Drawing Blanks

 

Following the path of a genealogical trailblazer can be helpful—until that guide ends up drawing blanks. In the case of the youngest child in Lyman and Deidama Dunham Jackson's family, that is indeed what happened when we look to their youngest child. 

Using the 1906 book, The Family History of Michael Jackson, we have so far traced most of the thirteen Jackson children. In many cases, the guidance of researcher Horace Mortimer Jackson has pointed us in the right direction. Perhaps in this final case, as so often happens, the baby of the family got shorted. 

Here's what the book tells us about the thirteenth Jackson child. First of all, her name was Lucy Deidama, garnering her mother's given name as her middle name. The author gives her date of birth as February 6, 1808, and indicates that she eventually married someone named Elisha Alderman.

That is the point in the brief narrative where we start drawing blanks. Of her death, the author provides merely a line "——" for the date. No place is given, not for her death, nor for her birth.

There were, however, several children listed. Of the eight named, however, even there we find a blank: the fifth child, a daughter named Calista, was said to have married "——" Clapp. With a given name like Calista, I thought it might not be that hard to determine the first name of Mr. Clapp—until I realized that husband's last name might not even be correct.

If it hadn't been for that old familiar destination for so many of the Jackson children who decided to leave home in Pennsylvania and move westward, I might not have found any further details to round out that scant history in the Jackson genealogy. But it wasn't long before I realized Lucy's family had left Pennsylvania's Erie County for Knox County in Illinois. Elisha Alderman had decided to follow so many of his Jackson in-laws.

While the 1850 census showed only six of the possible eight Alderman children in Knox County, that was enough of a jumping off place for me to trace the family's lines of descent. I started with the name I thought would be easiest to follow: their son who was listed in the Jackson book with the unusual name of Gilderoy. From that point, I've made it down to the current century with some of that son's descendants.

Granted, that makes one line of at least eight in this uncertain readout of the children of Lyman Jackson's youngest daughter. There is much more to still untangle, especially given the blanks left in that trailblazer's guidebook. But no matter how many blanks the author inserted in his narrative, there are still enough clues to enable a twenty-first century researcher with digitized records access to piece together the full story.

Thankful for the Trailblazers

 

Researching the men among our distant ancestors may be difficult enough, once we move from "modern" times to previous centuries, but turning to the women from those past generations presents even more of a challenge. Perhaps on account of this, I'm thankful for the trailblazers of earlier generations who thought to write down what they discovered about their family history, both of men and women.

As we move from the youngest of the ten sons of Lyman Jackson and Deidama Dunham to the next child, we step from that world of somewhat documented men to the invisible world of women. In this case, thankfully, we can rely on old family letters and records preserved in one book focused on the descendants of Lyman's father—The Family History of Michael Jackson—to serve as trailblazer for the three remaining Jackson children, daughters all. And more to the point, with the many digitized records available to us online now, we can confirm or reject many of the assertions made in such century-old genealogy tomes.

Following the birth of Norman Landon Jackson, the youngest of Lyman's sons, the next child was the last child to have been born to the couple in New York before the family moved to Erie County, Pennsylvania. This daughter, born on January 17, 1805, the Jacksons named Susannah Samantha.

By 1828, Susannah was a married woman, the wife of Henry Kennedy. Seeing that married surname sparks a question. As the Jackson sons had already demonstrated themselves to marry sisters—the Hendryx sisters for Jackson brothers Michael, David, and Abner—seeing the name Kennedy causes me to wonder whether Susanna's husband was related to the two Kennedy women who married Lyman junior and Royal Jackson. That is a research question I've yet to answer.

By the time we've arrived at researching the life story of the Jacksons' twelfth child, it comes as no surprise that Susannah and her husband Henry showed up in the 1850 census in Knox County, Illinois, destination for several of her Jackson relatives. We've seen that pattern before. And the census narrows the date range for when the Kennedys left their home in Pennsylvania, for their four year old son Byron was born there before the family made the trek westward to Illinois in time for the 1850 census.

Things did not go well for the Kennedy family in Illinois, for not long after their arrival, Susannah was widowed and remarried in Knox County on February 18, 1856. By the time of the 1860 census, Susannah and her son Byron were living in the household of her second husband John Robson, along with two of John's sons from a previous marriage.

Though in Susannah's case, the outline of her children's history in the Jackson genealogy book is sparse, it appears that following the trail provided by the book's author does at least help trace the family yet another generation—though the details need to be brought into clearer focus. This, as with all uses of published genealogy books, is a task for me to complete behind the scenes, but it has already been informative to peek ahead and compare notes with digitized records. Books can certainly point the way, especially when we are working with families whose recorded generations stretch back centuries, but those reports are best coupled with the documentation we can easily access online in our own times.

The Last Son

 

The last in a long line of sons of Lyman Jackson and Deidama Dunham was Norman Landon Jackson. The tenth son and eleventh child born to the Jacksons, Norman likely made his 1801 appearance in upstate New York before the Jacksons' final move to Erie County, Pennsylvania.

While his parents and a few brothers chose to remain in Pennsylvania, Norman was among the Jackson siblings who decided to move west. For a while, he could be found in Knox County, Illinois, along with his brothers Obediah and David Bardsley Jackson. However, he eventually settled farther west, in Minnesota territory. There, in the 1857 territorial census, Norman Jackson and his wife, along with his son Eli's household, were listed in a place once known as Jackson Lake in Blue Earth County. 

Left behind in Illinois were his two daughters. Back in Knox County, Lois married Andrew Tapp in 1847, and shortly afterwards settled in Black Hawk County, Iowa, before the 1856 state census.  Her sister Louisa followed suit, marrying John Ferris and settled in Black Hawk County, Iowa, before the 1860 census.

As for Norman Landon Jackson, he died in the place where he had settled in the 1850s. His memorial in Blue Earth County, Minnesota, bears the dates 1801 and 1869, spanning a life which took him from upstate New York, to Erie County, Pennsylvania, then westward through Indiana to Illinois, and eventually onward to what was once known as Minnesota Territory.   

Another Grandson Named Lyman

Much as I had suspected, Lyman Jackson would have more than one grandson named after him. While I'm building out the family tree for my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather, I've been noticing how many of his grandsons seemed to have shared this man's story. I've also spotted a few of those descendants sporting this grandfather's given name, so as I moved on through Lyman's ten sons to Obadiah Jackson, I wasn't surprised to find another namesake grandson.

Obadiah, the sixth son and seventh child of Lyman Jackson, was born in 1794, likely after the family had moved to upstate New York. Judging from the census return for 1830, Obadiah had moved once again with his father and older siblings to Erie County, Pennsylvania. But by 1850, he was far from that latest Jackson home in Pennsylvania.

The 1850 census revealed Obadiah's new residence in Knox County, Illinois, where he claimed the value of his real estate to be six hundred dollars. There with him were his wife, Mary, and several children. All but the oldest—Lyman—were born in Illinois.

In 1850, Lyman was listed as a nineteen year old harness maker in his father's household. Though I haven't yet located him in the 1860 census, before the following enumeration, Lyman was married and raising a family of his own.

Looking back to Lyman's father, I searched for a copy of Obadiah's will, to see a listing of all his children, but to no avail. While I did find a will, it was brief—far too short to confirm the names of any of his children. The document basically gave everything of Obadiah's property to his wife, Mary Ann, also appointing her as his executor. If there were any other legal instruments used to transfer property to his children, I'll need to revisit FamilySearch.org's Full Text Search to find any deeds mentioning Obadiah's name.

Lyman, in turn, remained for the rest of his life in Knox County, Illinois, marrying and raising a family of his own. As with all the other grandchildren of the senior Lyman Jackson, I'll revisit the children of Obadiah and continue documenting their lines of descent for guidance as I work through the DNA matches who turn out to be descendants of the Jackson lines. With many of the elder Lyman Jackson's ten sons and three daughters marrying and having large families of their own, there will be plenty to keep me busy for the remainder of this month.

Junkman Froggett

A timeline, based on newspaper snippets, of how one great-grandson of William and Cassie Riley—my own third great-grandparents—came to be known as "Junkman Froggett" of Decatur, Illinois:

March 3, 1930, down on his luck and taking a nighttime walk along the railroad tracks, Henry Froggett is not only held up at knife point for his money—which amounted to only $2 in change in his pocket—but the pants in which pockets the money was found.

January 3, 1935, charged with the theft of a garbage can, Henry is held at the city jail, where he explains he thought it had a hole and "was just a piece of junk." While police felt this was a lead that might link Froggett to other recent garbage can thefts, Henry hoped he could be released from jail before that Friday, when he was supposed to report for work at a new work-relief program.

January 4, 1935, "Junkman Froggett" is released from jail, as no formal complaint was filed against him when the owner of the missing garbage can came to retrieve his property.

May 4, 1937, two Decatur men—yes, including our Henry—are held in the county jail, charged with petit larceny for stealing fifteen chickens from a local woman's home.

November 26, 1940, two men—and Henry remains the only constant in this duo—plead guilty in county court for petit larceny of an inlet grating from the city, and are sentenced to six months at the state farm. Apparently, the strategy of switching from chickens back to scrap metal didn't work for Henry.

July 14, 1943, struck by a freight train at a railroad crossing at 10:00 p.m. the previous night, Henry Froggett was found the following noon by a passerby, and is now recuperating at the local hospital from injuries to his back and arm.

October 14, 1943, while walking uptown from his step-daughter's home at 8:30 p.m., Henry Froggett is struck by a passing automobile, an apparent hit-and-run incident. His body slumps in the darkness, and he sustains injuries to his shoulder and head. A local hospital confirms that he also received internal injuries.

October 16, 1943, Decatur police learn that the driver of a Model A Ford had swerved at the scene of the hit and run incident, realizing in the darkness that there was a body in the road. The driver had gotten out of his car and directed traffic around the slumped body so as to avoid any further injury before an ambulance could arrive.

October 16, 1943, funeral services are held at the Moran & Sons Chapel at 10:30 a.m. for Henry Froggett, with burial at Greenwood Cemetery.

November 12, 1943, the coroner's jury returns the verdict that Henry Froggett, aged 61, died as a result of injuries when struck by a hit-and-run driver. The driver has not yet been found.

Whether Henry Froggett—whom Decatur residents once knew as "Junkman Froggett"—was perpetually down on his luck, or just had a maddening knack for getting things wrong, is hard to tell from this brief litany of his appearances in the local news. Perhaps his was a life doomed from the beginning. Or perhaps we need to consider his shortened and struggling lifespan in parallel with history's own timeline of bad luck episodes in the 1930s and 1940s.

Regardless of the truth of the matter, finding these vignettes of his life's struggles evokes a pathos I couldn't escape. While citizens of one 1940s city in Illinois may have rolled their eyes in impatience at yet another of Henry Froggett's antics, I imagine it might have been hard to be the one living the life of Decatur's Junkman.  

 

 

Accused of Mooching

I'm not certain you can call "mooching" a legal term, but it was a term which could land a person in jail—at least in 1940s Decatur, Illinois. Discovering that the local newspaper applied that charge to a man who turned out to be my second cousin twice removed elicits two responses from me. One, of course, has to do with genealogy—you knew that; otherwise, why share it here?—and the other happens to have the potential to be a risky fascination on my part.

Delving into our roots can be risky in its own right. We start out, thinking well of our parents and assuming they came from worthy stock. We move from the generations we knew personally and step into the unknown of those who have gone before—and left us not a trace of information on their origins. Eventually, we step back from the family tree we have constructed and realize it has taken a shape vaguely reminiscent of that Norman Rockwell painting, "A Family Tree," which at its root included both a princess and a pirate.

After having discovered uplifting stories in my own family tree of people who managed to rise about their life's hardships to achieve notable accomplishments, I slammed right into a brick wall which, once chipped away, revealed a few tales I hadn't expected. That's when I realized I was staring at news reports which answered the risky questions I've always wanted to ask.

You see, in our decade of plenty—along with its paradox, the proliferation of the "homeless"—I have always had that inexplicable desire to approach one of these unfortunate people and have an "open" conversation with them. Something along the lines of asking, "How did you get to this point in your life?"

Whether the answer would be coming from a victim of post-traumatic stress following a tour of military duty, or coming from a young person plagued with mental illness (or simply under the influence of debilitating substances), it might end up being an answer delivered in a less safe manner than my unreasonable self might expect. So I have always kept a respectful distance and kept my mouth shut. But one always wonders....

Yet here, in the quiet of my own home, I've poked away at news records of a bygone era and run into a report of someone being jailed for "mooching." On December 28, 1942—right in the midst of the season proclaiming "peace on earth, good will toward men," an unidentified Decatur newspaper provided a small announcement under the headline, "Accused of Mooching."

Henry Froggett, 60, who police accused of "mooching" on the streets, was held in county jail today under a warrant charging vagrancy.

I never would have discovered this unfortunate turn of events for any man named Henry Froggett, if it weren't for the genealogical chase which led me, in search of my third great-grandparents' place of birth, to trace their grandchildren's life trajectories. From William and Cassandra Fincher Riley in North Carolina, I had wandered across the mountains to northeastern Tennessee, where they settled and saw at least two of their children marry in Washington County. From there, their son's family moved onward in Tennessee and eventually to Indiana, where their granddaughter Rachel Elizabeth Riley had married a man by the name of William Froggett.

The unfortunate Henry Froggett of the newspaper report was Rachel and William Froggett's youngest son, who had somehow stumbled his way from the family home in Putnam County, Indiana, to the city of Decatur in Illinois. And it wasn't simply that he was down on his luck that Christmas season of 1942; his, it turns out, was a story filled with instances of a hard luck life. This was just the kind of story which could obliterate my determination to stay the course and stick to my research goal. I had to take the detour.

Refocusing on the Goal

While it may be tempting to lose ourselves in the myriad questions about the Goodman family of Tennessee and Illinois—and, eventually, their descendants in Malheur County, Oregon—we need to keep our eyes focused on our goal. In the case of the photographs I found of Annie Goodman Tucker and her family, that means building a viable tree to see where she fits in the family constellation, and then, hopefully, see if there are any descendants out there who would be interested in receiving the Goodman and Tucker pictures I found in that antique shop in northern California.

Granted, the Goodman story has been somewhat confusing. It appears that Annie's mother, Sarah Baldwin Breeden Goodman, was once again widowed while living in Nashville, Tennessee. With three—or, if Dollie was indeed another child and not just a nickname for Alice or Emma, four—daughters, widow Sarah's primary interest was likely in marrying them off, or at least insuring that they were not left destitute at her own passing.

In the case of oldest daughter Annie, that meant marriage in 1884. For daughter Alice, eight years younger than Annie, hers was another marriage, this time in 1886. Yet, for the daughter in between Annie and Alice, it was a different scenario: work in Nashville as a single young woman, then marriage in 1893. And Dollie? All we know about Dollie was that she was in a photograph taken with Annie in Oregon. Who knows what became of her after that—or whether she was actually another Goodman daughter, or merely one of Annie's other sisters with a sweet nickname.

The challenge was figuring out just why a widow in Nashville would decide to drag her two daughters all the way to Jersey County, Illinois, to be married. What was the connection? We discovered the unexpected clue—at least as it was recorded in the marriage record—that Alice Goodman was not born in Tennessee, as one would expect from her parents' residence, but that she was born in Alton, Illinois. There was also that confusing switch of names for the Goodman father, from Henry in the census records to Andrew in Alice's marriage record—and even in a later Nashville city directory for widow Sarah. Could Sarah have actually traveled to Illinois to marry again, herself? I have seen that exact scenario before, in other families.

The connection to Illinois, from our current perspective, is fleeting for the Goodman daughters. Alice, once married to John Harris in Jersey County, lived there with their sole son Earl in 1900, but by 1910 had moved—I suspect along with several others from Jersey County, including Alice's sister Annie—to Malheur County, Oregon. As reader Per pointed out last Friday, another ten years and Alice's husband and son had returned to Illinois without her—the 1920 census indicated that John Harris was widowed—where they remained, according to both the 1930 and 1940 enumerations.

The story for oldest sister Annie Goodman and her husband Samuel Tucker was much the same. Living in Nashville, she married in Illinois in 1884, then by 1900, was living in Oregon. Judging from that 1900 census, their move was both earlier and more gradual than Annie's sister Alice: they remained in Illinois until after the 1887 birth of their daughter Eva, then stayed in Nebraska for the birth of five additional children. The Tuckers left for Oregon after the summer of 1899. However, like her younger sister Alice, Annie died relatively young, by the end of 1925.

There was, however, another Goodman connection in the story. Whether it was a Goodman who was related to Henry Goodman, Sarah's second husband (at least, as far as I can tell), I have yet to demonstrate—though the roots for both Goodmans reach back to Virginia.

You may have already spotted that other Goodman connection in our discussion of the wedding of Annie and Samuel Tucker. There, in the marriage record, was the maiden name of Samuel's mother: Martha Goodman. And no, that wasn't a mistaken entry, for if her married name had been inserted in error, it would have been Tucker, not Goodman.

What was interesting about that other Goodman line—the one of Samuel Tucker's mother, Martha Goodman—was that her mother's name was Fuller.

Fuller? I've seen that name before! In fact, I believe I have a picture from that family mentioning the Fuller surname. And since refocusing on our goal means getting back to connecting these abandoned family photos with descendants of these families, let's see what we can find about the Fuller connection to this extended family.

The Sisters' Stories

Brick walls are sometimes best conquered by reading between the lines on the documents we can find on our ancestors. I'm seeing that borne out again, now that I'm puzzling over the photograph I found of Annie Goodman Tucker and Dollie Goodman, the sister I can't find in any documentation. In the meantime, discovering how Annie and her sisters grew up in Tennessee with half-brothers who were born in Georgia, I'm at a loss as to how to explain her marriage in Illinois.

All I want to do is find out just how Annie Goodman of Nashville, Tennessee, managed to travel to Jersey County, Illinois, to marry Samuel Tucker in 1884. Really. Oh, and also figure out just who her sister Dollie Goodman might have been—the one we found in the picture abandoned in a northern California antique shop.

While my guess that Annie and her widowed mom might have traveled to Illinois in the company of her half-brothers from her mother's first marriage didn't work out—all her half brothers died in Nashville, apparently—I still have one more guess to check out. That one leaves the answer in the hands of the girls' team: Annie's sisters from her mom's second marriage to Henry Goodman. But even there, it was obvious that her sister Emma was listed in Nashville city directories—at least up to 1887.

That left me with the task of looking up records concerning marriages for Annie's known sisters Emma and Alice; remember, I hadn't been able to find any record of a Goodman sister named Dollie, whether actual name or nickname, until I found a first mention of her in the Nashville city directory.

But Emma married a man by the name of John McCann in Nashville, and died there in 1929. It was obvious Emma wouldn't hold the key to any explanation of how her sister Annie ended up marrying a man in Illinois. Yet, as we saw yesterday, Annie's widowed mom, Sarah Goodman, and her other sister, Alice, seemed to have disappeared from Nashville city directories in the mid 1880s. As it turns out, that little hint, reading between the lines in the city directories, provided a clue to scour the records elsewhere.

What we already know is that Annie married Samuel Tucker in 1884 in Jersey County, Illinois. That, in case you are as geographically challenged as I am, turns out to be a distance of about 350 miles from their home in Nashville. Inquiring minds want to know: how did she meet him? How did she make that trip from Nashville to Jerseyville? I was puzzled, knowing the customs of that time period, and the possibility that Annie's father might already have passed away. It seemed unlikely that a young woman of that time period would just strike up a friendship with a bachelor from a town far removed from her hometown.

But what about that other sister, Alice? There was no sign of her continued residence in Nashville, nor any marriage record for her there.

As it turned out, that younger Goodman sister followed in Annie's footsteps, marrying a man in Jersey County, as well. Her intended was John T. Harris, son of Thomas P. and Nancy Tally Harris. They married in Jersey County on March 19, 1886, according to an entry in the Jersey County records. While the record listed Alice's father's name as Andrew—not Henry—we can be reassured we have the right Alice Goodman, for the witnesses to the ceremony were none other than Alice's sister Annie and Annie's husband, Samuel Tucker.

Reading between the lines on that record shows us one more unexpected detail about the Goodman family's connection to Illinois: Alice listed her place of birth not as Tennessee—which would have been expected, given her two older sisters were born there—but as Alton, Illinois, only twenty miles south of Jerseyville. Though Alice gave her age as sixteen at the time of her 1886 marriage, I tend to think she might have only been fifteen years old at the time, based on the fact that her name wasn't included in the Goodman household for the July enumeration of the 1870 census in Nashville.

At any rate, though the Goodmans lived in Nashville in 1870, sometime between that July 2, 1870, enumeration and the time of her birth, Alice and, at least, her mother were living in Illinois.

Why? After all, the Goodmans returned to Nashville after that point—at least until Annie's marriage to Samuel Tucker in 1884 and Alice's marriage to John Harris in 1886.

As it turns out, Annie and Alice weren't the only Goodmans in that part of Illinois. There may have been another Goodman connection.

The two excerpts above from the Jersey County, Illinois, marriage records are for Alice Goodman's entry (above) and her husband John Harris' entry (below). Both images courtesy FamilySearch.org.

Rabbit Trail Warning : On the Hypothesis Hunt

How many times have I seen a woman, married once, subsequently with children, then widowed, then remarried with more children. Then widowed. Again. And then, in her later years, taken in by the oldest son from the first marriage.

Not being able to find any sign of Sara Jane Baldwin, widow of James Breeden and subsequently wife of Henry Goodman, I thought it might be worthwhile to test that scenario and see if this was an applicable hypothesis in her case. After all, though Sara Jane's first marriage occurred in Georgia, her second family lived in Nashville, Tennessee. If she were subsequently widowed again, it might make sense that she went with her daughter Annie to Illinois, where Annie, herself, was married.

So I took a long look at what became of Sara Jane's three sons by her first marriage to James Breeden. It was easy to determine their names, both from the two boys living in the Breeden household in Georgia for the 1860 census, and for the three Breeden boys who were in Sara Jane's home with her second husband, Henry Goodman, in the 1870 census.

Even in the 1880 census, it was fairly easy to spot the oldest of those Breeden sons, for son George Breeden was living in the household listed just before the Goodman household on Buena Vista Street. There, we found George to be a married man, though it took some reading between the lines to determine his wife was the older daughter of Mike and Lizzy Molter, by the name of Caroline. While the way the enumerator handled that census entry was confusing, it also appeared that George and Caroline Breeden had a daughter, whom they nicknamed Carrie.

Sara Jane's second son Carrol Breeden, in the Goodman home at the age of eleven at the time of the 1870 census, was listed as a driver for the Woodland Street Railroad in the 1885 Nashville city directory. He was even listed in the Nashville directory as late as 1893, so it was clear that he was not the one leaving town on a cross-country adventure for his half-sister Annie's wedding in Alton, Illinois.

Sadly, their youngest brother James would not have been in the Goodman-Tucker wedding party, either. An 1874 death register for Davidson County, Tennessee, revealed that one fifteen year old James "Breedon" from Georgia died on October 30 from tetanus.

Though Annie Goodman's half brothers Carrol and James would not have taken their (likely) widowed mother Sara Jane on an adventurous move to Illinois, could the connecting link have been oldest brother George? Even that could not be the answer, as you may have already noticed. While I searched for any sign of a George Breeden in Illinois by 1900, I was not able to locate any evidence. And small wonder: the very line next to his brother Carrol's entry in the 1885 Nashville city directory tells the story: Caroline Breeden, listed as widow of George, lived on the very street where we had found her in the 1880 census.

If George Breeden was gone before 1885, it is likely that he was not the one to lead his half sister Annie Goodman to Alton, Illinois, the place where she married Samuel Tucker in 1884. But if the Breeden half brothers were not the nexus for the tryst between Annie Goodman and Samuel Tucker, could it have been any of the Goodman sisters?

Furthermore, we can't let these rabbit trail diversions cause us to forget our original incentive for exploring all these possibilities: that mystery sister Dollie Goodman. Who was she, and where did she fit into the picture? At this point, I still haven't found any evidence—other than one photograph—that Dollie Goodman even existed.

More of Annie's Story

In trying to determine just who Annie Goodman's sister Dollie might have been—the young woman sitting next to Annie in a photograph taken in Ontario, Oregon—I can find no clues from census records. That might be due to the gap we family historians all bemoan, the missing 1890 census—but there still should be another way to figure out this puzzle.

Annie, born in Tennessee in 1863 to Sara Jane Baldwin and her husband, Henry Goodman, showed up in her parents' household in the 1870 and 1880 census, but I can't find her parents at any point after that. And to try and figure out who Annie's younger-looking "sister" Dollie might have been, I suspect we would need to look at records subsequent to that 1880 enumeration.

Annie, by then, was in her own household, as the wife of Samuel James Tucker, whom she married in Illinois in 1884, so there was no sign of any Dollie in records from that date onward. But where was Annie's mother? Or father? And how did Annie, a resident of Nashville, Tennessee, end up marrying a man in Alton, Illinois?

Hoping that I would somehow find Dollie in that mess, I pushed back a generation to Henry Goodman and his wife, the former Sara Jane Baldwin. I'm not sure this detour will ultimately lead me down a path to find Dollie, but I am finding other details, nonetheless.

The first detail that stood out to me was in the 1870 census. There, back in Nashville, were the couple, Henry and Sara Jane. But before we can locate the record for their oldest daughter Annie in that same 1880 household, we see the entry for three young males. Under the surname Breden (or possibly Baeden), we find thirteen year old George, eleven year old Carrol, and nine year old James.

Of course, the 1870 census doesn't provide us any guidance as to how—or even if—those three boys were related to Annie's parents, but one possible guess, considering that time period, might be that Annie's mother was previously married and then widowed.

I checked to see if there were any marriage records in Davidson County, Tennessee, for a Sara Jane Baldwin and any man by the surname Breden, but I didn't find any. Annie's mother, however, gave her birthplace, in that 1870 census, as Georgia. Wondering whether she might have been married in Georgia, I searched there for her maiden name. (I wasn't confident in the spelling of that Breden surname, so I opted to go the route of the bride's name.)

I did locate an 1855 Chatooga County, Georgia, marriage record indexed online with a groom's name listed as James E. Bruden—a possibility, since looking at the actual handwriting allowed me to imagine that it might just as easily have been translated as Breeden, phonetically close to the Breden surname we had already encountered. To double check, since I had already found the names of the two potential sons ten years of age or more from the 1870 census, I searched for a census record in 1860 with that grouping of names.

Thankfully, there was one possibility: an 1860 census record from nearby Walker County, Georgia, which included James, Sarah, three year old George and one year old Carroll. An encouraging addition was the entry in the household of two teenaged "boarders" with the surname Baldwin, the same as Sara Jane's maiden name.

The reason I took the trouble to ferret this out was for my research hypothesis: could it have been possible that Sara Jane, widowed a second time at Henry Goodman's untimely death—which I have yet to verify—followed any of her (potential) sons to move from her home in Tennessee to Illinois, and possibly from there even further to Oregon? My next goal is to find Sara Jane by seeking whatever became of those three boys from the Goodman household in the 1870 census.