A rose is a rose...

 Is a Hayward is a Haywood is an Award is a...

A year or two ago, I gave my husband a gift membership to Ancestry.com. He spent some time working on his family tree partly using the resources on the site and partly using family papers. He didn't become consumed by it as I did more recently when I started helping my sister do our family genealogy. I took classes and read books and learned by trial and error how to navigate various genealogy sites. I promised my husband I would work on his tree once I felt like I knew what I was doing. Last week, needing to take a break from a frustrating brick wall in my own tree, I started working on his family.

When I started helping my sister, she had already done so much research that there were thousands of people in our tree. There was still plenty to be done, especially on our father's side, but it was adding to her work. I didn't realize how much fun it would be to start with just a few dozen people in the tree. Discoveries and revelations at every turn! Every search successful! However, it didn't take long to run into a bit of a brick wall.

Here are the generations:

1. My husband
2. His father, H. Anders, born in Rostraver, Westmoreland County, PA
3. His grandparents, Frank Anders and Clara Vernom, born in the same area
4. Clara's parents, John Vernom and Agnes Updegrapft
5. John's parents, ? Vernom and Emma Hayward

The problems I ran into stemmed from variations and misspellings of the names Vernom, Updegraft, and Hayward. In addition, Agnes and Emma each had children in first marriages and then remarried, bringing the names Mann and Livingston into the family tree. I was fortunate because my husband's cousin, Vern (yes, he is named Vernom for his grandmother's maiden name), gave me a copy of a letter that was the key to the code I was trying to break.

In 1978, Vern's daughter was doing a school project on family history. She wrote and asked my husband's parents what they knew and my husband's mother responded with a four-page letter. Vern had saved this letter and brought me a copy of it a week ago. (Let me just interrupt myself and make a big plug for asking older relatives about family history. How I wish I had asked more questions and recorded the answers!)

The letter helped me figure out that Clara's parents were John Vernom and Agnes Updegraft. I knew Clara was connected to the Manns but I didn't know how, and I hadn't been sure of her parents' names. Emma, John's mother, had remarried and all of her children, from both her first and second marriages, were recorded on the 1880 census with the surname Mann. In addition, Ella, John's younger sister from that first marriage, was always known to the family as Ella Mann although she was actually Ella Vernom. It was difficult for me to see where the name Vernom came into the family until I read that 35 year old letter.

On the 1880 census, notice that John, the eldest son at age 20, was born in Illinois. Put together with the letter, I figured out that this was John Vernom, not John Mann. Emma's second husband shared a given name with her son from her first marriage, adding to the confusion. I have to admit, it took several readings of the letter and drawing pedigree charts before I sorted it out.

To sum up that tangle, Clara's father was John Vernom, who married Agnes Updegraft, John died young (we don't don't know how yet) and Agnes remarried to a man named Frank Livingston. She was known in the family as Grandmother Livingston (or Livingstink, as the children would say). John's mother, Emma, lost her husband early on and she remarried to a man named John Mann. John Vernom's full sister Ella was always known as Ella Mann in the family but her father was a Vernom.

Whew.

This leads us to Emma. We knew she had been married to a man with the surname Vernom and her son was born in Illinois. We know that Ella was from that marriage because she is on the 1870 census with John and their mother, and we know Emma married John Mann about 1873. (Knowing that John Vernom was born in Illinois, which was recorded on at least two censuses, has led to some clues but I'm not quite secure I have found the right man yet. One clue is a marriage record of a George Vernom and Emma Howard.) Somewhere, perhaps on another family tree, we picked up that her maiden name was Heywood and her father's name was William. We have a passenger list that matches the names and matches the date she gave on a later census of arriving in the U.S. in 1854.

I made countless searches for the Heywoods in Pennsylvania and Illinois, the two places I knew Emma to have been, as well as nationwide. I said to my husband, it's as if they stepped off the boat and dropped off the face of the earth. Suddenly a light went on. I knew that Heywood had several different Soundex and phonetic matches, such as Haywood, Howarth, and Howard. It dawned on me that the name recorded on the ship manifest might be incorrect and I might have better luck searching with one of the variations. Then another light went on - did that goldmine of a letter have any clues?

Hayward! In addition, I remembered that on the 1880 census, Emma's brother was in the household, listed as a boarder and on the top of the following page. I almost missed it.

Very quickly, I found a family tree that had sourced information that placed William Hayward, Emma's father, in Carroll Township, Washington County, PA at the time of his death in 1870, and that led to finding this 1860 census from Rostraver, Westmoreland County, just across the river.

Note that the family next door matches the family on the passenger list I shared above. I speculate that William and John were brothers, and there is a third man on the passenger list who might be another brother. On this census, William is now married to Deborah, born in Pa., and there are two small children born in Pa., including a younger Emma. Perhaps those were Deborah's children from a previous marriage. (In 1860, our 17 - 19 year old Emma was presumably in Illinois giving birth to John Vernom as that is his birth year and birth place, so we wouldn't expect to see her on this census.)

I never would have found this on my own, even looking at censuses page by page. Thank goodness for the search options on Ancestry.com that help you to search for variations of a name.

Award? Who would have imagined that? Then I thought about it. The family had come from England just six years prior to this and probably still had strong British accents. I don't know yet which part of England they came from, but I can just hear that Cockney accent where the H's are dropped, like Eliza Doolittle said 'enry 'iggins in My Fair Lady. Hayward would sound like 'ayward. Even autocorrect tried to change that to award!

Making Connections

It's a small world.

In my last post, Perseverance and Tedium Pay Off, I wrote about finding an 1850 census that, among other things, verified that my 2x great-grandfather had two older brothers. I started to look for more information about them, partly to learn more about them and partly to look for leads about their father.

I found military records that both William Henry Botsford and John Foster Botsford enlisted to serve in the Civil War in Deposit, New York. Deposit is in the county south of Otsego County, and is mentioned in one of the younger George's obituaries as his birthplace. I have found no record of him there, but this suggests that I should keep looking in that area. While the brothers enlisted on different dates, finding the records from the same place reassured me that I had the right people and not other people of the same name.

I was pleased to see that they both served. My husband and I both served, as did many people in both our families. I wasn't quite so pleased to find this next item:

My husband, who is a military historian, explained to me that this was not unusual and didn't necessarily indicate poor character. Men would often desert and then re-enlist, perhaps for a bonus or to get in a better unit, or because they were needed at home for a season. I have hopes that this will turn out to be the case.

I haven't yet found more records that I can be sure are this William Henry Botsford. There is one living in the St. Lawrence area of upstate New York, close to the Canadian border, and he may be the right one, but I am looking for more records to tie that person to this family.



Meanwhile, I have more documentation concerning John Foster Botsford. (He was apparently named after his mother's brother.) He's on the 1860 census in Springfield as a domestic with a family named Griggs.

Next we find his enlistment in 1863 at Deposit, NY. I love when I find a physical description of one of my ancestors as we so infrequently find photos.

Unfortunately, we next find this item, informing us that John Foster Botsford was killed at the Battle of New Market, May 15, 1864.

Later we have an application for pension in the name of his mother. It appears to be dated 1915, which is odd because Sarah died in 1873.

I found this description of the Civil War Memorial in Cherry Valley, which includes John Foster Botsford's name, and here is a photo of the memorial. I will definitely visit it to pay my respects when I am in New York in October.

Finally, here is the reason I called this post "It's a small world." My husband went to Virginia Military Institute, Class of 1968. The cadets of VMI were called on in the Civil War - the only time cadets from any U.S. military academy have taken part in a battle. Where did they serve? The Battle of New Market. VMI has a beautiful ceremony every year on New Market Day to recognize the fallen cadets. In addition, we lived in Shenandoah County, Virginia for four years, just a few miles from the battlefield. We have been there many, many times. I have many ancestors who fought in the Civil War, as does my husband. It was stunning to find that, out of all the hundreds of battles in the Civil War, my great-great uncle lost his life in this particular battle.

Perseverance and Tedium Pay Off

It seems I've been so busy doing the work of genealogy that I've ignored my blog. I'll give my ADD all the credit - the ability to hyper-focus on one thing while ignoring the routine of all other things!

I've discovered a few more things about the Botsfords.  George Arthur Botsford, my 2x great-grandfather was born about 1848 and died in 1942. We've found two obituaries for him, both saying his parents were George Botsford and Sarah Foster Botsford. I wrote previously about how a clue in one of the obituaries led to verifying Sarah's identity and helped me to find her family of origin in Look, Then Look Again. However, all my searching was getting me nowhere with identifying the elder George Botsford until I decided to look at censuses page by page.

In order to make old, hand-written records searchable, they have to be indexed. This means a human has to read the record and type in the information, which becomes part of a database that can then be searched. It takes a massive effort to index over three hundred years of records - and that's just in the United States. I learned in a class at the Mesa Family History Library that many records available on ancestry.com were outsourced to China for indexing. The people who indexed were trained in reading old hand-writing and such, but they are not native English speakers, so they don't know when something doesn't make sense, like a name is probably not going to be Fegtry, for instance. Sometimes the hand-writing is really difficult to decipher, even for an English speaker, and spelling was not standardized, so name variations are to be expected.

The search engines on ancestry.com are really good, and you can use different settings to look for an exact name, phonetically similar names, similarly spelled names, etc. Even with that, I could not find any trace of the elder George Botsford. Finally I resorted to looking at censuses page by page, and after quite a few hours, voila!

This is from the 1850 census for the Town of Springfield, Otsego County, New York. The name was indexed as BETHFORD, which is not close enough for it to come up in even a fuzzy search. I knew to look in this place because it is very close to Cherry Valley, which is where the obituaries said they were married, and it is the same place where Sarah's parents and siblings lived.

Although I have not been able to find any more documentation on George yet, this gives me a lot of information. Now I know that George was born in New York. This also confirmed the existence of the two elder children, William and John. I had seen the names on other family trees but I had not been able to find any documentation until I found this. It says here that John was born in Canada. On the 1855 census, it says that the younger George was born in Canada, and years later, the younger George once reported on a census that the elder George was born in Canada. I will look for Canadian records next time I go to the Mesa Family History Library, where I can access international records.

This also gives me an age for the elder George, which helps in further searches. The elder George and the oldest sons, William and John, do not show up with Sarah and the other children on the 1855 census.

Sarah and her son Thomas E. are listed with family number 24 in dwelling number 20 in Cherry Valley. Thomas is four years old, so he was born about 1851 and not present on the 1850 census. She is a servant. The younger George, at the tender age of six, is boarding with family number 232 in dwelling number 217. The census taker would walk from one house to the next in order, so we can assume that they were not close together (although Cherry Valley is not a huge place, that's still not easy on a young boy).

Where are the elder George and William and John? The boys would have been 15 and 12 in 1855, so too young to be off on their own. I did find both the boys in later records, which I will write about separately, but I have yet to find the elder George. What happened between 1850 and 1855? Did George die or perhaps go somewhere to try to improve the family's fortunes? Why did Sarah end up as a servant instead of living with some of her family? Her parents, aunt and uncle, and many siblings all lived in the area.

I will continue to look for answers online and in October, I will be traveling to Otsego County to visit my sister. We have many genealogy field trips planned. Searching for answers about the Botsfords is high on my list of things to do.