We can't, however, just leave this unfinished research question where it currently lies. It's time to go back, review the documentation that has been found, and start reading between the lines. Perhaps somewhere buried within the details we already know, we may unearth additional clues.

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.

Not in 1850

 

The all-consuming question for me this week: was Michael Creahan in New Orleans by the time of the 1850 census? To expand on that in a way that might help pinpoint the right Michael Creahan, just in case there were name twins: was Michael Creahan, son of Bridget Doyle Creahan and brother of Patrick Creahan, in New Orleans in time for that 1850 census? The answer—at least as far as I can see—not in 1850.

Granted, these missing members of a collateral line in my father-in-law's Kelly-Stevens family had some research challenges embedded in their very names. We may think of the name Bridget, for instance, as rather unusual here in America, but among Irish immigrants to this continent, the name was part of their heritage and a very popular name for women in older times, only recently dropping in popularity. In fact, Ireland's Central Statistics Office offers an app which examines the popularity of given names in their country by year, with the earliest year shown being 1964, when the name Bridget was ranked eighth of all baby names recorded in Ireland for that year. All that to say looking for an Irish immigrant Bridget in a city the size of New Orleans in 1850 might be a challenge.

Then, too, Michael Creahan's surname wasn't necessarily the easiest of names to record. Depending on the accent of the speaker and the accent the ears of the recorder were tuned to, that surname might go down on paper somewhat closer to Crane than Creahan. Even in the documents which I know belonged to Michael's own family, there was a wide variety of spellings.

Despite that, it was possible to go page by page through the census records for New Orleans, or at least do a bare-bones search for all surnames sounding like Crane, using not only Ancestry.com but FamilySearch.org, in case one company's indexing process missed what the record-keeper's handwriting might have been trying to tell us.

Still, no luck. Not for Bridget. Not for her other son Patrick. And certainly not for Michael.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, to look for those three family members in the 1850 census in New Orleans. After all, that was the lead gleaned from Michael's own obituary, which placed him as having arrived in port around 1847. It could be very likely that Michael worked to save money to send to Ireland so that his family could come join him after his arrival and establishment in New Orleans. Perhaps he only achieved that goal after moving north to Lafayette, Indiana, where we found him in the 1860 census. But judging from descriptions of the tenement surroundings of the places where Irish immigrant laborers settled in New Orleans, I wonder how likely it might have been that Michael was missed entirely in the enumeration process.

There are, of course, other ways to trace these three Creahans in New Orleans. We'll take some time tomorrow to see whether our results are more promising in the passenger records for that same time period.

When Stumped by Ancestors, Keep Searching

 

On a mission to find a family member—any family member—who could provide clues as to where the immigrant Kelly family once lived in Ireland, we've run across a puzzle: who was A. M. Crahan? We've found the children of widow Mary Kelly and her deceased husband James handily all reported in the same household for the 1860 census: sons Matthew and Thomas, plus daughters Rose and Ann. We already know the three grandchildren Mary was caring for were the children of her deceased daughter Catharine Kelly Stevens, and we were even able to spot the youngest of those grandchildren in the Kelly household for the 1880 census, long after Mary's own passing in Tippecanoe County, Indiana. But when we look more closely at the Kelly family entry in that 1880 census, we're stumped by the appearance of another relative: a thirteen year old niece named A. M. Crahan. Who was she? More importantly, who was her mother?

The plain response to such unexpected discoveries is: when stumped by ancestors, we simply need to keep searching. Hopefully, there is an answer out there. Somewhere. But it sometimes takes quite a bit of  looking before we run into the finding.

I tackled this messy question several years ago. I won't repeat all the steps in the discovery process here, as my point now is to gather all I can find on the Kelly siblings of Catharine. It is they who, if anyone would, might point the way back to their home in Ireland, wherever it was. Yet of the four siblings found in the 1860 census, we've since discovered that Matthew and Rose died unmarried. The appearance of this Crahan niece tells us that there was another Kelly sibling not listed in that 1860 household. Who was she?

A woman married before the 1860 enumeration, whoever she was, she was gone before the time of the 1870 census. Through a long series of steps, I discovered the woman's husband was named Michael Creahan, and the daughter's initials—"A. M.," as she was listed in the Kelly household for the 1880 census—stood for Anna M. Creahan. Her missing mother, who died in 1869, was the former Bridget Kelly.

So there was another Kelly sibling, showing me that it sometimes takes a lot of effort to track down all the collateral lines in a research problem. Perhaps there will be even more siblings to discover in this Kelly family. But for now, as I review this discovery, I realize that Bridget's husband Michael Creahan, himself,  might have some clues to help us in our search for more details on where the Kelly family once lived in Ireland.

When There are Too Few Matches

 

It is sometimes surprising to me to see how different the count is for DNA matches from different ancestral lines. The other day I mentioned working on my mother-in-law's Snider/Snyder line, where her ThruLines results (through her testing proxy, my husband) boast well over two hundred cousins—and then I scrolled down the list to see how many DNA matches there were for my father-in-law's second great-grandfather, James Kelly.

The result? A puny eight matches. Where were all the Kelly matches? Did no one among those descendants decide to test their DNA?

As I pore over the documentation for this Kelly family, I keep thinking there were far too few matches for the number of siblings Catharine Kelly Stevens had. Of course, I have to be doubly careful when analyzing these Kelly DNA matches, not only because the surname is such a common Irish name, but because my father-in-law actually descended from two entirely separate Kelly lines. But bearing that in mind, I still would have presumed James and Mary Kelly would have had far more descendants than they had.

Here's the overview, mostly drawn from the same 1860 census where we found the widow Mary in the household of her (presumably) oldest son, Matthew—along with her motherless grandchildren James, John Kelly, and William Stevens, found on the subsequent page. Matthew, then age thirty eight, was named in that census along with Rose, age thirty three, then Thomas, age twenty three, and finally Ann, age twenty one.

At first glance, it might be easy to assume, based on ages given, that Rose was Matthew's wife, and Ann was Thomas' wife. One could guess that Matthew and Thomas could have been brothers—but it is hard to tell what the family constellation might have been, given that there was only the most minimal of marriage information recorded for that census (whether anyone was married within the year).

With a record like the 1860 census, it takes comparing notes with other documents to construct the family's story more accurately. That there was some sort of relationship with the three Stevens boys was evident by their placement in that household, to be sure, but we'd need to look elsewhere to learn more about who, exactly, might belong in the now-deceased Catharine Kelly Stevens' collateral lines.

Fortunately, though I can't find Matthew Kelly in the 1870 census yet, he was still in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, for the 1880 census. And the 1880 census marked the starting point for recording family relationships, providing us the information that Rose was certainly not his wife; she was Matthew's sister. 

Furthermore, as we noted the other day, the youngest Stevens son, William, was also in the Kelly household in 1880, this time solidly identified as Matthew's nephew. At the time of Matthew's death a few years later, the local newspaper's report of his passing also noted his relationship to William, as we can see from the work of a Find A Grave volunteer, who posted the clipping on Matthew's memorial online. That same simple newspaper entry also confirmed that Matthew, up to the time of his death, was a bachelor.

If, like Rose in the 1860 enumeration, Ann was also an unmarried Kelly sibling, we begin to see why the number of possible descendants who could be candidates for DNA testing might be limited. And yet, that 1880 census provides us with another tantalizing clue: an additional member of the Kelly household, A. M. Crahan, identified as a niece. If she was Matthew's niece, yet not a Stevens descendant, which Kelly sibling claimed this child?

Though it gave us a start at piecing together the Kelly family constellation, that 1860 census apparently didn't reveal all the collateral lines of our Catharine Kelly Stevens. You know what that means: it's time to search for further Kelly connections.