So many clues, so little time!

Please note:  this blog is a sequential narrative.  To start at the beginning, click on "Blog Archive" on the right and select the entry at the very bottom "Jennie Louise Van Buren...or was she?" or click here.

My mind was reeling.  Right in front of my eyes was the record for Jennie (Jenny) Sly, 13 years old, living in Buffalo, New York, with James Van Buren, and someone named George Avery. There were too many pieces of the puzzle that fit together for this to not be "my" Jennie.

Van Buren, Avery, Sly, Buffalo, born in 1857...it was a treasure trove of clues coming together.

The name Sly carried more weight now, as did New York as a possible place of birth.  The names Van Buren and Avery were now definitely connected to Jennie, and here she was right in the middle of Buffalo in 1870! 

It seemed too good to be true!

Only a few days before, I had felt like this was the future of my pursuit of the story of Jennie:

Now, I had so many paths to choose from!

I was reminded that genealogists say that when you find one answer, you gain 5 questions. This was an exciting and interesting problem to have!

First things first.  I knew exactly where to find Jennie in 1880. By then she was married and living in Harveysburg, Ohio with her husband, Arthur Tappan Ham. And I could practically track her every move after 1880 until her death in 1945.

Now, I was pretty sure I knew where she had been in 1870, but what about before then? I needed to check earlier years for Jennie (Jenny) Sly in Buffalo.

Alas, my hopes were dashed:

Search results for Jenny Sly born 1857, living n Buffalo, NY
www.ancestry.com

Other than the top result for in the 1870 census, that search yielded nothing.  I knew I had to dig deeper than this!

I had several avenues of research I could pursue, so where to start?  Should I research James Van Buren?  His wife, Sarah?  Should I start looking for any and all Slys in New York State? What about Avery?  George Avery was with James Van Buren in the 1870 and 1880 census records.  Who was George, and how did he fit into the picture?

After looking closely at those records, I decided to try to find out more about him.  I knew he had to be more than "just" a boarder.  I strongly suspected that he was related to James or Sarah Van Buren. I hoped that finding out more about George might lead me to Jennie and her parents.

I made a list (yes, a list!!) of what I knew about George so far, based on the information in the 1870 and 1880 census records:

George W Avery
Born 1846-47
Born in NY
Listed as widowed in 1880
unemployed for 2 months before 1880 census
no occupation in 1870
George N Avery, age 5, living with George W in 1880

Was it possible that George W Avery had married between 1870 and 1880?  If so, then he had also had a child during that time (George N) and had lost his wife.  What a turbulent decade!

I decided to cast the net fairly wide again, to see what I could find.  I searched for George W. Avery, born 1846 +/- 5 years, living in New York State.

The first result was for a George W Avery in Buffalo in 1910, but I decided to save that one for later. There were other George Averys here and there, including one in Baxter Springs, Kansas, of all places, but none of them caught my attention, until I got to the 15th result: George W Avery, age 14, living in Mentz, Cayuga County New York in 1860.

Result for George W Avery, 1860 census
www.ancestry.com

To this day, I don't really know why this result caught my eye more than the others. Maybe it was because it was the only result in New York I could see for the 1860 census. Maybe it was intuition. Whatever the reason, I clicked on the image to get more information.

George W. Avery in the 1860 US Federal Census
Year: 1860; Census Place: Mentz, Cayuga, New York; Roll: M653_729; Page 792; Image: 315; Family History Library Film: 803729; accessed on www.ancestry.com

There was just something about this result that grabbed me.  Mentz was not a place I had ever heard of.  Polly and Edward were new names to me.  I decided to pursue the matter further.  I did a search in the 1850 census in Mentz, Cayuga County, New York for Polly Avery, born about 1805 +/- 5 years.

This was my top result:

1850 Census result for Polly Avery
Year: 1850; Census Place: Mentz, Cayuga, New York; Roll: M432_481; Page: 118A; Image: 240.
Accessed on www.ancestry.com

Wow!  Polly had a big family in 1850!  I started sketching out a hypothetical tree.  I included everyone in this census record except for Lewis and Jane Newman.  I had no idea how they fit into the picture, so they didn't make the cut for now.

My original Avery family tree sketch.

I was tempted to go down every rabbit hole and research everyone on this tree that day. I knew I would do this eventually. For now, however, I decided to focus on the 2 presumed daughters of Polly.  I was trying, after all, to find Jennie's mother, whose maiden name I thought was Avery.

Here were my 2 candidates:

Mary, born ca. 1836

Henrietta, born ca. 1842

Something about the name Henrietta was bugging me.  I couldn't quite put my finger on it.  It seemed like I had seen that name somewhere recently.  I looked back through the records I had found so far -- and there she was -- or, I should say, there was a Henrietta:

Henrietta Seaman, living with James and Sarah Van Buren in 1870, born ca. 1843.  I felt certain this Henrietta Seaman and Henrietta Avery had to be the same person, but only time and research would tell for sure.  Was she the connection between James and Sarah Van Buren and Polly Avery?

Even though Henrietta was listed right above "Jenny" in the 1870 census, I decided to research Mary Avery first.  The assumption I was working under was that Jenny was living with James and Sarah after her mother died.  If that was true, then Henrietta couldn't be her mother.

I have to admit, I was disappointed that I had not found a "Sarah Avery" living with Polly in 1850. I had suspected from the beginning that George Avery and Sarah Van Buren were siblings.  It looked like this might not be true, after all.  Then I remembered that one of my sources had said that Jennie went to live with distant relatives after her mother died.  I would not consider an aunt to be a distant relative.  So, maybe they were cousins, not siblings.  It was one more avenue to pursue later.  I also considered that Sarah might not have been living with her mother in 1850.  She would have been about 18 years old by then.

I decided to deal with Sarah another day.  For now, I wanted to put Mary Avery, born ca. 1836 under the microscope.  If my assumptions were correct, she was a likely candidate to be Jennie's mother -- and my 3rd great-grandmother.