Hector Watson or Hector Walton?

One has to love newspaper articles that provide insight into our ancestors' lives besides when they were born, married, died, or broke the law.

That's the case with this Trenton, New Jersey, paper item on Hector--Watson or Walton, depending upon which part of the article is correct.

Date: Friday, December 31, 1880  

Paper: Trenton State Gazette (Trenton, NJ)

  obtained on  Genealogybank.com

Bucks County is a reference to Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Hector apparently brought a load of goods to sell--turkeys, chickens, eggs, butter, etc. but had some trouble with his horse that became frightened.

The article refers to him as "Mr. Walton" at the end of the article--apparently a reference to the same Hector.

A search of the 1880 census should determine if there was a Hector Walton in Bucks County. On the surface, one cannot be certain whether the individual in question is Hector Watson or Hector Walton.
Directories for Bucks County may also answer the question of whether there was both a Hector Watson and Hector Walton in the area.

Of course, the Hector I'm looking for should be a farmer or someone with an occupation reasonably tied to the person in the newspaper article. The problem is that on the surface, we cannot assume that the first reference to Hector is automatically the correct one.

Funeral Notice Mentions One Son and I Needed NJ

Death notices are not always particularly full  of relationships, but occasionally one gets a clue. This funeral from February of 1906 mentions the home of Hector C. Watson's son James T. Watson. The name James was fairly common in this family, so a son with that name was not a surprise, but confirmation is nice.

Date: Sunday, February 18, 1906  

Paper: Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA)  obtained on  Genealogybank.com

I'll be honest--I'm not a city kid, so I am not really certain what "carriages meet trolley" means, but I do know what interment at Penn's Manor means. 

Searching for Watson was a little bit easier a I had his year of death and I knew that he resided in Philadelphia. With a last name like Watson, one has to have additional search parameters in order to have results lists that one can reasonably navigate. In this case, I did restrict my results to focus on hits  from Pennsylvania newspapers. 

Search screen  on  Genealogybank.com 

Turns out I should not have restricted my search on   Genealogybank.com to just Pennsylvania. A "copy and pasted" death notice was also located in the Trenton Evening Times from Trenton, New Jersey, on 15 February 1906.
Next step is to find Hector in the 1900 census. City directories are also advised as I don't have those and urban research usually indicates that directories be accessed.