The Stanford Boys

I will spare the readers too many details of the process of how I uncovered many of our ancestors and their stories, but suffice it to say, I duplicated many errors of other hack genealogists by linking to the wrong families, accepting others' work without verification (never again!), and jumping to wrong conclusions. Nonetheless, the more I delved into the process, the smarter I became.Serious genealogy requires being a natural sleuth, solving puzzles, noticing inconsistencies and anomalies. It requires more patience with niggling details than with my fellow human beings, like a good homicide detective.

It wasn't enough for me to simply find the right ancestors and post them in a tree - I wanted to know why our forefathers/mothers immigrated to America, why they lived where they lived, how they met their spouses, and who were those strange children living in their house? I wanted to know if they owned slaves, what they did for a living, how many acres they owned, and whether they served in the military. I wanted to know if they lived long lives, how many of ther children survived, and a little about their circumstances in the 1700s, 1800s and early 20th century. I guess I was just ridiculously curious - more curious, sadly, than most of our predecessor cousins, since most of the Cook and Smith family didn't even exist on any family trees on Ancestry.com until I tracked them down.

The Hawk family gave us a smorgasbord of interesting stories.

In the previous entry, I introduced you to the fifth generation Hawk - David Keppel Hawk, son of Daniel Hawk, father of Lydia Mable Hawk (Grandpa D's mother), who lived most of the time in Oil City and married Sarah Elizabeth Snyder, b. 1840. DK Hawk was not Sarah's first husband. In fact, she was married to a man named John William Stanford, b. 1837 in Clarion County, PA. John William (who may have gone by William), served in the Civil War until he was discharged with an injury in March 1863. He died in 1866 at age 27, presumably as a result of those injuries, but we don't know for sure. We did find his military grave on the "Find a Grave" website.

In the 1850 and 1860s censuses at ages 10 and 20, Sarah is living with her parents, William Snyder and Lydia nee Huff in Richland, Clarion County, PA. (Note that Sarah names her only daughter, Lydia - a key to confirming family relationships.) She must have married Stanford sometime around 1861, but she is nowhere to be found in the 1870 census. We know she married David Keppel Hawk on August 5, 1873, because we tracked down the marriage license. In the marriage license she is listed as Sarah Elizabeth Stanford. She appears in the 1880 census as Sarah Hawk, living with DK and her three sons with him: Alfred, Charles and Harry Hawk.

Meanwhile, in the 1870 census, two little boys, Elmer and William Sanford [sic] are living with their grandparents the Snyders, with their uncles who are close to their age. Sarah's youngest brother is 17 years her junior and only five years older than Elmer. The Sanford (?) boys appear in the 1880 census in the Snyder household again, listed this time as Elmer and William Snyder, which led me to believe they were adopted. They weren't. They went on to use their given name Stanford and appeared in a history book about Venango County published when they were adults. By 1880, Lydia Snyder, their grandmother, was a widow and listed as "Sadie" in the census, which was also confusing, because it was noted in various documents that Sarah Snyder Hawk went by the name "Sadie." You can imagine how perplexing this was. Who were those mysterious Sanford/Stanford boys?

To add yet another crazy fact, Sarah's younger sister, Mathilda, b. 1846, married a man named William Martin Stanford, b. 1847, who turned out to be John William Stanford's cousin. Were those boys really Mathilda's? No. Not possible! Many of you would have hurled yourself off a bridge by now, but I was determined to solve the Stanford Boys mystery. I finally found a definitive document that confirmed that Sarah and John William Stanford had two sons, Elmer b. 1862, and William Robert b. 1864. I found a book on Google Books about the history of Venango County, and it spells out who Elmer and William Stanford were. William Stanford and Sarah's youger brother Charles ("C.C.") Snyder went into business together in Oil City and were written about in this book.

But why were the Stanford boys living with their grandparents? Why didn't they go with their mother, Sarah, when she married DK Hawk? They lived right down the street in Oil City from their mother and step-father throughout their childhoods, yet stayed with their grandmother.

Did Sarah abandon them? Did DK Hawk tell her he would marry her only if she left her sons with her mother? We will never know. We do know that DK Hawk had moved to Green County, Missouri with his parents, Daniel Hawk and Elizabeth Buzard by the 1870 census (the one where Sarah Snyder Stanford is nowhere to be found), only to reappear in Oil City by 1873 to marry Sarah Snyder.

They must have known each other before Sarah married John Stanford. Daniel Hawk and his family were in Oil City in 1860, but moved west sometime before 1870 and stayed in Missouri until Daniel took ill and came back to PA in 1891 to die and be buried in Grove Hill Cemetery. Were DK and Sarah sweethearts before he moved to Missouri? She married another man after he left, and when her husband died in 1866, she sent a carrier pigeon to Missouri to let him know. It's not like she could call him on the phone, let alone post a new status on Facebook. Obviously, they had to have been corresponding all this time.

This is a love story with a sad twist. Elmer Ellsworth Stanford died young, possibly as early as the mid 1880s. His uncle, James Nelson Snyder b. 1845 (Sarah's brother), with whom he grew up, named his son Elmer Ellsworth Snyder in 1883, and his brother, William, named his son Elmer Ellsworth Stanford, b. 1885. So, that's kind of sweet.