X00288: What happened to Caroline Seymore Sanders Williams? Solved!!

Caroline Seymore Sanders was the wife of Isaac Amos Williams. They married 22 Oct 1850 in Guelph, Canada West [D04283]. The family later moved to Lindsay, Victoria, Ontario. Isaac Amos died in 1885 [D03762].

But after 1885, I had no further records on Caroline and so had no idea what had happened to her after 1885. I checked the Ontario death records, but couldn't find her. I checked census records with no results. I even checked the Ontario marriage records to see if she had remarried after 1885, with no luck there either.

So, I put aside that X-file for some time and started researching other members of the family. When I was researching the family of her second daughter, Fanny Sophia Williams and Fanny's husband, Lewis Dyer, I found Caroline living with them in the 1891 census in Uxbridge, Ontario [D05263]. So, I had at least traced her to 1891.

I started looking for the cemetery records for Isaac Amos Williams, figuring that if I found his gravestone, it might give some clues. I knew that he had died in Lindsay, so I had figured that he had been buried there. But I checked all of the usual cemetery sites: Find-a-Grave, Ontario Cemetery Finding Aid, Canadian Headstones, Ontario Genweb Project, BillionGraves, Canadian Gravemarker Gallery and didn't find a thing.

But I had a bit of luck when I did a search on the Ontario Genealogical Society's TONI database. There, I found a cemetery reference for Isaac Amos Williams. It had him listed as being buried in Riverside Cemetery in Lindsay. The name and date matched. So, I contacted the Kawartha Branch of the OGS and they did a look-up for me. Not only was Isaac buried there, but Caroline as well. And the stone inscription indicated that she had died on 7 Apr 1896 at age 70.

With that new knowledge, I did another search of the Ontario death records with just the year and her first name and I managed to find the record. The record had been incorrectly indexed as "Caroline Seymore" [D05298]. I've since submitted a correction request to Ancestry.



Lewis Dyer is the informant on the death record, to further confirm that it is the correct person.

So the X-file now appears to be solved. After her husband died, Caroline moved in with her daughter and son-in-law and likely lived with them until she died in 1896. Now the next step is to see if I can get a photograph of the gravestone.


Sources:
[D03762] Ontario Archives of Ontario, Ontario, Canada Deaths, MS935, Reel 42: 560, 35, 16571; digital image, Ancestry.ca, "Ontario, Canada Deaths," Ancestry.ca (15 May 2018).

[D04283] "Marriages," (Guelph) Guelph Weekly Herald, 22 Oct 1850, p. 3, col. 1.

[D05263] 1891 census of Canada, Ontario, district 102, Uxbridge, p. 30, family 152; RG 31; digital images, Ancestry.ca, Ancestry (accessed 27 Dec 2018).

[D05298] Ontario Archives of Ontario, Ontario, Canada Deaths, MS935; Reel: 81: 355, 19363, 15; digital image, Ancestry.ca, "Ontario, Canada Deaths," Ancestry.ca (19 Jan 2019).