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Note: N2382 The reader is warned that the identification of these people is tentative. FamilySearch lists Charles Day as having two wives, first Mary Gould, and second, Mary Anne Little. For numerous reasons I believe this to be correct; see the following notes and the notes on Mary Anne Little. However, Family Search is frequently unreliable and I have no primary sources for this. It is possible that there were more children; I have found the currently listed ones mainly in census records. I surmise that Charles is the father of John, Horace, and possibly Mary Anne by wife Mary Gould. I found Charles in the 1830 census of Crawford County, Troy Township, Pennsylvania. His household included a boy between 5 and 10 (probably Charles Jr.), one between 10 and 15 (probably John), a man between 50 and 60 (Charles), one girl between 5 and 10 (probably Nancy), two between 10 and 15 (one of whom would be Mary Anne), and a woman between 30 and 40 (probably Mary Anne the mother). Living next door was Horace Day, the right age to be Charles’s son, so I am assuming that Horace and John are brothers. In the 1850 census I was able to get his wife’s name and age (this must be his second wife Mary Anne); she was indeed considerably younger than he; and it would appear that, if she is Horace’s mother, she bore him when she was only about 14. Of course, if the 1787 birth date from FamilySearch is correct, then that would make her 18, if she is Horace’s mother. It is also possible that Horace and perhaps John are the sons of a first wife who died young, and that Mary Ann is his second wife. If indeed they were married in 1819, as FamilySearch says, then she would indeed be his second wife and not the mother of Horace and John. This is the object for future research. Daughter Dorothy also came from the 1850 census. That Charles was born in Connecticut enabled me to trace this branch of the family further. He obviously moved to New York; Horace and Charles A. were born there, as well as young Charles’s wife, in 1829. In fact I found Charles and family in the 1810 census of Granville, New York; the census includes two boys under ten years of age (one of whom would be Horace), three girls under ten, and two adults between 26 and 44 (Charles and Mary). The four other children are currently unidentified. Youngest daughter Dorothy was born in Pennsylvania. This leads to the conclusion that Charles Sr. and family emigrated to Pennsylvania from New York around 1830 but before the 1830 census was taken. The ancestry of Charles comes from an ancestral file at FamilySearch; his birth in Connecticut enabled me to discover this record. In December of 2008 Byron Davis called the following to my attention: Here's something new to me today: "Our county and its people : a historical and memorial record of Crawford County, Pennsylvania" (Samuel P. Bates, LL.D., 1899), p. 922: "Charles Day, Sr., of Sparta township, came from Whitehall to Sugar Creek, Venango county, Pennsylvania, in 1826, where he was a farmer. Later he came to Titusville, where he carried on the blacksmithing business; and from there he moved to Rome township, where he engaged in farming and blacksmithing. He married Mary Ann Crosett. Their son John was born at Whitehall, New York, in 1819, and came with his father to Pennsylvania, where he married Sarah, daughter of William and Clarissa Davenport. They settled in Rome, where he followed his father's trade and afterward removed to Spartansburg (in 1865), and still worked at the blacksmith's trade. He had four children,--George F., Luther W., William, who died as an infant, and Mary E. (Mrs. Edwin Hoffman)." . . . [followed by a bit more on Edwin Hoffman] Whether this is the same Charles Day is in considerable doubt. His son John was born in 1819, whereas ours was born in 1813. And this John born in 1819 has a completely different set of children from our John born in 1813. But this certainly casts some doubt as to whether this (or any) Charles Day was the father of our John. More research needs to be done.
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