Saturday, January 5, 2008

The Elusive Russell Smith - Post 2

In Post 1, I summarized the information I gathered recently about Russell Smith (born RI ca 1775), who married Esther --?--, and had at least three children, Ranslow Smith (1805->1870), Lyman Smith (1807-1889) and George Smith (1812-1876). The family history information from Old World Wisconsin says that Russell Smith settled in Jefferson County, New York in about 1800.

Over the years, I have gathered a wealth of Smith information from Jefferson County. From online searches and a research trip in 2004 to Jefferson County, which included visits to the Jefferson County Genealogical Society holdings at the Flower Memorial Library in Watertown and the South Jefferson County Historical Association in Adams, the information on hand includes:

1) Deed Indexes, 1806-1885, Grantor and Grantee for "Smith"

2) Surrogate Court Records - Estate papers (1805-1945), Estates, orders and decrees (1830-1910), Record of wills (1830-1900). I abstracted all Smith entries in the Estate papers file.

3) 1810 to 1850 US Census, and 1825 and 1835 NY State Census, data for Smiths in Jefferson County, by town.

4) Some of the Smith family records from the South Jefferson County Historical Association in Adams. I obtained these handwritten and typewritten pages, which were developed over time from records collected at the association. I don't believe I captured ALL Smith family records - only the ones with families in Henderson, Ellisburgh and Rodman townships.

5) Jefferson County cemetery list, in alphabetical format, for all Smiths in the database (10 pages, about 420 entries).

6) Three articles from the book "Old Houses of the North Country" that describe the Ranslow Smith house in Henderson, the Harvey Smith house in Henderson and the Jesse Smith house in Adams.

I have entered all of this data into my genealogy database in hopes that the parents of Ranslow, George and Lyman would magically appear, but that hasn't happened.

Unhappily, the name Russell Smith does not appear in any of these records. It looks like I'm stuck in a majorly way, doesn't it?

My current mantra is - "Smith families are easy to find, but hard to figure out."

1 comment:

Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...

You certainly seem to have covered Jefferson County! Have you looked for land & probate records in Oneida county?