Today I decided to look at the Gray family. If you look at our website you'll notice that we have a design called "Gray's Diamond". Our paternal grandmother's middle name was Gray. It was also the maiden name of her mother (Olive). Olive was born in Connecticut and I knew that her family was from that general area (near New York City).
To begin my research, I logged in to Ancestry.com and started searching for her grandfather - Richard Sylvester Gray. I started with him because his middle name is rather unique and I was hoping that would make for a quick and easy find. What I found was a book published in 1887 that was a history of the Gray name in the United States. In that book I found Olive's family and it was noted that her great-grandmother - Polly Gray - was still living at the time the book was published (1887) and that she lived with her granddaughter in Connecticut.
Knowing that Polly was living in 1887 and knowing the name of the granddaughter she was living with - I decided to try to find her in the 1880 census. A quick search for Polly Gray gave me not just the 1880 census, but also the 1860 and 1870 ones. Each time she is living with one of her sons. But the last one (in 1880) is what really surprised me. Here's a quick picture below with some key pieces highlighted.
It turns out that Polly (my 4th great-grandmother) was living with her son Henry and his wife Jane in 1880 in Brooklyn, New York. Not only that - but she was living on Graham Avenue. 520 Graham Avenue to be exact. Shocking for me to find this - because in 2008-2009 I lived at 538 Graham Avenue in Brooklyn - just one block away! Below are pictures of our street and our building. It's crazy to think that I used to walk the same streets as my great-great-great-great-grandmother - nearly 130 years later.
That's really cool!
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