Another clue comes to light

Yesterday while I was writing about making physical files and paying attention to all the details in the documentation, I was also organizing the many pieces of paper that had accumulated on my desk recently. I even printed a few more. My sister and I often joke about needing a "murder board" like the ones we see in TV shows about homicide detectives. However, the reality is that my desk usually looks like this.

For a minute or two, it looked neat, but then I came across something that sent me on a new flurry of activity. As I sorted the papers pertaining to the two George Botsfords (father and son) and their wives, something caught my eye.

1875 New York Census for Warren, Herkimer County

New York State performed seven censuses from 1855 to 1925. Only the later ones are available on Ancestry.com at this time (new records are added all the time - I'm sure they will all be there eventually). Fortunately, FamilySearch.org has the entire set. These censuses are available in other places, too. A couple of weeks ago, my sister searched for George Arthur Botsford and found him on the 1865 and 1875 censuses. From his birth in 1848 through the 1865 census, George Arthur lived in Cherry Valley in Otsego County, but in 1875, he is married and living in Warren in Herkimer County.

Notice that on this census, it says "G. A. Botsford." How do we know it's George Arthur? Besides looking at his family members on the census, we must look at the place and see if it makes sense. I grew up in the area so I know Warren, but I will point out that when doing genealogy, it pays to use Google Maps for checking distances, among other things. Although they are in different counties, Warren is only about ten miles from Cherry Valley, and they both lie along the historic Cherry Valley Turnpike.

Cherry Valley to Warren, NY

(If this all seems tedious and perhaps beside the point to you, then perhaps genealogy is not the pursuit of your dreams. Genealogy requires drawing together many bits of information from diverse sources so that you can draw conclusions you feel are reliable. I enjoy every bit of this!)

I want to point out that Warren - where you see the B marker on the map between those two small lakes - is where George was struck by a car fifty-five years later, in 1930.

Now we are sure that this is a reasonable place for George to be in 1875, let's look at the family members. Before yesterday, I'm a little embarrassed to admit, I had only looked at the next two people on the census - the ones that share the surname Botsford. We have R. A. Botsford and John F. Botsford. That should be Rhoda and their oldest son, John Foster Botsford. Yesterday, I suddenly noticed there are three more people in this household!

• Hattie Barton, age 6, niece, born in New York
• George W. Barton, age 4, nephew, born in Nebraska
• Henry K. Barton, age 3 and 2/12, nephew, born in Nebraska

Using my Sherlockian powers of deduction ;-) (too bad I don't have his power of observation!), I determine that these children must be Rhoda's sister's children. George had one brother, so no chance of Bartons on his side. If they were the children of a brother of Rhoda, they would have Wilkin or Wilkins  (her maiden name) as their surname. Therefore, Rhoda must have had a sister who married a man named Barton.

First I looked for Bartons in the immediate area. I found a few, but none looked promising (wrong age, gender, etc.). Then I started searching for the children. I did look briefly for Hattie, but since most women marry and Hattie Barton turned out to be a fairly common name, no luck there. Next I tried searching for George W. Barton in Nebraska and I hit pay dirt.

John Barton & family, Omaha, 1870

Here we have John Barton, age 32, born in Ireland; his wife, Sarah, age 29, born in England; their daughter, Harriet, age 2, born in New York; and they son, George, age 5 months, born in Jan of 1870 in Nebraska. Hattie is a nickname for Harriet, so that fits. The ages for the children fit, too. If my theory is correct, then Sarah must be Rhoda's sister, but I thought that Rhoda was born in Cherry Valley and her parents were born in England. I went back to the documentation we have for Rhoda and I see that on the 1875 and 1880 censuses, she indicated she was born in England, but on the 1900 census, she indicated she was born in New York.

This opens up so many questions, but also so many lines of inquiry. What happened to John and Sarah Barton? Why did the children end up with George and Rhoda in New York? Were John and Sarah able to take them back? (They were not on the 1880 census in George and Rhoda's household.) Now I can search for Sarah and Rhoda together with England as their birthplace. They, and John Barton, will have record of their immigration. Somewhere, there will be a record of Sarah and Rhoda's parents.

Look, then look again

In one of the classes I took at the Mesa FamilySearch Library, the instructor ended the class by saying that if you think you are stuck, if you think you've hit a wall, if you've searched everywhere you can think of for documentation, then go back and re-examine what you already have. She went on to say that no matter if you gathered your information two weeks ago or two years ago, you have learned things since then. You will look at the information with fresh eyes.

Several instructors have spoken of the importance of creating physical files to match what you have in your software and online. In fact, when I started the classes, it was my intent to do that before getting involved in the research, but when I started looking at our tree, I saw gaps in documentation that I felt needed to be addressed first. I decided to put off creating comprehensive files until at least some of that had been done. I didn't want to waste time and printer ink making files that might be wrong.

Now I know better! As I have written previously, I have been working on my 2x great-granparents, George Arthur Botsford and Rhoda A. Wilkins. If only I had printed out everything we have on them, I would have saved myself hours of time and effort. I had been using George's obituary to mine clues about his parents.

I was just blind to the fact that there was a second obituary.

This obituary differs from the first. The first says that he was from Deposit, which is a small town in Delaware County, the county south of Otsego County where most of the family resided. I spent many hours searching records from Deposit looking for the Botsfords and finding nothing. The second one says he is from Cherry Valley, which is in Otsego County. This makes much more sense as our family has much more history in Otsego County. The second one also gives his mother's given and maiden names. We had previously found several clues that led us to believe his mother was Sarah Foster, but not enough to feel confident. This obituary ties all those clues together - her given name, maiden name, married name, and a place. We have Sarah Botsford with George and his brother Thomas on three censuses (1855, 1860, 1865), and we have Sarah Botsford buried in Cherry Valley. We had several references on other people's family trees on Ancestry.com that her maiden name was Foster, but this is the first item that puts it all together - and I had it all along!

If that wasn't enough, I found another piece of information right under my nose that was like a key opening a locked door. In 1930, George was victim of a hit-and-run. There were several newspaper articles about it. As I read this article through again, a light bulb went on:

In the second paragraph, it says, "He had been visiting his cousin Jay Allen in Little Lakes..." Wait...a cousin? I immediately called my sister and together we started searching for Jay Allen in the 1930 census. We found him quickly and then looked at his information on someone else's family tree on ancestry.com. It turns out Jay Allen's mother was a Foster, and her father was the brother of Sarah Foster. Here was another confirmation that Sarah Foster was indeed George Arthur's mother, plus many, many pieces of documentation about her family. The Foster family lived in Springfield, NY, just a few miles from Cherry Valley. I hadn't been looking there at all!

I have spent the last couple of days adding this branch to the family tree, person by person, document by document. I feel quite confident that as I do this, I will discover links to George Botsford the elder, Sarah's husband and George Arthur's father. 

Enjoying the Journey

When I started helping my sister with the family genealogy, I didn't anticipate days like yesterday.

Yesterday I chose to follow up on one clue in George Arthur Botsford's (my 2x great-grandfather) obituary. The obituary says that he was born in Deposit in 1849, and that his father's name was also George Botsford.

I had previously determined where Deposit is, being unfamiliar with the name, and I found that it is in Delaware County, just south of Otsego County where where George passed away.  I searched federal and state censuses for a sign of the Botsfords in Deposit with no luck, so I started looking for online sources with local records. I found the Delaware County, NY Genealogy and History Site. This is an independent website developed and maintained since 1996 by a lovely lady named Joyce with no other motivation than a desire to make information available to fellow researchers. Dozens of people have contributed resources.

What fun and what a treasure trove! Was it my treasure? Not exactly. I didn't find one thing about the Botsford family, but I spent a lovely day visiting every nook and cranny of this site. 

One of the pages I visited holds several photos that are about a hundred years old that were taken in and around Mt. Vision, Otsego County, NY. I vaguely remembered that place name, so I went to Family Tree Maker, the software I use for genealogy, to check who in my tree had lived there. It turned out that my grandfather, Archie St. John (whose wife's mother was a Botsford), and his parents and grandparents had all lived in or near Mt. Vision. What's more, Archie was born in 1904, so it is entirely possible that he might be one of the children in this school photograph.

June 13, 1913

I contacted my youngest uncle to see if he recognized any of these photos or if he remembered any details about when his father lived in Mt. Vision. He did not remember. My other uncle has recently had surgery, so I will wait a bit before I contact him.

While I never did find out anything about the Botsfords, I did find several records of St. Johns that I have bookmarked for later when I am working on that line. In addition, I learned more about the area and the history of the region. I found links to other sites that I think will be useful. 

Some days, genealogy is more about the journey than the destination. Some days you don't make a big discovery or find that elusive record you've been pursuing for ages. Sometimes, what you didn't find tells you something important - maybe the obituary was wrong and they were never in Deposit. This would certainly not be the first time a newspaper article about a family member turned out to be erroneous. That is why it's always best if you can locate multiple records that agree on a particular fact like a name, a date, or a place.