New Year, Old Problems

One of my very few New Year's resolutions was to clear the stack of papers on my genealogy work table. Mostly notes, clues to follow up on, transcripts of records for people who are probably related but who don't yet fit into my tree, etc.

One such paper dealt with my great-great-grandfather William Hastings, whose parentage has been a long-standing brick wall. He was born in 1870, and I had identified 2 possibilities in the 1870 US Census, neither of which appears in 1880.

I had found William's son Harlon in 1910 living in the household of William & Ella Whaley, and the note was about my unsuccessful efforts to find a marriage record for them, to try to figure out the relationship. I looked for her in previous censuses. Quickly I found an "Ella Hasting" in 1880 with the right age, and in the same household, a "Willie Hasting" age 10. Bingo.

The household they were living in, described as "boarders", was that of Jesse & Mary Clifton. I immediately recognized them as the grandparents of the Georgia Ryan, William's future wife. This was a line that I had names for, but had not yet fully researched, and had not yet traced them through census returns. Also in the household were a son of Jesse and Mary, name illegible, and daughter-in-law, also Mary. With help from Ancestry hints, I soon found the marriage record for Jesse Clifton, the younger, and Mary Hastings, widow. Mary was the mother of William and Ella, and, in one of the 1870 census records I had already found, the wife of Elihu Hastings. (to minimize the age difference between her and Jesse, Mary had reduced her age by 10 years in the 1880 Census, to the extent that from the 1880 Census alone, she was unlikely to have been William's mother).

Never underestimate the power of collateral lines to open up brick walls.