Hints and Mysteries from the past: Southernbooklady's Genealogy Thread

As I posted in the welcome thread, I'm really only an amateur at genealogy. I'm mostly interested in family stories, more than establishing a line of who begat who back to the Norman invasion or something. But I love history and historical research, find the intricacies of documentation fascinating, and I have an extremely high tolerance for minutia and trivia. I like to spend time creating biographical sketches of people in the family tree, which I then post to a family group on Facebook. If nothing else, this has brought many far-flung cousins closer together, and we are now all talking to each other and sharing stories and memories, which I love. So while there are holes in what we know about the family in the distant past, the next generation will have much more information to work with. I enjoy this role I've adopted as "family storyteller."

Most of this past year has been focused on trying to understand how the family -- all of its various lines-- ended up setting in the counties of Stark and Portage, Ohio. So I have been learning a lot about the Western Reserve and the migrations of people from Pennsylvania west to the new territory. In the midst of this have been some surprises. A little while ago I came across my first possible family murder: George White, the younger brother of my great-great-grandmother, Sara Arcadia White. I think he may have had a twin sister, Emma. Twins run in my family and one of my first goals was to trace the line of twinning back as far as I could. George and Emma came up on a search through church baptism records (they were Lutheran).

Then, to my shock, I found a newspaper article in the Stark County Democrat from 1875:

Boy Lost --At noon on Monday, the first day of March, inst., George, a little son of Jacob White, of Ravenna, aged twelve and a half years, left the home of his parents, as they supposed, for the purposes of going to school, but he did not return at night nor have his parents since that time been able to obtain any information concerning him. He had on when he left home a suite of dark mixed cassimere, a black felt hat with rather high crown and narrow brim, and a white shirt. He is rather small for his age. Any information that will lead to his recovery, addressed to his father, Jacob White, at Ravenna, O., will be thankfully received. Exchanges please copy.

Needless to say, I spent weeks combing through subsequent issues of the newspaper, as well as other papers in adjacent counties, for any follow-up information, but I have found nothing. Little George just disappears. Heartbreaking.

>1 southernbooklady: That is shocking and heartbreaking.

This month's odd and interesting research project: I discovered an ancestor whose family was counted twice in the 1850 census. Once in the beginning of November in the town of Norton, Ohio, and then again three weeks later in the town of Green, Ohio.

A friend of mine who did this sort of thing for a living before she retired has given me a crash course in researching property deeds and tracking land ownership backwards and forwards via deeds and tax records. I'm trying to find confirmation that the family had two farms.

>3 southernbooklady: I was counted twice in the 1990 census. The census date was April 1. I moved a couple of weeks later, and a week or two after that a census worker showed up at my door. She clearly didn't believe me when I told her that I had been counted at a different residence, so I let her count me again. It gave me insight into those "counted twice" situations!

I suppose the people who lived there before you, or who moved in after you, might not have been counted at all. It probably all works out.

I suppose being counted twice is better than not being counted at all, which happened in several cases in my family. My Hesters lived in the "lost corner." You had to go into another county and dip back into the county to access the road. Enumerators missed it a lot in the 19th century. That probably suited my Hester family just fine. They got counted one time simply because the guy in the other county wasn't sure where the county line was, and he counted them. I was working on a distant uncle's line yesterday. He was missed in 1870 because he was in the process of moving from Illinois to Nebraska. He ended up in Kansas after a few years, but he did purchase property and stayed in Nebraska long enough to marry.

My main family history projects over the last month have been focused on organizing the material I have collected which threatens to grown rapidly out of hand:

1. transcribing interviews with Italian second cousins who remember our immigrant ancestor, Antonio Leone and his wife Rosa. There are only about 5 people, including my dad, who remember them.

2. identifying all the people in an old 1935-1945 film reel of the Italian side of the family. Antonio is in some of the shots, but it is most of his daughters and my grandfather. (The digitized reel was given to me by a cousin, who sent all the old reel-to-reel film he had inherited to a company for digitizing. I'm sorry about that, because I think the process destroyed the originals)

3. Creating a map of what I know of family that came from Switzerland. This is really to give me a better grasp on the forces that caused them to emigrate, and to understand how all the different families were related or connected. It's a huge muddle because they all came from the area where France/Germany/Switzerland meet, and sometimes records are in German, sometimes in French, sometimes a record will show they were born in Germany, and other times in France, even though it was the same town, just at different times. So the map is to help me grasp the bigger picture.

4. Most fun: last month I was finally fully vaccinated, so I am planning a trip this fall with my parents to visit some of the places we know our family is from: Batsto Villiage in NJ, Lebanon and Lancaster Counties in Pennsylvania. We discovered the Stauffer homestead from 1757 is still standing and now on a register of historic places.

Sounds like you've had a busy month!

>2 NinieB: It does indeed sound like a busy month! My problem is competing interests....