Sometimes, on a journey, you veer off the path you had chosen to take. Perhaps you saw a sign offering you a chance to see some great local sight. Maybe you just happened to look over and see something to the side of the road, and you wanted to check it out.
In one instance, my husband and I, while on our honeymoon trip, were enticed by a tape.
Though the Polaroid I took was slightly damaged, it still shows the “Sky Blue Journal” set of tapes that offered us insight into history and sites as we traveled through Minnesota. In the background, you can see one of those sites. You can also see our travelling companion, Blue. That’s another story. 😉
The tape happened to mention there was a statue of the Jolly Green Giant just a few miles away from where we were travelling. Of course, I wanted to see it. So, we went, and sure enough, there he was! You almost expected to hear the “Ho, ho, ho!” from the massive, 55 foot tall guy. We didn’t stay long, but we got pictures and enjoyed a quick break from our cross-country trip.
Lately, with my research, I’ve felt pretty much the same way. I try to focus in on one person, but I might catch a glimpse of something that leads me off my path.
For instance, I started researching my great-grandmother, Bessie Mae Layne Newell Massey. I was hoping to find some additional records about Herbert Newell, her first husband and my great-grandfather. Instead, I wound up getting more information about George Massey, her second husband. While interesting, it was not what I was looking for.
I did find one item today on one of these side trips that gave me some additional information on my grandmother’s family. I was looking for information on another great-grandfather, Manford Lawson, and came upon a death certificate for one of his sons:
You can see that James died of whooping-cough. This is just about the time that the whooping-cough vaccine was developed. Too bad it didn’t save him.
James was another of the family’s “One Hit Wonders”. He made his one and only appearance in 1920 on the US Census.
James in the 1920 Census.
Sometimes, being sidetracked can be fun, but at other times, it can be frustrating. I’ve had a particular post in mind, and it just seems like every time I start the research for it, I find myself on tangents. Even fruitful moments like finding the death record for James don’t make up for the fact that, right now, I should be finding other records for other family members.
Have you ever been sidetracked like this? If so, how do you break away from the side trips and get back to your genealogical path?
Does anyone else remember the television show “In Search of…”? I used to love watching it. My Dad turned me onto it at first. It was in the late 70’s and early 80’s; about the time I was in high school. The show was hosted by Leonard Nimoy, and was done documentary style.
The focus of the show was to explain mysteries and phenomena. Some shows dealt with natural occurences like tornadoes. Others delved into things like ESP or UFOs. Several shows dealt with mysteries of historical significance as well, like Jack the Ripper, the lost colony of Roanoke, Virginia, or even Dracula (Vlad the Impaler, but of course, they did touch upon the vampire as well).
“In Search of…” never claimed to have the correct answer. It gave the facts, provided some possibilities, but ultimately, it left it up to the viewer to make up their minds as to what the explanation really was.
In going through my family history, I have a few mysteries. One that keeps drawing my attention is a child without a name. So today on my genealogical journey, I’m going ‘In Search of…’ Baby Taylor.
I’ve actually mentioned this baby before. I first discovered information about this child on the 1900 US Census when tracing my great-grandparents’ travels from their native West Virginia.
My Grandfather and His Family
My great-grandmother has eight living children, but had nine children in total. The ninth child, Baby Taylor, is our mystery. When and where was the baby born? Was it a boy or a girl? How long did the child live? When and where did it die?
Assuming the child was not born out-of-wedlock, the date of birth would be some time after my great-grandparents were married. My great-grandfather’s obituary stated:
He was married on March 15, 1883 to miss Georgia Chrisman and to this union nine children were born….
I was able to confirm the date of the marriage using data from a vital records search at the West Virgina Division of Culture and History site (West Virginia has been probably one of the easiest places I’ve found to search for such information, and if you have family members that are from West Virginia, I would recommend searching there).
The date of the 1900 US Census was the 29th of June. So, I was looking at a window of birth somewhere between March 15, 1883 and June 29, 1900 (about a 17 year window).
Looking further into my great-grandfather’s obituary, it provided me with more information:
He moved with his family to Nebraska in 1884 and for nine years resided in that state. In 1893, he moved to Gallatin, Mo., where he made his home for sixteen years, moving from there to Arkansas, where he lived for three years.
So, unless born on the move from West Virginia to Nebraska in some state between those places, the baby would have been born in West Virginia, Nebraska, or Missouri. Those were the three states the family lived in within that 17 year window.
The birth months and years on the census of the 8 children known are:
Millard D. – October 1885
Oscar R. – March 1887
Boyd – July 1888
Lucy D. – April 1891
Ethel – November 1892
Anna M. – February 1894
Hazel – May 1896
Floyd R. – April 1900
I decided to look at the gaps between events:
From Marriage until birth of Millard D. – 31 months
Between Millard D. and Oscar R. – 17 months
Between Oscar R. and Boyd – 16 months
Between Boyd and Lucy D. – 33 months
Between Lucy D. and Ethel – 19 months
Between Ethel and Anna M. – 15 months
Between Anna M. and Hazel – 27 months
Between Hazel and Floyd R. – 47 months
I excluded any gap that would be too small for another baby to be born (assuming a normal term of 9 months for each baby, that would mean less than 18 months).
So, that left me with the following possibilities for Baby Taylor’s birthday (assuming the baby was not a twin of a sibling):
Between March 1883 and January 1885
Between April 1889 and July 1890
Between January 1892 and February 1892
Between November 1894 and August 1895
Between February 1897 and July 1899
The third one I found highly unlikely. My great-grandmother would have been almost constantly pregnant!
One day on familysearch.org, I was searching for more information on my great-grandparents, and I got a suggestion for an ancestral file. I went to look at it, and it showed the names of both my great-grandparents, and there were correct dates, including the date of their marriage. Underneath that it said “Show Children (9)”.
I figured that perhaps when I clicked on it, I would get eight names and then some “?” type entry for Baby Taylor. Instead, I got a name:
name:
Amy C TALOR
gender:
Female
birth:
15 Dec 1883
,, WV
death:
11 Aug 1885
afn:
6WK2-VK
AFN stands for Ancestral File Number, and is a unique indicator for that file.
Whoa! Not only a name, but a birth date and a death date too! The birth date and place listed was plausible; it was exactly nine months after my great-grandparents were married (that must have been some wedding night)!
But, before getting too excited, I wanted to check this out. Could I find the records that matched the information? Was Amy C. Talor (not sure why the different spelling) truly Baby Taylor?
So, back I went to my favorite vital research page in West Virginia, typed in Amy C. Taylor (figuring the Talor was a misspelling), Lewis County (last residence place of my great-grandparents), 1883, female, and hit search. I got back…nothing.
I started playing around with it. I changed the search to All Counties. Nothing. I changed the spelling to Talor. Nothing. I changed it back and just tried Amy. Still nothing.
Finally, out of frustration, I decided just to search just the last name. Show me all female Taylor babies born in West Virginia in 1883. That time, I got a list. Two results on the list of 25 caught my eye:
My great-grandparents were also born in Upshur county, and the date was two days off from the date given on the AFN record. While record 7 said Annie C. instead of Amy C., it was the same initials, and Lewis county was a possibility as well.
The unnamed Taylor girl did not turn out to be the right one. While the father’s name was listed as Wm., the mother was Idella M. and not Georgianna. Would I fare any better with Annie? See what you think:
The father’s name is hard to read here. It looks like a W and another letter. On the opposite page is listed the mother’s name, and the name of the person who reported the birth. The mother’s name is listed as “Georgie”. I wondered…would someone have heard the name Georgianna and thought it was two names instead of one (Georgie Anna)? I looked over to the name of the person that reported the birth. It happened to be the father, and he was listed as W. H. Taylor. The birth date was December 15th, an exact match to the record for Amy C.!
I thought of what that would mean that my great-grandparents had a child in 1883. They would have traveled miles with the baby in a wagon across several states to reach Nebraska. Where was she when she first started to crawl? In which state would she have taken her first steps? How would she have been kept occupied while her father worked on building their home?
Of course, I thought too about the death date that was listed. Annie would not have been quite two before she died. What happened? A sickness? An accident? Where would I find confirmation of the death date and would that provide other information?
Unfortunately, answers to those questions have yet to be answered. I have yet to confirm the death date, but I’m working on trying to reach the submitter of the AFN to see if I can get more details. I’m still looking for any other data on the family. I was hoping the 1885 Nebraska State Census would be helpful, but it hasn’t. I haven’t found any record of my family in it, even though I know they were there for Millard D.’s birth in 1885. They were supposed to have moved to Nebraska a year before that. Had something delayed them on the journey?
If I find out more information, I’ll share it when we go ‘In Search of…’ Baby Taylor Annie C. Taylor.
Turning aside from my own family tree, I had been travelling the path of my husband Bill’s ancestors. I enjoyed learning about his Transylvanian heritage, and discovering the ships that had brought his great-grandparents and grandparents to the United States.
Now, I turned my attention to Bill’s mother’s side of the family. Once again, I was entering data for all the family members we knew of, and I was getting hints here and there to explore further into the past. Already, we had seen some of the direction that this path would take us. Bill’s cousin had shared with us information about the research a friend of his had helped him with, and how it had taken them back to Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, where Bill’s mother’s paternal line had settled.
However, the trip I was taking into this portion of the family tree was soon interrupted. It was not because we had run out of items to research; we had barely scratched the surface of what Bill’s cousin had told us. The interruption came from the fact that I had received new information from my father regarding my side of the family. It was time to return to my original path.
The information my Dad sent me came to me via email over the span of a few days. My original request had been to see if I could get any more information for the brother whose children I was trying to locate. We were still waiting for the military records my Dad had requested. Apparently, because my Uncle had at one point served in a classified area, the military wanted to find out exactly what we were looking for. They actually called my father to discuss it with him.
So, Dad started by sending me the obituaries he had for his brother, which at least then gave me dates of birth and death. One was from the Flint Journal, the local paper in my home town. The other was from the Arkansas Gazette, which was from the state my uncle was residing in. In the email, my Dad mentioned that he had other obituaries and asked if I wanted them.
Did I ever! I told him to send me whatever he could as far as the family went. Obituaries, birth and death records, pictures; I wanted whatever he could send me.
And so, I began getting email after email (nine in all). Besides my uncle’s obituary, I got his funeral card. My father had obituaries for his other brother and sister as well. I received funeral cards for his parents and for my Grandma Opal, my grandfather’s second wife. My Great Aunt Jeanette’s obit was there, and there was a funeral card for her father, Joseph McCombs as well as his obituary. There was a funeral card for a cousin of my father’s, one that I remember very well, and for his father, my Aunt Jeanette’s brother-in-law, James Slaughter.
There was even more to come. My Dad sent me death certificates for both his parents and for my great-grandfather, Joseph McCombs! He also sent me obituaries for both of my Taylor great-grandparents, as well as a newspaper story about a family reunion, and a “ripped from the headlines” story that could very well have been a plot of a story for Law & Order: SVU if the show had been on back then. That story intrigues me, and though it does not appear to have been about my family, someone kept it for a reason, and I’m curious as to why.
So, my trip through Bill’s family history was interrupted by flood. It was a flood of information about my own family that had me postpone working on his tree a while, so I could delve back into mine. I was glad I could. One of the pieces I mentioned turned out to be quite a discovery!
In our journeys through life, two paths can come together. They will sometimes intersect, crossing one another for a brief time. When a marriage occurs, that intersection becomes a merger, as the history of one life melds into another.
My husband Bill and I had our paths intersect at first in the late 90’s, and before the end of the millennium, our paths had merged. Over our years together, he has shared with me some of his family stories, and, with parts of my own family history becoming blocked off for the time being, I took the opportunity to now turn my attention to Bill’s family history.
On my side of the family, I still didn’t know when my ancestors had arrived in the United States or even from where they came. On Bill’s father’s side of the family though, while he didn’t know the when, he most certainly knew the where. His grandparents had immigrated from Hungary and eventually settled near Columbus, Ohio. Family lore stated that they came more specifically from Transylvania. He would joke about being from the area where Vlad the Impaler (also known by his patronymic Dracula) ruled. Mainly, he would reference Dracula, the character in Bram Stoker’s novel. My “Hungarian Bloodsucker” as I would teasingly call my husband, also had another potential tie-in with vampires on his mother’s side of the family. His maternal grandfather’s name was Schreck (a shortened form of Schreckengost, and Bill often wondered if Max Schreck, the actor who had played Count Orlock in F. W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu, could possibly be related.
Bill's Dad (also Bill) with his mother Mary and father Mike. Funny...none of them look like vampires to me.
So, for now, putting thoughts of ancestors that could possibly turn into bats or go off in search of a blood feast, I started looking for records that could lead me back to the time when Bill’s grandparents came to the US. It didn’t take me long to find them in the 1930 US Census (names of the children have been blurred for privacy).
Grandpa Mike (as Bill calls him) is doing pretty good for himself. He owns a home, valued at $2,100.00 and he has four children already. He is a laborer and works at a boltworks.
When I looked at the rest of the fields for this census data, I found that all of the children were born in the US, and that Grandpa Mike and Grandma Mary had not become US citizens yet. Both could speak English though. We do know that Hungarian was spoken in the home; Bill said that he can remember his grandmother speaking Hungarian most of the time to his grandfather, especially when she got angry at something.
Bill’s Dad, who was the youngest, was pushed by his brothers and sisters to learn English before going to school; they didn’t want him to struggle the way some of them did.
One last thing I noted on this census was the years that each had come to the US. Mike arrived in 1908; Mary didn’t arrive until 1921. This meant that I would not be able to find her in any other US census previous to this one. My search would then need to focus on Mike and his family.
Joseph is the name of the youngest son.
As you can see, Grandpa Mike’s father’s name is also Michael. That made for some interesting conversations when I was trying to explain some of the records to my husband. Grandpa Mike is working at the boltworks on this census too, while his father, Michael Sr., works for a scrap iron and metal company. Bill’s great-grandfather has done well enough since coming to the US to own his home free and clear.
I was really surprised by the gap in Grandpa Mike and his brother’s ages. I wondered if they had tried to have other children in the 14-15 year span between the births of these two boys.
I did note that Bill’s great-grandparents had come to the US about two years apart. Apparently, Mike Sr. came over about 1906, and two years later, wife Anna came over with Mike Jr. So now I was going to be looking for three boats and not two. I would be looking for the boat that brought Michael over to prepare the way for this wife and son, the boat that brought Anna and Michael over to reunite the family, and finally, the boat that would bring Bill’s grandmother to the US where her path would intersect and later merge, with that of his grandfather.
I was fortunate to know most of my grandparents. On my father’s side, I did not get to know his mother; she died when I was just a baby. His father remarried, and it was his second wife that I knew as my Grandma. Once he died though, she moved away to be closer to her children from a previous marriage, and our family didn’t keep in touch with them. On my mother’s side, I was very fortunate to have both grandparents alive to see many milestones in my life. They were able to see me graduate from high school and later from college. While they didn’t get to see me marry the first time (since I eloped), they did get to be there to see me get married to my present husband. My grandfather died later that year. My grandmother, now in her 90’s, is still with us.
I only ever met one of my great-grandparents. My grandmother’s mother, Thenie F. Whittaker Lawson, had come to Michigan to stay with the family for a time. I was about eight or nine, and somehow, she intimidated, even scared me a little! She seemed much sterner than the smiling image of her daughter above, and I don’t remember her talking much. When she did talk, I don’t remember understanding her much. She mumbled and muttered much of the time. She was in her 80’s at the time, and was probably the oldest person I had ever seen at that time.
I remember the day that she died. My Mom and Grandma had gone with her to the store (Yankees, I believe, but it might have been about the time they were taken over by Zodys). I didn’t go into the store with them; I stayed out in the car (that was back in the days when people left their kids out in the car without fear of them being abducted or overheating). What I remembered was the ambulance coming, sirens going off and lights flashing. I don’t remember much after that other than going home. I didn’t know what had happened to my great-grandmother until later. She had a heart attack while in the store.
In trying to go back into Thenie’s history, I thought it would be easy. After all, Thenie is a rather unusual name. However, I didn’t realize how many twists and turns I would take with the name Whittaker! It didn’t take me long to realize that this again, might be a journey that would not be the straightforward path I had thought it to be.
For example, here are some of the variations of Whittaker that I found on my initial searches:
Whittaker
Whitaker
Whiteaker
Whitacre
And, as to Thenie being helpful because of it being unusual? I failed to take into account how census takers can mangle a name. And, in this case, I feel they did more than just that.
I had to make some educated guesses with these records, and I believe they all are showing the same family group. However, there is still a possibility that I could be wrong. Judge for yourself.
This is the one census that I know is correct for my family. Notice though that my great-grandmother is listed as Thenia instead of Thenie.
If you think that’s bad, let’s go back to 1910.
Now, Whittaker has become Whiteaker, and Thenie is now Othena? What gives?
Now, here’s also where family lore and census data start to butt heads. My great-grandmother did have a twin whose name was Mary. However, family lore stated she died as an infant. Yet, here she is, almost an adult! The lone son listed here is named Vetery. My great-grandmother had a brother named Vetter.
When I saw my great-grandmother listed here as Othena, somewhere in the back of my mind I could hear someone, in a voice very much like my grandmother’s saying to the census taker, “Now let’s see, we have a Sarah, a Mary, and a Thenie….”
When you get to 1900 though, things really start to get wonky:
OK, what is wrong with this picture?
OK, now the family has their last name listed as Whitacre. Thenie has now changed into Venie. The twin Mary is still there, and the birthdate is shown as May 1891 (which is the month and year of my great-grandmother’s birth). However, there is a big difference in ages between the Rebecah here and the Rebecca of 10 years later. I do notice though that the 1900’s Rebecah has 9 children of which 5 are living. The 1910 Rebecca has 10 children of which 5 still live.
The big problem I had here was the mystery of the youngest child. ‘Vetery’ who was listed as being about four years younger than the twins (and was listed as a son), had disappeared! In his place was a daughter named “Legie”, born in June of 1896 (which is, coincidentally, when my relative Vetter was born).
Talk about a roller coaster ride! I felt like I was zigging and zagging all over the place with these records. Just when I thought I would find something that would tie everything up neatly, a wild curve sent me whirling into a spin!
Ancestry.com has the option of saving items you aren’t sure tie into your family tree to a ‘Shoebox’ so that you can review them at a later time. I thought for sure that the 1900 and 1910 US Census records I had found would be in my Shoebox for a long time. Then, one day, I decided to do a search on Vetter Whittaker trying to see if I could find out more about him, and I stumbled across this record that I think ties it all together:
Lige (or Leige) Vetter Whittaker – now it was all starting to make sense!
So, Vetter’s first name was Leige. To me, this tied Vetter into the Legie that was listed in 1900. Their birth dates were the same month and year. They had somehow entered the gender wrong! Could it have been that the census taker wasn’t paying attention and copied information from the previous line. Had he made an assumption, thinking that Legie sounded like a girl’s name? I know that I’ve seen pictures of very young children, both boys and girls being dressed very much alike. If this boy got any hand-me-downs, they likely came from his sisters. Could the census taker have put down ‘daughter’ without asking anyone what the gender of the child actually was?
It was about this same time that in my journeys out in cyberspace that I came across the website www.findagrave.com. Find A Grave has contributors around the world that update, maintain, and add to the list of over 75 million grave sites. Searching the records is very easy, and you can sometimes find a great deal of information. Vetter was one of the first people who I searched for. Not only did I find him listed, but someone had actually taken pictures of his grave marker! Even more exciting was the fact that a piece on the head stone contained a picture of Vetter and his wife!
Vetter and his wife Arizonia. This is a close up of the picture medallion on their grave marker.
Eventually, I ran out of steam on this line as well, and so, I turned away from looking into my side of the family tree entirely and began to journey into my husband’s ancestral past.
For a time, my father’s family history had become blocked; I was finding no avenue down which I could make any progress. Two paths had merged when my parents married me and had children though. I decided to turn aside for a time from the path of my father’s historical lineage and begin to trace the path that was my mother’s family line.
My mother, sad to say, would not be able to share in this journey as my father has been able to do with the information I have gathered about his family. She passed away a few years ago. However, because the family had gathered together some of the history, I had more of a head start on this portion of my journey.
One of the things that intrigued me about Mom’s side of the family was the fact that, up until I had received a copy of this family history, I had always thought she was the first-born child. But, she wasn’t! She had, in fact been the second born; she had an older sister.
Family lore has a rather sad story about what happened to this little girl. She had been climbing up to get an item (nail polish, as I was told) that was on the mantle of the fireplace. In climbing, she had slipped somehow, fell into the fireplace, and was burned. She died.
I wondered about this little girl. It surprised me to find that while the family knew her name, they did not have anything to give me about her birth and death information. I wasn’t sure why this was. Perhaps part of it was due to the fact that my grandparents lost several personal items when they had a fire at their home in Tennessee. Up in flames had gone all their memories; photographs and home movies gone with no hope of recovery (the technologies that allow for some items like this to be recovered digitally did not exist when this occurred). The family had done what they could to restore some of these memories. Taking from their own family photographs, they were able to compile some family pictures for them, but none of them had a picture of the oldest child of my grandparents.
It didn’t take too long to find a birth record for her, however. Through Ancestry.com, I was able to find my mother’s birth record, and looking just a few years farther back, I was able to find her older sister’s. The death record was more elusive. I wasn’t able to locate any record of her death. At this point I wasn’t sure about when she died or even where she died. Because the story indicated she had climbed up to reach something, I figured she would be older than a toddler. My mother’s next oldest sister, three years younger than my Mom, had no recollection of her sister, therefore, my working theory was that she had died no later than when my Aunt had been two or three. As to the where, would she have died in Kentucky, where she was born? Could the family have moved by then? Eventually, my grandparents had moved from Kentucky to Michigan. Could my mother’s older sister have died in one of those places, or somewhere in between?
My journey down this path also had another mystery I encountered along the way. One of my great-grandfathers also did not have any recorded history of his death that I could find. My maternal grandfather’s father supposedly had died a few years after my grandfather was born. As to when that happened or where, the family had no clue. I had another challenge to overcome, and another potential road block loomed before me.
I’ve found on this journey of mine that the path is rarely smooth, and there are all sorts of bumps and twists and turns along the way. As I was to find when I started into my maternal grandmother’s side of the family, those twists and turns were going to make the going a little more treacherous. I was going to need to watch my step, or I might make a mistake that could set me off down the wrong path.
When I decided to trace my great-grandfather’s journey from West Virginia to Malden, Missouri, I never realized what a long and winding road his path would take! Malden was his family’s final destination, but by no means was it their only one.
I had already found a 1930 US Census that showed my grandparents had already moved to my home town of Flint, Michigan. As my grandfather was their youngest child, it was likely all the children were married or out of the house. Once I found the 1930 census, it confirmed my suspicions:
Portion of the 1930 US Census showing my great-grandparents.
My great-grandparents were living by themselves. I knew where my grandfather was at this time. Where were all of his siblings?
I did learn a few things from this survey. My great-grandparents owned a home, valued at $1,500 (not bad considering that this was after the start of the Great Depression). While you cannot see it from this except, my great-grandfather was not working, nor had he ever been a veteran. There was a discrepancy between the 1900 US Census and this one: back in 1900, my great-grandmother had been listed as being born in West Virginia like her husband, William Henry. However, on this census, she was listed as being born in Virginia! Which one was correct?
I decided to keep working backwards, and found them again in 1920 in Malden, Missouri, this time with one child still at home.
1920 and one child left in the house: my grandfather!
Georgia didn’t seem to know which side of the state line she was born on. This time, not only is she born in West Virginia, but so are her parents! In 1930, they, like her, had crossed over the border to be born in Virginia.
As I continued research on this and other parts of my family tree, I would learn over and over again that records can contain inaccurate and sometimes misleading information. I also began to distinguish between primary source data, and secondary source data.
The US Census contains a mixture of both. It is a primary source for where a person resided on the date that the census occurred. Much of the other data though is a secondary data source. Ages and birth year and month, places of birth, and places of parent’s birth are second-hand information on these records. Other records (like a birth certificate) would be a primary data source that could confirm the information on the census.
For now though, I would continue one more decade back and fill in the last gap. With the information on the 1910 US Census, I would be able to see the movements of my ancestors over a 40-year span.
So:
1930 – Malden, Missouri
1920 – Malden, Missouri
1910 – ?
1900 – Daviess County, Missouri
My working theories were:
The family would still be in Daviess County.
The family would be somewhere in Missouri between Daviess County and Dunklin County, where Malden is.
Since some of the children had been born in Nebraska prior to 1900, the family might have moved back there for a time between the two locations in Missouri.
The family would have already moved to Malden.
It’s nice to have theories, but of course it is the facts that will show where their path had really taken them. And, once again, the path led to a place I didn’t expect.
In 1910, my family lived in...Arkansas?
Here’s a copy of the 1900 Census too:
My Grandfather and His Family
It didn’t faze me in the least that in 1900 my grandfather was listed as Floyd R. and in 1910 was listed as Ralfa. Ralph was his middle name, and Ralfa I am sure, was a misspelling on the part of some well-meaning census worker. The M in Anna M. stood for Maud, so again, they had been easy to match up. Of course, Hazel and Ethel were pretty obvious matches.
What of the other children? Well, I knew from 1900 that my great-grandmother had nine children and eight were living. I noticed in 1910, the number of living children had dropped to six. Two of my grandfather’s siblings had died. We knew for sure the four children listed on the 1910 Census were alive. The four not on this census were Millard D., Oscar R., Boyd, and Lucy D.. Which two had lived, and which two had died?
I wondered what had brought my great-grandparents to Arkansas. You could almost draw a line straight down from Daviess County to Sevier County. What had sparked their southern migration? And why, within 10 years, had they returned to Missouri, this time settling in the southeast corner of the state?
It was certainly a long and winding road I had discovered on my great-grandparents’ journey to the West. From the information I had gathered so far, they had left West Virginia some time prior to 1885 (the approximate year their oldest known child was born in Nebraska). They stayed in Nebraska long enough to have at least five children. From there, the family traveled to Daviess County, Missouri, which is likely where my grandfather was born (and possibly at least two other siblings as well). The unknown 9th child could have been born in any of these locations. All we know for now is that as of 1900, the child no longer was alive.
By 1910, the family had lost two more of its children, and gained one new family member, a mother-in-law (which means this would be my great-great-grandmother). The name is listed as what appears to be Luveza Olaker (Ancestry.com listed the name as Luvcza Olaker, but I think my interpretation of the handwriting is closer to the truth). Two of the children had also moved on to their own paths in life. The family had also moved south and slightly west to Sevier County, Arkansas, a county just to the east of the Oklahoma border, and not too far away from the northeast border of Texas.
Ten short years later, the family returned to Missouri, this time residing in Dunklin County in the town of Malden. The 1920 Census only shows my grandfather residing in the home with his parents. There is not information given on this Census to indicate whether there are fewer living children now; we only know that by 1920, my grandfather’s remaining siblings had left their parents’ home. In 1920, I also learned that my great-grandfather was running a furniture store, and my grandfather was listed as being in sales (was he working for his father?).
By 1930, my grandfather had already moved out on his own and was working on raising a family of his own in Flint, Michigan. His parents, still residing in Malden, were no longer working. They lived in a house they owned.
I had exhausted this path for the moment, and so I turned to yet another detour. However, a surprising piece of information would soon come my way that would confirm much of the research I had just done.
