As we were working on the "David Milks problem", I mentioned Eliza Keays' diary and the son named William Jeremiah Keays about whom I knew nothing. Sandy took this up with me and together we put together the full story of his life shown in the Wm. J. Keays section of this website. Much of what you will see there came to me as a result of Sandy providing me with direction about where to look. Sandy also found and sent me several of the newspaper clippings and land records so helpful in piecing together his life.

Sandy found Wm. J. Keays' descendants in 20th century U.S. census pages and this led to telephone calls to Florida and San Francisco in which I was able to chat with William's descendants on several occasions.

Other newspaper clippings from Goderich and Sarnia came from Peter Sturdy of Sarnia Ont. who also has an interest in William J. Keays. He was referred to me by the librarian at the Huron County Genealogical Society who I had consulted about the Keays' graves in Goderich.

I went back to the Diary of Eliza Amelia Giff-Keays-Bellamy and resurrected one of my mysteries - that of an unknown person named Jeremiah with whom Eliza exchanged many letters. I decided to search, in great detail, the 1851 census of Augusta Twp. using microfilm available from Archives Canada through interlibrary loan. This particular census record contains all the names of all the members of a household. Earlier censuses had just the name of the head of the household together with simple counts of males, females, adults and children living in the house.

In June, 2003, I was in our Niagara Falls Library viewing this microfilm and I found, as expected, the whole Samuel Bellamy family which included Eliza Giff-Keays-Bellamy. As I continued to scroll very slowly through the microfilm, I came across the name of James Burwash and his family. He and his wife are mentioned several times in the Diary and James Burwash had helped Eliza and William Keays register James Keays' will and ultimately transfer title of James' land to William. I pored over the Burwash family members one-by-one and when I got to the end, the last name in the household wasn't Burwash, it was Jeremiah Giff!!! Here was the Jeremiah mentioned in the Diary in 1855. He was a relation of Eliza's through her family back in Ireland. Another read of the Diary showed a simple sentence I had missed. Eliza wrote: "I sent letters to William and my nephew." Jeremiah was with William in Goderich, Ont. and he was Eliza's nephew!

I traced Jeremiah Giff to Goderich with William Keays in the 1861 census and then he disappeared. Sandy Wunder took over. She found him in the 1880 U.S. census in Chicago. Using census records, she traced his family down to 1930 and provided me with photocopies of the individual census pages. One contained a person named George Giff born in 1927. I checked the Chicago telephone directory, found George Giff and telephoned him. We had a good chat for a half hour or more.