52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: In the Census (Week 05)

In the Census

Oh boy, sometimes those census records can really throw you for a loop. Sometimes they might even change the entire way you think about a family you are researching. There is never a family that confused me more than the Mays family. Any Mays researcher out there will agree with me. They are hard to pin down! This week I’m going to spotlight Rebecca Mays, for sheer stubbornness!

1850 United States Census
1850 U.S. census, Morgan County, Kentucky, population schedule, Township not stated, p. 133-B, dwelling 634, family 634, William Mays Jr household; digital images, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 6 Jan 2018); citing National Archives and Records Administration microfilm M432, roll 214.

In the 1850 Census, everything seems fine. Nothing out of the ordinary here. We won’t even go into the fact that I don’t believe I have ever found a document that states William Mays Jr was the son of William Mays Sr. Especially since I know from watching many webinars that sometimes the Sr and Jr were added by enumerators if there was an older and younger man of the same name living near each other. I’ll get to that in my Do-Over when it’s time to stress over that! This census is important because it’s the earliest one that is going to give me ages of the children closest to the birth. This is especially important for Rebecca, who is aged 9 in this census.

1860 United States Census
1860 U.S. census, Morgan County, Kentucky, population schedule, West Liberty post office, p. 484, dwelling 230, family 227, William Mays household; digital images, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 5 Jan 2018); citing National Archives and Records Administration microfilm M653, roll 388.

This is where Rebecca starts to play with our minds a little bit. Between 1850 and 1860, William and Rebecca swapped places in the birth order. Things don’t get any better as the years go. To save space, I made us a chart of the family through the years.

The Mays Family in the Census

Rebecca Mays, you are making this harder than it needs to be! Note: You will probably have to view this image in a separate tab to see the text.

For the chart, I decided to leave blank spaces when children left the household. I was hoping it would help give a clear view of the family group and it did! 1870 was really a crazy census year for the Mays family. The oldest 4 children had left the household, no big deal. Then there is Rebecca. Oh, Rebecca. She managed to gain 3 years between 1850 and 1860, which actually isn’t that unusual for census ages. It’s between 1860 and 1870 that Rebecca clearly found the Fountain of Youth! She only aged 2 years in that time! When you look ahead to 1880, you can see Rebecca’s age actually goes back to what her age would have been if she’d stayed consistent through her lifetime.

Sidenote: I see you appearing out of nowhere Jane! Or is it Elizabeth J. Mays pulling a fast one like her sister Rebecca. I just don’t know anymore!

It wasn’t an indexing error.

Those of us with a few genealogy years under our belt might say that it could be a transcription error in 1870. That maybe it was just really hard to read and so it looks like 18 but was actually 28.

1870 U.S. census, Elliott County, Kentucky, population schedule, Precinct 1, p. 446-B, dwelling 148, family 148, William Mays household; digital images, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 1 Feb 2018); citing National Archives and Records Administration microfilm M593, roll 459.

Nope, it sure is clearly saying Rebecca is 18 years old. Oh, Rebecca. I appreciate you and all your age games!

Previous 52 Ancestors posts:

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Invite to Dinner (Week 04)

Which relative would I invite to dinner?

Oh boy! This was a tough one. There are plenty of people in my family tree I’d love to have over from dinner and conversation. Narrowing down my prospects wasn’t easy. I decided to pick someone from my Dad’s side of the tree since I picked Mom’s side last week.

George Thorward obituary. Taken from Llewellyn Moore’s box of records.

George Thorward

Soon, I will be highlighting my immigrant ancestors here on the blog. That means you’ll be hearing more about George Thorward. I picked him for this prompt because I know he has some stories to tell. I have so many questions for him.

  • Was his name really George Thorward… George Yohn? Johann Georg Weigel?
  • Did you emigrate from Germany for political reasons?
  • Did you and your brother really make up your name and then go in different directions?
  • Were you close to your siblings?
  • How many siblings did you have?
  • Did you all immigrate?
  • Why did you come to America so young?
  • What happened to your parents?
  • Did you share your immigration story with your children or was it a secret?

I can honestly say if George were still around there would be plenty of questions from me and his other descendants!

L-R: Living Descendant, George W. Thorward, Lewis Thorward, George Thorward (4 generations of Thorwards)

Previous 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks entries:

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Longevity (Week 03)

Janie Jegley (1906-2000)

Longevity

I thought long and hard about how I would interpret the prompt this week. I was going to do the longest living male and female. Then I was going to do the longest married couple. Thinking about all those tempted me to look in my old file, so I decided right then and there I was going to poke around my current Do-Over file and see what jumped out at me.

Mary Jane Mays-Jegley

Aunt Janie was my Grandpa Stanley’s half-sister. Aunt Janie stood out to me because at the current part of my Do-Over I am trying to untangle the online theories about her father and his parents. That’s a story for a different day. I’m here to spotlight Janie. She is the daughter of William Harmon Mays and Sarah Elizabeth McDaniels. I’ve talked about them a few times. Here is their marriage record and this is a timeline of William’s life. I also talked about a census entry for Sarah in 1910 that had me curious. More on that later as well. She was born in September of 1906 in Rowan County, Kentucky. After her mother’s early passing, she moved to Clermont County with her father and paternal grandparents.

That is 94 miles away from any other family that they had. That is a massive distance in the early 1900s, especially for rural farmers who didn’t have much. I don’t know what prompted the family to move. It does seem that there was plenty of sicknesses going around at the time, but I haven’t been able to research fully to know if there was an increased death rate in the area. To move so far, so completely away from everyone, it must have been something though.

After moving to Clermont County, William hired Iva Belle Moyer to look after Janie and he eventually married her. Janie married George Jegley in January of 1928 in Clermont County and they had a son. My Grandma didn’t write down all of Janie’s descendants, so I’m going to have a heck of a time finding them all, but I hope they all know how much my mother’s family loved her. I haven’t heard anyone speak an ill word of Aunt Janie.

From what I can tell, Janie was close with her brothers and her sister in law, Emogene. She often wrote letters to Emogene… but more on that later. 😉

Longevity

Aunt Janie lived to be 93 years, 7 months, and 1 day old. She currently has the longest lifespan in my family tree file of 480 people. In addition to that, she outlived the average female lifespan in my database by close to 30 years and the longest living male in my database by 7 years.

Previous 52 Weeks Ancestors:

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Favorite Photo (Week 02)

This is a special treat for those that followed along all those years ago when I posted The Diary of Llewellyn for 3 years. Many will recall midway through the Diary, my Great-Grandpa Bill started showing up with his future wife. One of their favorite activities to do was dance.

I miss the Diary entries but I love filling in the gaps like this…

In fact, if you search this blog for “we danced” it comes up more than once!

William and Llewellyn Moore, 1972

This is one of my favorite photos because 50 years later and you can tell she still loved dancing with him!

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Start (Week 01)

Happy New Year!

This new year, I’m hoping to be way more organized than last year. I didn’t do too bad in 2017, but I would really like to stay a little more focused when it comes to writing up my findings or even just sharing information with my family on social media. It feels like I’m sharing the same things all the time with no context.

One cool thing I’m trying to do this year is participating more in writing prompts. 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks sounds like a fun way to start. I’m sure I won’t be posting all 52 weeks, but as many as I can sounds perfect!

Week 01 Prompt: Start

The first week’s prompt has the vague meaning of Start. When I read this prompt, I immediately thought of my start in genealogy. I was doing an eighth-grade project. I don’t remember the specific project but my mother just happened to mention it to my Grandma Emogene. She was visiting us at the time. What I didn’t realize until that moment was that my Grandmother traveled with a copy of the family tree.

The blue binder is the tree and the white binder is corresponding pictures. I’ve talked about it previously in entries. Reminiscing about the Beginning in 2010, Me in 2011 and Fearless Females: Heirlooms in 2011. It’s possible I talked more about it. After blogging for almost 8 years now it’s hard to keep track.

I know that I’ve disproved much of that beginning paragraph, but the basis of the book, the actual family information is more accurate than I expected. It’s only after this recent Do-Over that I realized it. I hunted down the person titled “Me” in the right side picture. Though I’ve yet to research her.

It’s funny, I even remember a great moment with Grandma. I’ve thought about it a lot over the last year. When we were looking at this book, I saw the three sets of twins that Mollie Jane Webb had and I thought to myself that’s a lot of twins! Grandma looked right at me and said, “Well maybe you or your siblings will have twins someday.” It’s strange to say it but ever since that moment I knew twins were coming to us. I was probably the only person not shocked when my brother and sister-in-law announced they were having twins last year.

Not a bad start to my genealogy at all if you ask me. Thanks for giving me my passion for this Grandma!

Grandma and Grandpa Wayne
Grandma and Grandpa Wayne