Surname Saturday: Cahoon

Well, here we are at another Saturday and that means another look at a surname that I'm researching.  We come back to my lines this week with one that I learned about only very recently, and that discovery came about after discovering that a surname further down the line was misspelled.  So, today we look at the Cahoon surname connection.

The path that led me to this line was through a quick search for information on the parents of Mary Kyte (F; b. 29 Aug 1861; m. 2 Sep 1880 Jonathan Rice; d. 30 March 1917).  When I received the book According to the Record recently, the index had entries for the Kite surname but not the Kyte surname.  Based on that, I tried searching for Mary Kite instead and found her and her family in the U.S. census, but then Beta FamilySearch helped further by doing the search in a "sounds like" query and found the family listed in other census records spelled as Keyt.  The bonus in this search was that I found her mother's maiden name, Voliva, which in turn led me to Sarah Cahoon.

Sarah was born in North Carolina right around the time of the American Revolution.  Different research results that I've seen list her birth year as either 1774 or 1779.  The North Carolina marriages dataset at Beta FamilySearch lists her marriage to Joseph J. Voliva on 27 June 1795 in Tyrrell County, North Carolina; unfortunately this doesn't rule out either birth year, as she could have been either 21 or 16 at the time of her marriage, and in the late 18th century, it wasn't unheard of to marry at that young age.  I know of three children born to this marriage: William Glenn Voliva (M; b. 8 Apr 1798; d. 7 may 1855), Nathan Voliva (M; b. 1800; d. 19 Sep 1855) and Thomas Jefferson Voliva (M; b. circa 1803; d. 10 Aug 1852).  It appears that the whole family moved in the 1830s from North Carolina to Fountain County, Indiana.  The migration is another case of multiple dates recorded, so some of the family may have preceded others to Indiana.  Sarah is listed in the 1850 U.S. census living with her son Nathan and two of his daughters in Richland Township, Fountain County, Indiana.  Sarah's death is recorded as happening some time in the 1860s or 1870s, and my guess is that it happened in Indiana as well.  I haven't found any information on Sarah's parents yet.

Since there is so much doubt with some of the records that I found, both in published research results and in IGI records, the next steps to research this line are, obviously, to find more reliable sources to prove and nail down the dates and places that are still in question.  Once I have that, I may find her parents listed in some of those records, but then the next step will be to extend this brick wall by another generation.