Another Look

On a fairly regular basis, I write to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh for obituaries. A great majority of my grandmother's family either lived there or passed through the area at some point, so I am fairly successful with getting copies.

As good as the staff at Carnegie is, I find that when I go there for a visit that I usually discover additional obituaries / death notices / funeral notices that contain new bits of information. When you have an area that has numerous daily newspapers, this is bound to happen, so I make it a point to see if I can track down some new articles on any of those relations where I may only have a short notice to start with.

Such an occasion happened on a recent visit. I had a short funeral notice for a gg-grandfather that I had gotten a number of years earlier and looked at the other dailies to see if I could find anything else. I did.

The new notice that I found confirmed the birth surname of his mother by indicating that an uncle had attended the funeral - which opened up a new line of research for me in that, other than the mother, I had no information on that line of the family. Although a first name for the uncle was not provided, I was able to find him because of his profession, which was noted in the article.

Now if I could just discover who their parents were.

What are you saying

I am subscribed to a number of genealogy lists and contribute when I can. That being said, there are times when I want to contribute and help but just can't. Because I can not figure out what the writer is asking for.

Listen, my grammar usage is not the best, and I am not always certain that I am using the correct punctuation or even spelling the words correctly. But some messages I've been seeing lately are just unreadable.

No capitalization, run-on sentences, using commas and dashes instead of periods and writing everything in one huge paragraph make my eyes cross over. In the past, I used to try to sort it out, picking apart what should be sentences, but no more. The Back Button is my friend.

Please begin your sentences with a capital letter, or, if the shift key on your keyboard does not work, complete the sentence with a period. And really, it's okay if your message has three or four short paragraphs consisting of a few sentences each.

A number of forums offer a Preview of your message before it posts. It will give you a chance to see what your post looks like before it is sent.

I'll make a good faith effort to look something up and answer your question, but only if I can first figure out just what it is that you are asking.

Turn Around, Look at Me

Got back last week from another research trip. I probably won't get another chance to do any out-of-town searching until later next year, so I tried to make the most of this one.

There is one cemetery that I visit every chance I get because a number of the relations back in the line seem to be buried there. I have a numbered plot map of the entire cemetery (no names though), so once I know where they are buried, I can find the sites relatively easy. Or so I thought.

I got to the approximate location and found a few markers that confirmed that I was in the right area, but I just couldn't find any headstones for the two I knew should be buried in that plot. I did see one fairly large headstone that had a familiar name on it but it was on a stone with a family name I did not recognize. After about a half hour search, we gave up, and I went to the cemetery office to ask if I did indeed have the correct plot number. They confirmed it, and even made a copy of the burials from the plot book. (This is somewhat significant because I have always had to pay for that information when I write to them.) Anyway, I noticed that several of the burials have that unrecognized family name that I had seen previously. Turns out that a daughter of the couple I was seeking had married into that name - and she was buried there. So I went back out to the lot to take pictures and make a note of the headstone transcription.

I don't know what made me walk around the headstone, but there in full view were the names of the couple I was originally looking for. And I can't believe that I hadn't done that in the first place. I can only attribute it to not wanting to walk up the hill anymore than I had and thinking that I had already looked in the correct area for their names. The one familiar name I had initially noted was another daughter, but I just didn't put it together with the other daughter's married surname.

So that will be a lesson for me not to give up too soon.

They're Here

My grandmother's paternal line is from England. They came over from England when her father was just a boy. As far as I knew, no one else from that family ever made it to the US.

Some time ago, I ran across some notes I jotted down while talking to my aunt a number of years ago. She had said that some of the mother's relatives had also come to the US and gave me some first names. I had also written down 'Whitaker' beside those names and had thought that that was their last name. When I again found this note, I realized that she had been talking about a section of where they lived. I used the family name to find these people, and there they were - living in Whitaker.

So now the task is to find out more about them.

Along the way, I found that one more from that family made it across the Atlantic. They eventually settled near Richmond VA, an area that I have never researched. For a while, I looked up online resources, checked books in my local state genealogy library, and kept tabs on the Rootsweb message boards. I was finally able to find a funeral home reference for one of them, and I was off. It gave me her cemetery, which led to me asking around about this cemetery, which led to someone in the area actually looking up everyone who was buried in the same plot with her.

And you know, the really neat part about it all is that someone else is getting so much more out of this than me. When I first found that this family (George and Flora) had come to the US, I searched Rootsweb archives postings to see if anyone else was looking for the same family. I found one, halfway across the world - George is in my family line and Flora was in hers. Thing is, when her ancestor left England, he never returned and was never able to find any trace of the family in later years. He died not knowing that his father and siblings had left England shortly after he did.

And hopefully, sometime in the next few months, I'll be able to visit the cemetery and take pictures, and she'll finally have some closure on that missing section of her family.

NC State Archive Move

Just putting this here so it shows up in more places:

The N C State Archives will be closed from September 24 through October 22. The closure is to move the materials back to the renovated second floor. Until the 24th, the temporary Archives location on the first floor will be open. The Archives has its own blog on BlogSpot, so if this is a place that you use on a regular basis or are planning trips, you might want to google and bookmark it.

This should not interfere with operations of the N C State Genealogy Library that is on the Mezzanine Level of the Archives Building.

Copies, Copies, Copies

Back from a reasonably successful trip to Georgia. Found some items, didn't find others. Braved visits to cemeteries in the nearly 100 degree heat. Read newspapers on microfilm for two and half days. Made nearly 100 copies.

Now, I just have to enter all the little notes into records. The fun begins.

But I don't have time to rest. I have another research trip coming up in a month, and I have notes to get together so that I can find the items that I need without waiting until the last minute.

More Getting Personals

Well, I now have a death date for Edward (referencing my previous entry). The notice that I found did not state where he was buried, just that a former resident had died. So I still had my work cut out for me.

I still did not have any burial information on Edward, his two wives, or any of his three children. By his first wife, he had two daughters. Mary died as an infant, and Julia was still listed on the 1930 census. He had a son by his second wife, and I had not yet been able to find a death date for him either.

I had Julia's death date. Rather than relying on the search feature on the digital newspaper database, I went to read each day's scans starting with the day she died. I found her obituary - not certain why a search didn't pick it up. Although it did not state where she was buried, it did verify her mother's birth surname, the name of an aunt (one of the sisters I was searching for in my previous entry) and listed her half-brother, Samuel, as a survivor. I knew that he was still alive in the 1940s because he was included in the WWII 'old man's' draft in 1942, but it was nice to know that the two were in touch with each other.

I was able to finally locate an obituary for Samuel - AND it listed where he was buried. Which, when I thought about it, made a lot of sense. It is in an area where he and his father Edward were living just prior to Edward's death, and I am really hoping that this is where I might find Edward's and his wives' burials. It is now on my list of cemeteries to visit on my next trip.