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.