HAGAMAN-BARNHART Clue uncovered....

For sometime now I have been trying to uncover the linage of my 3x great grandmother, Elizabeth (Barnhart) Hagaman.  This weekend I found a nugget that might just prove to be the link.  Elizabeth was born 4 December 1818 and we learn from a brief death notice (she died on 15 October 1890 and is buried in the Somerset Center Cemetery) that appeared in the Jackson Citizen Patriot that her birthplace was Macedon, Wayne County, New York.  Macedon is located just southeast of Rochester, NY and the Erie Canal runs right through that community.  In the past three years we have also learned that her husband, Jacob Hagaman's family was from Walworth and Macedon.  With a known location, this triggered a more in-depth hunt to discover Elizabeth's family.  What I discovered was a large family of several generations of Barnharts living in Macedon and the neighboring community of Palmyra (Palmyra, the birth place of Joseph Smith the founder of the Mormon faith).  But each male Barnhart I look at in an effort to see if Elizabeth could have been a daughter didn't work out.  So, I wasn't sure what I could do to narrow this down until this weekend--what I discovered was a Jacob Barnhart (and his wife Elizabeth) who were from Wayne County, NY and had migrated to Branch county, Michigan in the 1830s.  They had several children that were listed on their findagrave.com post, which indicated a gap between one of their oldest son's and the rest of their children....could this be a clue?

Next I notice that Jacob's spouse, died in Litchfield, Michigan in 1859.  OK--that can't be a coincidence...Litchfield is a small town in Hillsadale County and I discovered that when Jacob and Elizabeth Hagaman migrated to Michigan in the 1840s they first settled in Litchfield where Jacob was a merchant and it was there in 1858 that their youngest child, George Henry Hagaman was born in 1857.  Then I examined the 1850 census and two sons of Jacob and Elizabeth Barnharts were living in Litchfield.  OK--that seems more of a possibility in my mind now.  But, we really need to figure out what documentation we can find to help prove these relationships. 

--Ive begun looking at newspapers

--death certificates prior to 1897 are pretty sparse

--several of Jacob and Elizabeth Barnharts children remained in Girard, Branch County...which is only about 20 miles from Litchfield.  So, I'm going to pursue looking at their known children to see if there are any published genealogies or biographical sketches in the vanity press books of the late 18th century.

Cross your fingers for me!!!!