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.