Scholefield Family Tree
After the DeGraff censuses prompted a list of questions, off I went to try to answer them.
The first question was about Catherine DeGraff born abt 1841 (actually probably closer to 1843 based on when Helen was born). Who was she? I still dunno! I can assume that she is a daughter, but that can be dangerous with older censuses which didn’t list the relationships. She could have just as easily been a more distant relative. I need a second source to make the connection stick. I searched the newspapers at Fulton History. I searched the databases on Ancestry. I checked the cemetery transcriptions which are available online. Nothing turns up. If she was a daughter who died young, she was not mentioned in her brother’s and sisters’ obits. That would likely be a result of not being alive to meet her nieces and nephews, so I can’t use that as conclusive proof either.
Susan born 1849 is “missing” in 1860. I can’t find her in the census with a regular search or near her family with searches using only partial data in the hope of catching a misspelling. Because people were “missed” somewhat frequently for any number of reasons, this doesn’t worry me, but it means there is no quick way to tie to a family that she might have been living with.
The DeGraff men who are nearby in the censuses are so varied a group that I can’t connect anyone of them with Harmanus with any certainty. It seems I would be in the same boat with each of them — there are no exact records on the internet that reveal which belongs to which set of parents. In fact, the names of these men are even harder to trace because the DeGraffs reused family names. Harmanus only showed up in a few family lines. It seem that every DeGraff had a son named John though! (Hence the THREE Johns nearby in 1870!) To work this out, I’d need to conduct a whole DeGraff family study. That might not be a bad idea for a future project, but probably not.