A Comforting Thought and Some Follow Up on Carles

First some follow up on Carles Thompson.

It turns out that Carles Thompson and Susannah from Butler County PA (see last post Hollingsworths next door) are actually Charles Thompson and Susannah Colby from Butler County PA. I was able to find some family history on them. Charles is born in Massachusetts and his daughters marry Washington Perry Smith (ironically born in Indiana). Charles' son Warren dies in the area before his son Michael. No Levis are mentioned in the material I found.

Charles has some interesting connections to Allisons from the History of Butler County:

 Mr. SMITH has been an active worker in the Republican party
since its organization, has held the office of school director for
sixteen years, and has always manifested a laudable interest in the
progress of the public schools. He was married in 1848, to Harriet, a
daughter of Charles THOMPSON, of Massachusetts. She died in 1850,
leaving one child, who died in early youth. His second wife was
Emeline THOMPSON, a sister of his first wife, to whom have been born
five children, as [p. 1073] follows: Harriet N., wife of John N.
ALLISON;

JAMES ALLISON, a native of Ireland, first settled in Maryland, and
came to Centre township, Butler county, Pennsylvania, in 1802. He
purchased 300 acres of land, and cleared a farm, a portion of which is
now in possession of his grandson, John ALLISON, the old homestead
being owned by O. D. THOMPSON. Mr. ALLISON married a Miss THOMPSON,
and his family were as follows: Frank; William; Robert; Margaret, who
married James PHILLIPS, and Ellen, who married Henry THOMAS


Now for the comforting thought.

John B. Hollingsworth and family from my last post make their way to Indiana between 1850 and 1860, without any decade of layover in Ohio. That means to me that my searches in Ohio may be fruitless. It's comforting though because it means that people really did just leave Butler PA and move to Madison Indiana. The family of Howell D. Thompson seems to make a similar trip from York PA to Randolf, Grant and Madison county Indiana so it's not uncommon at all.

What is uncommon to me is how I can track all these other families back to Pennsylvania, but not Levi. I've tracked multiple Thompson families in the Madison area and I can't get any of them back to Butler County PA. What makes me feel a lot better about this lack of data is that I CAN get John B. Hollingsworth, neighbor in 1860, back to Butler.

If Levi is on the up and up and he really is just misrepresented in the census records or in the index of those records (as he has been in every one I've found) then at least I have circumstantial evidence of other Butler-ites in the same town..one house away in Madison Indiana.

If Levi is not on the up and up and possibly doesn't even know his origins, but borrowed a background to make life easier when he joined the Army. Then I have a person he would have associated with who influenced him enough to give him some kind of past and a profession he would fall back on when times became hard.

Either way, he didn't just appear in Madison Indiana like a magic rabbit and that, to me anyway, is comforting.

Now I should check into the family that John B. Hollingsworth is living with because there is another stone cutter there and I need to look at the three Thompson children living with the Bayer/Boyers in North Butler.

Then of course there is the matter of John Thompson and Jane Stevenson's children. John dies in the 1840s, that doesn't count him out as a father of Levi but it's cutting it close. His other sons would be a decade or more older in that scenario. I have a few sons listed for John and Jane with no ages assigned. Any of them could be parents of Levi too.

The trail though really seems to stop at John. He is from Lancaster or Chartier's creek, and is one of the many faces of John Thompson in Butler. He may be the one with 11 children...or he may not.