The leaves that pop up

Occasionally I get an email from ancestry.com letting me know that their system has found some information that might be associated with someone in my family tree. Frequently it turns out to be someone similar, but not the actual person in my tree. But, often enough, they find a gem of data. This weekend I received such an email. This time it was concerning an 1880 census taken in Oregon County, Missouri. It was the census information for a family headed by an M. V. Smith, and included a daughter Anna Smith. I had never found this one on my own, and might have skipped over it if I did. Since it was brought to my attention I examined it closely.

It turns out this is the Martin VanBuren Smith family with their daughter Queen Anne Smith. Queen Anne Smith who was 12 at the time of this census in 1880 went on later to become the wife of my great grandfather William Rich Bowen.

Prior to this, I did not have any specific data to put them in Missouri. They had started out in Tennessee and later returned to Tennessee. Now I have another hole filled in. This is one of the things that makes genealogy so much fun to me, the surprises. Things like this make the subscription worthwhile.