Sunday, July 10, 2011

Henry Townsend wasn't where he was supposed to be...

I was tracking a family of interest to me through the census records, and I noticed that Alice Bosworth, who had been married to Henry Townsend in the 1870 census of Pamelia in Jefferson County, New York, had remarried to C. Talcott Stewart by the time of the 1880 census in Watertown of the same county. Alice can be identified as the mother of   F. Belle Townsend, born in 1874, and of Mary Stewart, born about 1876. The older daughter is listed as stepdaughter of Talcott Stewart. One might think Henry Townsend had died. That would be a reasonable assumption. I checked the newspaper articles by searching the names in the family, and learned that Henry had gone missing one day, and while it was originally thought that he must have had an accident of some kind and died, one of the local townspeople claimed to have seen him in Chicago, Illinois when she was visiting there. She had no doubt it was him.  Whether true or not, it was published in the paper.  Old Fulton Postcards (http://www.fultonhistory.com) is an excellent and free site for searching for ancestors from upstate New York. Because there are so many articles scanned, it works best for searches on unusual, or less usual names. But it is always a great place for searching, and there are fascinating reads.

No comments: