It’s October!!! No one told Mother Nature in Tucson since the high is 91 today, but the evenings cool down into the low 60s and mornings are wonderful, so the weather is really just about perfect.

It’s also the first weekend of the month and Randy Seaver has a new challenge for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun this week:

1)  Sometimes an ancestor or relative just disappears out of the records and we cannot find another record after a certain date. 

2)  Tell us about one or more of your relatives or ancestors that have disappeared and not been found since a certain date.  Do you have any idea of what might have happened to them?

This week’s challenge isn’t just the typical “brick wall” where a family might have remained in one place for a long time, but details like maiden names, ancestral origins, etc are not known.

This is an ancestor who, moving forward in time, gets scooped up by Martians and taken away, never to be heard from again.

I definitely have a few of those, but who to choose?

I think I’m going with a definite oldie but goodie, my 7X great grandparents, James and Elizabeth (Williams) Lakin who lived in Groton, Middlesex, Massachusetts.

They were married in Groton on 12 February 1717/18 and nine children were born to them with all births being registered in Groton town records.

James and Elizabeth are last found on 5 April 1765, selling their land to their son, Ambrose.

I suspect that James and Elizabeth continued to live with their son Ambrose and his family. Whether either lived to see American independence is unknown, but they were not at home with Ambrose in the 1790 census and I suspect they died before the American Revolution even began.

If they lived in the South or on the frontier, it wouldn’t bug me that there are no further records for this couple.

However, living in Massachusetts with their marriage record and complete birth records for their children all recorded in Groton, it is very strange that neither had their deaths recorded.

No probate isn’t that odd because James sold his real estate to Ambrose in 1765. It’s also odd that no gravestones have been found for either of them even though there are many surviving stones from the 1700s in Massachusetts.

Ambrose eventually moved to Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, but that wasn’t until the late 1790s and his surviving siblings all lived next to Groton in Pepperell and died there.

It’s always possible that James and Elizabeth shared one gravestone, which has been lost to time, but it doesn’t explain their deaths not being recorded in any town records.

They both just vanished into thin air!

Randy, thanks as always for another fun challenge.