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!