Wordless Wednesday

 

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Best or Important Image or Document Recently Found Online

And I'm still falling behind and trying to catch up.  So it's Wednedsay; who says I can't post my Saturday Night Genealogy Fun tonight?  At least I have a document to share!

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music here), is:

1.  What is the best or important image or document that you have recently found online? [Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting topics!]

2.  Write your own blog post, or add your response as a comment to this blog post or in a Facebook Status post or note.

I'm still noodling around with the 1950 census and finding stuff.  One page that I found has my father's two older paternal half-sisters:

They were living in Bridgeton, Cumberland County, New Jersey.  The census shows my aunt Dottie (Dorothy M.) married to Clarence N. Lore, with three children:  Albert L., Clarence G., and Joan.  Living with them is my aunt Mil (Mildred A.) Sellers.

This is an important find for a few reasons.  First is that my aunts, along with my father and his parents, were not enumerated in the 1940 census.  I have looked up, down, and sideways for them, and they're simply not there.  According to a list of addresses my grandfather compiled (possibly for a security clearance for work), they lived in three different places that year, so it's easy to understand how they could have been missed.

Second, the youngest child in the household, Joan (whom I was told was named JoAnn), did not live long past the 1950 census.  I don't have an exact date of death, but she died sometime around 1951–1952.  So I am thrilled to have her appear in a census.

Third, not only was my aunt Dottie one of the people who was "sampled" to give additional information (six people on every page), she was the one of the six who was asked even more questions!  She did not work during the year previous to the census; the last work she had was as a restaurant waitress; she had been married more than once; and she had borne three children.

And fourth, this is another example of how you need to verify all that information that shows up on the census.  My aunt Dottie told two different stories about her marriage to Zeke (Clarence; no, I have no idea how the nickname Zeke came out of Clarence), and I have not yet been able to check on whether they were actually legally married (because if the person you are marrying hasn't gotten divorced, yours doesn't count as a legal marriage).  So the fact that the census says they were married might or might not be true.

Um, married more than once?  I've never heard that, either from my aunt or my cousins.  I don't know what she had in mind, but now I need to check around and see if she was married to someone before Zeke.

And three children?  Nope, she had borne four children by this time.  The one not accounted for was Raymond Lawrence Sellers, born September 23, 1945.  Dottie gave him up for adoption, I believe that same year.  I am still trying to find him.

So don't believe everything you read in the census.

Something else important about this discovery is that my cousin Albert is still alive.  I get to show him himself and his family in the 1950 census!

Wordless Wednesday

 

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Plans to Travel for On-site Genealogy Research

I keep falling behind on my genealogy posts!  I have all these great plans, and they somehow don't materialize.  But I can always start again at catching up, as I am doing tonight with Randy Seaver's post for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music here), is:

1.  Do you have plans to travel to do on-site genealogy research?  [Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting topics!]

2.  Write your own blog post, or add your response as a comment to this blog post or in a Facebook Status post or note.

Here are my thoughts.

Let me start off by saying that I definitely don't believe I can do all my research online.  That means I have to look at doing on-site research myself or hiring someone else to do it.  And I really like doing my own research.

I have so much New Jersey research where I am sure that the archives will have information that is helpful; not everything has been filmed by the LDS Church.  So many of my family lines (my paternal grandmother's side of the family) were in New Jersey for centuries.  I still have to find my great-grandmother Amelia Gibson's parents and family, and my 4x-great-grandfather Joel Armstrong's parents (is he my connection to practicing Quakers?).  And I want to see the farm schedules from the census to learn more details about what my farming ancestors were doing.  It wouldn't be practical to hire someone for this research because there's so much to do, with one piece of information leading to another and another.  I need to find some time to go back east, stay at my sister's, and make daily trips to the state archives.

Notwithstanding how many records and indices Reclaim the Records has managed to get from New York City, there's still a lot more to see, and my mother's side of the family lived there for more than a century.  In some ways it might be more practical to hire someone who is more experienced with the repositories to do that research, but it would be far more enjoyable to do it myself.  I think I still have cousins in NYC; maybe I can sleep on a couch and make that my base of operations.

Those are my big chunks of research where there's a lot to be done.  I could do research in just about every state in this country because I have cousins everywhere, but most states have only a few relatives to research.

Do I have actual plans for any of this research?  No, not currently, but I could and I probably should.

Now, the Ukrainian research I would like to conduct on my mother's side, maybe that I don't want to do on site myself.  I think that's a good candidate for hiring a researcher to do it for me, at least for the immediate future.  The research in Moldova and Belarus also might be served better by hiring someone, rather than going in person.

Wordless Wednesday