My Trails into the Past

This post will double as a 52 Ancestors and a 12 for ’26 post. This month, I’m studying the Shotts and Bishop families, beginning with Amos Gorrell’s wife, Catharine Elizabeth Shotts. Elizabeth was born on 18 February 1835 in Ross County, Ohio, to Daniel Shotts and Mary Ann Bishop. [1] She was the second child of six. The family lived in Huntington Township and Daniel was a farmer. Even though Daniel could not read and write, his children were all attending school in 1850. [2] When she was 22 years old, she married Lemuel J. Sayre on 14 January 1857. Rev. William Morris officiated. [3] Lemuel was a 21-year-old Virginia-born farmer, the son of Squire and Lydia Sayre. [4] They had three children. Mary Adela Sayre was born on 29 May 1857 and she died 11 November 1858. [5] She is buried in the Denver Cemetery, Ross County. Her death date was calculated from age at death: 1y 5m 13d. [6] George Sayre was born on 3 August 1859 and he died on the same day. He is also buried in the D...

Sometimes our genealogy database is not completely clean and tidy. I might know a fact’s date down to the minute. I might not know the exact place an event took place. Different records that name our ancestors might give us different answers to a research question. So, what do we do? Enter all the different dates into our database? Pick the best one and ignore the rest? This is where following the Genealogical Proof Standard (GPS) helps us answer this. [1] For a reminder, the GPS asks us to first do reasonably exhaustive research, while recording source citations for each item we find. We also must analyze each document and the information we find in the document to understand the source of the information. If we get conflicting information, and that is common when we find different dates for an event, we work at resolving the conflict, hoping to get close to the correct answer. And lastly, we write up our conclusions and share them. [2] When we have multiple information pieces tha...

Once the research expands back into the census with tick marks and only the head of household listed, it becomes more difficult. I have a family who were living in Yalobusha County, Mississippi, in 1850. The head of household and his wife were born in South Carolina. The children were born in Alabama, with the youngest at 1 years listed as born in Alabama, suggesting they came recently to Mississippi. Common Surname Their name is common: Johnston, which often is rendered as Johnson. I must look at people with both spellings. His first name was Sam or Samuel. I have found 14 men with the first name of Sam, Samuel, or S Johnson/Johnston in the 1840 Alabama census. Three households have a man in the right age group: Samuel Johnston, Talladega Co. Samuel Johnston, Benton Co. S. Johnson, Lauderdale Co. Of course, it is also possible that they moved to Alabama after the 1840 census enumeration was conducted and were still in South Carolina, or were in the act of traveling to Alabam...