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.

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.

Detective Work

I sat down at the computer at the Mesa FamilySearch Library to ferret out more information on Fred Groth (subject of my last post). I'm afraid I wasn't very successful. In fact, the only new information I found only served to further cloud the waters.

Find a Grave is a great website that my sister and I use frequently. I had searched it earlier because Fred's obituary mentioned where he was interred. Somehow there was a disconnect and I didn't find the grave. However, I used World Vital Records at the library to search on his name and it came up with a link to Find a Grave. He and Faith are buried in the same cemetery. There are no pictures of the headstones, but fortunately it's close to where my sister lives and I've asked her to go photograph them.

Meanwhile I ponder the information on Find a Grave because it gives Fred's birth year as 1878. His obituary says his birthdate was October 17, 1873, which agrees with the passenger list and naturalization papers we believed to be his. However, his age as listed on the censuses of 1900, 1910, 1915, 1920, 1925, 1930, and 1940 compute to his birth year being from 1874 to 1877. His draft registration card, dated September 12, 1918, lists his age as 43 and his birthdate as October 17, 1875.

In addition, the difference between Fred and Faith's ages on the censuses ranges from three to seven years. There are further inconsistencies with her age. She appears on the 1880 census as a one month old infant, yet her obituary and headstone give her birth year as 1881. The two newspaper articles about their elopement say she was 16. Given a birthdate of May 13, 1880, that would be accurate as their marriage date of April 24, 1897 would have been a few weeks before her 17th birthday. (The marriage date is the one date that stays consistent through all the documentation we have gathered on them.) The age that Faith gives on each census computes to birth years from 1879 to 1882.

Those naturalization papers and passenger list make him out to be 16 years old when he arrived in New York in 1889, but in a newspaper article about Fred and Faith's 50th anniversary, it says that he came to America when he was seven years old. The 1930 census asks for an immigration year and Fred answered 1889, which matches the passenger list. The 1925 New York census asks for the year of naturalization, which he said was 1898. That does not match the naturalization papers we have, which were issued in 1894.

All of this leads me to believe that those naturalization papers and the passenger list may refer to another Fred Groth. There were several Fred Groths in New York during those years, even some who immigrated. I have searched for other records but so far I haven't found anything that seems like it might be him.

In my search on Family Search, I did find a new document from an index of marriages ("New York, Marriages, 1686-1980" which you can find in the records on that site by browsing collections) for Fred and Faith's marriage. It did not give me any new information on their birthdates, but it did list their parents' names. This is my second source naming Fred's parents as Conrad Groth and Martha Bainhauer (Beinhauer). It lists Faith's parents as George Botsford and Rhoda Wilkins. Faith's mother's name has varied a lot through the documentation and this is the second time she shows up as Rhoda.

I've speculated that Fred may have started to lie about his age so he seemed to be closer in age to his sixteen-year-old bride. Perhaps he wasn't sure when he was born. I'm hoping that the marriage papers I've ordered from the City of New York and Grace Church will shed some light on the problem. We can also follow up with the church and cemetery where they were members and were buried. We will just keep following the clues, however tiny they may be.