I’m having some Saturday Night Genealogy Fun (#SNGF), with help from Randy Seaver and his prompts! Feel free to join in.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: April 11, 2026

Prompt: “Do you have an ancestor with no defined birth and death dates or places? This week, please tell us about that ancestor and what clues you used to estimate a birth and death dates and places.”

Introduction

I hope you don’t mind if I interpret this week’s prompt a little loosely and apply it to a marriage date rather than a birth or death date.

While tracking my ancestor Jason Smith, it became clear that he had two wives. I first suspected that because a relative posted a tree online saying she was descended from his first wife. That left me trying to figure out when Jason married my ancestor Mary Denny, who then became the elusive Mary Smith. Sigh.

My Response to the Prompt

Because the children were born in the 1830s and 1840s, there was not much documentation in their records to clearly identify their mothers.

So I started with the children and looked for patterns in the sequence, especially any gap that might suggest a death and remarriage. Here is the lineup I was working from:

Adelia Smith, b. ?
William Mulford Smith, b. 14 May 1835
Deborah Ann Smith, b. 31 Dec 1837
Jason A. Smith, b. 20 Mar 1839
Mary Catharine Smith, b. 30 Oct 1841
George Henry Smith, b. 1 Oct 1843
Charles Edward Smith, b. 12 Jul 1845
Oscar F. Smith, b. ca. 1846
Alice Matilda Smith, b. 16 Feb 1850
Sarah H. Smith, b. Jan 1852
Lewis N. Smith, b. Aug 1859

Looking at that list, I suspected the wife change happened somewhere in the middle, but I did not think it was as late as Alice’s birth in 1850.

Then, finally, a newspaper notice turned up online.

I found an item in the Baptist Advocate dated November 14, 1840, and that gave me a much firmer point on the timeline.

That newspaper notice, announcing the November 4, 1840 marriage of Mr. Jason M. Smith and Miss Mary Denny, helped clarify when Jason’s household changed. So, my working theory based on the children’s birth dates turned into something much stronger once I had contemporary evidence to support it.

This guy did not waste any time finding a mama for his littles.

It was a good reminder that when exact dates are missing, we often build a timeline first from the children, the census, and whatever indirect clues we can gather, and then wait for one good record to bring the picture into focus.

How do you estimate unknown dates?

AI Disclosure

This post was created by me with the help of AI tools. While AI helps organize research, the storytelling and discoveries are my own.