One of the mysteries I’ve been pondering for years is the whereabouts of my great great grandfather, George Washington Adams (1938-1945) after his divorce in McLean County Kentucky in June of 1920 and before he checked into the National Home for Disabled Soldiers in Danville, Illinois, in July 1922. I haven’t found him on the 1920 census and it’s been bugging the heck out of me. In the divorce, he was awarded custody of his 12-year-old son Wayne Horace Adams (1907-1976) and for the longest time I was looking for the two of them.
A few years ago, I found Horace (as he was known then) on the 1920 census living with his half brother. I blogged about how an indexing error kept his whereabouts elusive. But I still haven’t found George on the census. When I was at RootsTech this year, I did a free consult with a genealogist from Trace, seeking help on the question George’s whereabouts between 1920 and 1922. The genealogist asked me why I wanted to know. I didn’t have a good answer, but I still wanted to know. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any Eureka! moments in that short session, but she gave me some avenues to pursue.
In any case, as I was working through my backlog of downloaded documents during the August 30 x 30 challenge, I processed a couple of newspaper articles that shed some light! It was very exciting. (I found out an article about him visiting a son in Oklahoma in 1921 and returning to Kentucky in 1922, a month before entering the soldiers’ home, with his son, after an extended visit to Oklahoma. I don’t know which son, but it’s something.)
Those newspaper articles had been languishing on my hard drive for two years! If I were processing my documents as soon as I downloaded them, which is always my goal, I would have had this information years ago. This is an inconsequential example, but it shows how these newspaper articles–which can be a bit tedious to process–can contain important nuggets. (Here’s a post I did on how I process newspaper articles.)
Lesson learned. My resolve is stronger than ever to eliminate that backlog, which I’m working on once again in this month’s 30 x 30 challenge.
I swear I should just stop researching, writing, and blogging for a year and just concentrate on processing documents…I worked hard on my blog, though, so would hate to give that up. Perhaps next year my posts should be about the document(s) I’ve processed that week…hmmm…
Like you, I’ve found answers to questions I’ve had in documents languishing on my hard drive…