Tag: Mays

The Mystery of Henry

Posted on by Kathleen

There is always one person in your family file who frustrates you. Sometimes it’s because they show up out of nowhere. Or maybe they disappeared. How these mysteries are ever solved I don’t know. I usually just walk away from it for awhile and try again later with a clear brain. Sometimes it works, most times I have to lather, rinse, and repeat a few times.

One of those people in my family is Mr. Henry C Mays. He showed up in the household of John and Celia Mays in 1900. He’s listed as their son. When my Mom was researching this family, she was always suspicious about him. She thought maybe he was actually Nancy’s son but her parents were raising him. Who knows what the real story is. There isn’t much to verify that available to me right now. Especially since Henry was born in or around 1885. Well before Kentucky started regulating birth records in 1911.

Henry is still there in 1910, still listed as John and Celia’s son. So I’m going to go for broke and assume that he is their son. The problem is that I can’t seem to find a death record for him to verify this. There is a Henry Mays living in Rowan County, Kentucky in 1920 but I can’t be sure that is him and the family is gone again in 1930. 1920 is when John, Celia, and William Harmon moved to Ohio. Nancy married and stayed in Kentucky though. So Henry could have ended up anywhere. Eventually I hope to find him. I’ll keep trying until I find out where he went.

The even crazier part is we asked my Grandmother about William Harmon Mays’ family before she passed away. No one was even aware that William had a sister, let alone another brother somewhere. Who knows what we could have found out if my mother’s father had lived longer, but we may never know what happened to the Mays family. They seemed to have scattered and not spoken of each other.

Mays Family Update

Posted on by Kathleen

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After I made my Mays Family post yesterday, I went back through the Kentucky Death Records on Ancestry.com. I decided to just put random details in there and see what came up. You may not be able to tell from the size of that death certificate but that is Jurena Mays‘ death certificate. It shows her married name as Adkins. So that was a nice little hint. It also showed her parents as William Mays and Anna Click. That answered the questions about whose family she belonged to, but not my questions about why she showed up out of the blue in 1870.

Having the tip of the married name of Adkins, and the Informant name of Milburn Adkins, I set about finding Census records for Jurena. What happens next is why I took a two day break from the Mays family. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

1900 was the first census I tried to find. I couldn’t find Jurena anywhere. I tried all the combinations I could, but I couldn’t find her. So I jumped to Milburn Adkins. In all the remaining census years Milburn has a wife whose name varies. The birthday never various. The birthday matches up with Ellen Mays, but her name is mostly listed as Eliza, except for one year when she was known as Eliza Ellen. So my immediate next thought was that this must be Ellen’s husband and he acted as informant for his sister-in-law. Only when I started relaying this information to my Mom. She broke out her old notes, she had a complete different husband for Ellen.

It’s about that moment, I threw my hands in the air. Put on my fluffy pajamas, and grabbed myself a cold drink. I was done. So now I’m going to take a break from the Mays family and focus for a bit on the Taylor side. They are so much easier to locate!

Now I Remember

Posted on by Kathleen

I remember now why I allowed my Mom to have control over the Mays Line of our tree for so long. It gets very confusing. With that many different people I guess it’s only a matter of time. Since I’m determined to do things right this time, I found that I was trying to ignore big discrepancies between Census years.

In the 1850 and 1860 census years, the children of William and Anna Mays were very easy to match up. The birth years weren’t off by more than a year or so. I was able to figure out who everyone was by name and age. It was glorious… Then I went to 1870. Things just got complicated.

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At first, I couldn’t find them in Morgan County, KY where they had been in 1860 and 1870. Then I found William and Anna in Elliott County, KY. After a quick peek at the history of Elliott County, I found that it was formed in 1869 from parts of  Morgan, Lawrence, and Carter counties. So that little mystery was solved. They most likely didn’t move, the county border did!

Things didn’t improve after that little nugget of information though. It’s when I started to try and match up the kids that I ran into more troubles. Thomas Lindsey Mays wasn’t an issue. He matched up perfectly. Besides that weird stuff at the end of her name, Anna Mays lined up pretty well also. I think I was almost too confident at this point. I had to be, because what else could I have done to deserve this.

Rebecca Mays threw me for the big loop. The problem she threw at me started because I can’t decide what to believe about her. You can see in the image her age is shown as 18. However, I know she is older than that. In fact, my dates put her at 10 years older than that. What on earth went wrong here! I certainly can’t take the age of 18 as fact, because she was in both the 1850 and 1860 censuses as 8 and 18 respectively. So I just scratch my head and put a little note in the file about this discrepancy.

I then moved on to Arminda, age 17 from the image. I’m going to assume that she is Amanda Mays, (born. about 1854). I’m finding that Arminda and Amanda were basically the same name back in those days. It’s like Sally and Sarah. They are a bit interchangeable.

Jane, age 15 is my big frustration here. Her age shows that she should have been in the last census. I promise you there wasn’t a Jane. There was an Elizabeth J though. Jane was a very common middle name for Elizabeths in my family. Very very common. It wouldn’t be an issue if my Elizabeth wasn’t supposed to be 23 in this census. Of course, they were off by 10 years on Rebecca, so could this be another case? Or is this a niece/cousin/relation staying with the family. It wasn’t until 1880 that they even started adding relationships onto the census.

blog-144I had to look at the 1880 census before I made any decision about who Jane was. Maybe I’d get lucky and she’d be there. So I looked. Luckily Rebecca was back to her rightful age. My Jane from the last census is now in the form of Jurena I think… This is all really confusing to me. If Jurena is another daughter. She should have been on the 1860 census, aged 5 years old. There was no Jurena, just Amanda/Arminda who was close enough in age, but she’s accounted for in the 1870 census.

So my final conclusion is I have to add Jurena as a separate child, but I have no idea where she could have been in 1860 census, but maybe when I check in with all the other families, I will find her. I’ll just have to make note of her special circumstances.

Forward Progress

Posted on by Kathleen

I’ve put this off for a long time but now I’m breaking it out and working on it. I am restoring a damaged photo of my Grandfather, Stanley Mays. It’s one of the few pictures we have of him, and it’s certainly the best one. So here’s my progress so far.

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Not bad so far if I do say so myself! This is only after a few minutes of doing it so I had some progress to show. 😉

What does this mean? Anyone know.

Posted on by Kathleen

I’ve been going through person by person, census by census. I’m trying to do this all correctly which means if something comes up, then I have to ask questions. I’m currently trying to cite all the census information for William Harmon Mays and his family. He and his young daughter moved to Ohio after his first wife died. In Ohio, he then met and married my Grandfather’s mother, Iva Belle Moyer, when she was hired to look after his daughter. This is all per my Grandma.

So now I’m left with getting all the factual evidence. I may never get “evidence” for the nanny part, but I can at least document the marriages and death of the first wife, right? Maybe not. We’ll see.

There are some trees out there that give the marriage date of William and Sarah Elizabeth McDaniels. Until I find the documentation, I’m going to leave that off, but the date sounds right. So at least I have a place to look. The not promising part of the picture is that Kentucky didn’t regulate recording marriages until 1958. So I may be out of luck, but hopefully there will be something on a local level.

My next step was trying to actually confirm with the census records the places William would have been at anyway. That’s when I ran into this.

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Hard to read, I know. Maybe a local visit will turn up a better copy too. Basically what I’m seeing is that Elizabeth is marked as William H’s wife, with daughter Mary J. All the ages fit perfectly. William’s parents are living next door. So this is the right family. However Elizabeth is crossed out. So I’ve always assumed this means that she died before the census day. However, I want an official answer on why she would be crossed off. This could be a clue as to what happened.

So I went to Ancestry’s 1910 census main page and started reading everything they give about the census.

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What I gather from this instruction is that the enumerators were to still count people who died between April 15, 1910 and when the enumerator showed up. This is the most logical explanation I could find for why Elizabeth would be crossed out. This family was counted by the enumerator on May 3, 1910. It’s a little sad knowing that Elizabeth would have died within the month, heck it could have been that week!

If there is anyone out there reading this that knows for sure this is why Elizabeth would have been crossed out, please let me know! I will make a note of it so I can try and search death records for her.

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That is if it was recorded. Hopefully a trip to Kentucky can solve this problem.