Research and Conversations With Claude

 

California Gold Rush family

A blog post that I wrote about my 4th great grandfather Joseph Chicken Sr. whose gravesite I visited for the second time a few years back, elicited a response from a previously unknown cousin of mine. We have been corresponding via emails back and forth and sharing information. When I get these emails and requests, I typically start going back through my research to try and get facts straight and such and this time was no different. However, at the same time this was going on, I was also applying finish to six sets of chaos coasters so between coats while waiting for it to cure, I found myself with time on my hands.

So I decided to focus on one of my nearby ancestors, in this case a fellow by the name of John Bolton who is the father of Joseph Chicken's first wife Frances Ann Bolton. John is sort of a blank canvas to me because he got caught up in the California Gold Rush of 1849, the only one of my direct ancestors to do so. However, I'm not sure he ever made it back. Years ago, I found a book on life in Lafayette County, Wisconsin where he was a lead miner that mentioned that many of the miners left for the California gold fields during the gold rush. I have no direct evidence that John went but I suspect he did for a couple reasons.

First, during the 1850 U.S. Federal Census, he wife and two children were living with another family in Wisconsin and John wasn't mentioned other than his wife is listed as still being married. Secondly, in the next record I have for the family which is the 1861 England Census, it shows the family as moving back to England. The census also shows two more interesting tidbits of information. First that John's wife Mary is listed as being widowed and that the youngest addition to the family is a son named Jerimiah that is listed as having been born in California in 1854. So from those two records, I have long surmised that John perhaps died during the Gold Rush in California and without him, his family immigrated back to England from whence they came. Fortunately for me, my 3rd great grandmother Frances, John's middle child, would sail back to America and marry Joseph Chicken's son Joseph Chicken Jr. who for some reason changed his surname to Baker, a name that carried through to my grandmother. 

That's the back story to what I am about to tell you next. So with my new cousin focusing my attention on this branch of my family tree and time on my hands, I thought I would plug in John Bolton's name into new A.I. driven resources to see what they might find. In this case, FamilySearch has an A.I. tool now that can read handwritten documents that have been scanned but never indexed, since having someone reading handwriting written hundreds of years ago and indexing all the names can be a labor intensive exercise. Artificial Intelligence evidently doesn't mind these sorts of mind numbing tasks. I quickly discovered this:

Naturalization Oath for John Bolton

That turned out to be a Naturalization Oath where John Bolton swore his allegiance to the United States. In it he also states his birthplace which has been here-to-for unknown to me other than England. Rather than try to read it myself, I just went with what the A.I. said which was Stilton, England. I know not where Stilton, England was so had to look it up on a map but it was quite aways from where conventional wisdom said John had likely grown up which is much further north in Yorkshire County. But I didn't question it and made note to investigate Stilton further in the future.

Flash forward another few days and again I had time to kill while waiting for finish to cure and I decided to run John Bolton's name through Claude to see if he could point me towards sources of information to investigate. I input all the information I had, including uploading the above copy of the naturalization oath and posed my question to Claude. Immediately Claude chastised me by saying that John Bolton wasn't born in Stilton but in a town called Skelmanthorpe which is in Yorkshire as evidences by the document above. So I looked at it again and compared it to my prior transcription from FamilySearch's A.I. bot that had said Stilton and I could see obviously Claude was correct. I guess the moral of the story is to verify what one A.I. says with another and then peer review it with my own eyes. 

While conversing with Claude about John Bolton, he suggested I should look in the 1852 California State Census for more information. Huh? I hadn't been aware of that. So that is just what I did and I found this document.

1852 California State Census for J. Bolton

It doesn't say John Bolton but it does list a J. Bolton and is a miner. I had a hard time reading the cursive writing going vertical but it does look to say "Borders on the Chuda Bar" in Yuba County, California. Doing some internet research, Yuba County, specifically the Yuba river was the epicenter for the famous gold rush and low and behold, I found a camp called Cordua Bar along it. So it could be my 4th great grandfather was mining along the Yuba in his final years. That is a lot more specific than the entire state of California which is as far as I had narrowed it down previously. So between this document and his naturalization oath, I can focus my research on more specific areas for birth and death documents. Of course, it may be all for not because John could have very well given up his search for gold and went back to Wisconsin where he died and was buried somewhere... or really anywhere in-between for that matter. Maybe Claude will have a better idea.