Brick walls: Asa BLY and Elizabeth GIBSON, 4th great-grandparents
Karen K | Wednesday, November 16, 2011 [UPDATE BELOW]
I can't seem to find the parents of either.
The only record I have for Asa BLY is of his marriage to Elizabeth GIBSON in Rockingham, New Hampshire on 5 Mar 1812.
Asa was of Plaistow, and was almost certainly a grandson of James BLY and Joanna HADLEY, who settled there and had ten children. Problem is, I don't know which one of their sons-- if any-- he was born to.
He seems to have dropped to the earth to get married and have a couple of daughters, and then disappeared. No birth record, no census records, no death record, nothing.
He and his wife Elizabeth had two known children:
Eliza, b. 1816 in Epping, d. 19 Aug 1896 in Nottingham. She was married to Jacob C. TUTTLE.
Sophronia, b. 5 Oct 1818 in Epping, d. 8 Oct 1905 in Fremont. She married 1) John MACE, 1841 and 2) Joseph FELLOWS, 1859. I'm descended from Sophronia and John Mace.
According to the 1850 census, Sophronia was living in Plaistow with her children (3rd great-grandfather John Mace had literally vanished one day when he had gone out to cut wood-- only his axe and his lunch pail were ever found). I noticed that her "next door" neighbors were Benjamin and Nancy BLY-- my hunch is that Benjamin was a brother of Asa and Sophronia's uncle.
And Nancy's maiden name, I found, was GIBSON. She was the daughter of Robert and Rachel (BROWN) GIBSON-- who also had a daughter Elizabeth, born in 1784.
Was Nancy a sister of my 4th great-grandmother Elizabeth? I have no evidence that it was this Elizabeth who married Asa Bly, but it seems a fairly common thing back then for two siblings to marry into the same family.
Banging my head against my laptop's keyboard...
Karen K
Update: When I looked more carefully at Sophronia Bly Mace's entry in the 1850 census, I realized that she was not living next door to Benjamin and Nancy Bly, but with them (Sophronia and her children are listed as a separate family, but in the same household). She is listed as a "pauper", so she had evidently moved in with Benjamin and Nancy out of financial necessity.
This means Benjamin and Nancy were definitely relatives of Sophronia's, likely fairly close ones-- my hunch about them being her aunt and uncle is probably correct.