Excerpt from Comes to The Light - Chapter 8 - Who is Jane Senior?
Genealogy is a mix of common sense, geometry and biology. Let’s look at the process of a woman from a baby until she gets married to better understand this theory. When women are born, they carry the surname of their father until they marry. That same surname or what we call our maiden until we marry changes to the husband’s name. If she marries more than once, a woman’s surname will change with each subsequent marriage. That part is common sense. The biology comes in with the educated guess or hypothesis, like when I had to guess about Enoch Sr., and the meaning of the Indentured Slave contract he signed. The geometry comes in with providing proof for the theorems. If you remember, the goal in geometry is to prove an angle was an angle, and what type of angle it could be.
With Jane, I ended up having to use all three skills. I found Jane and Papa Johnnie’s father, John, in two instances: in the 1870 and 1880 U.S. Federal Census records. Both times, their children were living with them. Jane was having children seemingly the same way her granddaughter, (my grandmother) Annie Mae, had done: every eighteen months to two years. Since I knew Jane’s maiden name from one of her child’s death certificate, I decided to do a fresh search of Jane using her maiden name and her birth year.
When the information came back, of course I found her in the 1870 and 1880 U.S. Federal Census records. I noticed, however, in the 1870 census that there was a woman named Jane Williams. My great grandmother was listed as Jane Senior but this other woman who was listed as Jane Williams stood out to me. This Jane lived in the Grey Township area of Edgefield while my Jane was in the Blocker township area of Edgefield – the distance between the two townships was 22 miles. I was drawn to this Jane Williams because her birth year was 1837, two years distant from my great grandmother Jane Senior. I was starting to feel like Jane Williams might also be my Jane Senior. I re-examined the two 1870 census records I had found, citing the two different Janes. I looked at the date each record was enumerated. The one for the woman I knew to be Jane Senior was taken 1 August 1870. The one for Jane Williams was taken on 20 August 1870. Could one person be counted twice?...For more on Jane Senior purchase the book Comes to The Light: Learning About the Entangled Families of Edgefield, South Carolina
