Story: How we found Rufus

All these stories depend on input from many sources. Finding Rufus was no exception. Here is the barebones sequence of events that led us to find him. Karen Elias, Helen Leaver, Malcolm Stottler (dec.) and Mary Brett all contributed over time.

Alfred Adams was the earliest name we knew in that line. He married Hannah Scott in Greenwich in 1834. Later he was in Stamford working. Otherwise he seems to have left no trail.

I worked through Adamses in Redding CT, where there was a cluster of them, and in New York from Poughkeepsie down to Port Chester and up to Bedford. There were some in Norwalk, too. I looked wherever there were Adamses.

Alfred was born in either CT or NY, depending on the census. He was born around 1815, with some variation on either side.

Candidates for his birth family that I had recently focused on included John in Bedford NY, all the Adamses in Stamford in 1810, and Nathan and Rufus in Greenwich. 

The idea was to go through the censuses, which at that stage had only numbers of family members in each age range, to see which might have a son born in about 1815.

The year 1815 makes it tricky because for example in the 1820 census he could have been in the 5-10 year old range, or the 0-5 range.

The idea is to eliminate families that did not have males of the right age, then use a finer-toothed comb for the remainder. Then to compare the results with the family structure in the 1830 census to see if the good candidates from 1820 still made sense. And likewise compare with the 1810 to see if a child in the right range might have been too old.

A few candidates emerged: John in Bedford, Nathaniel in Stamford, Rufus in Greenwich...

I mentioned what I was doing to Karen Elias, who is a Scott but not an Adams, because she has a sound head for research and analysis, and she said, "I think it's Rufus". 

So I took another look at Rufus's family structure:

1820 census: girl 5-10, boy 0-5. 

1830 census: boy 10-15, girl 5-10, boy 5-10

1840 census: girl 5-10

The boy in 1820 and the older boy in 1830 could have been Alfred. It was worth pursuing.

Karen pointed out that even though one of Alfred's census records reported he had been born in NY, the rest said CT. So it was reasonable to stop looking at NY. That left only Nathaniel, Rufus, and several Adamses up the coast around the Westport area, farther afield than we usual find family members from that long ago but not impossible.

So I continued to look at Rufus. 

By the time the censuses started to list names of family members, in 1850, Alfred was 35 or so and long gone from his growing-up family.

So we needed other sources of information, and we could hope that other family members might help out.

I found a tantalizing tidbit in Malcolm Stottler's papers a few months ago, after his daughter Helen Leaver had sent them to me from her own collection. Among the papers we found a page that suggested that Malcolm was trying to assess whether Alfred could be the son of Rufus Adams and Sarah Douglas, which later I was to discover must have come from Stamford cemetery records. There he mentioned this possibility as the 5th of his possible scenarios, but the other 4 were missing. He also mentioned there that Alfred had been born at Sound Beach, a section on the far southeastern part of Greenwich right up against the Stamford line.

The cemetery records were from Woodland cemetery, which is very close to Sound Beach.

I had to assess why Malcolm might have put in his notes that Alfred was from Sound Beach. It was stated as a fact, not as one of many scenarios. So I took it at face value, though elsewhere in Malcolm's notes there were obvious errors. At least it was a good starting point.

The next source I used was the Stamford cemetery records that are posted in this blog. I thought the nearness of certain graves was important, and I knew that the Stottlers, Warrens, and Davenports, among others, were all family members. 

And very close to graves for some members of those families were the graves of Rufus Adams, Sarah Douglas Adams. Next to them are Addie Duncan, David Duncan, and Annie Adams Duncan. 

In addition to 'Annie Adams Duncan' the Duncan name really attracted my attention. Mary Jane Adams Stottler, Alfred's daughter, named her 4th son Lorenzo Duncan Stottler. So I suspected Duncan was a family name and here was Annie Adams marrying David Duncan. 

I just couldn't make the pieces fit.

This email I wrote to Karen as I thought this through will tell the next chapter in the story.