Update about blogCa

Thursday, May 9, 2013

I was wrong

...and ignorant.  Mainly I published here (this is public, therefore, printing something here is publishing)...something about my ancestors which I have since learned was a mistake.

Probably nobody really cares, who is alive today.  But the reason I'm putting these dates and names into digital realism is that those who come after me may sometime wonder about these elders who have gone before.

Otherwise I wouldn't bother.


Tree of Life
What I found out yesterday was that my grandfather's mother lived into her 60's.  I had posted that he and his sister were raised by their guardians when their father died when my grandfather was 2.  Not so apparently. 

The census of _______ shows that their mother, the widow, had a household with both children living in it.

I will now check the census of the guardians through the years and see when (and if) the children lived there.

I did find that the mother in question lived with her married daughter, until her death in 1924.

I also found out that my father was no longer living with his parents prior to his marriage to my mother.  At least according to the census.

Lots of information.  The most fun is all the mispellings.  But when the birth dates and places are considered, if it sounds like Ada, but was spelled Eda, it's still the same person. One census report spells Rogers as Regus.  But that reporter had awful handwriting.  You really couldn't tell where he/she wrote Texas if it was anything like that word.

It is great that the Federal Census Bureau actually has made available up till 1940, the actual sheets of the census from everywhere (at least everywhere I looked).  Genealogist heaven.  Now I can see who moved where, and most important, who lived with them, within a decade at least.  Of course this only covers a few hundred years that the US has had Census reports.  But those are a few thousand of my relatives!  No kidding, by the time I go back 5 generations and my "kin" had 11 children who mostly all married and had maybe not so many children, there's a possible hundred cousins of some level of remove.

And then there are their children, wives with their parents and siblings, and their children, husbands, etc.  You didn't know you were a relative of mine, did you!  I am related to Gibbs, Wilson, Booth, Webb, Cannon, Phillips, Swasey, Ross, Bass, Pulsifer, Granger, Whitty, McElhaney, Powell...and so on.







3 comments:

  1. I spent some time yesterday on ancestry researching the grandmother of my great uncle's wife. I found her twice in the 1970 census. Once with her husband and children in June and once in February with her children and sister. The names were recognizable but sometimes the spelling of Phoebe was amazingly, creatively wrong. Maybe you will find the kids living in two different households when you find the guardians.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for your comment...actually the kids were 20 and 22 and living with their mom on the census that I discovered. I was so surprised, having thought that since they had a guardian, they lived with him. But the census before that one has been destroyed by fire, so I won't find out that way.

    ReplyDelete
  3. If they are in a city you may be able to find them in a directory if they are that old, and if they were working. I sure do miss that 1890 census!

    ReplyDelete

There is today, more than ever, the need for a compassionate regenerative world civilization.