I just ran across a third cousin who died at age 33 in 2003. Wow. What happened? Sometimes I get lucky with Findagrave entries--when some kind soul has attached the deceased's obituary to the record of the cemetery information. But no luck for this cousin. Ancestry searches of newspaper records also failed to turn up anything, and since his obituary would have been published over ten years ago--beyond the point most newspaper archives reach--there really isn't any way to track it down. Not unless I trundle out to Blue Earth County to physically search newspaper microfiche or computer records.
I tried Google and Bing. No luck. My cousin isn't searchable.
So I'm left with a mystery. What could have happened to this very young man? About the only things I can rule out at this point are his being murdered or dying in a car accident or some sort of bizarre accidental death. Any of those possibilities would probably have popped up on Google. So illness? Common accident, like a fall? Suicide?
I've run across several of these sad mysteries in my research, and each one bothers me. How can there be no way to discover what happened to this person? How can there be nothing left of a life but a birth record and a death record? Where's the good stuff? Where's the life story? There must have been one--maybe not an exciting one, but every life has something worth remembering, right?
Guess I'll go break out my Band Perry CD and play "If I Die Young" and have a drink in this lost cousin's honor. To the sharp knife of a short life! Salud!
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Sunday, September 6, 2015
How do children just disappear?
Every once in a while I will be loading a newly-discovered obituary into my family tree, and discover unexpected family members--a child or a sibling that hadn't appeared on any other records I'd turned up. How does this happen? So mysterious!
Recently I was exploring a branch of cousins on my mother's side of the family. The couple I was researching had 5 children--four daughters and a son. Nice large family. The birth records of all five children had easily popped up when I searched on Ancestry. No mysteries. No problems. Or so I thought.
But one of those children died fairly young, in his fifties, just this year. I found death records--Social Security, state records, but the obituary was a little tricky. The only Ancestry link to it didn't include the whole text. I was lucky, however. He'd died just this past year, so I was able to find the text still in the local newspaper archives online.
But as I read the obituary, I saw some sibling names I didn't recognize. I started counting the names. The dead son had six siblings listed, not the four I expected. There were two other sons, including one who was named after his father. How had I missed these two?
Annoyed, I typed their names into the Ancestry search engine, expecting to pull up records that had escaped me previously. But no luck. Nothing. How do you have birth certificates for five children, but none for two of them? How old were these two men? Older or younger than their dead brother, who was the baby of the family? Were they children from a previous or subsequent marriage perhaps?
But looking at the dates on the parents' marriage records and their current addresses, I realized that unless the father had managed to marry before age 20 and father 2 sons really quickly, or had an affair (what a juicy tidbit that would be!), there was no second family--the couple had married at 20 and were still married in their 80s.
I looked at the birth years of the five children I had on record. There was an odd five year gap between the oldest child, born in 1939, and the supposed second oldest, born in 1945. Then the rest of the children arrived at steady two-year intervals. Given that a son named for a father is usually the first son, I suspected these "lost boys" had been born in that gap. Nothing showed up in Ancestry, even when I searched the names within the five year birth window.
Using the sparse information in the obit--the first names of the two sons and their wives, and the towns they were living in as of 2015--I turned to outside resources like Intelius and the White Pages listings to track them down. I found possible birth dates for each--1942 and 1944, right where I'd expected to find them. To get further confirmation, I ended up searching for their children, using my best Ancestry search skills: plug in the last name of the possible child, guess at the probable marriage date of the parents, search 10 years on either side of that marriage date, plug in the parents' names, and the likely state the parents lived in during that time period, and hit search. Worked like a charm in this case, pulling up the maiden names of the missing sons' wives, and a child for one son and three for the other.
Using that info, I was able to verify the birth dates and middle names suggested by the White Pages listings, and add those scraps of information to my Ancestry file. But even with that additional info, Ancestry's data bases just couldn't find any record of them. According to Ancestry, they weren't part of the family.
I am still baffled as to how that can happen. Did something happen to county birth records during World War II, removing those years from the database Ancestry uses? Since the men were born after the most recent of the released Census records--1940--I couldn't rely on census data to fill in the blanks of "missing" children like I could if they were born a few decades earlier.
Truly mysterious. Now I will be sure to read each obituary with great care, counting the named relatives to make sure I don't miss any future "lost children."
Recently I was exploring a branch of cousins on my mother's side of the family. The couple I was researching had 5 children--four daughters and a son. Nice large family. The birth records of all five children had easily popped up when I searched on Ancestry. No mysteries. No problems. Or so I thought.
But one of those children died fairly young, in his fifties, just this year. I found death records--Social Security, state records, but the obituary was a little tricky. The only Ancestry link to it didn't include the whole text. I was lucky, however. He'd died just this past year, so I was able to find the text still in the local newspaper archives online.
But as I read the obituary, I saw some sibling names I didn't recognize. I started counting the names. The dead son had six siblings listed, not the four I expected. There were two other sons, including one who was named after his father. How had I missed these two?
Annoyed, I typed their names into the Ancestry search engine, expecting to pull up records that had escaped me previously. But no luck. Nothing. How do you have birth certificates for five children, but none for two of them? How old were these two men? Older or younger than their dead brother, who was the baby of the family? Were they children from a previous or subsequent marriage perhaps?
But looking at the dates on the parents' marriage records and their current addresses, I realized that unless the father had managed to marry before age 20 and father 2 sons really quickly, or had an affair (what a juicy tidbit that would be!), there was no second family--the couple had married at 20 and were still married in their 80s.
I looked at the birth years of the five children I had on record. There was an odd five year gap between the oldest child, born in 1939, and the supposed second oldest, born in 1945. Then the rest of the children arrived at steady two-year intervals. Given that a son named for a father is usually the first son, I suspected these "lost boys" had been born in that gap. Nothing showed up in Ancestry, even when I searched the names within the five year birth window.
Using the sparse information in the obit--the first names of the two sons and their wives, and the towns they were living in as of 2015--I turned to outside resources like Intelius and the White Pages listings to track them down. I found possible birth dates for each--1942 and 1944, right where I'd expected to find them. To get further confirmation, I ended up searching for their children, using my best Ancestry search skills: plug in the last name of the possible child, guess at the probable marriage date of the parents, search 10 years on either side of that marriage date, plug in the parents' names, and the likely state the parents lived in during that time period, and hit search. Worked like a charm in this case, pulling up the maiden names of the missing sons' wives, and a child for one son and three for the other.
Using that info, I was able to verify the birth dates and middle names suggested by the White Pages listings, and add those scraps of information to my Ancestry file. But even with that additional info, Ancestry's data bases just couldn't find any record of them. According to Ancestry, they weren't part of the family.
I am still baffled as to how that can happen. Did something happen to county birth records during World War II, removing those years from the database Ancestry uses? Since the men were born after the most recent of the released Census records--1940--I couldn't rely on census data to fill in the blanks of "missing" children like I could if they were born a few decades earlier.
Truly mysterious. Now I will be sure to read each obituary with great care, counting the named relatives to make sure I don't miss any future "lost children."
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