The Sawyer household has required a bit more detective work, but I’m quite confident that we’ve found them. Let’s review what we know from Grandma Hannah:
- Aunt Caroline was 17 (the age of Harriet’s marriage) when the family moved from Ontario County to Cattaraugus County about 1827. She reached marriageable age while her family lived in Freedom.
- Where, presumably, she married a man named Sawyer.
- They then had four kids, known to their grandmother as Malvina, Oliver, Andrew, and George Sawyer.
- By 1856, as far as Hannah knew, all four were living in Michigan, Malvina as Mrs. Azro A Jaquish.
So when we look in the US Census for Freedom, we find
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in 1820 (when Freedom was still called Ischua), only one Sawyer household, that of prominent early settler “Colonel” Earl Sawyer, who served as Justice of the Peace 1823-6 and as Town Clerk 1821-28: a man and a woman, each aged 26-45, and two girls and two boys, all under 10.
- in 1830, Earl’s family consists of one man in his 40s, a woman in
her 70s, another woman in her 30s, three boys and a girl under 5, two boys 5-9, one boy 15-19, one girl 10-14, and one girl 15-19. Big family. Probably includes some farm-hands and other boarders. Room in the group for the four children noted in 1820.
- BUT…there’s now another Sawyer family in Freedom: that of
Caleb Sawyer with one male 20-30 and one female 15-20. We begin to suspect that we’ve found the newlywed Caleb (aged 22) and Clarissa Caroline Wheeler Sawyer (20). Especially since Caroline doesn’t appear in the Wheeler enumeration for 1840.
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The 1840 US Census of Green Oak, Livingston County, Michigan lists Caleb Sawyer (20-29), a woman 20-29, a boy and a girl under 5, and two boys 5-9.
Sounds a lot like Caleb, Caroline, and the four Sawyer grandkids Hannah knew, freshly moved in from Freedom.
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